Hey, have you checked your refrigerator today? Are there any enticing offerings chilling in there? Some rice from takeout the other night? Maybe a few chunks of rotisserie chicken? Or half a bundle of herbs you bought a few days ago and need to use soon? That stuff is golden: those odds and ends are the seeds of your next glorious meal. You could simmer it all into a soothing, lemon-scented soup. Or for something friskier, you could break out your spices and fill your kitchen with the delicious aromas of a gingery curry. Perhaps you’d like to make two different meals from your refrigerated bounty. No problem: try coconut waffles with the rice, and a scallion-sesame chicken salad for lunch. Is it possible you have some overripe pears in the fruit drawer as well? If so, trim them up and roast them with chai spices for an aromatic fruit compote that you can use to top your morning yogurt or late-night ice cream.
I take uncommon delight in putting together memorable meals out of the morsels in my refrigerator: it’s creative work with just a hint of virtue embedded in it. I hope to sway you with some of this enthusiasm. Secrets of Great Second Meals is a cookbook dedicated to a spirited engagement with what’s really in our refrigerators: it’s here for inspiration to put our food to its best possible use, to limit waste, and to get the most out of our valuable time.
My first goal is to help home cooks transform yesterday’s meal into tonight’s dinner, and an enticing one at that. My other goal—and this one is a little more of a lifestyle adjustment—is to inspire you to start planning for those extras. I’ll show you foods that are versatile and worthy of stocking. Remaking them into a second meal becomes its own exciting ritual, saving you cooking time and shopping in the end. The recipes in this book are designed to be flexible: they can handle all sorts of tweaks and additions. Throughout the book, I’ll share cues for how to improvise with whatever golden tidbits you have in your own kitchen. And with those creative skills, you can start to save time and money in your home.
Welcome to the world of great second meals!
I know how hard it is to cook regularly. Even I fall out of the habit from time to time, and I’m a food writer who works in a home office. But sometimes when I’ve spent hours driving the kids from activity to activity, when volunteering and work pile up, dinner is just another chore at the end of a tiring day. If I have nothing cooked in the refrigerator, the result is usually takeout. But if there is something—let’s say some cooked beans, or a few ounces of salmon from last night’s grilling—then I feel rooted again. I know that it’s easier, healthier, less costly, and frankly, less boring to work up a delicious dinner than to call out for another pizza.
There’s nothing I like more than figuring out the right way to reframe a good meal into another satisfying meal. There’s the self-congratulatory pleasure of reducing waste in my kitchen and producing a frugal meal. There’s the anticipation of new flavors and textures at the next meal to come. And most distinctive, there’s the eureka! moment when I fit together disparate extras into a delicious new context. At my house, reinvention might mean crafting a beautiful salad with some second-day salmon, stuffing cooked whole grains into a gorgeous summer squash, or pureeing extra beans into a dip to share as an after-school snack with my daughter.
Now, how you deal with extra food in your refrigerator can be a touchy subject.
On one hand, thoughtfully saving and repurposing food is environmentally and fiscally responsible. But sometimes warmed-over seconds can also feel a little boring, obligatory, or even miserly. In this book I want to add the element of play to the whole equation. Is it good for your budget and the environment to throw out less food? Of course it is. But it’s also the best way I know to make home cooking work in busy modern lives. If you cook intentionally, knowing some part of one meal is destined for the next, you have a step up when it’s time to cook again. By the way: I’ll try to avoid using the word intentionally from here on out, lest I sound too much like a recently certified yoga instructor.
As I got started on this cookbook, I had to help my mother move out of her house and into an apartment. Helping her downsize made my own childhood kitchen memories percolate. All these objects that crackled with memory: her tattered sea-green copy of Joy of Cooking from the postwar years (with techniques on how to cook beaver and opossum, advice trimmed from more recent editions), the perfect, heavy French tart pan that she still won’t give me even though her new kitchen is tiny, and the yellow spatter-ware bowl that was the start of every baking project in our home.
