Background: When I’m in a rush but I’ve prepped myself up a bunch, I can resort to stacking moves quickly. On a night when I’m making buttered noodles for my kids and my wife is working late, I’ll combine these moves to make myself something good.

1. Do the Buttered Noodles move.
2. Feed the kids, make them get in their PJs, and let them have some screen time.
3. Now do the Beer Braised Mushroom move. Add extra beer to your mouth if desired.
4. If you’ve done the Wild Onion move, add that to the mushroom move. If not, add your allium of choice (or proximity).
5. Judge your desired noodle to mushroom ratio and pull out any mushrooms you want to save for leftovers or freeze for another move.
6. Throw the noodles right in the mushroom pan to rewarm.
7. Add a butter, milk or cream if you’ve got it.
8. Grate some hard cheese like Asiago on top.

Why It Works:

1. You can do the buttered noodles move the night before if your kids don’t mind microwaved. noodles.
2. Your call on showers/baths.
3. You can do this move the night before if you don’t mind rewarmed mushrooms. Warm them up in a pot or skillet though.
4. Chives or garlic work well. Regular Frenched or diced onions plus braised mushrooms don’t create a lot of contrast in mouth feel. Through they would work if you do mod #1 below.
5. The point here is to judge how much mushroom you want to save.
6. There should be enough liquid in the pan, but if not, go to move #7.
7. You just want enough to coat everything and bring the sauce together. Everything is going to warm up quickly, so not much is going to cook off.
8. Or you might crumble a soft cheese like chèvre or Maytag bleu cheese at the end.

Mods:

1. Add ground beef to this move.
2. Add ground wild game to this move.
3. Add toasted pine nuts to this move at the very very end.

Background: Usually, by mid summer my garden is producing a lot of zucchini. Sometimes they get massive. Volume-wise, it’s one of the hardest things to eat your way through. So I developed this move as a way to use up those summer squashes and make a vegan (I’m not) lunch that’s satisfying.

1. Get some zucchini.
2. Get some avocado.
3. Get some jalapeñoes.
4. Light a real fire with hardwood someplace safe with a grill grate.
5. Roast some jalapeñoes like in the Roasted Pepper move.
6. Cut your zucchini in half, salt, and oil the flesh side.
7. When the flames die down to coals, put it on the grate, flesh side down, and let it smoke until the skin side can be pierced easily with a chef’s fork.
8. Put it in a food processor with the roasted, seeded jalapeñoes and steamed garlic and blend until it’s the consistency you want.
9. Fold it in with chopped avocado like you are making guac.
10. Season to taste with cumin and salt.
11. Serve with corn chips or make your own like in the Corn Crisp Strips move.

Why It Works

1. Zucchini is cheap, and it’s even cheaper if you grow it. It’s easy to grow from seed.
2. Avocado is relative expensive and hard to grow. So you are cutting the expensive thing with the cheap thing, which is a classic move.
3. Jalapeñoes vary in Scoville Heat Units. If you don’t know your tolerance to capsaicin, go easy on them.
4. You could use any pepper.
5. I like pecan. If you don’t feel like smoking it, you could gas grill it. This move won’t taste the same over a gas grill, but you could still get some benefit out of that process.
6. You could do this ahead or use some from your fridge or freezer. Just make sure to thaw well ahead of time.
7. The flesh side is the side that will absorb the most smoke…I’m guessing…but it will also stick to the grill. Plus, the extra oil will help the consistency of the purée when it’s time to blend.
8. You could char it over flames and then scrape off some of the charred skin like you would a roasted pepper.
9. You could go chunky or not. Your call. You could use a fork to kind of mash it in, if you want.
10. If you don’t like cumin, you could try coriander to take it in a different direction. If you don’t like either, I can’t help you.
11. It’s a versatile move. Just make the crisps triangles instead of strips.

Mods:

1. Add cilantro, of course.
2. Try yellow squash instead of zucchini.
3. Add sour cream for another kind of dip.
4. Add cream cheese for a spread.
5. Add pico. Just don’t call it guac. Remember that whole pea thing?

