Background: I’m so sick of pizza. I mean, I eat it because it’s pizza. Sometimes I eat just the point because everyone knows that’s the best part. My kids don’t eat the crusts. A while back, I started making croutons out of them. Over time, I’ve developed this move designed to be built with lettuce and the healthiest pizza toppings.

1. Get a pizza.
2. Get some romaine lettuce.
3. Use kitchen shears to cut the crusts off all the slices.
4. Use the shears to cut the crusts into crustons.
5. On a sheet tray, toss the crustons with a bit of oil and the “Parmesan” cheese packets that came with the pizza.
6. Toast the crustons.
7. While they are toasting, chop some romaine.
8. Add your favorite vegetable pizza toppings. Mine are: Kalamata olives, banana peppers, red onions, & arugula.
9. Throw in some halved grape tomatoes for the tomato component.
10. Make a Wild Onion ranch dressing.
11. Cool down the crustons, add them to the salad, and toss.

Why It Works

1. When you have three kids, there’s always a pizza party and that means there’s always leftover crusts.
2. You need a strong lettuce to stand up to this salad.
3. Often I’ll do this before I serve the pizza so the crusts aren’t mangled by kid hands of varying cleanliness. Sometimes, I cut the bite marks off the discarded crusts and trust the heat of the oven to kill the germs.
4. It’s a portmanteau.
5. I don’t think this stuff is really Parmigiano Reggiano.
6. I set my oven to 350 because it’s pretty forgiving at that temp. Air fryers also work (and do the job much faster).
7. Keep using the kitchen shears. You should be able to do the whole salad with shears without even getting a cutting board dirty.
8. Do they have to be vegetables? I don’t know. Are you going to feel better if you eat a pepperoni salad?
9. Keep using those shears.
10. I also added the Pickled Wild Meadow Garlic Bulblets the last time I did this. It was delicious.
11. Tossing the whole sheet tray in the freezer will bring the temp down faster.

Mods:

1. Consider adding anchovies someplace (perhaps to the dressing). I didn’t because the olives and peppers have plenty of salt.
2. I considered ordering a pizza with mushrooms and olives on it, just so I could pick them off and throw them in the salad. I didn’t because then my kids wouldn’t eat the pizza. But I still think it’s worth a shot for free salad ingredients.
3. Try an Italian dressing and throw some soft cheese (goat cheese or bleu cheese) in there.

Background: I often find myself with a half a bag of leftover, slightly stale, corn chips. I also have mild-food-waste-trauma from a heavily tattooed sous chef yelling about P & L– and how his bonus was tied to the amount of food that was wasted in the kitchen–every time he saw someone waste food. I was also a poor graduate student for much of my life. So even if my chips are stale, I’m going to try to make something from them, just like I do with Three Day Old Bread. Here are my favorite moves.

1. Make Migas, duh.
2. Grind them up to use for a crispy coating for trout.
3. Garnish chicken tortilla soup with them.
4. Make a kind of non-Frito frito pie with chips on the bottom and chili and fixings on top.
5. Use them to make a Panade for meatballs.
6. Use them in a taco salad or southwestern chicken salad.
7. Put them in Cauliflower Quesadillas.
   

Why It Works

1. You can adjust the chip-to-egg-to-veg ratio based on what you have on hand.
2. They are thicker than some other breading, so they are especially good at protecting thin fish that could overcook quickly.
3. Add these just before eating.
4. The old-school camping way to do this is to roll down the sides of the bag to make a kind of bowl-bag and then put the chili right in the bag with the chips. Top with sour cream, chives, and your favorite peppers.
5. This is my favorite idea that I’ve not actually tried. I’ll keep you posted.
6. My favorite version of a southwestern salad is romaine lettuce, charred corn, chilled black beans, chips, a few halved grape tomatoes, green onions or chives, and poblano ranch dressing.
7. It adds a little extra crunch like putting potato chips on a sandwich.

Mods:

1. Add leftover grilled shrimp to the southwestern salad under no. 6 above.
2. Bread chicken cutlets instead of fish as in no. 2 above above.
3. Imagine a version of meatballs that uses both leftover chips as a panade as in no. 5 above and the leftover salsa that came with the chips. Serve over rice.

