I haven’t talked that much about food in this very self-indulgent, free-ranging column, and yet I think about it every day, and cook it, too. I usually plan my menus for the day, and past that, while I swim. I think over what’s in the fridge to be used up, what’s coming up during the week, and when I might have time to adjust or augment my plans. Case in point: I have leftover flank steak and mashed potatoes from our birthday dinner for my 70-year-old friend. He didn’t want to take anything home. So, of course, it will be shepherd’s pie but there’s no gravy. I had to look in the supermarket and had to ask for directions for canned gravy - never buy it. So that’s coming. I also had salad to use up; added a ripe avocado and had it for lunch yesterday. You know already that I’m a leftover cook.
I haven’t mentioned my spiralizer, have I? I had read about them and when I visited my daughter in August, she owned one and demonstrated. I love it. I bought one and used it for the first time for a cook I admire very much and she already had one, (wouldn’t you know?) but said she enjoyed my spiralized zucchini with pesto sauce and big shrimp.( NUM.) For those of you who do not know, but you probably all do, it’s a tube with a serrated blade at each end inside, one for thicker slicing, one for thin. You push and twist a zucchini (for example) down the tube, past the blade, and out comes long spaghetti-like strands. Pat it/them? dry with a paper towel, cook in salted boiling water for no more than 3 minutes and serve with a sauce of your choice. It’s like pasta, only far far fewer calories and good for you because it’s a vegetable.
About the same time, I finally yielded to cauliflower rice. It’s easy: you can use a knife to chop this vegetable into fine bits that look like rice, or you can run it through your food processor. You can make stir-fry rice or pretend it’s mashed potatoes. It has solved a long-time problem for me. In latter years - very latter - I had stopped buying cauliflower. Most cauliflowers are bigger than my head and they are a definition of eternity: a cauliflower and one person. After I’ve made mashed ”potatoes” and stir-fried “rice”, I can handle steamed cauliflower with cheese sauce.
Do you know that one of the hardest jobs in the world (well, you know, - hyperbole - but it’s rather difficult ) is the creation of an edible recipe? The creation is not the problem, the execution is, and then the description: how to do it. I edited a cookbook only once, but I have written three The one I edited fell upon me during one of my stints as a writer-in-library when wannabes were invited to subvmit manuscripts, from 30 to 60 pages, depending on the circulatlon of the library and the number of manuscripts submitted . That cookbook needed a lot of editing, that is, straight, old-fashioned cutting. You all know Strunk and White’s most often repeated advice in their book “Elements of Style”:
Omit needless words.Omit needless words.And go heavy on the repetition.
One of these days, I’ll go through a week of menus with recipes, that is, if anyone wants to see that. You can let me know?