My homie Karen asks:
What do you normally eat for dinner when you cook for yourself?
I really like to bake, but I don’t bake myself food for dinner because most of what I bake is desserts and I’m not so far abased as to eat strawberry rhubarb pie for a meal and I am in my thirties and can’t eat a whole trayful of oatmeal cookies any more.1 I would like to avoid diabetes for as long as possible, thanks, and given my sweet tooth baking is something I can only do infrequently. That having been said, I do make a damn good cornbread and socca when it comes to non-sweet baking.
When I cook for myself, usually it ends up being one of two things:
1.) A sandwich. I almost never use deli cuts (notable exception: ham).2 I like loose meat, preferably some that I’ve just grilled or sauteed or broiled. I tend to prefer pork because you can do a lot to pork but still retain its essential flavours; chicken is good too but it’s easy to overpower with spices, and I love to spice meat when I cook it. The other benefit of cooking the meat is that I can cook vegetables at the same time and put them in the sandwich: sweet peppers are my favorite but hot peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumber and snap peas are all quite nice cooked up and tossed in a sandwich. Toss on some lettuce or cold cucumber, some cheese and mustard and maybe a little horseradish or Miracle Whip?3 Perfect. That’s a meal. And the bread has to be good bread. I’ll often grill the completed sandwich on a Foreman grill or similar when it is done.
Also: peanut butter, or egg salad, or tunafish. All will work, all are healthy and delicious, and all are quick.
2.) If I don’t do a sandwich, I usually don’t bother with meat at all: I do a potato-chickpea curry, or rice cooked with various things (often chickpeas – I love chickpeas), or pasta – usually with pesto, but a tomato sauce is nice and a bean medley and olive oil is very good too. If I’m too bored too cook, vegetables and hummus/baba ghanoush of some kind with some pita bread is doable. I’m not that big on salads; I like salad, don’t get me wrong, but other than buying the crappy bags of salad you need to store a lot of produce to make a good salad regularly, and I don’t want it that regularly, and until I have a full-time job of some kind I have to share fridge space with roommates.
Wasn’t that thrilling?
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15 users responded in this post
For someone who writes 18 blogs and is pursuing a law degree you seem to have a shocking amount of time to spend making sammiches…
It was not a good idea to read this before I ate lunch.
However, my appetite has been more than sufficiently whetted. I tip my hat to you, sir.
I have a follow up question and that question is, “how do I obtain a recipe for potato-chickpea curry?”
I use one very similar to this one.
I’m with LurkerWithout, that is an ungodly amount of work for a sandwich and I’m a big fan of hot sandwiches. There’s just to much prep work involved. So, if I’m gonna make a sandwich it’ll be deli meat, cheese and Miracle Whip. If I’m really lucky and we’re doing a sub night for dinner I’m going to go crazy with it: ham, turkey, chicken, cheddar, Swiss, provolone, Colby, sometimes even American, lettuce, tomato, sometimes onions, Miracle Whip or in a pinch mayo, finished off with an oil based salad dressing or bottled sub dressing you can buy. As you can see it’ll be a monster, but all the better for it.
As far as salads go I find that, unless you want to keep a garden in your fridge, then go the ‘Italian’ method; lettuce and Italian dressing. Very, very simple (and I like big salads too), but were you lack in variety you can make up for in quantity, as a single bag of lettuce has at least four bowls of salad in it. Added bonus, if you get a low cal Italian dressing it’s healthier then other low fat or low cal dressings, which is were most salads fail on the healthy meter.
Do you mean that Miracle Whip is possibly the creation of an intelligent life form, or that Miracle Whip is possibly *itself* an intelligent life form? I am prepared to accept either case an an initial hypothesis for discussion.
Dinner life is really hard when all you want to do is bake. It takes monumental effort to make a key lime pie last two whole days instead of just having it for breakfast, especially when there’s no witnesses. Be glad you have roommates to shame you out of the diabetes.
Bologna gets a bad wrap, since it’s pretty good and hilariously easy to prepare.
Yaaay for my question.
As for bean salad, I like doing a bean salad with a can of bean medley, halved cherry tomatoes, a crapload of chopped parsley, maybe some chopped red onion, and some crumbled feta. Bean salad rules.
Last night I caught an episode of Good Eats wherein Alton attempts to teach people how to make red beans and rice. It was the first time I ever wish I had a DVR.
One of my roommates works at a sushi place so we always have fresh free wasabi in our fridge. Mixed with mayo, spread on some good bread with ham, cheese and tomato? Pretty sure that’s how roasted angels taste
I feel your pain. Stupid changing metabolism. Used to be able to pig out and stay thin no matter what, but now if I do that too often, my stomach gets bigger. I wish it would stop doing that, but it refuses.
Chicago is full of these pro-miracle whip billboards. Especially near wrigley field. Take that as you will.
Miracle Whip is God.
There’s only one food were I find Miracle Whip isn’t the better replacement for mayo: fries.
On a bit of a whim one afternoon in college, the Snack Bar where I worked, had Ruben sandwiches. I being particularly hungry took two and a boat of fries. I remembered that my Dad often talked about when he was in Germany during his Army days that the Germans didn’t use ketchup on their fries, but this mayo dip. Now he never knew what was in it, but I decided to experiment with the idea with straight mayo. That led to four years of me eating fries with mayo. I’m sure that is how I developed by beer gut, despite the fact that I don’t like alcohol.