Every Thanksgiving I plan a “simple” holiday meal only to crash halfway through cooking it, because it wasn’t quite simple enough.
I’m tempted to skip the celebration, but holidays matter, just like good meals matter, even to solo cooks, the housebound, the ill. They remind us what we value; they allow us to share in our culture’s observances; they give us a chance to enjoy beautiful, once-a-year rituals.
But they’re a heck of a lot of work.
I normally downsize holidays: take the full, overwhelming shebang and reduce it to what I hope will be a manageable level with simpler recipes, fewer dishes, and more storebought items. But really, downsizing has never quite worked. Whatever I do is still more than I would typically do in a day–just washing the dishes, let alone cooking the meal. I end up overly tired and wondering whether next year I’ll even bother.
Downsizing also has negative undertones. You downsize by subtracting from something larger, and that can make me feel a little deprived–like what I’m doing is “less than” or second best, not what I would do if I were healthy. It can foreground the losses of illness.
This year I’m going to experiment with upsizing instead. I will add just one thing to my regular fare to give my meals the flavor of holiday. For 2019 that one thing will be cranberry sauce. (In fact, I’m not really doing any extra cooking–in my normal menu rotation, Wednesday is already sauce-making day.)
I might make a traditional sauce, or this Cuban-influenced one with cocoa, orange, and lime; or a family-favorite “salsa” with dried cranberries, orange, pecans, and red chile powder. They are all good on everything from oatmeal to sandwiches to baked apples. I might just eat cranberry sauce at all three meals, because if I’m going to do such a simple thing, I can go over the top with it.
That’s the thing about upsizing, about addition: you feel like you’re going over the top. Upsizing focuses on gain rather than loss, on the plenty you have rather than what you are missing, on abundance rather than scarcity. What you do is “more than;” it is extra, bonus, gratuitous.
And that sense of gift, of gratuity, is a first big step toward gratitude.
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.
In this 4-part series, I’m exploring “rolling food prep” as a strategy for pacing: preparing extras of one or two ingredients each time you cook for use in future meals, so that you prepare about half of each meal fresh and assemble the rest from previously prepared ingredients. Part 1 introduces the basic concept. Part 2 shows my typical weekly template for meal planning, which focuses on one type of food a day: beans, perishable produce, meat, “sturdy” produce, grains, and condiments.
In this post we’ll look at how this routine played out in last week’s actual menus in my one-spoon kitchen. Even if the foods aren’t suitable for your diet (or tastes), I hope this “real-world” example is helpful in showing the general balance of fresh effort to re-assembly, and how that balance can help you create tasty, nutritious meals with real variety.
I’ve underlined ingredients that I prepared extras of that day, and italicized the foods I had already made (sometimes weeks before). I’ve also noted how much active time each meal took—not the start-to-finish time, but the time I was actually on my feet doing something—and estimated the time needed if everything were prepared from scratch instead.
Thursday *Cannellini beans with kalamata olives, sundried tomatoes, and lots of finely chopped fresh parsley; tossed with oil and red wine vinegar * Roasted, chopped cauliflower and carrots with balsamic reduction sauce * Pita toasts with basil oil Active time: 15 minutes (35-40 if all ingredients are prepared fresh)
Friday * Baked sweet potatoes topped with slow-cooked jammy onions, red peppers, and cherry tomatoes and shredded smoked mozzarella * Sautéed baby spinach with crumbled bacon Active time: 15-20 minutes (25-30 if everything is prepared fresh)
Saturday *Cannellini and summer squash soup (cooked in bean broth) * Arugula salad with sliced pear, toasted pecans, and lemon-orange dressing * Pita toasts with basil oil Active time: 25 minutes (30 if everything prepared fresh)
Sunday Leftovers
Monday * Whole-wheat pasta tossed with arugula-poblano pesto and feta cheese *Tomato-onion soup (Since I had the food processor out for the pesto, I also shredded carrots for Tuesday) Active time: 20 minutes (40 if everything prepared fresh)
Tuesday *Shredded carrot salad with lemon-orange dressing and fennel seed *Poached chicken breast and rice with sautéed onion and New Mexico red chile sauce Active time: 15 minutes (45+ if everything prepared fresh)
Wednesday * Sautéed red cabbage, onion, and apple, with cider vinegar and caraway *Cannellini beans with sage oil * Baked sweet potato Active time: 20 minutes (25-30 if everything prepared fresh)
These were not complex meals (if by some chance they sound impressive, then trust me, they weren’t), but they each had a protein, starch, and three vegetables,* beautiful colors, balanced flavors, and varied textures. If I had tried to prepare every ingredient from scratch each day, I would have had to settle for much less.
Rolling food prep can save anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of active effort each day, usually averaging half the time it would take to prepare the same meal fresh. It also puts a lot of ready-to-go components at your disposal for no-energy days.
There are alternative strategies for low-energy cooking, of course, from batch cooking to meal services to once-a-week prepping. In the last post of this series I’ll talk about some of them and why rolling food prep has worked best for me.
_______________________ * Note: Red chile is a vegetable here in New Mexico rather than a condiment. It is the food of the gods, and we eat generous portions!
One Spoon Cooking 