Mise en Place plus Technique equals Dinner

Now that I’ve put the restaurant to bed I’ve been really noticing how I cook.  Not what I cook, but how.  Maybe it’s all the years of cooking out of a walk-in refrigerator but I realized that nearly all the meals I prepare at home are built on foods that I’ve already made.  They’re like the meals that keep on giving.  In fact sometimes I play a game with myself by seeing how long I can go , how many meals I can go without bringing in a new ingredient through this activity called grocery shopping (which I truly hate).

I don’t want to call this collection of usable materials leftovers.  I would rather just expand the definition of mise-en-place.  Usually mise-en-place refers to the building blocks of a particular recipe or set of recipes. The saute chef at a restaurant will have the proteins or veg that are the focus of a dish tucked into a countertop refrigerator or drawer and then the mise-en-place tucked into  little containers easily accessible to turn the raw protein/veg into a finished dish.  There will be minced onion and minced parsley, maybe a chiffonade of herbs or diced aromatic vegetables.  There may be a broth or wine for deglazing and butter for building a sauce.  At home I view the entire contents of my refrigerator as my mise-en-place.

When I have a week when I do some private cooking anything extra gets added to the mix.   So for example a current snapshot of my refrigerator today would reveal: a whole small pumpkin, spring onions, broccoli, cauliflower, cilantro, dashi, bone broth,  tons of prepped romaine and baby carrots which I normally never use, and a gallon of white bean puree that I forgot to put out on a buffet.  I have Pesto alla Genovese and a gallon of Tomato-Basil Sauce.  Olives of all types are there.  Now this is in addition to all the regular stuff in there ready to cook and more condiments than one human should have.  See me if you’d like to collaborate on inventing a condiment refrigerator.  My task is to use everything perishable in the refrigerator as I move through making meals for the week.  Follow along with me this week to see how I use a few simple techniques to turn the contents of the refrigerator into dinner, or breakfast.