Either way, I’m happy with my choice. Yes, sometimes I feel guilty riding the elevator, but it’s the choice I’ve made, and I think that makes all the difference.

Every day we’re given opportunities to be a little healthier. This sounds like complete self-help schlock, and it partly is. But I think the important first step isn’t to make the right choice. It’s to realize those choices exist and to be conscious of them. When you drive into a parking lot, you can choose to park close to the store or farther away. When you’re going to get a snack from the machine, you can choose a Twix (oh, delicious Twix!) or a dinky bag of mixed nuts (or you can go ahead and stick with your plan of eating the apple you brought from home). Or, when we’re walking in to work, we can choose to take the stairs.

So as we embark on this journey together, let’s try to remember to be mindful. Honestly. The first step in making healthier choices is being aware those choices exist.

You haven’t given them any recipes
Who needs recipes?
Your readers might like one or two. You know, that’s why people come to a cooking blog. For recipes.
They shouldn’t.
No?
No. Besides, I’m not very good with recipes. Mine are always slap-dash and imprecise.
Then why should they bother?
They should bother so they can learn how to cook.
So what are you waiting for?

If I’m being honest, I can say I’m a descent cook. I make food good enough to win a departmental cooking contest, but I’m certainly no Grant Achatz. I’m not even an experienced line cook. But I’ve been fortunate to have a patient wife who’s willing to encourage my cooking, even when it doesn’t go well, and I know enough to pay attention so I can learn from my mistakes. A big one I run into time and again? Cooking cold chicken thighs too fast so they’re under-done in the center.

I know what the problem is: cold chicken thighs take longer to heat through than even cool chicken does. And they have that cold bone in the center, acting like a heat sink. So I put them in the pan, sear them, and when the skin’s nearly perfect they’re still raw in the center.

Bummer.

What’s the secret? Start with chicken thighs that have been allowed to come closer to room temperature, or finish them off in the oven. Either one works all right, though starting closer to room temperature gets better results.

And I’ll get to some recipes, I swear. I just think it’s important to mention a few things before we go there.

Heat, Moisture and Time

For me, cooking comes down to these three elements. When cooking, you’re trying to heat food without losing all its moisture. At least I am. Don’t heat enough, though, and it’s raw. Heat too much and it’s burnt. Proteins cooked too high and too long end up rubbery and tough. Vegetables cooked too long and too dry become leathery or brittle. Pasta cooked too long disintegrates. Cakes and breads turn to carbon. They have for me, at least.

The thing is, knowing the various cooking methods can pull you back from the brink of a bitter disaster, and just might salvage an otherwise inedible dinner.

Cooking methods: wet and dry

If you pay attention to recipes, you’ll see the same cooking methods come up over and over again. You’ll see some of them stand alone, and others you’ll see used in conjunction with one another. The important thing is to notice. Notice when a high, dry cooking method is paired with a long, low wet one, or vice-versa. Pay attention to how people use bake and roast (in my experience, it’s mostly about temperature, but I am probably dead wrong about that). When you’re working with food, figure out how sturdy it is. Brussels sprouts are going to stand up to a par-boil much better than Ritz crackers could ever hope. But bagel dough? Boil away.

Because I cook when I get home from work, and because I want my family to eat closer to 6:30 than 8:00, I tend to rely on fast cooking methods. For the most part that means lots of cooking energy or very high heat: boil, steam, grill/broil, sauté.

Boil
I hope you know what it means to boil. If you don’t, go fill a pot with water, put it on high heat on the stove and don’t look at it. If you watch the pot, it’ll never boil.

And old wife told me that.

Anyway, boiling can be a remarkably fast cooking method because the water currents and constant motion mean hot water molecules are smashing into cool food molecules, imparting some of their energy, then racing off to gather more energy. It’s also an incredibly violent process and only hardiest foods can stand up to it. Think beans, sturdy vegetables, starches and dry pastas. Boiling won’t brown food, though, because it’s not hot enough. For browning, you need to go with direct heat and a little fat.

