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
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.
“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.”
“I really like the idea of being able to bridge tonight’s effort into a meal in the future,” she says. “If you don’t get ahead, you feel like you’re constantly catching up.”
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“Her idea to get a head start to make something really big today that’s going to be totally delicious and then take those leftovers and turn them into something else – that’s the real way that she cooks,” said her editor, Justin Schwartz, vice-president and executive editor at Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “It’s a concept that was true to her heart.”
“The biggest challenge was wanting those flavour profiles to be vastly different, but finding commonalities between them,” she says.
In one recipe pair, Garcia roasted a whole chicken in a lemon-garlic mix for a rustic country meal and then used the breasts to make an Asian-inspired sesame chicken for the second dish.
“You don’t necessarily look at those two dishes and think that they can work together. But garlic and lemon show up in Asian style food a lot. And so I kind of leaned into those threads,” she says.
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Her editor says Garcia didn’t take short cuts or fall into the lazy trap of just making two similar Southern dishes for meals one and two.
“Cassy has such a great sensibility about food and flavours. So she really brought that to the table,” said Schwartz.
Garcia is the creative force behind the popular food blog Fed + Fit, which she started in 2011. A holistic nutritionist, her previous book was Cook Once, Eat All Week: 26 Weeks of Gluten-Free, Affordable Meal Prep to Preserve Your Time & Sanity, which stressed cooking over the weekend for use during the week. She lives in San Antonio in the US state of Texas, with her husband and two children.
She is a tinkerer in the kitchen, constantly refining. “I sometimes like to think that my recipe development method is almost literally, throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks,” she says, laughing, and adds modestly that she identifies with the incomprehensible Swedish Chef Muppet character.
Cook Once Dinner Fix is designed to help families stray from the temptation of ordering in, and, by planning two meals, to reduce that tense feeling around five o’clock on weekdays: what’s for dinner?
“As much as I love to cook, getting a dinner on the table can feel incredibly cumbersome and stressful,” Garcia says. “Meal two, it’s done. It’s planned. You know what it’s going to be.”
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The global pandemic interrupted the making of the book – shutdown happened just as the poultry recipes were being photographed – but Garcia used the time to revisit her work.
“It allowed me to kind of look back through the manuscript and assess, how do we make this even easier for people?”
