Category / Strategies

by Stacy

In Praise of Dried Vegetables

I recently promised (threatened?) to honor dehydrated vegetables in their very own post. Here are my impressions from a couple of years’ experiments.

Tl:dr: Dried veggies are great helps for cooks with energy-limiting or pain-causing conditions. They do have different flavors and textures than their fresh counterparts, though, so play to their strengths rather than expecting them to be equal substitutes.

The Upsides: Dehydrated vegetables have 90% of the nutrients of fresh. (They lose some heat-sensitive vitamins like C. If that’s a concern, look for freeze-dried veggies rather than dehydrated.) They require no chopping. They won’t spoil if you have a few rough days (or years…) in a row. They are “set it and forget it” foods that make pacing easier. They’re available online, so accessible to people who are housebound and/or living in fresh-food deserts. You can prepare meal mixes with them for zero-spoon days or travel. Solo cooks can easily make single servings.

The Neutral: Their flavor tends to be more intense than fresh, since all the diluting water is gone. To me that’s an asset, but you have to account for it—these foods have a learning curve.

The Downsides: They do have a learning curve if you want to make the most of them. Despite the claims of the companies that sell them, the flavors and textures of reconstituted dried veggies are not the same as fresh, frozen, or canned, and you may well notice that and not like it if you swap them straight out. Yet recipes tailored for them are thin on the ground. In addition, dehydrated vegetables cost more than fresh, unless you dehydrate your own. They generally don’t shine solo, which narrows their usefulness.

Recommended Uses: Dehydrated veggies make superb soups or additions to stews, grain and legume cooking liquids, casseroles, and some sauces. They give their best with low-and-slow cooking methods, as the veggies’ stronger flavors infuse the cooking liquid to make a rich broth. Use smaller quantities than of fresh so the flavors aren’t overpowering. Err on the side of caution until you know what you like.

While their flavors are stronger, dried veggies are missing some living brightness. After a few meals they begin to pall. Adding just one fresh ingredient to a dish—anything from a garlic clove to a single carrot or diced tomato—can restore their zing.

As I said, they are not direct substitutes for their fresh counterparts! Sun-dried tomatoes will never give the juicy-crisp texture of a fresh beefsteak tomato to a BLT. Play to dried vegetables’ strengths and honor what they can do. Texture is often not their strength; flavor usually is, but that flavor has different “notes” than fresh.

Image shows meal preparation in progress: In the background, a pot of toasted red lentils simmers on a flame tamer. In the middle ground are containers of dried red bell peppers, chives, tomato powder, and tahini. In small dishes in the foreground are New Mexico red chile oil (toasted earlier, directly in the dish, while I waited for my morning tea to brew) and dried spinach. Toasting the lentils and chiles gives the stew the liveliness it might otherwise lack. I will put a spoonful of each ingredient in the pot and let everything cook sloooowly, and maybe add a teeny splash of vinegar at the end. Energy cost: One spoon.

Recommended Veggies (in no particular order)