Steam
Heat water until it evaporates and then don’t let it escape. Steaming is a quick, efficient method of cooking delicate foods like fish. It’s also great for imparting even heat pretty quickly because a lot of hot molecules are coming in contact with the food. Steaming heats a little quicker than boiling because condensing water vapor releases some energy in the form of heat (it’s an exothermic reaction).

Steaming doesn’t get hot enough to brown food either.

Sauté
Sauté comes from the French, and means, literally, to jump. The idea here is that food comes into contact with a pan so hot the surface water in the food immediately steams away and causes the food to ‘jump’ in the pan. It’s the European equivalent of a stir fry. To sauté, make sure you have some fat in the pan (oil, butter, etc.), get the pan piping hot, and toss in the ingredients. The key here is to make sure the ingredients have enough room to let the steam escape. If they’re too crowded, they’ll end up steaming, not sautéing, and you won’t get the wonderful caramelization of sugars or the browning of amino acids.

When sautéing vegetables, it’s important to keep them moving. When searing meat, poultry or fish, you’ll want to let it sit on the pan long enough to get a good crust on it.

So now what?

Now you can cook. Seriously. Don’t believe me? Try these simple dinners:

Rosemary and sage-scented pork roast with potatoes and carrots

This is a variation on the pork roast from the salt post. See how this stuff fits together? (You’ll also see now what I meant when I called my recipes slap-dash).

rosemary and sage scented pork roast with carrots and potatoes

Ingredients

• Pork loin
• 6 Yukon gold potatoes
• 5 carrots
• Kosher salt
• Rosemary
• Sage
• Butter
• Olive oil

Supplies

• A large skillet
• A large roasting pan
• A splatter guard

Take the roast out of the fridge, salt it, and set it aside in a container on the counter. Begin preheating the oven to 300 degrees F. While the pork sits and the oven comes to temperature, cut up the six potatoes and break apart the carrots. Toss them into the roasting dish, sprinkle them with a couple pinches of salt and set it aside.

Place the pan on the oven over high heat and add about a teaspoon of olive oil. When it gets hot (the olive oil will look a little shimmery), lay the roast in the pan, cover with the splatter guard, and leave it alone for about a minute. Turn and sear each side about 60 seconds, then transfer it to the roasting pan. Make sure the roast is down in the potatoes and touches the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle in a few pats of butter (two tablespoons, total), a couple sprigs of rosemary, and a few sage leaves. Cover in aluminum foil and slide it into the oven for two hours.

The next night you can use the leftover pork to make pulled-pork sandwiches. Delicious and amazingly easy, especially if someone’s in the middle of painting your kitchen.

Notice how in that example we used high, dry heat to brown the meat and then steam to finish cooking it? In this next dish, we do just the opposite.

Skirt steak with collard greens, potatoes and carrots

Skirt steak with collard greens and seared potatoes

Ingredients

• Skirt steak
• 16oz collard greens
• ½ medium onion
• A few strips of bacon
• Kosher salt
• Red pepper flakes
• Leftover potatoes and carrots from the roast

Supplies

• Large skillet
• Large stock pot
• Splatter guard

Again, take the meat out of the fridge and salt it. Set it on the counter so it’ll come to room temperature. Dice the onion and chop the bacon. Put the big stock pot on a big burner and turn the heat to medium. Add the bacon to the cool pot.^_1

Once the bacon has just begun to brown, add the onion. Stir it around a couple times and then let it sit.

While it sits, microwave the leftover potatoes and carrots a couple times. I used 1 minute, 15 seconds, twice.

Now, add the collard greens to the pot, give them a stir and then add enough water to just cover the greens. Increase the heat to high and bring the pot to a boil. Once it’s boiling, reduce the heat to medium and toss in a couple tablespoons of kosher salt and a few shakes of red pepper flakes. Cover the greens with a tight fitting lid and let them boil away about 10 minutes.

When the 10 minutes it up, remove the lid, but don’t do anything else.