Background: It’s really, really, really hot where I live most of the year. I used to make this with peeled, deveined, precooked, prechilled spicy seasoned shrimp from a fish counter that I trusted. I’ll still do that in a pinch, but it’s so much cheaper to do it this way. This is one of my go-to meals in the hot months.

1. Make the Chipotle Ketchup 1000 Island Dressing mentioned in mod #2 of the Super Sauce move. You can keep it on hand for a while. When you feel like having something cold and satisfying, do the rest of this move.
2. If you trust your seafood source, get some fresh shrimp. If you are unsure, get frozen. A small handful of large or extra large shrimp per person will work well. I get shell on, tail on, but EZ peel.
3. Get an avocado, a lime, and a head of romaine lettuce.
4. Put an inch of water in the bottom of a pot and put it on the stove on high. Then, use an electric tea kettle to boil more water quickly.
5. Add the kettle of boiling water and the shrimp to the pot at the same time.
6. Quickly make two ice baths.
7. When the shrimp are pink and floating, use you spider strainer to move the shrimp from the boiling water to the ice bath.
8. Take them out of the ice bath one at a time, peel and devein, and put in a fresh ice bath.
9. Toss the shrimp in the Chipotle Ketchup 1000 Island Dressing.
10. Arrange romaine leaves on a plate, spread sliced avocado on top of the lettuce, put a good spoonful of the shrimp salad in the center, and give it a squeeze of lime.

Why It Works

1. This dressing is made mostly from shelf-stable ingredients, comes together quickly, and keeps for a longish time in the fridge.
2. Frozen shrimp these days are often flash frozen on the boat and will emerge from the ice bath tasting “fresher” than poorly handled fresh shrimp.
3. You need a hearty lettuce to stand up to the shrimp salad and avocado. Spring mix and baby lettuces don’t have the structure and crunch to stand up to the other ingredients.
4. Or just boil water as you normally do. I do it this way to not heat up the kitchen as much.
5. The key here is to add the shrimp to already boiling water so that they don’t overcook.
6. Time is of the essence because, depending on the size and the state (fresh or frozen) of your shrimp, they could cook very quickly.
7. This stops the cooking and starts the chilling process, even before you’ve started peeling them.
8. Shrimp have an open circulatory system and absorb flavors. So it’s important that your water and ice are filtered and clean for both ice baths.
9. I like to toss the shrimp alone in the sauce. They are now essentially preserved and can be chilled in the fridge for service. I wouldn’t necessarily eat them three days later, but it’s fine to make ahead for a dinner party.
10. Sometimes I just toss in a big red bowl and sometimes I make a composed, plated salad. It depends on the context and my mood. But as long as your lettuce is sturdy and crunchy, it should work.

Mods:

1. Use a wedge of iceberg and make it a wedge salad.
2. Add Corn Crisp Strips like you would croutons.
3. Garnish with cilantro.
4. Throw some chilled roasted corn on top.

Background: I think we have enough sauces now to introduce the concept of Super Sauces. These are not like the five mother sauces of French cuisine. They are more like super groups where a couple famous established sauces and–let’s be honest–usually a lesser known sauce come together for a while to preform together. The moves make Super Sauces, but they are micro moves.

1. Combine Green Apple Tartar Sauce with Pecan Aioli for a mayo-based sauce that’s got it all.
2. Mix Handmixer Mayo with Chipotle Ketchup.
3. Fill a blender loosely with Roasted Peppers and then add the The Move for All Salad Dressings until the blender starts to blend everything together.

