How to Master Last-Minute Meal Preparation

A reader recently emailed me an excellent question on making last minute meals:

Q: It's 2:45 PM and I have no clue what to make for dinner tonight. What do you do when you're in this situation?

A: I order a pizza.

Just kidding! Seriously, this is a common problem that at times strikes even the most experienced cooks, and it brings to mind that wonderful quote from former Gourmet Magazine editor Ruth Reichl about dinner planning: "if it's 4 o'clock and you're in your office and you haven't figured out what you're having for dinner tonight, the battle's half lost." The bottom line is you usually need to plan your dinners with at least a few days' lead time. There's just no way around it.

But most Casual Kitchen readers lead extremely busy lives, and inevitably there will be days when a pre-planned dinner just isn't possible. For those situations, we have a few solutions here at Casual Kitchen.

First, we always make double batches of whatever foods we cook. This way, we almost always have a stash of leftovers available in our fridge. There's no easier way to get a decent dinner on the table than to reheat something you've already made.

Second, try and keep a relatively well-stocked pantry, and focus your pantry supplies on food items that you can use to whip up a simple recipe at the last minute. Which recipes and which items, you ask? Well, start by perusing The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen. Pick out the easiest recipes that appeal to you the most (I suggest starting with Black Beans and Rice, Chickpeas, Pasta and Tomato Salad, Red Lentils and Rice or Smoky Brazilian Black Bean Soup). Then, stock extra supplies of the key ingredients to those recipes in your pantry at all times.

This way, you'll always have an option or two for a simple meal, and you'll be able to get dinner on the table in half an hour or less--even on those days when you have absolutely no clue what to cook.

Readers, what ideas would you add?


Help support Casual Kitchen by buying Everett Bogue's exceptional book The Art of Being Minimalist. (This is an affiliate link for an e-book I strongly recommend to my readers--and if you decide to make a purchase, your purchase will help fund all of the free content here at CK!)


Related Posts:
If It's So Cheap to Cook at Home, Then Why is My Grocery Bill So Huge?
Spreading the New Frugality: A Manifesto
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
Finding Inspiration In an Uncluttered Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

A Short Guide to Common Nicaraguan Foods

I thought I'd share few details about the food we've enjoyed while we're here in Nicaragua (recall, Laura and I are here with a team of eyecare professionals giving free eye exams in several villages here in the country).

First, the food is really good here. Really good. Simple, straightforward, unpretentious and delicious. We've had gallo pinto (simple beans and rice) with nearly every meal, whether morning, noon or night, and we've really grown used to this wonderful comfort food. I have to find out a way to copy the special way they make it here.

Another common food here is vigaron: cabbage salad. It's thinly sliced cabbage in a light vinegar sauce that's found alongside nearly every meal. Nicaraguans consider it like a side salad. Again, it's basic, unpretentious and really good.

Also, queso frito or fried cheese. They have a simple white cheese here that is salty and firm. When fried, this cheese doesn't melt--it gets just a bit crispy on the outside. It's a common appetizer or side dish here and it's utterly delicious. One of the best meals we had during our entire trip was a simple platter of queso frito, fried plantains and a side of gallo pinto--along with a Toña, one of Nicaragua's national beers:

Finally, a delicious fish we've had the pleasure of having here: guapote. It's a mild white fish, typically grilled and served up whole. It's kind of a beastly looking fish that looks like it belongs in the Jurassic era, but it's easy to eat, not too bony, and well worth ordering.

Guapote con salsa tomate, arroz (rice), tostones (fried plantains) y vigaron:

Guapote, detail:

We didn't come to Nicaragua for the food, but we've been really surprised and happy with everything we've eaten on this trip. And we've been overwhelmed with all of the people we've met and the things we've seen here. This is a friendly and inexpensive country that is patient with tourists. It's almost as if they've seen enough tourists to appreciate them, but not too many to get sick of them or try to take advantage of them.