Place the skillet on another burner over medium-high heat. Add a pat of butter. When the butter begins to brown, gently lay the skirt steak into the pan, cover with the splatter guard and let it sear for about 2 minutes. When that’s done, turn it over and let the other side sear about 2 minutes. When that’s done, move the steak to a plate and let it rest.

Now add the potatoes and carrots right into the skillet with the beef juices and browned butter. You can stir them a couple times to mix everything together, but we’re really looking for a good crust on some of the potatoes and carrots to lend some texture and taste variety, bite to bite. So just let them sit there in the pan a few minutes, then bring them off the heat.

Plate the collard greens using a slotted spoon, pile on the potatoes, and finally cut the skirt steak against the grain and place a few pieces on top.

Congratulations
You just seared potatoes that had been steamed to cook them through (the opposite of what we did with the pork roast before), boiled a hardy vegetable and seared a steak to perfection.

You have just used sautéing, boiling and steaming to cook a couple really delicious meals.

Oh….you want substitutions? Fine. You could use the same method to cook a beef roast instead of a pork roast. Or to steam potatoes on their own. If you boil other greens, like kale, don’t let them go as long. Boiling kale takes about five minutes. Instead of skirt steak you could sear chicken breasts. Or, you remember those chicken thighs from the very beginning?

Salt the chicken thighs and let them come very close to room temperature. Add a couple table spoons of olive oil to a pan, get it piping hot (medium-high should do it), and set the thighs in the pan, skin-side down. Let them sear about four minutes, then flip them over and let them sear another four minutes. Then add a half cup of white wine and a couple bay leaves. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer for about 10 minutes. Serve with some crusty bread and Spanish rice.

Congratulations, you’ve just added another cooking method to your repertoire: braising.

1. Adding the bacon to a cool pot and letting it cook as it also comes to temperature will render more fat out of the bacon. The fat will lend its flavor to the collard greens. Plus, the bacon will end up good and crispy, if you let it cook long enough.

Given some thought, I don’t think Mr. Wells is a bad person. I don’t know him. But little these days galls me more than people who complain about situations of their own doing, particularly when it has to do with hours in the day.

I understand people work. I understand people have long commutes and can’t get home until 7 pm. When I was in those circumstances, I looked to change them as quickly as I could, changed jobs and moved. Now my commute’s about 25 minutes, and dinner is served by 6:30 at the latest.

So what’s the key to all this? I know how to cook, I’m aware of my limitations, and I know enough to plan ahead. Oh, and I put cooking first.

On every weekend todo list, there are at least three items:

• Laundry
• Menu plan
• Groceries

I don’t need to air my dirty laundry here (ha!), but I do want to talk about menu planning and buying groceries. Planning a week’s menu (or nearly a week) is crucial if you want to be able to cook dinner for your family every night. If you’re one of those people who must stop by the market every evening to grab the freshest and most interesting ingredients, then you’ve picked shopping over cooking, and there’s little I can do to help.

But let’s say you want to fix that. Let’s say you want to be able to sit down every night and enjoy a moderately unhurried meal with your family. Then you have to be mindful of your time.

For me, a typical menu (with variations) might look like this:

Sunday: roast chicken (or pork roast, or beef roast) with potatoes, carrots and other vegetables

Sundays are wonderful because they’re unrushed, and a long-cooked, roasted entrée is ideal. It doesn’t require a lot of monitoring. Just salt the meat and vegetables, pre-heat the oven (yes, in that order), stick everything into a casserole or roasting pan, and cover it in foil. When the oven’s hot, slide the pan onto the middle rack, set the timer and walk away. Now you can play with the kids. Or check email, or write a blog post or read a magazine. Whatever.