Background: Yesterday, as I was considering taking the night off from blogging to mourn the end of Wild Onion season and make Pickled Wild Meadow Garlic Bulblets, I spotted the thing I’d been looking for since the Bastard Cabbage and Bluebonnets sprung up. It’s, without a doubt, my favorite flower. It’s sometimes, unappealingly, called Horsemint and sometimes, confusingly, called Lemon Beebalm (despite the fact that it’s different from both Bee Balm and Lemon Balm). Whatever you call it informally, it’s legit name is Monarda citriodora. Here’s what I do with it:

1. Hunt for it with kids.
2. Chew the flowers.
3. Pick the leaves and use in recipes that call for oregano.
4. Dry a year’s worth.

Why It Works

1. It’s so distinct and beautiful that my kids love to find it for me and bring me bunches of it, showing off their plant ID skills. It’s also does really well in wide open spaces like the right-of-ways on roads.
2. If you’ve ever taken real oregano oil for any ailment, you will know the flavor of the flowers. It’s strong and peppery. It helps calm and focus me, like Bee Balm is reported to do for some. I chew the flowers and tuck them in my lip and spit them out when they lose their flavor.
3. The leaves can be used in salads or to flavor sausage.
4. When the fresh stuff is gone, you can make a tea from the dried stuff that helps with sleep.

Mods:

1. Use the dried flowers to infuse cocktails.

Background: I was tempted to just write “can’t.” But in all seriousness, sometimes you just can’t make dinner. You cycle through your family’s go-to takeout places to give yourself a break. And that’s fine. But it doesn’t have to just be pizza again when you are so pizza’d out, but the kids are not. The fact is, places that cater to kids don’t always have what adults are looking for, whether it be spicy and adventurous or healthy and lite. We have a move in our house called DD&D for the initials of a northern Thai place and an old- school burger joint that are right next to each other and on our route home. If we time it right and order strategically, we can get several meals out of one mine. Here’s what we do.

1. Order the adult meals from the Thai place.

2. Order burgers and/or chicken strips from the adjacent burger joint.

3. Make substitutions and additions to stretch the meals through the whole weekend.

Why It Works

1. We order enough of the things that reheat well to last several meals.

2. The kids never eat all of their meals, so they have leftovers, too.

3. We make strategic substitutions and additions to make more meals. Subbing a side of ranch instead of gravy with chicken strips means we’re halfway to a salad. Ordering extra sticky rice with the Thai food means the kids have an extra base layer for another dinner, and they are sorta kinda getting exposed to other cultures. Sometimes, they eat sticky rice with mango. That counts as a serving of fruit in my book.

Mods:

1. Any two adjacent places that y’all like on your route home can work. Just map it out.

Background: Y’all know I’m crazy for Wild Onions (aka Meadow Garlic). The past couple weeks are the most bittersweet time of year for me. The hellscape of summer is looming. The not hot times are over. It feels like plucking the bulblets off the tops of the meadow garlic before they wilt away is the last time I will fully enjoy the outside for months. I will survive it. I will find things to enjoy. But I will long for the not hot times. Here’s what I do as much as I can this time of year.

1. Find a patch of Meadow Garlic with little papery white cones of flower bulblets on top.
2. Pluck a handful of them from an area well populated with them.
3. Don’t gather more than a handful in any one location.
4. Plop them into a jar of pickles in the fridge when you get home.
5. Use them like you would capers or pickled garlic.

Why It Works

1. This is your last shot before next fall.
2. The handful is the right amount this time of year. It’s not too much to process or store.
3. You never want to forage more than 10 percent of the plants you find in a given area.
4. Any jar of pickles will do. Make sure it’s a brine you like, obviously. (Does everyone have pickles that wound up in their fridge that they don’t like?)
5. The bulblets on top are like tiny cloves of garlic, but also, like capers, part of the flowers.

Mods:

1. Make your own pickle brine.
2. Flavor the brine with coriander seeds, which are also setting now.
3. Long for November.

Background: Nope.

1. Get some hot dogs.
2. Get some compostable paper plates.
3. Microwave the hot dogs on a paper plate until they explode.
4. Try again. This time pay attention.
5. Cut up and serve bun-less with foraged ketchup for dipping.

Why It Works

1. I mean, you could actually try. Get grass-fed, free range, organic, uncured, artisanal hot dogs if you want to, but it doesn’t really matter.
2. I know you are upset, but don’t be a monster using styrofoam plates. Sheesh.
3. If you splurged for the artisanal hot dogs, eat the exploded ones yourself.
4. Also if you got the expensive hot dogs, there’s a good chance the kids won’t eat them.
5. Forks are optional.