If you're considering a visit to Nicaragua, both Laura and I would highly encourage it, and if you want to ask any questions, feel free to reach us via email or by leaving a comment below.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

Why do "appetizers" make us hungrier, when in theory they should make us less hungry? Why is it so easy to keep picking and nibbling at the food in front of us, even when we're full? And why do we always have room for dessert?

It's all because of priming.

Psychologists use the term priming to explain why people become reflexively hungry in the presence of a large supply of tasty food.

There's a simple logic to why this trait exists. Back in prehistoric times, food was scarce and infrequently available. That delicious mammoth that your tribe just roasted up might just be your last meal for a while. Having the ability to summon an enormous appetite so you could consume extra food would significantly increase your odds of surviving until the next mammoth roast. That's why it made a ton of sense for our brains to develop adaptations which would enable us to eat far beyond satiety when the (infrequent) opportunity arose.

In the modern era, however, we are constantly surrounded by cheap, palatable and energy-dense foods. And this has turned the priming reflex into a singularly harmful adaptation. It drives us to wolf down our food, ingest calories far beyond our needs, and worse, do it again the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. After all, the food never runs out, and neither, it seems, do our appetites. As a result, priming has become one of the key drivers behind the global obesity pandemic.

What can you do to help fight off the priming reflex? How can you stop it from subverting your health and your diet?

1) Wait.
Everyone knows that the sensation of fullness occurs with a lag. Your stomach always waits a good twenty to thirty minutes before it decides to tell your brain that it's full. This time lag is in fact a key part of the priming reflex, because it makes it lot easier to eat beyond satiety.

The trick is to recognize that those twenty to thirty minutes are the most precious minutes of mealtime. They offer you a fulcrum moment: you can overeat during that time and hardly notice, or you can take your time, slow down and eat sparingly for the first half hour of your meal. These delaying tactics will allow your brain to catch up to your stomach, helping you push away from the table without eating too much and without feeling hungry or deprived. (See more ideas on how to avoid overeating at the dinner table.)

2) Think, don't react.
Remember, priming is just a reflex. It's nothing more than an autonomic urge. You, however, are are much more than the product of your reflexes and urges: you're an intelligent human being, blessed with an enormous cerebrum that sits up on top of those unruly, instinct-based parts of your brain. If you use your higher brain to intellectualize the urges and appetites you experience, you'll find that your unhealthy instincts and reflexes suddenly have a lot less power:

"I know that chili relleno platter looks amazing to me right now, but if I eat the whole thing I will feel awful in an hour. If I split it with my friend, then I'll still get to taste plenty of food, and I won't regret it later."

Having a quick internal dialog like this is a great way to bring higher-order mental processes into an eating situation. If you can train yourself to have a higher-brain conversation like this each time you sit down to eat, you'll find it a lot easier to outwit the priming reflex.

3) Notice.
Finally, build a habit of using noticing and mindfulness techniques every time you sit down to eat. Pay close attention to the taste, smell and sensation of your food, starting with the very first bite. Chew slowly and carefully, and take the time to savor and enjoy the full experience of eating. Do this throughout your meal.

Mindful eating is in fact a perfect synergy of all three of today's eating tips. It helps you enjoy your food on an intellectual (higher brain) level, rather than a reflexive (lower brain) level. It slows you down. And most importantly, while you're carefully chewing your food, you're also chewing up the clock, making it all the more easy to use up that critical 20-30 minutes of critical "fulcrum time" while your brain catches up to your stomach. Result? You will eat much less, yet still leave the table perfectly satisfied with your meal.

Remember, hunger is often a highly misleading mental state, and the priming urge causes us to experience hunger far out of proportion to our nutritional and caloric needs. With the help of our higher brains and a few minor habit changes at the dinner table, we can permanently put the priming instinct where it belongs--in the dustbin of human history.

Wait, think and notice, and recognize that hunger doesn't have to be mindlessly obeyed.