  • Julienned, dry-packed, sun-dried tomatoes. Intense flavor on the sweet-tart side. These can usually be used either straight from the packet or reconstituted. They’re good additions to whole grain bowls, pastas, or bean salads. I often chop them more finely to distribute them better through the dish. Recipes abound for these, as they were the It ingredient about 20 years ago.
  • Tomato powder. One of my favorite ingredients of all time—it is So. Useful. Combine equal parts powder and water to make tomato paste. Add a teaspoon or so of powder per serving to many soups for richness, or two or more to make it tomato-based. (But don’t use just tomato powder to make tomato soup. It will be Sad.) Mix a small amount into a plain vinaigrette for a little sweetness. I add a sprinkle while sautéing sweet bell peppers if the peppers are bland. As with all dehydrated veggies, err on the side of caution until you know what you like—you can always add more. Too much tastes metallic to me. Tomato powder cakes easily when exposed to air, so I recommend storing it in a zip-lock bag or something that lets you squeeze the air out of the package.
  • Chopped spinach. A great “stealth” vegetable in soups. Start with a scant tablespoon per serving. More than that, and it is no longer stealthy—the cooked spinach flavor is pronounced.
  • Celery. Dried celery tastes like CELERY—ultra-bright and grassy, with a hint of salt. If my taste buds need entertained, I snack on this straight from the package, when the texture is crunchy-chewy. Use it sparingly in soups, as it will not stay politely in the background, and the texture turns rubbery.
  • Powdered porcini mushrooms. These have typical porcini mushroom flavor, amped up by 10. (Store the opened powder in a glass jar with an airtight lid, or your whole cupboard will smell like mushrooms x 10.) Stir a teaspoon into cooking liquid to make a rich broth. Sprinkle a tiny amount anywhere you want to boost savory, umami flavors. My current favorite: Soak 2 generous tsp. mushroom powder, 1/2 C cashews, and other seasonings to taste in 1/2 C boiling water until the cashews have softened. Blend to make mushroom gravy or cheater’s stroganoff. Delicious on egg noodles or buttered whole grain toast.
  • Chopped green beans. Excellent in soup. These are the only dried veggie I’ve tried that I would eat as a regular side dish—they make me nostalgic for childhood. They taste like livelier versions of canned beans.
  • Chopped chives. I prefer these to dried onions in soups, etc. To my palate, dried onions are more sulfur-y.
  • Red bell peppers. I actually prefer cooking with these than with fresh, as they’re more intensely sweet with a hint of paprika’s depth of flavor. They’re fabulous additions to black bean anything, chili, and sauces. I also like to reconstitute them in water and olive oil with some Italian seasoning, garlic powder, and the like, then add a splash of vinegar to make a sauce, spread, or dip. I recommend waiting to add vinegar to any dried vegetables until they’re almost fully reconstituted, as the veggies absorb too much otherwise.
  • Freeze-dried corn. This is good in soup or chili and reconstitutes fairly well as a plain side dish. I also like sprinkling it dried on salads as a crispy topping . When reconstituted it is similar to frozen corn in flavor and texture.

Neutral (Neither recommended nor not recommended)

  • Dried whole mushrooms. Like the powdered ones, they offer delicious, intense mushroom flavor, and they come in more varieties. They tend to be gritty, though, even if you soak and rinse them. (And if you discard the soaking water, you’ve discarded a ton of flavor.) Chopping the mushrooms prior to cooking can offset their rubbery texture. A little goes a long way: one shiitake mushroom can easily flavor a serving of rice.
  • Heat-dehydrated corn. The flavor is a little like hominy, and the texture is chewy in a good way. I enjoyed it, but it is sloooowww to reconstitute.
  • Carrots. I like the flavor (though it’s tinny in excess) but don’t care for the rubbery texture. Your mileage may vary—many people love these.
  • Sweet potatoes. I always keep them on hand and have tried them successfully in soup and chili, but I more often find an excuse not to use them. I suspect they have potential that I don’t know how to bring out.
  • Green bell peppers. They’re not my favorite fresh vegetable, so I disliked the strong flavor of dried. If you like them fresh, you may enjoy these.

Not recommended

  • Broccoli. I liked the taste—a little like roasted broccoli. But I got a lot of inedible, sharply fibrous stalks mixed in with the florets—maybe 25%. Too much unpleasantness for the reward. If you can find 100% florets or dehydrate your own, go for it.
  • Leeks. Exceptions to the “intensified flavor” rule. The ones I tried had very little flavor.

Not tried: Butternut squash, zucchini, cabbage, and I don’t know what else.

