Recipe Challenge

January 11, 2009 3:25 PM

Do you have a recipe that will work for these difficult conditions? I have access to a lot of high-quality ingredients but I DON'T have a lot of space and I have many food restrictions.

--I have no room to chop or dice more than one ingredient, unless they all go in the dish at the same time. Or unless I can use some frozen or canned version instead of chopping fresh.

--I hate chopping garlic so I have to be able to use prechopped garlic.

--Meat is ok but the less I have to handle it the better. I just don't have the space to juggle it safely with fresh greens etc.

--Oven stuff needs to fit in half the size of a normal oven

--Fewer pans = better. I do have a rice cooker and a small crockpot.

--Anything that smokes is probably not practical. I don't have an exhaust hood and it's too cold to open the windows and pray.

--Fewer ingredients = better.

--More whole grains = better.

--Lower number of spices = better. Not the amount of spice, the variety. I can't be running out to Whole Foods for fresh thyme AND rosemary AND marjoram AND allspice. That place is a madhouse. Nor do I have room to store many spices over a long period of time.

--Hot stuff, I love it, best if I don't have to chop any peppers

--I love healthy fats, like vegetable oils & avocados.

--I love fresh food, fresh fruit, fresh veggies; but canned and frozen are awesome too.

--Cheese must be optional OR aged for a very long time.

--Bread is ok but it shouldn't need to be fresh

--I like strange flavors and I'm really very adventurous with food, & will eat nearly anything I'm not allergic to.

ABSOLUTELY NO:
Onion
Tomato
Apple
Shellfish
Pear
Kiwi

posted by sondrialiac to food & drink (17 comments total)

Wow, you're seriously making this more complicated than it is.

So let me make it dead easy for you.

Stir-fry.

You've got the rice cooker, you can stick all your chopped up vegetables on a plate before you toss them into the frying pan/wok, and you can add whatever weird sauces/flavours you want. Hell, you can even buy diced chicken, which means you don't have to cut it up.

Now, come back when you've got four potatoes, half a sausage, and a dinner party of six coming in two hours, and we'll talk recipe challenge.
posted by Katemonkey at 3:52 PM on January 11

I don't understand why you can't cook whatever you want. If you have one cutting board, you can cut everything as you need to use it, no need to set out some huge mise en place. You can be safe with meat by getting a separate board. You can deal with a half-size oven with half-sheet pans and avoiding cooking giant whole birds (incidentally, I lived in a studio with a half-size oven and honestly had no problem cooking anything; maybe not a 20-lb turkey but pretty much everything else works). Use your rice cooker and crockpot to make full meals if you feel like it. Wash everything as you go.

You might want to check out Smitten Kitchen. Deb cooks all kinds of amazing things in a very small space. Yours may be smaller, but you might still get some tips for juggling a dinner without a lot of counter room from reading her, and maybe storage ideas, too. Pot racks and folding dish racks do wonders. And her spice system is genius; rig something like this up and get some spices, it's sad to cook without them.
posted by peachfuzz at 3:56 PM on January 11

OK, perhaps some veganish soups? I'm making one now, but sans garlic, tomatoes and onions the only ingredients would be 1/4 cup olive oil, carrots (3- 2 diced, 1 chopped), celery (3 stalks with leaves, chopped), 1.5 cups dried lentils, heap of dried oregano, salt and pepper, half green bell pepper diced, few pinches cumin, 1.5 quarts water, splash of mushroom soy sauce. everything except water and beans, about 10-15 minutes, stirring regularly, add water, heat to boil, add lentils, bring back to boil, reduce to simmer for 40 minutes. 2 cabbage, sliced thin, stir in during the last 5 minutes.
posted by dawson at 3:57 PM on January 11

Meant to say, here's one of her posts about her cooking space.
posted by peachfuzz at 3:57 PM on January 11

that would be 2 cups of shredded cabbage...
posted by dawson at 3:58 PM on January 11

You probably want to do some searching on some food/recipe sites like allrecipes or epicurious. A lot of sites let you search by ingredients.
posted by gudrun at 4:00 PM on January 11

Buy a basic cookbook such as the Joy of Cooking and pick out recipes that sound good to you. If they contain ingredients you don't like, figure out how to modify them.

I used to have some classmates who could whip up amazing curries in their dorm room on a hot plate, so I'm not sure your kitchen is as limited as you perceive it to be.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 4:11 PM on January 11

But here are some recipes ideas that would work for you:

Stews, soups, and other one-pot things. Braising is really good for the winter - pretty much any protein + aromatics + liquid + seasonings combination will be great if thrown in a pot and cooked slowly in the oven. Try seared chicken with garlic, leeks, green olives and preserved lemons with white wine for a sort of Moroccan-ish dish. Or classic beef + carrots, celery, leeks, and potatoes + red wine.

I really like roasted vegetable salads, sometimes with grain and sometimes without. Roast some beets, butternut squash, potatoes, or whatever you want on your half-sheet pans. Dress while still warm with olive oil and lemon juice or vinegar. Add accent notes of your choice - nuts, grated cheese, whatever - and toss everything with arugula or watercress OR oiled and grilled stale bread cubes for something more substantial.

