Rethinking My Recipes

What brought this on?

I was doing that dread chore again, cleaning out the freezer and the refrigerator. I was struck by the sheer amount of “mystery leftovers” that I found. We all have them, even if we don’t think about them. However, it got me thinking about the food being wasted and thrown out.

So what seems to be the problem here? None of us start out looking to waste time and money, especially not on food. This puzzled me so much that I decided to take a look at what the answer might be.

For those of us who learned to cook from our parents, we probably had to cook enough for between 4 to 6 people. I know that I did. The trouble was that when I got married, I only knew how to cook for 6. All the recipes that I knew made that much.

I remember looking at cookbooks, looking for smaller recipes. What I found was recipes that started at 4 servings and went up from there. Not much help, to be honest. After my children were born, the 4 servings were just right, but things changed.

What to do, what to do!

Portion control and Serving Size are two of the key factors in any meal plan. It’s all fine and good to say that the recipe makes 4 servings, but if you don’t know how much a serving is, how can you make sure you’re getting the correct amount?

With some recipes that feature things like chicken parts, pork chops, etc., it’s easy. A serving is one piece. Recipes that make stews, soups or chili are harder to work with.

Once again I had to go digging through cookbooks for clues. The older cookbooks (think Betty Crocker) might tell you how much soup the recipe would make, and then you could use the information to find out how much a serving is. However, these cookbooks don’t give you the nutritional information. The newer cookbooks have the nutritional information but not how much soup the recipe makes! Frustrating to say the least.

A Two-Part Solution

The solution turned out to be a two-part solution for me. The first part involved getting smaller appliances such as a slow cooker or an Instant Pot Mini. There are just some foods that you cook on the fly such as a roast. If you can only fit so much into your cooker, you can’t make as much. You start automatically reducing the amount of food you are making.

The second part was both easy and difficult at the same time. The recipes that you use have to be sized to make only 2 servings. My favorite example of this is lasagna. Most of the time a lasagna recipe makes a 9 x 13 pan. Nice if you are having family over, way too much for a couple. If you substitute a loaf pan for larger pan, you end up with lasagna that is just enough for 2 people.

You might think that the easy part would be to simply divide your recipe in half. You would be wrong. My favorite source of recipes is the people at America’s Test Kitchen. When they initially set out to create a cookbook for 2 people, they discovered the flaw in that thinking. You see, there are some recipes that work because of the “ratios” of ingredients. Those recipes have to be totally reinvented to yield 2 servings. For other recipes, it makes more sense to change the ingredients to accommodate smaller amount needed.

The easy part? Finding cookbooks for two! The hard part is giving up your favorite recipes to start including ones that make smaller amounts