Mods:

1. If anyone asks for a bun, wrap a naked dog in a tortilla and see if that will fly.

Background: I love sour cream. Always have, always will. Here’s how to make it yourself.

1. Get three sanitized glass jars with lids
2. Get a 16 oz. container of sour cream.
3. Split the sour cream across the three jars.
4. Mix half and half and heavy cream at a ratio of 1:1.
5. Pour the mixture over the sour cream in the jars.
6. Shake or stir the jars.
7. Leave the jars on the counter.
8. Check in 24 hours. If it’s not the thickness you’d like, let it go for 24 more hours.
9. Put them in the fridge with one at the way back, one in the middle, and one toward the front.
10. When you get to the jar in the back, make a new batch repeating the process with the “homemade sour cream” as the starter.

Why It Works

1. You want glass so you can sanitize well, see the progress, and shake the jars.
2. You can use whatever sour cream you want.
3. This is your starter.
4. You could use straight cream, but cutting it with half and half is more economical.
5. The more sour cream to half and half and cream mix you have, the quicker it will thicken.
6. This is to disperse the cultures.
7. The cultures will start to multiply rapidly at room temperature.
8. If it doesn’t thicken up after 48 hours, add more sour cream or change the location.
9. This allows you to rotate your stock of sour cream and remind yourself when to make another batch. You could label the lids in the event that they get jostled out of order.
10. This is, grossly, called back-slopping, which is also exactly what it sounds like.

Mods:

1. Use a fancier “cultured” sour cream, which has a slightly different flavor. (There are cultures in all of them so it’s mostly marketing.)
2. Use all cream plus your starter.
3. Use all half and half plus your starter.
4. Use buttermilk and heavy cream instead and you will have “crème fraîche.”

Background: If bread sits on my counter for two days, I start thinking about what I’m going to do with it next. I have a three day rule for most leftovers (unless they are preserved in some way) and bread. (These kinds of things are passed down in families. Many of these are things my mom did or made or suggested when I asked her about this.) Here are my favorite ways to use old bread:

1. Make Croutons.
2. Use it for a Panade in meat loaf, meat balls, or extra-lean-meat burgers.
3. Make toast points for hummus, tuna salad, or caviar if you are feeling fancy.
4. Make French toast.
5. Turn it into breadcrumbs.
6. Use it in frittata di pane (or bread frittata or egg casserole with bread)
7. Make stuffing or dressing for poultry.
8. Make a strata.
9. Use it on the top of French onion soup.
10. Make bread pudding.
11. Throw it in the fridge or freezer and decide later.

Why It Works

1. If I make croutons, I’m more likely to make a salad. However, croutons could also become bread pudding or dressings or stuffing or bread crumbs. You are essentially preserving them by heating the moisture out of them.
2. While panades are great for meat loaf and meatballs (because they are cooked quickly) a panade can work well for burgers made with lean meats and wild game, too.
3. I mean, they are just big croutons. You can save time with the cutting and change up the kinds of dishes you serve them with.
4. This is one my mom used to do that I’m slowly introducing to my family. So far, so good.
5. This is basically the move when I’m long on stale bread and tight on fridge and freezer space. It’s the most compressed move. Also, there are a million moves you can do with breadcrumbs.
6. You might be noticing a theme with old bread: soaking it in milk and/or egg and then cooking it works in a bunch of different configurations.
7. A departure from the egg and milk combos, this is a good move when you need to use up bread and have extra stock and mirepoix or trinity around.
8. This could be almost identical to the frittata di pane if you use the same ingredients, but a strata is necessarily layered and can go in many directions, including directions that don’t involve eggs. The oldest strata I could find was a very Midwestern dish of bread, white sauce, cheese, bread white sauce, cheese, and topped with seasoned bread crumbs (from The HAND-BOOK of HOUSEHOLD· SCIENCE by JUNIATA L. SHEPPERD, M.A. an INSTRUCTOR IN DOMESTIC SCIENCE, SCHOOL AND COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.)
9. It’s like a giant crouton raft, covered with cheese, afloat in goodness.
10. Warm bread pudding with cold ice cream is pretty great.
11. I store my croutons, toast points, and breadcrumbs in the fridge to dry them out faster and more thoroughly. Seal them or they can take on the aromas in the fridge.