In general, I think one-pot cooking will be your friend. Stir fries (but you do have to cut everything up in advance for this - put stuff that goes in at the same time into bowls together to consolidate) are good with pretty much any vegetable+protein. Simple skillet suppers like protein + sauce + rice or noodles (like, sear off some chicken, remove, make a roux and add stock and milk OR some kind of simmer sauce OR icky cream-of-whatever soup, add starch and meat, cook till everything is done).

And finally, use your broiler, it's there and very useful for cooking quickly without heating up the whole space or getting into some long involved thing. I cook chicken breast every morning to chuck into whatever I'm taking for lunch that day for some extra no-brainer protein - I take a square of foil, double it, fold the edges to give it some sturdiness, and plop a thin butterflied piece of chicken on it. Stick under the broiler, done in a couple minutes, no clean-up or additional pan to deal with.
posted by peachfuzz at 4:14 PM on January 11 [1 favorite has favorites]

I would recommend looking for recipe books designed for yachts, where one has many space restrictions and often restrictions in terms of fresh food available. Sorry, no specific recommendations.
posted by AnnaRat at 4:21 PM on January 11 [1 favorite has favorites]

--I have no room to chop or dice more than one ingredient, unless they all go in the dish at the same time. Or unless I can use some frozen or canned version instead of chopping fresh.

Hunh? Chop item. Put in bowl. Chop next item. Put in same/different bowl, depending on when they go into the pot. Stack bowls if using multiple bowls. Repeat.

Am I missing something about your constraints?
posted by leahwrenn at 4:51 PM on January 11

How about Thai curry? You need rice, the sauce is 1 to 2 tablespoons of Thai curry paste in and a can of coconut milk, and then you add whatever veggies/meat you like. I made tofu, mushroom and carrot curry with a toaster oven and a Coleman camp stove recently.
posted by zinfandel at 5:29 PM on January 11

Seconding the "I don't have room to chop more than one vegetable" confusion. Chopping vegetables isn't really a matter of...room, as such. As leanwrenn said, "Chop item. Put in bowl. Chop next item. Put in same/different bowl, depending on when they go into the pot. Stack bowls if using multiple bowls. Repeat." Or, hell, you could do what I did when I had a microscopic kitchen and put bowls in the empty sink, on living room chairs, or even the closed toilet lid if I had to.

Also: the spice issue. You could solve the space problem one of two ways --

- Find a store that carries spices in bulk and just get them there -- cheaper, and you can get only a tiny bit (although some places do make you take a quarter ounce minimum, but that still isn't much) and put it in a smaller jar, or

-- Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but if you get into the habit of cooking more, the spices will disappear faster, and storage won't be as much of a problem. Voila.

Another question:

"Meat is ok but the less I have to handle it the better. I just don't have the space to juggle it safely with fresh greens etc."

...I'm afraid I don't understand this at all. Can you not, you know, wipe the counter/give the chopping board a quick wash between one food item and the other?

As for the the food restrictions...first I'm going to recommend the Moosewood "Daily Specials" first off, as they have a ton of one-pot soups and stews, as well as a ton of salads. There are several recipes that involve onion or tomato, but...there are also several that don't.


But, there's one nice, basic meal you could make that I think fits all your requirements, and you can prepare it in a way that avoids any of the cleanliness triggers...steak frites with green beans.

You only need to pick up three things -- a small inch-thick steak, whatever cut you want; either a) fresh green beans or b) frozen green beans; and either a) frozen french fries or b) one potato.

French fries/potatoes first: If you've gotten the frozen french fries, just prepare them the way they say on the package (usually, this just means pouring them onto a cookie sheet and heating them in the oven). If you've gotten the potato -- wash it off, peel it if you want to, and then slice it into 6-8 wedges. Sprinkle on some salt and pepper, rub some olive oil on them and thenlay them in a cookie sheet. bake them at 450 for about 10 minutes, then flip them each over and bake for another 5 minutes.

For the green beans: If you're using fresh, just cut the ends off, and cut them into bite-size lengths if you want. Put about an inch of water in a saucepan, bring to a boil, dump the beans in, cover and let that all steam for about 5-7 minutes. Drain. If you're using frozen, just prepare like it says on the package.

For the steak -- Just salt and pepper it, then run it under your broiler, about 3 minutes per side.

You haven't had to cut the steak in any way, the only spice you use is salt, no onion is involved, and if you've gone with frozen beans and frozen fries, you don't even have to dirty a knife. And yet you've got steak frites and haricots, something you can get in a halfway decent French bistro.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:54 PM on January 11 [2 favorites has favorites]

Mark Bittman, the food writer for the NY Times and the author of How to Cook Everything, has a tiny kitchen in his NYC apartment just like everyone else here. He still manages to make very delicious food. He talks about cooking in his tiny kitchen in this NY Times article. You can do it too. You just have to make do with what you have. Stack bowls, use every surface you can think of, and buy pre-diced stuff if you don't want to bother with cutting it. But space really shouldn't limit you as much as you think it does.
posted by bedhead at 6:48 PM on January 11 [2 favorites has favorites]

My kitchen is quite tiny also - and really, who can chop more than one thing at a time anyway? May I recommend paper plates for chopping? They're great for cutting things on and they are stackable. You can even keep your meat and greens separate!

