Learning how to make great-tasting RealAge foods in less time than is required for “convenience foods” is one important way to find enough energy for all the activities of a good life. Learning the principles that significantly increase your kitchen’s IQ can make RealAge cooking even faster than driving to the take-out place. This chapter describes some general principles, tricks, and shortcuts that shorten your time in the kitchen while increasing your kitchen’s IQ. Almost all of the recipes in this book you can prepare in half an hour or less.
And these meals and preparations can be easy whether cooking for yourself and your family, or entertaining big time. Doing all you can for the health of your friends is one of the best ways to show you care. And what better way to entertain than by serving RealAge-smart foods? If you entertain more than once a year, this chapter is for you. Entertaining need not be stressful. The key to reducing stress for you and your family is to increase your kitchen’s IQ so that entertaining is fun to plan and carry out. This chapter shares the principles that I—and many e-mailers—have used to make cooking for yourself and the entire entertaining process so age-reducing you’ll want to do both more often.
At Home, Meals for One
The twentieth century was a time of tremendous change in food preparation at home. More and more women began to work outside the home. Also, after World War II, the so-called convenience foods made their appearance. As a result, the way we feed our families has changed completely. In our grandparents’ time, all cooking was done from scratch, and it was a never-ending, time-consuming daily grind.
Because of modern conveniences and the increasing number of two-career families, we’ve found ways to escape that grind and get dinner on the table faster. Unfortunately, these methods frequently involve adding certain ingredients to food—such as sodium and saturated fat—that can sap your energy and make your RealAge older. Members of busy two-career families are the very individuals who can most benefit from home-cooked meals shared with loved ones at the end of the workday.
Fortunately, the idea that preparing a home-cooked meal must be a complicated and time-consuming process is a myth. In truth, you can put together a home-cooked meal just as quickly (and almost as easily) as picking up so-called fast food. In the process, you’ll help keep your family much healthier and more energetic, now and in the long run. The salt, trans fats, and other additives in many convenience foods make their purchase a quick way to accelerate aging. Like most of the principles of RealAge-smart eating, learning to make fast but nutritious meals from almost-scratch is easy (and gets easier) with practice. Start by keeping the following rules in mind:
• Organize and prepare. It’s those trips to the grocery store for some forgotten item during the week that are the worst waste of time. Create a master grocery list tailored to your family’s smart-eating habits and take it with you on a once-a-week stock-up trip. Any perishable items you might hesitate to buy days in advance can almost certainly be frozen and served later (organizing and planning your meals is worth up to 6 Kitchen IQ points).
• Strive for simplicity, spend for quality. The heart of quick and delicious RealAge-smart meals is simplicity. The fewer the ingredients, the better. However, the fewer the ingredients in a dish, the better each should taste. A fresh, high-quality grilled salmon steak, for example, needs only a squeeze of lemon for perfection. Because the true taste of your foods won’t be masked by complicated additions, buy the best-quality ingredients you can find. Testing, and not necessarily high cost, is the best means of judging quality. (Using six or fewer ingredients in 70 percent of the dishes you make is worth 3 Kitchen IQ points.)
• Set up beforehand. Whenever possible, set the table and prepare the kitchen the night before, or in the morning before you leave for work. Nothing is a more welcome sight when you arrive home than a nicely set table. If you’ve already set out dishes on the stove (and put water in the pasta pot, or brown or basmati rice in the rice cooker), the wait time for dinner can be substantially reduced. Cooking slowly seems to be better healthwise—in one study, a group of diabetic patients was given food cooked with either high heat for a short time or food cooked slower with lower heat. Markers of aging were 50 percent less with lower, slow temperature cooking. So a crock pot cooking method may be healthier (2 Kitchen IQ points).
• Develop a few favorite dishes. Develop a few fabulous-tasting favorites that are particularly easy to make, and then make them often. You’ll become so adept that eventually they’ll take less effort than a so-called time-saving but artery-aging option such as picking up a heavily cheese-laden pizza (5 Kitchen IQ points).
• Give up on elaborate perfection. Many people who learned to cook during the gourmet cooking craze of the seventies and eighties developed an all-or-nothing approach to cooking—either high-end, multitiered entrees, or a bowl of cereal. An agonizing, stress-laden approach to cooking can be unlearned. Enjoy every meal that simply does what it should—provides delicious RealAge-smart nutrition to you and your family—and save your epicurean extravaganzas for special occasions (3 Kitchen IQ points).