Goodness, you’ve been reading a lot of prose. Image shows a juniper trunk and branches in silhouette framing a sliver of lake, a mesa, and a glowing evening sky. View from my sliding door, Heron Lake State Park, New Mexico, September 2023

Honorable Mentions (They’re not technically vegetables, but still useful)

  • Pinto or black bean flakes. (These are often marketed as “instant refried beans,” though they take 10+ minutes to reconstitute.) Depending on how much hot water you add, they can be dip, soup, or a soup thickener. I prefer the ones with added salt only, but you can also get them pre-seasoned with Tex-Mex type flavors.
  • Instant mashed potatoes. One tablespoon can quickly thicken a thin soup. My favorite instant comfort food mix: potatoes, powdered milk, Parmesan cheese, dried chives, dill, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Combine one serving potato mix with hot water and a pat (or two) of butter. Ready to eat in 60 seconds tops.
  • Unflavored soy curls/TVP. These add quick protein to soup or whole grains and can be seasoned however you like. I don’t recommend the chicken or beef flavored ones, as they don’t taste particularly like chicken or beef. A better option is to use, say, chorizo or sausage seasoning blends to flavor the cooking liquid.

Brands: I only have experience with brands available in the USA. Augason Farms have been the most consistently good. They have a broad range of choices in No. 10 cans. It’s Delish products have had excellent flavor for good value, though they have limited choices. Frontier Co-op, Mother Earth Products, and Bob’s Red Mill are good sources for dried legumes and TVP. I give Harmony House mixed reviews on quality, but their sampler packs are helpful. Their spinach, green beans, celery, and tomato powder have been good.

What am I missing? Have you tried other dehydrated vegetables? Can you recommend other ways of preparing them?

by Stacy

Zero Spoon Meals for Long Days

You know this scenario:

Your day runs unexpectedly long, your symptoms are flaring and you are wading through the Slog. You’ve long since used every spoon you have and then some. You need food but don’t have the oomph or willpower to prepare anything healthful. What do you do?

Do you follow the path of least resistance and gorge on calorie-dense, nutrition-poor snack foods? Buckle down to force your body past capacity to make that healthful food? Order take-out, even though it’s not really in your budget or helpful for your symptoms?

None of these options deserves moral judgment: in no-win situations, we have no good calls to make. But realistically, all these choices are liable to drive you further into energy debt and keep a vicious cycle going.

Zero spoon days happen. They are less likely to be no-win food days, though, if we face that truth squarely when we do have energy and prepare for them in advance.

Image shows a close-up of white to pale lavender fleabane flowers. Some of them are past the first flush of bloom, and all their petals are curled back tightly. They are still lovely with deeper color and perfect symmetry, rocking their zero-spoon days.

We have created a new category on One Spoon Cooking for zero-spoon options. This first Zero-Spoon post features one of my vanlife favorites. It illustrates the kind of advance thinking and preparation I encourage—not daunting or complicated to prepare, easily adapted, easy to cook in a couple of ways. Alas, I would probably (wrongly!) have sneered at it while in my house, because I would (wrongly!) have associated it with bad backpacking food:

Thermos soup made with boiling water and dehydrated veggies and beans.

Oh, tell me you’re not sneering. Thermoses and dried veggies are great additions to your low-spoon toolkit.

Photo shows a deep-dish blue plate on a matching blue placemat. Artfully arranged on the dish (::cough:)) are soup mix ingredients: navy and green beans, tomato powder, soy curls, and dried herbs and spices. To the side is one smallish wooden spoon, which is all the energy the assembly demands.

Advance planning: On a day when I have about half a spoon of spare energy (5 minutes to gather/put away ingredients, and 5 minutes to mix them), I make 6 servings of dry soup mix, with parboiled, dehydrated navy beans, dehydrated vegetables, and seasonings.

Zero spoon days: On a day I know will be exhausting, like my weekly travel and chore days, I add a serving of soup mix, olive oil, and boiling water to a thermos in the morning (zero spoons). On unexpected no-energy days I do the same at some point when I’m already up and about so I don’t waste energy making a special trip to the kitchen. At dinner time, when I most need some nutritious, hearty, comfort food, I have a delicious meal all ready to go (zero spoons).*

That is six zero-spoon meals, my friends, for half a spoon’s worth of energy in advance. That is a lot of flavor and nutrition bang for the effort buck. 