You can make additional temporary flat space in your kitchen (or just outside your kitchen) by using folding tv tables - the wood kind, not the wobbly metal kind.

Keep everything in your fridge or cupboard until it's needed, and put it back after it's used.

As for recipes... You can cook anything that doesn't require: Onion, Tomato, Apple, Shellfish, Pear or Kiwi. (Although - I can't imagine living without onion.)
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:33 PM on January 11

Bean soups are probably worth looking into; there's a recipe for lentil soup I use that calls for a teaspoon of mustard and a tablespoon of vinegar at the end -- it gives it more heat and liveliness than bean soups sometimes have. Also, they generally only call for a couple of vegetables--carrots, celery, and you could bump up the garlic to compensate for the lack of onion (or if you're not allergic to other members of the family, maybe try leeks or scallions instead? Or dried onion, which might not have the oils?)

How are you for refrigerator storage space? You could try getting some premade pizza dough, separating it into personal-sized pizza servings, and making individual pizzas. You could use pesto in place of tomato sauce, or a white sauce with some aged parmesan. In place of mozzarella, you could use some combination of aged asiago or aged parmesan or another aged cheese. I think your best bet is to go with components of food you can prepared at different times and then be used for different things. Like you can prep a squash, make soup with part of it, cut part into cubes and toss with flour, parsley, garlic, and olive oil and bake it, and use the cubed part on top of a pizza with asiago (I did this last night -- it was awesome.) You can store them for different days...

Chipotles in adobo are a great canned product that add a lot of smoky heat. I buy the cans, divide the contents up, and freeze them in little foil packets for when I want them--I like one or two in squash soup.

You could also cook a pot of beans in advance and then use them for spreads w/some garlic and lemon, or mix them w/pasta and some cut up greens and cheese--same withe grains. Same with greens, actually. If you deal with a bunch of chard, you can use some in a bean soup, some with pasta, etc. That way you don't have too much going on in the kitchen but you get to have a variety of ingredients.

Also, you might take a single trip to Whole Foods to stock up on some of this stuff (dried grains, etc.) but also -- I think dehydrated garlic is a really good product, better than the jars of prechopped stuff, and is nice to have to get out of chopping garlic occasionally. It needs to rehydrate in whatever it sits in, and it's twice as strong as non-dehydrated garlic, so you don't use a ton. Red pepper flakes are probably a good thing for you to have around, too. So if you can put up with thirty minutes of Whole Foods, which I strongly agree is not the easiest thing to do, you can get some things that could help out.

To increase work space, can you put a cutting board over the sink?
posted by A Terrible Llama at 1:40 AM on January 12

Steamed veggies + anything. Get a decent steel steaming insert, for example: this one. Chop some veggies, whatever you have that is cheap and fresh at the time, broccoli, savoy cabbage, romaine, yams, plantains, potatoes, cauliflower, mushrooms, medium-thick pasta (on the bottom), celery, any kind of squash, zuchini, spinach, brussels sprouts, etc. Put them all into the steamer. Now this is VERY important: sprinkle some olive oil over the veggies. Go ahead & steam them while cleaning up the cutting board and counter and knives. In 15 minutes or so it'll be ready (but you have to make sure that you sliced potatoes and yams thin). Now put some low sodium soy sauce over the veggies and steam them for another 15 seconds. (You can also add cottage cheese and/or sour cream, or cheese). It's now ready! The greatest thing about steamed vegetables is that each ingredient retains strong fresh flavour while at the same time the flavours mesh and flow through other veggies; and they retain texture much better than boiled dishes. You can use the pan that's under the steamer to make lentils or rice at the same time.
posted by rainy at 3:21 AM on January 12

Please favorite some of the excellent above replies, if you're serious about advice. Bittman has fans and detractors, but you have to accept the basic advice that space is not an absolute limitation about what you can cook. Servants+space = luxury, but ingredients + planning + patience = i'm coming over. Stacking bowls rock.
I think a lot of vegan things will fit your needs, but if you want meat you can minimize hassle (and satisfy your paranoid side, (which I, as an ex-veg, definitely share) by buying pre-cut (and making sure you cook well) or having a second cutting/ mise en place arrangement for your meats. ) You can also cover your cutting boards/ bowls with something disposable if that isn't an environmental problem for you (got any banana trees with extra leaves?)
Also, number of spices...might think about number of fresh spices, since many others can be held a long time with no hassle and very little space, and in Indian and many other traditions long-stored spices are woken up by dry-frying (or oil-frying).
[Personally, if I could always have fresh coriander (cilantro) I'd settle for everything else coming from the dry spice shelf or the freezer!]
posted by Mngo at 8:06 AM on January 12