• Target your serving time. The time to create a dinner is always defined by the dish that takes longest to make. This dish is most often on the whole-grain side, such as rice. Hit the button on the rice cooker the moment you get home. Then prepare the other dishes at a more leisurely pace. The completion time for that first dish is your target serving time. Counting back from this target time tells you when to start the other dishes, depending on how long each will take.
Don’t be concerned if you can’t get all the dishes to finish cooking at exactly the same moment. Instead, plan your serving time according to your most delicate dish. For example, most soups, stews, hearty salads, and grilled dishes can sit for several minutes after cooking and still taste just as good—or better—a few degrees cooler. Many cooked vegetables, however, are best nice and hot, and lose appeal if they sit for too long. The same is true for green salads once they’ve been dressed.
When You Care Enough to Serve the Very Best
If you think that having a cocktail or dinner party at your home is too stressful, think again. Several key steps will ensure that the evening is just as enjoyable and relaxing for you as for the guests. After all, stress-free living is an important part of the RealAge lifestyle.
• To the greatest extent possible, take care of your guests’ needs in advance. Guests are uncomfortable when their needs are troublesome to their hosts. For the sake of your guests, take care of their needs—where to put their coats, how to get Great Aunt Sally into the house in her wheelchair, what drinks to serve the guests who don’t want alcohol—well before their arrival. That said, don’t require perfection and don’t blame yourself if something goes wrong during the party. It’s the gracious handling of a mishap—or perhaps even finding humor in it—that can make an event truly memorable and fun (2 Kitchen IQ points).
• Choose one specialty dish. This is an old catering trick: have one truly wonderful dish for which you are known. Some people believe that the success of a party depends on turning out endless complicated, completely home-cooked dishes. This is not true. Choose one dish that’s a crowd-pleaser, RealAge-smart, fabulous tasting, and that you genuinely enjoy making and love eating. Make that dish the centerpiece of your special occasion. The other dishes can be extremely simple, such as crusty, home-baked bread or a fresh garden salad, and should serve only to complement the focus dish, not compete with it.
Don’t worry if you’re serving a dish you served at your last party. That’s the point of a signature dish. In fact, your guests may very well be attending with the hope that you’re going to make that same delicious Cioppino you made before (4 Kitchen IQ points).
• Prepare as much of the food as possible in advance. Aside from your specialty dish, as much as possible, serve dishes that can be assembled in advance and frozen, dishes that can be assembled the day before and refrigerated, and items that can be picked up from a specialty store on the day of the event (2 Kitchen IQ points).
• Enjoy the all-important half hour. Professional caterer and author Nicole Aloni believes it’s vital to have a free half-hour after you’re dressed and ready for your guests but before their arrival. In this free time, you can have a glass of wine or champagne, take a quiet moment with your family member co-hosts, and admire the fruits of your labor. The time helps you relax and be refreshed when you greet your guests, and this relaxed state will probably set the tone for the entire evening. Since stress is the greatest ager of all, planning to ensure you have this half-hour to enjoy is key to keeping your RealAge younger (4 Kitchen IQ points).
• Pick one passion and let others do the rest. Just as you should select one dish you love to make, you should select one aspect of decorating or preparation you particularly enjoy. Perhaps you’re great at arranging flowers, or have a gift for artfully assembling unusual objects for a centerpiece, or can create beautiful ambience through lighting. Spend most of your prep time on that project and farm out the other chores to family members and friends or, if possible, paid professionals (2 Kitchen IQ points).
• Feel good, not guilty, about serving RealAge-smart food. It’s easy to think that guests might arrive to a party expecting rich, fat-laden dishes that often accompany a special occasion. Don’t feel pressure to veer off your path of RealAge-smart eating because of that expectation. Instead, take the event as an opportunity to show your guests that a bruschetta made with fresh basil and tomatoes from your garden can be more delicious than the saturated fat-laden pâté they might have been expecting. Feel good about this benefit—it shows that you truly care about your guests (2 Kitchen IQ points).
If you prefer not to serve alcohol but are unsure about hosting an alcohol-free event, consider having a brunch early in the day, so that smoothies and fresh-squeezed juices can be served. By the same token, you shouldn’t feel guilty about not serving alcohol. It might be a good idea to mention the fact in your invitation, especially for dinner parties. Or you could invite guests to BYOB. (Lack of guilt is worth 6 Kitchen IQ points!)
Like so many of the activities described in this book, entertaining in a relaxed fashion with RealAge-smart foods is a skill that gets easier and easier with practice. We hope you’ll keep up your friendships with those people you like best by opening your home to them, all the while helping to keep them healthy and young with the recipes in this book.