Why It Works:

1. The Green Apple Tartar Sauce has strong flavor like capers, apples, strong herbs and alliums that are actually balanced with the nuttiness of the pecans and the pungency of the garlic. The green apple balances the pecan. The pickle-pops of the capers cuts the richness of the nuts, oil, and mayo. The wild onions harmonize with the garlic, but still sing their own notes. The cilantro can be heard in the mix among all the strong flavors. Plus, all the ingredients are great late-fall items, so mixed with leftover turkey around Thanksgiving, they make a great turkey salad sandwich. (Have I mentioned the great preservation power of sauces to keep meat from oxidizing? Put the turkey in there as soon as it’s chilled.)
2. If I’m being honest, I find the Chipotle Ketchup too much. It’s too smokey. It’s too sweet. It’s texture is too cloying. It’s too spicy for many applications. Cut it with homemade mayo and you’ve got a totally different sauce where all the flavors and textures all kind of even each other out. I usually don’t stop there. See mod 2 below.
3. This move can go a couple ways. Use spicy peppers and you are making a hot sauce. Use mild peppers and you are making a salad dressing.

Mods:

1. Make the Green Apple Tartar Sauce with Handmixer Mayo instead of Duke’s then combine with Pecan Aioli.
2. Add pickles to the Chipotle Ketchup Handmixer Mayo mashup and you’ve got a Chipotle 1000 Island dressing that’s great special sauce on a burger, binder for a chilled shrimp salad, dipping sauce for crab cakes, or spread for a great Reuben sandwich.
3. Eighty-six the vinegar in The Move for All Salad Dressings, add garlic, and use jalapeñoes as the pepper and you are making Austin’s famous Doña sauce.

I love Super Sauces so you will be seeing more of them later.

Background: I always have buttered noodles on hand for my kids as a safe food if they don’t like the dinner I’ve prepared. I’m not sure it’s a good parenting move, but It’s better than a tantrum at meal time. I’m embarrassed to even be writing this down as a move. I do so obviously not to prove my culinary prowess or because I think there’s anyone who doesn’t already know how to do this. I do it to let other home cooks out there know that when feeding the 5-and-under set, things might get really boring, repetitive, and beige. But this boring repetitive task also takes your time, attention, and skills. It’s just a different skill set than making steak au poivre with perfectly steamed asparagus and roasted baby potatoes with rosemary. If you’ve ever made dinner–any dinner–with two screaming five-year-olds in the kitchen without yelling at them and throwing dinner rolls at them, then you know what an insane collection of skills that takes.

1. Get some dry multicolored veggie-enriched noodles. Have boxes of them on hand. Like many many boxes.
2. Heat up an inch of water in a large pot over the stove and fill an electric tea kettle with water and start it at the same time.
3. Take some deep breaths and know you won’t be cooking this way forever.
4. When the water on the stove is boiling and the kettle has gone off, pour the kettle of boiling water into the pot of boiling water.
5. Pour enough noodles into the pot so that they sit just under the water line.
6. Set a timer for 8 minutes.
7. Get your spider strainer and a big refrigerator-safe container to store the leftover noodles.
8. Stir the noodles. The water should be evaporating pretty quickly, but there should be still some in the bottom of the pot when the timer goes off.
9. Scoop the noodles out with the spider strainer and put them in the container, but don’t turn off the simmering water yet. Let it reduce.
10. While the noodles are still hot, put some pats of butter on top of them and sprinkle with salt, gently fold the butter into the noodles until all the butter is melted, and adjust the salt.
11. Let it cool to just above kid eating temperature and then call them to dinner so they have time to transition. (You might need the entire cool down time for your kids. In that case, call right way and take some cool down time for yourself.)
12. While the noodles are cooling, throw some butter, dried herbs, and grated Parmesan and crushed black pepper in the pasta water. Taste and adjust the seasoning.
13. Divert a portion of the noodles you made for the kids to the sauce and warm them back up to adult eating temperature.
14. Take another deep breath. Call them to the table for the 4th time and feel pride that you just simultaneously made noodles for them and a classic Italian dish called Cacio e Pepe for yourself after work on a school night.

