Cooking for Two - Bruce Weinstein [0]
for two
120 Recipes for Every Day
and Those Special Nights
Bruce Weinstein
and Mark Scarbrough
To Susan Ginsburg,
career cartographer, patient yea-sayer,
and friend
Contents
Introduction
Before You Start Cooking
Notes on Equipment
A Quick Reference Guide to Some Ingredients
The Everyday Pantry
Five Tips for Success
A Word About What “Everyday” Means
soups and stews
main course salads
casseroles
pastas
vegetarian dishes
fish
chicken, turkey, and duck
pork and lamb
beef and veal
cookies
puddings
fruit desserts
cakes and other treats
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Bruce Weinstein
Source Guide
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
making tea for two with a recipe for eight
Remember the old song “Tea for Two”? Romantic, yes—but hardly the stuff of most cookbooks, which offer recipes for what happens long after you’ve had your tea for two: once the kids come along, once the company starts dropping by. Sautés for six, casseroles for eight, cakes for ten.
We’ve come by these grand designs honestly enough. Consider the holidays. Thanksgiving dinner may be the single most important meal of the year—and that’s not to mention Hanukkah, Christmas, or even the traditional Fourth of July picnic. The crowded cooking spirit of those celebrations surely works itself back into our notions of everyday cooking. So we’re left with a 9 × 13-inch casserole on an ordinary Thursday night.
And what about the images we’ve seen on TV? The Brady Bunch, The Waltons, or even My Three Sons? Most of us would say the average American family has a mom, a dad, and two kids, if not more. But the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2000 that the average U.S. family had just 3.14 members; the average household, just 2.59 members.
So despite our 9 × 13 dreams, we cook in smaller pots. And even if we occasionally cook for crowds, we get to those celebrations the old-fashioned way: by starting out with just two. We date, fall in love, get married. Or perhaps it’s not even as romantic as that. We have a standing dinner date with a friend on Wednesday nights, just the two of us.
We also tend to end up as twosomes: the children off to college, or on their own. Perhaps we lose a spouse. Or start over, a new life. Dating at forty, fifty, sixty. Or even this: the kids go away for the weekend, a week, or the summer, off to the grandparents or sports camp. So what do you do with that cherished meatloaf recipe? Make it and you’re stuck with leftovers for a week. And cookies? One batch, four dozen.
So here’s a cookbook for smaller pots. For mac and cheese, that comforting weeknight supper, but this time without any leftovers or any waste. Or for peanut butter oatmeal cookies. Six is the perfect number on Saturday night after the movies.
cooking in small batches without
that half-a-can-of-stock predicament
If you’ve ever cooked a typical recipe for two, you know the shtick. You use half a can of stock, or less, and then what? You’re left with that irritating can in the refrigerator, the one with aluminum foil wadded across the top, the one you throw out a week later. And what happens when the recipe calls for, say, two teaspoons of chopped onion? A week later, you come across those wiggly, brown slivers, laminated in plastic wrap, turning to mulch in your crisper.
We decided part of the secret to successful small-batch cooking was doing it without waste. So we’ve crafted techniques to cut down on the yield without larding your refrigerator with leftover bits and pieces. You’ll buy what you use, use what you buy. For example, a small chicken egg is too large for a batch of six cookies or two brownies; so we offer alternatives: either pasteurized egg substitutes such as Egg Beaters or quail eggs. Instead of half a can of stock, we use the liquid that dried mushrooms have soaked in, or we make a small amount of broth with vegetables and herbs before adding meat to the stew. We use shallots instead of onions, vermouth (which keeps for months) instead of wine (which sometimes