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food

I owe a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite for prompting me to think about the issues in this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet: Diet and Athletic Training Part 2

This is Part 2 of a three part series on diet and athletic training.
Part 1
Part 3

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We continue our series on diet and athletic training with today's post, which focuses on high-carb/low fat diets. I’ll talk about why this kind of diet is absolutely optimal for people undertaking moderate levels of physical exercise.

Like most people, when I was in my teens and twenties, I paid absolutely no attention to my diet (one of the luxuries of youth!). But at around age 22-23 I began running seriously, and I decided I’d like to try to train for and run a marathon. Of course, being the type-A corporate tool that I am, I started studying books on distance training as well as books on optimal diets for runners.

And I happily fell under the influence of Dr. Robert Haas’ book, Eat To Win. Haas made his name in the early 80s as one of the key people behind Martina Navratilova’s dominance of professional tennis at that time. His highly useful and readable book advocates coupling exercise with a diet low in fat and rich in complex carbohydrates. His slogan "fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate” pretty much says it all. I started dramatically cutting back on my junk food intake (yes, even dark chocolate), and I paid very close attention to, and ruthlessly limited, how much fat I ingested. And I ate a lot more pasta.

Furthermore, I started paying much closer attention to how well I ran under various dietary circumstances. I started to put more effort into noticing* how my body handled itself during my runs after a few days of excessive high-fat eating, compared to days when I ate more healthily.

I had never really paid that much attention to my body's physical performance in the context of my diet. But once I started noticing, the conclusions were obvious: runs after “bad diet days” were universally awful compared to runs after “good diet days.”

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve talked about how if you exercise regularly and eat energy-dense foods sparingly, you will experience profound changes in your body. You'll begin to feel better, you'll begin to sleep better, you'll have more energy, and you'll feel lighter on your feet. You will begin to metabolize your excess body fat.

Granted, when you exercise, your appetite increases also. But the ironic secret of this diet is this: you don't really need to eat that much less food! As long as you exercise regularly and reduce the fat content and overall energy-density of your diet, you will see results.

Moreover, many people who embark on this diet and exercise combination even find that their body simply stops craving high-fat foods. That bag of Doritos just doesn't look as appetizing when you think about how it will clog up your cardiovascular system during your run tomorrow morning.

And this is where an amazing virtuous cycle begins. Your improved diet leads you to feel better, which leads you to have better and better workouts, which leads you to crave fewer high-fat foods, which leads you to feel even better, which leads you to have even better workouts, which accelerates the metabolization of even more body fat. Rinse and repeat.

That, in a nutshell, is the primary “pro” argument for a high-carb/low-fat diet and exercise combination. You will be astounded at the improvements in your physical fitness after just a few weeks of maintaining an Eat to Win-type diet combined with light to moderate exercise.

What I did, however, was take this diet to an extreme. We'll discuss the "cons" of this diet in the next post in this series.

Related Posts:
Mock Wild Rice: An Insanely Easy To Make Side Dish
How to Make Fried Rice
The Granola Blogroll: The Ultimate Authority on Great Granola Recipes
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time

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* NB: I've talked very briefly about the concept of “noticing” (some psychologists use the term "attention") in Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating. This is a powerful concept that has applications in life far beyond the scope of this blog, but I hope to return to it in a cooking context. You can find a powerful, although non-food related, introduction to this concept in Timothy Miller's mind-opening book How To Want What You Have.

Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer

Today's post isn't exactly about cooking. Instead I bring you ten rules that I hope will help you enjoy eating. Eating out, that is.

1) Go out to a really nice restaurant once in a while. It doesn’t have to be a daily thing, obviously. If you’re budget-conscious, think of it as a reward for yourself. Enjoy life a little bit by spending a little extra money once in a while for a great culinary experience.