Why It Works

1. Do not be under the illusion that this is a serving of veggies. Actual real vegetables are always better than processed food. You are exposing them to the word “veggie” and different colors.
2. This is a weird method and you should feel free to just boil the water in a pot like a normal. I like it because I think it gets the water to boiling faster because boiling two smaller quantities of water, one of which is covered, is faster than boiling a whole bunch of water in a pot. The water in the pot is just there so I can get the pot heating up at the same time as the water without scorching the bottom of your pan. I’ve never actually timed this though and I’m not 100% sure that’s how physics works.
3. Seriously. I’m not going to say some BS like “deep breaths make everything taste better,” but I will say that I know for a fact that yelling back a kids who are melting down in the kitchen is a sure-fire way to ruin everyone’s dinner. I speak from experience. So. Much. Experience.
4. Time it if you want and check my math. Is it actually faster?
5. We were all taught to boil noodles in way too much water.
6. If you are also going to eat them, you might pull them just before 8 minutes.
7. This prepares you to reuse the starchy, silky water for your own sauce and get the leftovers ready to go in the fridge.
8. Because you are using less water than normal boiling pasta, you have to stir (gently, every once in a while) to keep the pasta moving around in the water.
9. Use the same container to mix the noodles with butter and salt and to store the leftovers in the fridge.
10. Butter and salt to your kids’ tastes.
11. You are going to be making this a lot. You will get the timing down perfectly.
12. Again, you will get the amount of each ingredient dialed in the more you do this.
13. I always make enough for me and my wife’s lunch and for backups for the kids the next day.
14. And you didn’t yell. Or maybe you only yelled so they could hear you call them to dinner over their laundry basket stair luge competition. Or you yelled because they doing something legit dangerous. Or you yelled because they do this every freaking night. Whatever. You got dinner on the table again. Good job.

Mods: These mods are all for you. Kids don’t like mods yet.

1. Now would be the perfect time to try some of those compound butters you made.
2. Wild onions/meadow garlic are a great addition to this. I know you have kids and thus limited foraging time, but you can probably find them in the wooded areas around municipal parks.
3. For a super easy quick mod, add capers and a squeeze of lemon to the sauce.
4. Beer braised mushrooms make an excellent addition to the sauce.

Background: Migas are often served in breakfast tacos in Austin where I live. I think migas means crumbs, but I don’t speak Spanish much at all, so correct me if I’m wrong. (That’s how you learn, right?) I understand that it’s problematic to talk about a move that’s also a Spanish word. I am not claiming this is my move, that it’s a move that I’m expert in, or that I should be writing about it. But it’s a move I use a fair amount. I am open to a discussion about cultural appropriation. That said, here are some moves that might make an approximation of migas if you put them together in the right order:

1. Make Corn Crisp Strips.
2. Make Pico de Gallo.
3. When you get down to the last bits of these two things, do the following moves.
4. Grate some sharp cheddar cheese.
5. Make Scrambled Eggs with Sour Cream.
6. Just before the eggs have set, add the pico to the eggs, being careful not to pour the residual pico liquid into the eggs.
7. Stir and let any moisture from the pico get to the bottom of the skillet to cook out.
8. Add the corn crisp strips.
9. Add the cheese, cover, and remove from heat to let the cheese start to melt a bit.
10. Warm up a flour tortilla and scoop a wad of migas into it.

Why It Works:

1. The best migas for tacos are made with strips because you want them to remain kind of crunchy in the taco and it’s easier to achieve that texture with strips than shards of triangle, in my experience.
2. The pico is a quick way to have migas at the ready without much chopping.
3. This is why I stock certain things–like corn crisp strips and pico–together regularly and how meal plans come together.
4. My family likes extra sharp New York cheddar cheese for most things, so that’s what I use.
5. Because migas need that little extra step of covering to melt the cheese, the sour cream egg move will insure they don’t overcook.
6. There will be liquid coming out of the pico no matter what, and that’s OK. You want to create a little steam when you cover to melt the cheese, but not so much that you make the chips totally soggy.
7. Nothing should be sticking to the bottom of the pan at this point, but it shouldn’t be soggy when you add the crisps.
8. Fold them in so that you have even coverage and so that some are sticking out of the top and some are on the bottom.
9. The residual heat from the pan and moisture from the pico should create steam that you are trapping with the lid to melt the cheese.
10. Usually I use a cast iron skillet to heat my tortillas to give them a little bit of extra texture, but sometimes I use a microwave.

