Nutritious choices made simple®
Whether you’re “packing a lunch” as you work from home, feeding kids at home, or are part of the essential workforce (thank you!) that needs to eat lunch outside of your home, many of us are needing to rely less on restaurants and cafeterias and more on home cooking for an extra meal each day. What’s a better go-to option?
Flatbreads are almost universally yummier when they’re fresh. Shaping them tends to take a little extra effort because you’re shaping individual portions (which helps with the speed of cooking). Shaping is also an excellent task to give to young cooks, and you can learn a ton about bread texture from the exercise. Here are a few more familiar flatbreads for you to play with.
Banana bread has been having a moment in the sun. Bananas do not have a long shelf-life for fresh storage, but most home cooks are well aware that the browner the banana, the sweeter the banana bread. If you stocked up on bananas because they were available and couldn’t eat them before they went a bit soft, banana bread is a natural choice. It is not, however, your only option for dealing with aging bananas. Also, bananas are not the only food that quickbreads are good at using up.
I am starting to lose track of the number of people who have come to me for help troubleshooting their preliminary adventures into the world of sourdough. This is not because I am an expert on sourdough, but because I am one of the few people in my social circle that has been wrestling with the challenge of producing good sourdough as an infrequent home baker for more than a decade now. Which is to say, I’ve turned out enough leaden lumps to have learned some lessons along the way.
Right now, we’re all facing an unusual number of calls to culinary greatness resulting from not having all the ingredients on hand. It’s easier to get where you want to go if you keep in mind a few fundamentals about substitutions.
I’ve gotten really practiced at dealing with the challenges involved in cooking to clean out a pantry or working with ingredients that are unfamiliar to me. I know many of you are experiencing these cooking challenges in a freshly unavoidable way as grocery stores have uneven supplies and stay-at-home mandates are making us try to use up what’s on hand. I have some ideas that may be of help.
Every cook around the world has recipes they reached for when a loved one isn’t feeling well. Nutritious foods nourish our bodies and help us recover. Some sicknesses reduce our appetites or leave us with sensitive digestion for a few days. Some sicknesses congest us and inhibit our tastebuds. The recipes gathered here are meant to help you draw on the wisdom of different cultures to find recipes that will help you and your loved ones nourish a body that’s on the way to recovering from illness and offer food comfort to your household on the whole.
If you’re sheltering in place or self-isolating somewhere that offers only a microwave to cook, the ability to eat nutritious and flavorful meals may seem impossible. If you can expand your cooking tools a little, your options increase, but if a microwave is all you’ve got, you can do more than you might realize. Microwave dinners and canned soups, move over.