2) Make a point of patronizing owner-operated restaurants rather than chain restaurants. Forget the Olive Gardens and the Red Lobsters and the Macaroni Grill. Does it really help the world if you give business to huge corporations like Darden Restaurants or Yum Brands? Help support a local entrepreneur in your town instead.

3) Try at least one appetizer. Or better, order two and split 'em with your dinner companion.

4) Try one of the house specials. Learn what the chef is good at. Ask the waiter or waitress "what's good here?" and make a point of ordering that dish.

5) I wish I didn't have to include this one, but it goes in anyway: Never speak on your cellphone in a restaurant. You’re just not that important. Turn your phone off for once and try and enjoy the here and now.

6) Order drinks, or try a new wine you’ve never tried before. Laura and I have a weakness for the occasional margarita (rocks, and I'm sorry but I must admit it, extra salt).

7) If the restaurant has a sommelier, use him. Yes, I know this sounds snobby, and you don't have to do this EVERY time. But it's actually kind of fun. Tell him something cryptic like "I like red" or "I like sweet wines" and let him go to work. Then write down all the information on the label--and even a jot down note or two on whether you liked it or not and why--and keep those notes somewhere. Heck, file them with your 401(k) statements--you might cheer yourself up this way.

8) Don't clean your plate. Take some of your food home with you. This will give you room to follow rule #9, which is…

9) Leave room for dessert! It's an especially good idea to ask the server for a suggestion or a favorite recommendation when it comes to dessert.

And finally,

10) Tip 20%, never less. This isn’t the 1980s anymore. Make the universe a plentiful place. We're in the era of outflow. If service is atrocious, tell the server politely (and keep an understanding and sympathetic smile on your face while telling) and still tip 15%.

I'd love to hear any additional rules that readers out there think I should include. We'll update this one as needed.

Related Topics:
Using Salt = Cheating
Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life by Shakti Gawain
The International Sommelier Guild

Fake Maple Syrup

I wrote a really positive post on Tabasco Sauce a few days ago, so in the interests of journalistic balance (and so I don’t seem like just another product flack), I decided to do a negative piece this time.

So today you’re going to read a piece condemning fake “syrup”.

A polemic. A denunciation, dripping with invective. A jeremiad. A screed, if you will.

Okay, so maybe you can tell by now that I, uh, don’t really like fake syrup. And it’s not just the taste. It’s more the phony-ness. The chemicals. The fact that we already get too much “high fructose corn syrup” in our diets as it is.

So to convince you, and to turn your stomach a little bit today, I’d like you to try a quick little exercise with me:

Let’s take a quick look at a highly typical phony syrup: Aunt Jemima. I’d like you to take a look at their “Original” syrup product page. After you go to that link, click where it says “Ingredients.”

Wow. Ewww. So this is what you are putting into your body when you eat this brownish-colored industrial goo:

INGREDIENTS: CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID (PRESERVATIVES), ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE.

Do they think they are doing a good job selling the product by putting that information on their webpage? I’d call that some pretty suspect work from the marketing department. Most people (including me) can’t even pronounce “sodium hexametaphosphate” much less do we want to ingest it. PS: does anybody out there care to weigh in on what the heck that chemical actually does? Is it toxic?

Maybe the hardworking webmasters at The Quaker Oats Company should just stick with simple pictures of the bottle, a smiling drawing of Aunt Jemima’s face… and just leave out the nauseating ingredients part

This is why you should ONLY use real maple syrup in your home. It’s delicious, it’s actually a real product, it keeps nearly forever, and it doesn’t contain sodium hexametawhatever.

To learn more about pure maple syrups from New York State, I encourage you to start with the New York State Maple Producers Association website. They have a thorough list of syrup producers here.

And if you want to learn about different syrup grades, take a look here. Keep in mind that in addition to New York, Vermont and Pennsylvania are well-known and highly regarded maple syrup producing states.

PS: My personal favorite is the New York Grade A Dark Amber!


Related Topics:
Waffles!
An Ode To Tabasco Sauce