Mods:

1. Add avocado at the end.
2. Add chorizo to the eggs.
3. Add a schmear of black beans to the torilla.
4. All of the above.

Background: Everyone makes scrambled eggs a little differently. Here’s the method I like:

1. Get the best eggs you can; farmers markets are a great resource.
2. Scramble them a little with a fork in a large bowl.
3. Add a spoonful of sour cream for every 2 eggs.
4. Scramble them a lot.
5. Put a skillet on the stove on high.
6. Add butter to a skillet and let it foam, but not brown.
7. Turn down the temp to medium.
8. Add the scrambled eggs.
9. Use a rubber spatula to pull the uncooked egg into the center of the skillet.
10. Continue to whisk with a fork as they cook.
11. Turn off the heat before they brown and remove from pan immediately.

Why It Works:

1. Farm fresh eggs make a difference in flavor, color, and texture.
2. I find a fork does a better job than a whisk of incorporating the yolk and the white.
3. The sour cream changes the flavor slightly, but it’s more about the texture. It keeps the eggs from getting rubbery.
4. This is to break up all the sour cream you added.
5. The classic French way is slow and low, but I like this method.
6. I think browned butter in my eggs tastes fine, but the color can be off putting to some.
7. Turning down the heat will make sure the butter doesn’t brown.
8. I add them all at once, scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula, and then immediately scrape the skillet with a rubber spatula.
9. Pulling the egg away from the edge of the pan will keep those edge sections from cooking faster than the center. You kind of fold them into the middle as more scoooshes to the edge.
10. This makes for smaller curds, which is great for tacos and sandwiches, my go to vessels for eggs.
11. If you let them sit in the pan, they will continue to cook, even off the heat.

Mods:

1. Reduce the amount of sour cream at the beginning by half and replace it with cream cheese at the end. Fold it in gently.
2. Fold in some warmed up Beer Braised Mushrooms at the end.
3. Add cheese, duh.

Background: You have had a day. You have had a week. You are tired. You don’t want takeout again, but you just can’t with the kitchen and the dinner and the dishes. This will work, assuming you have made Green Apple Tartar Sauce. Get you some rotisserie chicken and do the two fast moves and prep yourself up for the slow move. I’ll keep the steps simple.

1. Buy two rotisserie chickens.

2. As soon as you get them home, eat the wings, legs, and thighs off them, standing over the sink like the animal that you are.

3. Remove the skin and save for broth.

4. Remove the breasts and chop them up in chunks the size you like in chicken salad.

5. Mix HALf of the breast meat with green apple tartar sauce in one of the lids that the chicken came in. Save the rest for the next move.

6. Cram both chicken carcasses in the other container the chicken came in, put those in the fridge.

7. When you are feeling up to it in the next day, make chicken broth with the carcasses and mirepoix you have in the freezer.

8. Strain into a bowl and add the rest of the chicken and pico de gallo. Reheat in the microwave if necessary. Add stale corn chips crumbs if you’ve got them.

Why It Works

1. I don’t bother doing anything if I bring home roti chix. Sometimes I do the following moves over the next couple of days.

2. I might share, but I’m not making any dishes dirty.

5. Again, not making dishes dirty. If there are vent holes, consider them strainer holes and put a piece of foil down for easier clean up.

3. I eat some of the skin right away, too.

4. I usually pull them off with my hands. I chop them in pieces about a half an inch.

6. They’ll both fit if you try hard enough.

7. What do you mean you don’t have mirepoix in the freezer?

8. What do you mean you don’t have pico? Yes, corn chip crumbs are a great resource.

Mods:

1. You don’t have the energy for mods.

2. Ok swap out the corn chips in the soup for leftover noodles and now you have chicken noodle soup.

3. Fine. Take out the pico and add more mirepoix, then.

4. What do you mean you don’t have mirepoix?