Mods:

1. Try going savory with the French toast.
2. Try the big cheese crouton on top of other soups besides French onion. I mean, tomato seems like a no-brainer.
3. Change up the flavors and seasonings and make a stuffing that doesn’t remind you of thanksgiving at all.

Background: Sometimes I just can’t. But then I do. Kind of. Mostly not.
Me: “I’m not making dinner tonight.”
Her: “You need to tell me when you are going on strike.”
Me: “I’m not going on strike this time.”
(Actually, I was going to go on strike when I decided I wasn’t making dinner that morning.)
“I’m just not pushing my dinner agenda on anyone tonight. There’s enough food in the fridge for everyone.”
(And, I thought, everyone knows how to work the microwave, which is conveniently now on a speed rack at kid height due to a microhood malfunction.)
“Sometimes the other things–emotional needs, more outside time–seem more important than my plan for dinner.”
Her: “Gotcha.”
“I haven’t eaten all day.”
Me: “I can make you fiesta Mac ‘n’ Cheese out of the Buttered Noodles I’m getting out for the kids.”

Somehow everyone ate dinner. Here’s how I pulled off this magic.

1. Keep Buttered Noodles on hand in the fridge.
2. Keep the sauce from Mac ‘n’ Cheese on hand in the fridge.
3. Keep Pico on hand in the fridge.
4. Keep All Purpose Crunchy Vegan Topping on hand wherever you want to store it.
5. Combine the first three steps above.
6. Microwave until it’s hot.
7. Top with number four.

Why It Works

1. It’s basically a casserole.
2. I don’t tell her that.
3. She doesn’t like casseroles.
4. I think that’s a prejudice against my people because she loves lasagna and lasagna is definitely a casserole.
5. Anyway, it has cheese and starch so it’s delicious. It has at least five different kinds of plants and no meat.
6. It works because it’s fast and simple and cheap and vegetarian and delicious and it didn’t come from a box. It came from your fridge, your prep work. I mean, some of it came from a can a while back. And plastic wrapped American cheese. And, shit, there was a box in there. But there were also wild foraged onions in there so that’s like buying box offsets.
7. Now it also has healthy protein from cashews and nutritional yeast and a few more kinds of vegetables, if you can consider fried onions, shallots, and garlic vegetables.

Mods:

1. If you had time and energy for mods, you wouldn’t be making this.
2. On the bright side, now you’ve used up the last of the queso, pico, and buttered noodles. You have fridge space and the marginally healthy food is gone. Your mod is actually trying tomorrow.
3. Maybe you should make kale tomorrow. Then they will go on strike.

Background: I love quail. I get local quail four at a time at the meat counter I go to. They are pricey, so I don’t get them often. But they are also very fast and easy to prepare. Here’s what I do:

1. Preheat an oven (or convection oven) to as hot as it will go (like 500 degrees).
2. Get some local partially boneless quail and lay them on a sheet pan.
3. Salt and pepper to taste.
4. Put a pat of butter on each.
5. Roast for 7 minutes and check the temp with a probe thermometer.
6. Using a basting brush, cover each quail with the now melted butter on both sides.
7. Flip them and roast the other side for 7 minutes.
8. Check the temp again and continue roasting and flipping at 2 minute intervals until the birds hit 165 degrees.

Why It Works.

1. I cook my quail like I live my life: hot and fast.
2. The boneless ones will cook faster, so adjust if you have ones with bones in them.
3. You could add other seasonings as well.
4. The milk solids in the butter will help the quail brown.
5. Your oven, convection oven, or air fryer (which is actually a convection oven) may vary. You are looking for browning.
6. Rather than painting on melted butter before roasting, this method makes use of the butter solids. When you melt butter, the solids sink, but we want them on the top because they will help with browning.
7. You are looking for browning. When the skin is browned, they are almost certainly done.
8. If there is a beautiful brown side and the temp has hit 165 degrees F, you have a choice to make. Do you keep cooking to get more brown crispiness but risk overcooked bird, or do you pull them now, and serve a done bird with the beautiful brown side up? Your call. You could use the broiler to push the browning.

Mods:

1. Use compound butter.
2. Use untoasted aromatic seeds like fennel seed, coriander seed, or caraway seed. They will toast in the butter as the birds cook, adding more scent to the dish.
3. Stuff the birds with woody herbs like thyme or rosemary. This is a great way to use those sprigs without having to pick little leaves. (Also there are tricks to that, but that’s another move.)