We’re wrapping up this cooking course by bringing together some leftover ingredients and tips to make cooking feel less daunting.
Hey, I'm Christina Quinn.
Welcome back to try this from the Washington Post.
This is the final class in our course about how to enjoy cooking more.
So far, we've identified our kitchen personalities, figured out how to build a repertoire, and learned about the ritual pleasures and meditative tasks of cooking.
And now we bring you the kitchen sink.
It's a collection of tasty morsels from our experts that offer the shortcuts we crave and some more food for thought.
We're going to hear from the voices you've heard throughout this course, starting with my colleagues on the post's food team.
They took me through the ingredients they always try to keep stocked in their kitchens.
Frozen vegetables.
Frozen vegetables and grains are a godsend.
Yeah, there's rice you just pop in the microwave.
That frozen brown rice, or even just the shelf stable rice, it's more expensive, but, ooh, is that convenient.
The thing is about frozen vegetables, they're often picked, frozen, cleaned, at their peak freshness.
So a lot of times what you're getting in the freezer can be of higher quality than whatever is in the produce section that's been sitting around or shipped or is out of season, that kind of thing.
And sure, I mean, you need to pick your recipes carefully.
You're probably not gonna pass off, you know, frozen broccoli the same way that you would in, like, a fresh broccoli, broccoli salad.
But, like, Joe did a recipe for a broccoli pasta salad where he roasted frozen broccoli, and it worked great.
Stir fry.
Those usually do well.
I mean, frozen vegetables and soup, like, yeah, don't bother with necessarily the fresh stuff.