When you’ve been cooking for one for as long as I have, you know that the supermarkets sell almost nothing in packages smaller than an SUV, quantities less than what would feed a brigade of troops in Iraq for a week. And you learn to cope. The knife, the Tupperware-type bowl, the plastic bag (especially the ziplock type), and the freezer are indispensable allies in the fight against waste. Fresh vegetables pose the biggest challenge. Especially lettuce. Unless you’re prepared to shell out major dinero for those postage-stamp-sized packages of “spring mix� or what have you, you get it a head at a time. That’s a lot of salads and sandwich garnish. You can’t freeze it, nor can you leave it on the shelf. If you refrigerate it and don’t seal it in a bag, it’ll wilt, especially in modern-day frost-free dessicators … sorry, refrigerators. If you do seal it in a bag, it’s likely to rot. It’s a neat trick finding the right combination of bag, and bag sealing, and bag positioning in the refrigerator, and prayers of propitiation to Shiva the Destroyer, to keep that head of lettuce edible long enough for you to actually eat it all without making it all you eat. And even if you do manage to keep it around for more than a day or two without it going terminally flabby or transmuting into slime, it’s likely to turn yellow. Like the lettuce I used on my tacos for lunch. Which reminded me of how it came to be that, today, I will seldom cook for more than one.
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