make everyday simple
Streamline day-to-day cooking with these tips, tools, and appliances personally utililized by the Unvirtuous Vegetarian.
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I abhor waste... So, when I finally started growing enough tomatoes to can, the sight of compost bin bound skins made me weep. This year, I ran across a post from Serious Eats that offered microwave instructions for drying tomato skins. Excellent! I loved the idea but considering the amounts of tomato skins I'd be drying at a time, their microwave method wasn't practical. So, I dried my skins in the oven just like I'd dry chilis or herbs. Keep the powder in your spice rack to top popcorn, french fries, or mozzarella.
After summer events, my fridge is often littered with containers full of bean, quinoa, and rice salads. Let these sides take center stage as quesadilla filling! Quesadillas are perfect for a quick lunch or dinner.
Fresh and dried basil are vastly different ingredients. While you can substitute dried for fresh in tomato based sauces and soups and still produce a great result, for pestos and curries, dried basil is simply not an option. But as autumnal colors paint the landscape, not only is fresh basil scarce, the stuff you find in clamshells is lacklaster, expensive, and the varieties are limited. So, if you want pesto in December, your best solution is to plan ahead and freeze your garden fresh basil. Your winter pesto may never be as bright as summer's, but when winter has come, you'll welcome a taste of summer.
No ice-cream machine? No problem. Ice-cream, sorbet, and their lovechild, sherbet, are all about texture. Smooth, soft, scoopable texture... And without a machine, you're just not going to achieve a decent scoop. But frozen ice pops are wonderfully forgiving and easy to make!
Lemongrass is a perennial that's only hardy to zone 9. So, here in zone 6, if you want fresh lemongrass, you got to grow it as an annual or grow it inside. Indoor plants never survive my neglect, but in order to get the most of my plant, I dry the leaves so that I can have herbal lemongrass tea throughout the winter. Being caffeine-free, this tea can be enjoyed all day, and the dried leaves don't have the bitterness that plaques steeped fresh leaves.
After a cook-out, I have way more burger buns than a single vegetarian can ever hope to use. I don't mind keeping a bag in the freezer for the occasional veggie burger, but I don't have the space for much more than that. So, this year, as I was breading my zucchini, I thought, "Why not make that extra bread into breadcrumbs?" You can use any sort of buns or bread, store bought or artisanal, stale or fresh. Failed attempts at baking bread work too! Before it ends up in the compost bin, try this...
Summer picnics and parties leave the fridge full of leftovers, and after a couple days, you're done eating that caprese pasta salad. Give these side dishes a second life as soup or chili. While mayonnaise heavy pasta and potato salads won't work, Mexican, Greek, and Italian inspired quinoa, pasta, and rice salads are perfect.
While breading zucchini isn't something you'll find yourself doing on a weekday, you can bread, bake, and freeze so you have slices ready to go. These frozen slices are a great start to many meals... Obviously, fried eggplant and zucchini are wonderful in a parmesan casseroles, but what about pairing panko crusted eggplant with garlic sauce and rice? Or try corn meal on squash and bake up an enchilada casserole!