By Julia Bartlett – Gleaners Nutrition Education Team
Weeknight cooking can feel like a chore in between the busy aspects of life like work, school, commuting, and other commitments. Often times, we may feel the pressure to perfectly meal plan before each week: find recipes to follow, make a grocery list, purchase everything needed for those recipes, and follow them to a tee. However, life happens! Sometimes we end up going out for dinner one night, our appetites change, or we are short on time to go grocery shopping and need to use what we have on hand.
Rather than always relying on an exact recipe, you can use what is called a “recipe framework,” which calls for using interchangeable base elements to create a meal and following general cooking guidelines. For example, if you were looking to cook a batch of soup, rather than use a recipe that called for specific vegetables, proteins, and spices, you could use a framework model to utilize whatever you had left in your fridge or pantry. This may look like: a quart of vegetable stock, onions, some potatoes or other hearty veggies, chicken, frozen corn, wilted spinach, and whatever herbs you have on hand.
It’s important to follow the same general cooking guidelines for soups and stews such as first cooking diced onions in some oil until translucent before adding heartier vegetables, seared protein, aromatics and herbs, and stock or water. Allow extra cooking time for heartier vegetables and add in more delicate or quicker cooking vegetables such as spinach and frozen corn later in the cooking process. Always check that whatever protein in your soup is cooked until its appropriate internal temperature; for chicken, this would be 165 degrees.
English 
Spanish 
Arabic