Routine Cooking + Weeknight Meals

Reflecting on one big meal a week and some inspiration to get you cooking on a Wednesday

As one might on a winter weekend afternoon, I spent half an hour a few weeks ago, while the kiddos were sleeping, rubbing down some lamb bellies with a dry-cure seasoning mix and tossing them into the refrigerator. I had this idea to make lamb bacon¹. As one might when he has friends who get a kick out of such things, I texted a few photos of the process to

Sam Sager

.

Besides his standard response of “ohhh baby²,” Sam also commented how he was “thinking the other day about how remarkable it is for [me] to always have a dish to talk about on cow we doin [sic].³” He continued that he loves cooking, but typically just makes the same things over and over.

I get that sentiment. I truly enjoy the act of cooking — it’s a tremendous way to reconnect with yourself⁴. The physicality of it is a stark contrast to working on a computer, which so many of us spend so much time doing. You can’t cook through a screen, despite what The Jetsons promised over a half-century ago⁵.

That being said, it’s not easy to cook a fanciful menu 5+ nights a week. It takes time; life sometimes can get in the way. While I’d love to maintain the illusion that something like home-cured and home-smoked lamb bacon carbonara is standard fare on the CWD Ranch, that we make lobster risotto with regularity, that’s not really the case. Like Sam, more often than not, we end up cycling through the same 10-15 meals, sometime varying ingredients, sometimes varying seasonings, usually having enough for at least one or two nights of leftovers⁶.

This type of cadence allows me the latitude to make one “fancy” meal each week, allows me to have something to write about in this newsletter. I can show you from-scratch mushroom sourdough pasta with all-day simmered sauce, forgoing the broiled salmon and roasted vegetables and slow-cooker chuck roast that bore the bulk of the week’s meals⁷.

Whether you choose to cook and eat the same meals over and over, or strive never to repeat an entree, I hope that you do, at the end of the day⁸, choose to cook. An act as simple as chopping vegetables, seasoning meat, or cooking pasta is a wonderful transition from being “on” after a long day to sitting down at the dinner table and turning “off⁹.”

In that vein, in lieu of a dedicated recipe this week, here are a handful that you could make this week, all of which come together quickly, with no fancy ingredients, and taste delicious. No homemade lamb bacon required!¹⁰

I. Grilled Cheese

Preheat your oven to 375(F). Butter two slices of bread and stack some cheese and bacon if you have it on the inside. Place in a searing hot cast iron pan with butter until one side is well toasted. Flip and remove to the oven until the cheese is melty on the inside.

II. Dinner Tacos

Cook up a few links of Mexican chorizo. Drain a can of bean and cook over medium heat with cumin, garlic and onion powder, salt, pepper, and chili seasoning. Fry a few eggs. Serve this all with warm tortillas and hot sauces and salsa as you have available.

III. Sausages and Roasted Vegetables

Slice up a few onions and a few potatoes¹¹. Douse them in a roasting pan with olive oil, salt, and pepper then roast in the oven at 400(F) for twenty minutes. Layer on top a few sausages, making sure to make a slit of two in each so the juices run out while cooking, and roast for another 20-30 minutes until the sausages are cooked through and veggies browning.

IV. Tuna Salad Sandwiches

Toast a few slices of bread. In a small bowl, mix together a can or two of tuna packed in olive oil, some cottage cheese, a dash of mustard, salt, pepper, and a splash of vinegar. Lather the tuna onto the bread and top with a hard-boiled egg¹².

There you go folks, four easy recipes. Many of these you can make simply with the ingredients you should have in-stock in your pantry¹³. Each of them should take no more than 15-20 minutes to pull together from inception to ingestion, and I won’t tell anyone of you decide to eat them every week.

With that, I’ll leave you to your Fridays. Weird week in New England with a bust of a blizzard on a Tuesday, splitting the week in half. Still not sure I’m adjusted. It’s cold, but spring is around the corner — though I’m not sure we ever felt winter really bear down — so make the most of the cool weather while you can. You might miss it when it’s 75 and sunny!

1. Bacon from a lamb, of course, isn’t going to be the traditional slicing bacon you get from a domestic pig in the grocery store. Besides being much leaner and much smaller (a bacon-yielding pig being close to 300-lbs at slaughter time, the lamb I used was under 100-lbs, some of that being it’s wool), I’m not entirely convinced I used the exact “belly” cut for this experiment. Having broken down the lamb myself, I may have mislabeled what is likely the flank as the belly — but, not being a professional butcher — I’m not 100% certain where the distinction between the two falls on a pig, let alone a lamb.

Any more competent butchers who happen to read this, please opine.

2. He actually wrote “Damn that looks good,” but it’s funnier if he had said “ohhhh baby” and who am I to let fact get in the way of a good recounting?

3. I’m flattered that you think I’m remarkable, Sam.

4. To say nothing of reconnecting with food.

5.

Myles Snider

has written about this concept before, but I can’t for the life of me find it anywhere. Maybe he can drop some knowledge in the comments, or at least direct me to where I can give him credit.

6. Especially in the winter, when the meals tend to be heartier and stand up well to reheating.

7. Some weeks we don’t even make anything I haven’t cooked before — and those are the weeks where I find myself scrolling through the photos on my phone looking for something I haven’t yet featured in CWD. If I can’t find anything, you get a holiday gift guide or an expose on the creative act of parenting.

8. Pun!

9. And please, eat at the dinner table. Light a candle if you have them, make dinner time more than just eating off the coffee table watching another screen. Food is meant to nourish you — savor it.

10. Though if you feel like making it, here’s how. I used a similar adaptation of Jesse Griffith’s “Wild Hog Bacon” from his amazing cookbook The Hog Book. The proportions of salt, cure, and seasonings are roughly the same no matter what recipe you use, so feel free to experiment a little — just keep in mind that because this is lightly- or entirely uncured, you’ll want to cook this fully to 165(F) before you eat it, just from a food safety warning. If when you take it out of the fridge, anything seems funky or off, absolutely don’t risk food poisoning by muscling through.

11. We used sweet potatoes for this version, since we were out of regular potatoes and it tasted delicious — probably better than even the typical potatoes.

12. To make the perfect runny yolk egg, place a few eggs in a small sauce pan and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil, cover, and cut the heat. Set a timer for five minutes, and when it goes off, remove the eggs to a bowl of ice water and to stop the cooking. Peel and serve.

13. Don’t know how to stock a pantry? Good news: I wrote a long-forgotten guide to it about a year ago.