The rest of my week might look like this:

Monday: Chicken tacos (or pulled pork sandwiches or beef and broccoli stir fry)

Tuesday: – (I teach Tuesday nights, so my wife and the kids have to fend for themselves)

Wednesday: Pan-seared steak, Brussels sprouts, simple salad (This might also be a chicken frittata, depending on how large the original bird. I might also do vegetable beef soup, if there’s any beef roast left. The pork is always gone by now because pork is delicious)

Thursday: Steak sandwiches (maybe this night I’ll do the stir fry with the left-over steak. Again, vegetable beef soup is an option here, as is another egg dish)

Friday: Maybe curried lentils with rice, or potato and leek soup. Friday is usually a quick, low-prep meal made with staples from the cupboard. It’s been a while since we shopped, and the week is long. Sometimes we’ll order a pizza.

Saturday: We just figure it out. (Again, there’s no strict timetable on Saturdays, so we have a lot more flexibility to, for example, go to the market, look at what’s fresh and then compare that against what we feel like eating. Saturdays are also good for experiments.)

And that’s it. The next week might be some variation on the above or something completely different. Spinach artichoke dip, or a simple supper of brie,  bread and grapes. Even when we had purchased a CSA share and picked up our vegetables on Wednesday, the plan was the same: survey what we have and make a menu plan accordingly. Wednesday nights we often had nothing but fresh vegetables with homemade dressing, or something like wilted spinach with grilled onions and salami. Simple, delicious.

I stake my claim on time

For me, the hours between 5 and 7 are pretty sacred. That’s the time I spend going home, cooking, and eating with the people I love most in the world. I know I’m not going to have time to figure out what I’m going to cook, and I’m not going to have time to shop. I understand these limitations and work around them. I also know my strengths: I have fair knife skills, so I can do prep work fairly quickly. If I didn’t have good knife skills, I might buy vegetables already diced, or spend some time on a Sunday dicing vegetables and parsing them into freezer bags.

You probably don’t have time to do all the things you’d like during the day. Many people don’t. However, if you find yourself complaining about the things you wish you had time for, and you haven’t given up all you can to make those few things happen for you, then I’ll claim you’ve picked bitching over action.

Mr. Wells asked how do working parents do it? For me, the answer is pretty simple: I choose to do it. I don’t talk about it, I don’t fret about it, I just make it happen. Evening after evening, meal after meal. I don’t go to the gym, and I don’t watch a lot of television. But I don’t complain about either of those facts. They exist because I cook dinner every night, and I’m happiest that way.

I work pretty close to a Steak ‘n Shake. I also think their shakes are delicious. Sometimes on slow afternoons, I’ll go buy one and drink (eat?) it.  Submitted without further ado, a recent exchange with a friend of mine via IM*:

Me: I think I’m going to get a milkshake
Him: Steak n Shake?
Me: Yeah
Him: Oooh, you gonna go for the super caramel-bomb side-by-side turtle chocolate explosion shake?
Me: No, probably just a vanilla shake.
Him: C’mon, man, if you’re going to indulge like that, you gotta go all out.
Me: It’s not an indulgence, it’s just a milkshake
Him: I hate you.

The more people I speak with, the more I understand I am in the minority when it comes to this kind of thinking. And more and more I wonder why. Why do we view the things we’re “not supposed to have” as indulgences? Why do we deny ourselves so long that when we finally give in to temptation, we completely bust the bank?

If you make a choice about healthy eating, it should not mean you take on some kind of monastic path of self-denial. Far from it. I think you just need to be a little more mindful about the choices you make. Having a milkshake? Why go for the large? Why go for the small? Ask if they have a kids’ size. Also, why go for the most extreme, highly engineered concoction they offer? You think you have a film crew and something to prove? If you want some chocolate, order a chocolate. If I want my vanilla, I’ll get my vanilla.

The other thing I might advise is that you allocate milkshake time. I’m totally serious about this, though it might sound like a quip on a Dove Promise wrapper: when you’re drinking a milkshake, drink the milkshake. Don’t rush back to the office and feel like you have to suck the damn thing down before you get off the elevator. It’ll make you sick and leave you feeling unsatisfied.

