CUT YOURSELF SOME SLACK! BE A SMART COOK. 🌞 [View all]

‘No ingredient was spectacular all the time,
and no dish was appealing every day.’
Judy Rodgers, The Zuni Café Cookbook



TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT Bee Wilson


Learning how to cut corners can make the difference between feeling
willing and able to cook, and wanting to curl up on the sofa with a
takeaway (fun as that can be). The key is knowing which corners you can
cut and which will ruin the dish. ‘A pot-saver is a self-hampering cook,’
writes the great Julia Child. Loath as I am to contradict Julia, I can’t say I
agree. A pot-saver is often a smart cook who understands that sometimes
you need to cook dinner fast and in a single pan or not at all. We speak of
‘taking the easy way out’ as if it were a bad thing, but the real question is
why anyone would take the difficult way when an easier and equally
delicious option presents itself. I think of this as win-win cookery.

Here are a few examples straight off the bat.

— Rice noodles are quicker to cook than any other kind of noodle and as an
added bonus you can serve them to your gluten-free friends.

— Fresh ginger doesn’t need to be peeled before it is grated. I spent ages
searching for the best method of peeling these knobbly rhizomes – a
teaspoon, a swivel peeler, a tiny knife – only to discover that it doesn’t need
to be peeled at all. Just rinse and grate.

— Instead of topping a fish pie with mashed potato (which takes ages to
make) you can just cube some bread, toss it in melted butter and possibly
some finely chopped rosemary and top with that instead. Whoever you
serve this to will think this is an original new take on fish pie rather than
any kind of compromise.

— You don’t need to pre-salt aubergine slices before you cook them. Old
cookbooks tell you to do this because aubergines used to be more bitter than
they are now, but with modern varieties there is no need.

— Don’t fret if you don’t have any stock for a soup. Many excellent chefs,
including Rowley Leigh, prefer the clean, clear flavour given to a soup bywater and salt alone.

— When you want vegetables but you are tired, there are always frozen
peas. Also frozen spinach, frozen corn, frozen artichokes and frozen baby
okra (so good in stews).

It’s also important to recognise that not all forms of cookery lend
themselves to the easy midweek dinner. There are a few kitchen tasks which
can’t easily be simplified, especially in the realm of pâtisserie. If you set out
to make a Gâteau St Honoré, an amazing French dessert that calls for four
different kinds of pastry plus caramelised sugar and pastry cream, you know
you are in for the long haul. But when it comes to everyday meals, there are
usually far more workarounds than we realise. If you can find a way to
make something wonderful in a much easier way, that means you will get to
eat wonderful stuff more often.

One of the ways we torment ourselves in the kitchen is with the idea that
‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ cooks would never take shortcuts. This is
nonsense. Traditional cooks didn’t suffer for their art because they thought
it was noble but because they had no choice.

All over the world, traditional cooks are embracing electrical devices
which help them to make the same delicious food in a fraction of the time.
It would be unusual now to meet a South Korean cook who didn’t use an
electric rice cooker, and electric blenders have been adopted everywhere
from India to Lebanon.

Long before the advent of electric gadgetry, cooks were inventing ways
to make food prep simpler because – contrary to popular opinion – people
(people here usually means: women) have always been busy with plenty of
tasks around the house other than cooking. These shortcuts have not often
been recorded in cookbooks, which have tended to be written by elite male
chefs. They are not recipes so much as ways of life. I have a friend who
speaks of ‘survivalist cooking’: the kind you need when just getting
something on the table is an achievement. When my children were small,
almost all my cooking fell into this survivalist category.

When I am feeling truly low but need to cook, one of the things that
suddenly seems too effortful is the instruction to chop and sauté the
vegetables for the soffritto that seems to form the start of almost every soup,
stew or sauce. Sautéing vegetables is enjoyable when you are in a leisurely
mood; not so much when you feel rushed. So I was elated to discover from
Lynne Rossetto Kasper (in The Italian Country Table) that there is a whole
category of Italian vegetable soups involving no sauté at all. As Kasper
instructs, ‘You put everything in the pot and simmer until the flavours melt
into each other. Do this in water or broth.’ It sounds too easy to be true but
trust me, it works. The first time I did this, I thought that somehow the soup
would be flavourless or thin, but actually, all the vegetables seem to end up
tasting deliciously of each other. You don’t even have to chop them small if
you are planning to blitz the soup at the end, which is what I usually do
(although another option if you are not a fan of smooth soup is to chop the
vegetables smaller and leave the soup untouched and chunky at the end)

From "The Secret of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/247908.Bee_Wilson

Words of wisdom.

**Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson FRSL is a British food writer and journalist.
She writes the "Table Talk" column for The Wall Street Journal, and is also a
campaigner for food education through the charity TastEd.