I wish I had even thought of the humble thermos when I was still working or had my house. Thermoses are portable—I could have eaten a hot (or cold) meal between exhausting errands or doctor’s appointments. They are lightweight—I would not have had to lug the slow-cooker around my kitchen. Their vacuum-sealed, not-quite-boiling, slow-cooking environment concentrates flavors, which means more taste for less effort. My thermos is small enough to open without hurting my hands on higher pain days.

And dehydrated veggies—well. They will get their own post, because they have been game changers for me. But for now, suffice it to say that they have 90% of the nutrition of their fresh counterparts with no chopping. As long as you don’t expect any preserved food to act or taste like fresh (do you expect vodka to taste like a potato??), you can play to their strengths, and zero-spoon soup mixes are one of dehydrated veggies’ very great strengths.

I’ve been told that proper food blogs feature photos of the plated dish, so here ya go: Image shows a hand holding a shiny, silver thermos with a spoon sticking out of it at a jaunty angle. The diner’s feet are elevated on a bench outdoors. (Could she possibly have POTS??) In the sunlit background, cottonwoods along the southern Rio Grande are just barely tinged with autumn gold.

I’ll share the recipe below as an example of proportions. So many of us have food sensitivities or special diets that recipes aren’t always much use among us. If the idea makes sense in your life, though, the recipe is here as a helpful framework for you to build on.

Tl;dr takeaways:

  • Prepare ahead for inevitable zero-spoon days.
  • Thermoses are lightweight, portable ways to cook hot zero-spoon foods.
  • Dehydrated veggies make great zero-spoon soups.

What about you? What is one simple, low-effort thing you can do this week to set yourself up for a nutritional win on your next zero-spoon day? How might you make it a habit?

__________________

*At dinner time I could also just put the soup mix, oil, and water in a pot on the stove for 15 minutes. Physically that would still be zero spoons, but it would cost a mental spoon because I’d have to find the gumption to take action.

Zero Spoon Day Navy Bean Soup

(Note of caution: I never actually measure anything, so these are all estimates. But they’re close enough to give you the idea.)

Per serving:

1/4 C parboiled, dehydrated navy beans

1 T unflavored soy curls/TVP flakes

1 heaping T dehydrated green beans

1 scant T dehydrated spinach

1 heaping tsp. tomato powder

½ tsp. Italian seasoning or to taste

½ tsp. fennel seed

¼ tsp. black pepper

Salt to taste

Put everything together in a zip-lock bag and shake to mix. Sometimes I also add 1 T dry packed, julienne sliced sun-dried tomatoes per serving.

To prepare: Add ingredients to a 16-oz. vacuum-seal food jar with about 1 T olive oil and boiling water to fill the jar. I usually add garlic powder and sometimes chives just prior to serving, as thermos lids absorb garlic and onion odors too, too well. Cost: roughly $2.50-3.00 per serving.

by Stacy

Rolling Food Prep Part 4

Pros and Cons of Other Strategies

In this series, I’ve explored “rolling food prep” as a strategy for pacing: preparing extras of one or two ingredients each time you cook, so that you prepare about half of each meal fresh and assemble the rest from previously prepared ingredients. Part 1 introduced the basic concept. Part 2 showed my typical weekly template for meal planning. Part 3 looked at how that template turned into a week’s menus.

In this final post we’ll consider some other strategies—ones that have real strengths but that did not work for me. Of course, they do work well for many—we all have different abilities, resources of time and money, and interest in food and cooking. I’m certainly not preaching against these strategies! But if you’re new to life with an energy-limiting condition, this post may save you some trial and error.

The Strategies

Batch cooking—making one huge meal on Saturdays, say, and eating the leftovers for the rest of the week. Batch cooking does make most of the week easy, but cooking day can be intense. If you have limited or highly variable energy, this may not work for you. On the other hand, if you are working, batch cooking can guarantee you a healthy meal even when you come home from work exhausted.

