I’ve said it before: baking is a science, cooking is an art. What I mean by that is that baking involves the balance of baking soda, baking powder or yeast, flour, and liquid ingredients. If this balance is off even just a little, you could end up with hockey puck cookies, cakes that don’t rise, or biscuits that taste like soap. That’s right – if you add too much baking soda your baked goods will taste like soap.

Cooking is an art. Some people seem to be genetically predisposed to it. My mom hated cooking, and she worked full time most of the time that my sister and I were growing up, so my sister and I started cooking when we were quite young. My dad taught us his style of cooking, which I would describe as: “take what you’ve got and throw it in a pot.” (Actually, he used a frying pan most of the time, but that doesn’t rhyme.)

I knew some families who threw leftovers away, and I remember my dad’s indignation at the wastefulness. I grew up before the age of microwave ovens (yes, I am that old!), so reheating stuff like roast beef and potatoes called for a bit of creativity. But it really isn’t difficult.

Roast beef and potatoes is a good example of a Sunday dinner. Make at least twice as much as your family will eat on Sunday, and refrigerate leftovers promptly. Here are four examples of what you could do with roast beef and potatoes, or any other leftovers you have in the fridge:

Skillet Dinners:

You will need a cutting board or two (some people have one cutting board for meats and another for vegetables, I usually just turn it upside down), and a good chef’s knife. Chop some onion and sauté it in about 2 tablespoons of oil in a frying pan. If you’ve got some celery, red or green pepper, or maybe some garlic you can toss that in. Sauté the veggies for 2 or 3 minutes. Chop your leftover meat and potatoes, and stir fry for a couple more minutes. If you have some gravy, you can add that. If you don’t have gravy, try adding a can of cream soup, like cream of mushroom or celery. Tomato soup actually works well also. Simmer all of that until it’s bubbly, about five or ten minutes. If you have some leftover cooked veggies, you can add them. Frozen veggies like peas or corn work too, just add them and simmer for another 10 minutes, or until they are done to your liking. I hate mushy veggies.

Stir Fry:

You can take the same ingredients, follow the same instructions until adding the gravy, add a honey garlic or sweet & sour sauce instead, and have a totally different meal. I actually don’t add a sauce at all, I just drizzle about 2 tablespoons of honey to my sautéed meat and veggies. That gives the veggies a bit of glaze. You might want to leave out the potatoes, and make some rice instead. If you have some frozen eggrolls, you could cook them in your toaster oven to save energy, or use a conventional oven.  

Casserole

The staple of church potlucks and hospitality gifts for new moms or families in crisis of any sort, the casserole can be a conglomeration of whatever you have on hand. You just take a casserole dish, spray it with a cooking spray (like Pam), and then add cooked meat, cubed or chopped vegetables, and a starchy carb like cooked diced potato, cooked rice, or cooked pasta. The theme here is that your ingredients are already cooked, so you just need to add a sauce, like a cream soup, tomato soup, prepared alfredo sauce, or like I keep saying, whatever you have. I have used a brick of softened cream cheese as a sauce and it was yummy. I often top casseroles with grated cheddar cheese. You can use browned ground beef instead of leftover beef, chicken, pork, or tofu or whatever you eat. (Irrelevant anecdote from university years – a friend of mine called one day to ask how to brown ground beef. We need to teach our kids some survival skills before we send them off!)  As long as you have a representative of all four food groups, and a sauce of some sort to bind it together, you’ve got a meal that you can either bake right away for today’s dinner, or refrigerate or freeze, or take along to that potluck. Bake it covered in a conventional oven at 350º for about 45 minutes. Defrost a frozen casserole in the fridge overnight, or bake it from the frozen state for at least an hour and a half.

Soup

Homemade soup really isn’t that hard to make. You just need an hour or so of time to dedicate to stirring, or else it will all stick to the bottom. The liquid part of soup is called stock. The old fashioned way to make stock is by boiling bones from ham, turkey, or other meat. These days you can buy readymade stock in the soup aisle, or you can make a culinary cheater’s stock by adding beef, chicken, or vegetable bouillon powder to water and boiling it. Then you can add whatever meat (cooked and cubed), vegetables, and seasonings you have, get the mixture just to the boiling point, and then turn the heat down to a simmer, cover, and stir it every 5 or 10 minutes for about an hour, and voila! You have made homemade soup.

Cooking really isn’t that hard. If you are so inclined, you can take a recipe, buy all of the ingredients listed, measure carefully, and follow the instructions. Go for it! I have dozens of cookbooks, plus a drawer full of assorted recipe cards and scribblings on scraps of paper. I look through them now and then to get ideas.

I wouldn’t consider myself a gourmet cook, and my meals are usually nothing fancy, especially now with Parkinson’s disease I don’t have the ability most days to spend hours in the kitchen. The point of this article is that you don’t have to be a gourmet cook to make great meals for your family.