Sunday meal prep
Sunday is an unglamorous day. If my wife and I are going out, we typically do it on Saturday (such as when we saw the pro shot of the musical Six yesterday) unless Sunday is the only day an event we want to attend is happening. Sometimes I will arrange a day hike on Sundays, but it's overwhelmingly dominated by chores.
The best part of Sunday chores, however, is meal prep. This week, I decided I wanted to do something a little special for my first full week back at school.
Breakfast
I landed on Eggs and Cornbread for breakfast. It is going to ask a little more of me in the mornings before school than normal, but not too much, and the premade eggs never pop back for me.
This is a classic Southern poverty meal and really easy to make. My mom always kept Jiffy cornbread in the pantry, and we usually had some sitting on the counter come Saturday. My parents usually worked on the weekends once I was a teenager, and scrambling an egg was one of the first foods I learned how to make.
But for meal prep purposes, all it really requires from me is to make the cornbread. I like to make mine with a few diced jalapeños, sugar, and a handful of corn kernels. I have some bacon fat as well that I use for the bottom of the skillet.
And that's pretty much it. I'll crack open and premix two eggs with a little milk the night before, and slightly under cook some breakfast sausage (I prefer turkey just since there's already quite a bit of fat in the cornbread). Come morning, while letting my coffee steep, I'll crumble up a healthy wedge of the cornbread into a pan and saute it with the sausage (not adding any fat besides what is already in the meat). I also plan to toss a handful of spinach to give it a little more fiber then add the egg. In total, it will probably take about five minutes, and doesn't require me to babysit it too closely.
It's good to eat how it is, but I like to add a little Valentina as opposed to the more traditional Tabasco sauce as I find Valentina has a better taste and less aggressive heat (I have a fairly high tolerance for spice, but don’t want the burn with my hot coffee).
Lunch
One of my favorite soups is French Onion. I made French Onion soup for the first time when I lived in Korea (which is really when my love of cooking solidified), and I made a few different recipes before settling on one I really liked. It’s hard to know what the exact origin of the soup was, but onion soup had been a staple among peasants for centuries. The root of the recipe I use today leans more heavily on the peasant tradition rather than the more common and modern interpretation.
It is extremely simple: A boatload of sliced onions caramelized for ~4 hours with a little bit of fat, salt, and pepper until it becomes almost like a jam. I used to use just butter, but I've lately used a mixture of butter and olive oil since the latter is a healthier cooking fat and has a higher smoke point, whereas the former gives a better flavor. Cooking it that long reduces the amount of water and concentrates the flavors so that stock simply isn't needed to deepen the flavor. Water, wine, done.
The result is a soup that is extremely onion-forward, rather than many of the soups I’ve tried where the onion is lost in the stock. You can throw it with the classic day-old bread and Gruyère cheese and have a delicious meal. Or I’ve also cooked noodles in the soup and added some cream to make a delicious, creamy onion pasta. The leftovers also make great stock for cooking roast.
It’s a tasty meal, but not especially nutritious. Since I’m bringing it for lunch, I decided to make it more like a minestrone. I cooked some navy beans in the soup for fiber and protein and some whole wheat pasta shells for extra fiber and nuttiness.
Also, a banana for my afternoon tea. Can't forget that. I could improve the healthiness of this meal (mostly looking at the fat content) by replacing the bacon fat and removing the butter, but I'm not too worried.
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.