Into that bowl my grandmother and she would carefully trim all the forlorn apples that our four ornery apple trees produced in my childhood yard. We could never eat any of them out of hand because each bite would risk a sloppy bruise, or worse, a wriggling worm. But every September we would gather the fallen apples and my mom and grandma would stand over the yellow bowl paring and editing any imperfections from dozens and dozens of apples. Most would go to make applesauce, which Mama kept in the standalone freezer in the garage. A special few would go into her glorious apple cake, studded with translucent apple chunks and crowned with a thin crust of buttery brown sugar frosting.
The cake is still one of my favorite things in the world—and I’ll provide you a recipe for a similar apple cake in this book, one that also upcycles leftover bread! That apple cake also represents a key part of my kitchen instincts. There was frugality at the core of my mother’s cooking: she was only a babe during the Depression, but the ethos lived long into the war years of her childhood and beyond. Nothing was to be wasted; every item, whether costly or not, could be stretched into another meal. We grew up on reheated spaghetti and vegetable soup filled with the odds and ends of the past few dinners. Because my mother was a good cook, the second meals were rarely unappealing: leftovers were a fact of life, a way of economically feeding a hungry family. The already-cooked ingredients in the fridge also gave my tired working mother a head start on feeding us at the end of the day.
As we grew older, I’ll admit, some of those instincts of my mother’s drove me a little bonkers: my sister and I would joke about the tennis ball of plastic wrap it took to preserve the thimbleful of salmon leftover from a meal or the forlorn Tupperware containing fourteen peas.
My feelings about leftovers became further complicated as I got older and started to run my own kitchen. Some of this had to do with my career in food, first in cooking and then in writing about restaurants. Years of seeking new flavors and new textures spoiled me and made me cranky about sameness. I would eat out so often that the extra food in doggy bags would dry out before I could rewarm them. Cooking magazines like the ones I wrote for were celebrating the joys of freshness, of farmers markets and novelty, all of which, consciously or not, kind of undermined the concept of food thrift. Preservation, like fermenting and jam-making, were all the rage, but little was made of the day-to-day preservation ordinary people did in their refrigerators and freezers. We looked askance at foods that were known for incorporating leftovers; retro cuisine like casseroles, Jell-O salads, and turkey tetrazzini.
This was something of a generational gap, which Nigella Lawson pinpointed in her book How to Eat. Of her mother, she wrote, “She, you see, was a product of her age, which believed that cooking lay in what you did to inferior products. . . . I, however, am a product of mine, which believes that you will always use the best, the freshest produce of the highest quality you can afford—and then do as little as possible to it.” With that bias in mind, I felt ambivalent about leftovers. That doesn’t mean I threw out the extra food that I had left over: I would regularly toss day-old remnants into pastas and salads and soups and sandwiches. But I kind of kept it to myself.
Nevertheless, as I cooked and wrote more, I began to feel like there was something missing from the story: If we revered these ingredients that were painstakingly grown in organic fields and handcrafted by food artisans, why did we not also appreciate them after the first meal? Why wasn’t the skill of cooking a second meal with extra food more celebrated? It seemed strange not to revel in that conservation.
When I started writing a healthy food plan for Bon Appétit: The Food Lover’s Cleanse, which became my first cookbook, I really embraced cooking ahead for multiple meals. Cooking whole-food ingredients like whole grains and vegetables takes time. Longer-cooked items, things such as whole roasted beets and farro, didn’t seem so time consuming if they served in two or three meals. I realized that the dinner-cooking for the night before could be the centerpiece of a fresh new meal, typically a bright, texturally varied salad for lunch the next day.
There are people who have made this same realization and adopted the idea of meal planning: working out a plan for each week’s meals in advance, batch cooking components on the weekend, and following their plans to a tee all week. It is a reasonable way to approach cooking and eating. The problem is that I’m not quite that judicious when it comes to cooking. I start to resent plans that are too exact. I get cravings. I love making spur-of-the-moment menu decisions.
And so, with this book I sought another path, one that acknowledges the wisdom of planning but also affirms my craving for impulsive pleasures. With good ingredients—say, some braised pork from last night’s dinner party and a pile of braised greens—lying around the refrigerator, I know that my improvisations will have a healthier backbone. I get to choose whether to use them in an elegant white bean salad or a golden, puffed soufflé. But I know I am ready to go in either case.