The Never-Ending Meal
/The concept of “the never-ending meal” doesn’t mean eat endlessly, particularly not during the holidays – please consume mindfully. It means prepare every meal to feed into the next. Find your meal planning flow. The basic idea: each time you prepare food, make extra of something and set aside one or more ingredients for subsequent meals. It’s simple, versatile, and uses leftovers creatively to avoid waste and overwhelm.
For example, how does a Thanksgiving feast provide for the weekend, and beyond? I’ll share what I prepared in my home. Thursday: pasture-raised turkey, local potatoes with gravy, roasted beets over arugula with candied walnuts and local chèvre, roasted acorn squash, cranberry sauce and homemade sourdough olive-herb bread. For dessert, apple pie with coconut whipped cream.
Friday, a simple breakfast: spiced oatmeal with nut butter, leftover candied walnuts, a dollop of cranberry sauce. Made turkey stock with the carcass and, while it simmered, lunched on a smorgasbord of Wednesday’s leftovers: salmon, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, dolmas, kraut, crackers. Enjoyed the afternoon while the bone broth cooled. Strained the broth and harvested as much turkey as possible from the bones. Refrigerated for later. Dinner: pizza crusts (pre-made from the double batch of sourdough) smothered with pesto from last week, sliced olives from bread baking, chèvre from the salad, and sautéed local pork sausage (half the package). Topped the pizza with the remaining arugula. Took two minutes to rinse white beans for soaking overnight.
Saturday breakfast: dessert – leftover apple pie with Greek yogurt and the remaining walnuts. After breaky, rinsed the beans, added them to a slow cooker; then rinsed and soaked brown rice. For a north-bound Nordic ski day, packed an easy, well-balanced lunch: the last of the chèvre spread over olive-herb bread with prosciutto and sliced apples with sides of pistachios, dried fruit, and dark chocolate from our pantry stash. Later, back at home, I made a simple dinner with yesterday’s turkey stock, the cooked beans, and other ingredients I had on hand (onion, garlic, carrots, parsley, and kale). We ate hearty soup over rice (and I made extra).
Sunday morning, I made crêpes adorned with the remaining apple pie filling (because I made a double batch), Greek yogurt, nut butter (because, um, protein) and don’t forget the coconut whipped cream in the freezer! Lunch was easy-breezy: leftover rice and white beans with the remaining squash from Thanksgiving, topped with avocado slices. Dinner: a big batch of roasted Brussels sprouts, leftover potatoes reheated in a cast iron pan in the oven topped with cheese (deliciously crispy), and turkey with gravy.
Monday morning: Greek yogurt, granola, fruit. Midday: leftover turkey soup, rice, almost-stale toast. (Freeze the rest.) Dinner: make quiche using a third pie crust (made while preparing apple pie), leftover Brussels sprouts, the remaining sausage, cheese of choice and eggs. (Hopefully, there will be a slice leftover for Tuesday.) Make a side Caesar salad with pumpkin seeds (and prepare tomorrow’s lunch: lettuce, seeds, the remaining canned anchovies used in the dressing, and whatever else in the fridge needs consumed).
Sound gourmet? Start with one meal and a bit of forethought to transform subsequent meals into various iterations. Need to simplify? Purchase frozen pizza crust, bottled dressing, canned beans, boxed broth… You get the picture. Now, go find your flow!
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