For me, cooking day was overwhelming, and by the fourth day of leftovers, I dreaded the food. If I didn’t have the energy to cook on the designated day, then I didn’t have meals prepared for the whole week—especially a problem if I had several low-energy days in a row. Lots of ingredients spoiled when I couldn’t get to them on time.

Once-a-week food prep—pre-chopping or cooking lots of foods to combine throughout the week. This method has many of the strengths of batch cooking while making it easier to vary your meals. Still, I ran into the same problems: food-prep day was often intense enough to provoke crashes; if I couldn’t prep I had nothing to eat; and I wasted food.

30-minute meals from cookbooks. Most of the brain-work, from making the grocery list to integrating the steps for multiple dishes, is done. The ingredients are usually few and flavor-packed. The meals are likely to be tasty and (reasonably) nutritionally balanced.

I enjoyed this option most—even more than rolling food prep, just because the recipes were reliably good. Since I’m cooking for one, I could cook 3-4 times a week and have leftovers to freeze or mix around for variety or to keep in reserve for no-energy days.

30-minute meals, though, use time efficiently—not energy. Every one of those 30 minutes is jam-packed with activity, and that doesn’t include the time to get ingredients out, wash produce, and put things away. Factoring in my slow-moving mind and body, I needed at least 60 minutes to cook a 30-minute meal. It was exhausting, exacerbated my POTS, and pushed me out of my “energy envelope.”

Convenience foods like take-out, frozen pizza, or TV dinners, supplemented with salads or quickly prepared veggies. For zero-spoon days, this is certainly the easiest option—and far better than going without food! Even the healthiest convenience foods, though, are not nutritionally balanced. They often contain ingredients that don’t work with special diets, and they are expensive. I was priced out of this option. I do turn to these foods in a pinch, but not as a standard part of my diet.

5-ingredient “meals.” Simplicity is the best feature of these meals. They often rely on store-bought sauces or mixes for flavor, though, which pose the same problems as convenience foods. And no matter what they call themselves, they aren’t usually full meals, complete with protein, carbs, and three vegetables—when I tried them, I usually found myself preparing other dishes to round things out, which defeated the purpose.

Small-batch cooking—only chopping enough vegetables, etc., for one serving at a time. This lets a solo cook do smaller amounts of work per day, which can help with pacing. It can be a relief only to chop one carrot, or half an onion—I liked that, when cooking my vegetable-heavy meals. The inefficiency of getting out the same bag of carrots EVERY DAY to prepare one carrot, though, drove me up the wall and cost me more energy overall. This method also creates no leftovers to have on hand for no-energy days.

Meal Kit Services. These services deliver all the pre-chopped and measured ingredients for several meals to your door. All you have to do is open the packaging and follow the cooking directions. Nutritious, “foodie-friendly” options are available for many special diets.

I have not tried these kits, but friends have found that just opening the packaging (and then recycling it when done) challenged their energy; the meals also still took them at least 30 minutes of active time. In addition, these services are not budget friendly for those with limited means.

Rolling Food Prep to the Rescue

Rolling food prep keeps many of the strengths of the above methods and solves many of the problems:

  • You can stay within your energy envelope, doing small amounts of work often rather than huge amounts at once.
  • You always have a range of prepared ingredients on hand, even on no-energy days.
  • You get plenty of variety.
  • Frequent food prep minimizes waste.
  • All ingredients are known to you and can be safe for your diet.
  • Meals are budget-friendly.

This has been the most sustainable method I have found so far—the best combination of gentle on the body, affordable, and satisfying to eat, while still making provision for no-energy days.

Resources

For more ideas, see:

  • Naturally Ella on component cooking
  • Pam Anderson, How to Cook Without a Book, especially the chapter called “A Little Mise”
  • Ronna Welsh, The Nimble Cook, especially the introduction