Cook once, eat twice: home chef Cassy Joy Garcia’s paired recipes turns one meal into prep for another

Cook Once Dinner Fix: Quick and Exciting Ways to Transform Tonight’s Dinner into Tomorrow’s Feast offers ways to transform one meal into two different ones

The cookbook, for example, shows how you can go from a beef and veggie stew one night to shredded beef tostadas the next

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Curried chicken one day, herb-crusted roasted chicken the next? Cassy Joy Garcia get creative in Cook Once Dinner Fix: Quick and Exciting Ways to Transform Tonight’s Dinner into Tomorrow’s Feast. Photo: AP

Published: 10:15pm, 23 Sep 2021

Some families just love leftovers. What’s easier than reheating and digging into yesterday’s meal? But that’s not Cassy Joy Garcia’s family: they’re not leftover fans.

So Garcia had to get creative for her latest cookbook, which offers busy home chefs a way to lower stress levels in the kitchen by transforming one meal into two different ones.

How she does it is by planning out two meals that usually share a protein. She cooks that meat, fish or poultry for one meal and sets aside extra for tomorrow’s dinner, which will have its own flavours.

“As we started to put that puzzle together of what it could look like, I started to realise we were gravitating toward something that I already do and have been using,” she says. “I’ve just never really thought about it as a formula.”

The cover of Cassy Joy Garcia’s new book. Photo: AP

Cook Once Dinner Fix: Quick and Exciting Ways to Transform Tonight’s Dinner into Tomorrow’s Feast shows how you can go from a beef and veggie stew one night to shredded beef tostadas the next. Or dry rubbed barbecue brisket on Tuesday and cheesesteak stuffed peppers on Wednesday.