![]() ![]() ![]() Perfectly Good Food tasks itself with a lot of teaching: how to shop for and store produce, how to save ingredients for later, how to extend a single ingredient into many meals. As with Everlasting Meal, it is a cookbook that I imagine will be most useful when turned to idiosyncratically - at the moment, say, when I realize a bunch of greens is swiftly wilting. If the source of waste is not having enough good ideas for what to do with tomatoes, for example, there are many straightforward and delicious recipes to solve that problem. No doubt informed by its authors’ experiences as restaurant owners (one of the book’s early tips is FIFO: first in, first out), its goal is to provide an approachable way to reduce food waste at home. Some of these ingredient entries, like leftover eggs Benedict, have a touch of fantasy, but most - “chicory, wilted,” “shallots, too many” - are deeply real.įollowing a similar school of thought is Margaret and Irene Li’s zero-waste-centered Perfectly Good Food, due out in June. For each item, Adler offers suggestions: “Any smoothie that isn’t being drunk should be frozen into ice pops,” she writes. The book is organized into categories (fruit and nuts, for example) and then into ingredients that might linger (“smoothie, any”). Although there is no shortage of straightforward recipes, many of the entries are more like ideas for thrifty, resourceful ways of repurposing what’s in your kitchen. With The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Adler offers “over 1,500 recipes.” This sounds daunting until you actually read the book. Many of us are trying to do more with less, but can cookbooks help us unlearn waste and embrace efficiency? It comes down to how they teach us about intuition, which helps us understand what parts of a recipe actually matter, and what can be molded to fit what we have. Grocery costs are high, the economic forecast is precarious, and the world has too much trash. ![]() Of course, our collective tendency toward waste carries its own growing tensions. The flawed system of expiration dates teaches us to toss rather than think, adhering to too-strict structures. It is the sense that a bag of spinach in the crisper drawer will go slimy and that replacing it with another one is just the cycle of life, and that things like broccoli stems, kale ribs, and wilting lettuce aren’t for eating but avoiding. It is a nontraditional outlier of a cookbook that tasks itself with guiding readers to see halves and ends as beginnings, just as naturally as Adler seems to.Īdler’s perspective runs counter to another, far more common inevitability: that you can always go to the store, and that food waste, while unpleasant, is unavoidable. It’s an approach that has been praised for its “sense of inevitability.” Naturally, the same perspective motivates The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, but this time, Adler isn’t trying to fight the recipe, but bend the form toward her goal of helping people be more autonomous cooks. With her emphasis on cooking “with economy and grace,” Adler takes advantage of time, energy, and food that might otherwise go to waste. “My first book was really written to help unshackle people from the recipe,” Adler says. In it, she muses on ways to maximize the payoff of minimal efforts: Boiling is so useful because in one pot you can boil cabbage and then potatoes, which can feed you for several meals with little modification, and then use that water as broth for soup. The original Meal isn’t a cookbook, though its essays have the effect of teaching you Adler’s theory of cooking. Together, egg and soup are made new, and neither is wasted.Īdler’s new cookbook is a follow-up to An Everlasting Meal, her 2011 meditation on cooking. The egg adds flavor and body to the soup, which was already destined to improve after a night in the fridge. “When you remove the container to transform it, a bit of your transformation will already have been done for you,” Adler writes in The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, released last month. This, for the author and cook Tamar Adler, refers to the act of storing the ends of one ingredient with another ingredient, such as saving the leftover half of a boiled egg in a container of soup. Here is a concept I’d never considered: refrigerator cooking. ![]()
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