When Enough is Enough

 It poured rain in my neighborhood all weekend. I’m talking about thunder cracking right overhead, so loud my cat jumped off my lap, lightning flashes that lit the backyard up like a sunny day, and rain clattering on the roof like a drum festival. I loved it.

 It helped that I had nothing important to do, no reason to go out into the weather. Yeah, we needed milk and we were looking sketchy on bread, but there were other options and neither of us would suffer food deprivation. A stormy weekend is the perfect time for a leftovers free-for-all.

 I didn’t want to go out in the rain. More than that, I wanted to get everything already in the refrigerator eaten or in the freezer before it spoiled. A big problem with a two-person family is the excess food if you cook anything major. A roast, a pan of lasagna, the Easter ham, even a 9 x 13 cake are a lot of food for two people.

 We had Alix and Adam over for Easter dinner, so four people worked on our delicious ham when it came out of the oven. It was a reasonably sized 9 to 10 lb ham and we sent a good hunk home with them, too. Still, I had enough left to make another dinner and plenty of sandwiches. How soon do you think we got tired of eating ham?

 This weekend, I knew it was do or die for the ham from a food safety point of view, so I took an hour from lazing in my recliner, reading a book, to process the remainder. I carved into it with more vigor than finesse and pulverized the resulting meat in my food processor. That yielded ground meat for ham salad: plenty for that night’s pick-up dinner, with extra tucked into the freezer for later. I put the remaining ham bone and scrappy pieces in the freezer, too. I’ll get around to them when ham sounds good again.

 I bought a cookbook for two several years ago: The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen. It is a lovely compilation of recipes, with ample, clear illustrations and offerings in all the categories from appetizers to desserts. Many of them are tagged for lower calories and fat, in case that matters. (And to whom might it not matter these days, I wonder?)

 One problem I find cooking with it is unfamiliarity. I’ve been cooking for myself and my family for 50-some years. I have a repertoire—things I know how to make, like to make, and, most importantly, like to eat. New recipes with strange ingredients in untried combinations throw me off. I have to think too hard about advance shopping and needed prep time. It is not pantry cooking. It confounds me just enough to send me back to tried and true recipes—and leftovers!!

 In addition to the Easter ham and a subsequent giant kettle of pea soup, I also cooked a small rib roast with root vegetables smothered in homemade gravy last week. I’ve had a serious craving for roast beef for a while now and I finally caved, leftovers notwithstanding. Let’s consider a rib roast. Juicy, succulent, tender: just what you want in a piece of beef. But they are too big by far.

 We got a lovely 5 lb roast recently and cut it in half—well, as close to half as one can with those rib bones in the way. Both pieces went into the freezer and when my craving struck, I took out the smallest one. When a satisfying and supposedly healthy portion of meat is 4 oz, how many servings are in a 2.5 lb roast? Too many. So our last week has consisted of two really good meals—baked ham and rib roast—and lots of leftovers. I’m so over leftovers!

 It is time to break out Cooking for Two again. That means thoughtful shopping so that we have the needed ingredients. Some things the recipes have called for that aren’t in our usual repertoire are fresh herbs, scallions, fennel (not seeds), eggplant, and orzo. I can manage these—I just have to find and buy them before it’s time to cook. Some things they use that will never be in our repertoire are tofu, jalapeño, quinoa, and kale. Eat them if you like; just leave me out of it!

 So what now? I can see that we need to go back to the Cooking for Two recipes despite discomfort with new and unfamiliar ingredients and techniques. I can’t say that cooking for two is new or unfamiliar—we’ve been empty-nested for an awfully long time. But during a weekend when I didn’t mind all the bad weather, the leftovers finally got to me. No more!!

We know what I’m tired of this week. How about you? What have you had enough of, long enough? And how are you going to change that?

 Ciao