Savor it. Be aware that you’re drinking a milkshake. Rather than beating yourself up over it, embrace it. This is my moment. This is my milkshake. Consider each sip. Again, this sounds like some kind of feel-good bullshit designed for a 40ish woman newly divorced and considering a third cat, but it’s also rooted in some serious science: eating more slowly leaves a person feeling more sated. It allows his body to keep pace with his mouth. It enables you to be conscious of your behavior.

Awareness is key. If you’re aware of your milkshake today, you’re less likely to have one by accident tomorrow. And becoming more aware of your food and eating will make you less likely to reach for that fifth handful of M&M’s. Moving the dish from desk will help that, too. But then, you already knew that.

“When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, nor social harmony.” – Marie-Antoine Caréme, Chef (1784 – 1833)¹

I started this blog just over two years ago with no idea what I was doing or where it would go. For a while there, I think I had a pretty good run, but something always smacked of charlatanism. After all, there isn’t much I can claim: I’m not a chef, I have never worked in a kitchen, and I’m not a person who keeps a liquid nitrogen canister underneath the sink. I don’t come from a family with a rich food tradition, food fads don’t really interest me, and I like to get most of my dinners done in an hour (Sundays being a noted exception).

Still, I’ve been a pretty serious home cook for a few years now, and more than ever I believe cooking is one of the most important things we can do for another. Cooking makes us better stewards of the planet, and it provides a relatively easy means for good health. Plus, it puts you in control. If you have to ask some jackass behind a counter to make your food every meal, you can’t really be your own person. Somewhere along the way, though, I kind of lost my curiosity.

Why switch gears?

I have to admit I’ve been coasting a long time. I have a pretty sizable menu of go-to dishes I can pull together with some variation with little problem. But it strikes me that I’ve become one of those people who falls back on the same recipes over and over. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that. I just want that to be a choice, and not something I’m forced to do. And I’m hoping that by forcing myself back outside my comfort zone, I can re-ignite my curiosity. I’m also hoping, truly, that I can help people live healthier, saner lives. Really.

Let me depart here and tell a little story: Last January (2010) I weighed myself on the scale at the local grocery store. I weighed in at 198, which isn’t bad for a dude who’s 6’2”, but it wasn’t what I wanted. My pants were tight, my face was kind of puffy, and I realized that I’d allowed myself to put on a lot of weight without being conscious of it. I chose to begin eating more plants and less animal fat, and I shed about twenty pounds over the next six months. I’ve been able to keep the weight off, and I feel great. Bonus: I don’t have to go to the gym, count calories, or read food labels. What made it so easy for me? Yeah, I was fairly lucky when they doled out metabolism genes, but I’m incredibly lazy and completely lack discipline when it comes to anything that isn’t fun. But I did know how to cook, and that made taking control of my food choices incredibly easy for me.

What’s in it for you? (how about what isn’t?)

Can I claim learning to cook could make you a better person? You better believe it. Can I claim it’ll let you live a healthier, happier life? Sure thing. Are those claims founded in scientific experimentation and analysis? No way. Not mine, anyway, but more and more studies show unrefined, natural foods are a key to good health. So you’ll get that.

What you won’t get is a bunch of crap dogma decrying your love of bacon (though I think it’s jumped the shark), extolling the virtues of flax seed or millet, or the need to source your own ground beef from some yurt in outer Mongolia. I just don’t have time for stuff like that, and neither do you. I’m also not big on keeping track of the latest kitchen gadgets, and you won’t find six easy, simple, fast and fun (!) ways to jazz up chicken on a Wednesday. Someone else is doing those things way better than I ever could.

So what are we going to do?

First, we’re going to talk about salt. Just salt because yeah, it is that important. Then we’ll talk about finding the right hardware without spending a terrific amount of money, and we’ll talk about how food works. Sure, there will be recipes, but I hope to go beyond that and talk more about ingredients and how they fit together. Then, when you find yourself with half a roasted chicken and whole hungry family and nothing but a pie plate and your spice cabinet, you’ll be able to make a meal all by your lonesome and feed a table-full of smiling faces.

And if you don’t think that’s a great feeling? I don’t know. You might be dead inside.

from The Flavor Bible