Ep 463: Dinner With 10 Ingredients Or Less
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And what I would recommend and what I do is I look in my fridge and I see what is going to go bad first. It could be as simple as some dill that I should probably use and I start from there. So I always work to use what I already have and then maybe I have a protein in the freezer that I could defrost. So I start to kind of triangulate and see what will go bad the quickest and then what I want to eat.

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Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining me today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky and I want to know,

If you, like me, have ever found yourself running frantically to the grocery store because you are missing one ingredient, one, but you need it desperately for whatever you are trying to make for dinner. Maybe it is thyme, maybe it's bay leaves. Often in my house, it's buttermilk. I could go on, but then you use that thing one time and watch as it slowly goes bad in the back of your fridge.

Look, I have done this more times than I could count and with food prices continuing to rise, it just feels worse every single time, which is just one thing.

of the reasons that I am so excited to talk to Allie Slagle today. She is the queen of fast and flexible recipes and using fewer ingredients in more ways. That is straight out of the bio of her incredible sub stack, which is called 40 Ingredients Forever. Allie is also a New York Times contributor. She is the author of the James Beard Award nominated cookbook,

I dream of dinner so you don't have to. Probably the cookbook that I have given as a gift more than any other. Allie, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me.

The premise of your sub stack, 40 Ingredients Forever is, well, it's right in the title, right? So we don't have to go through the entire supermarket or even the entire list of 40. What are the few things, five to 10, that you think everybody must have in their kitchen at all times if they want to have a prayer of getting dinner on the table? Yeah.

Well, the true answer is I think you should start with the food you really want to eat. If there's food in your house that you really want to eat, you're probably going to eat it. So for me, that's chickpeas, pasta, eggs, garlic, lemon, and oil. I think I could live for a really long time with just those ingredients.

Wow, chickpeas is a really interesting one on the list. I have all the rest and I do have chickpeas in the house, but I rarely reach for them. Maybe we can talk about that.

Food prices have gone up 28% in the past five years. That is honestly as insane as it sounds. And the one thing that people can't stop talking about is the price of eggs. A lot of people think that the price of eggs is responsible for the winner of the presidential election.

Eggs are on your list of ingredients. I always have eggs in my fridge. I love breakfast for dinner. I don't think there's a swap for eggs. First of all, is there a good swap for eggs?

It depends on how you're using them. If you want to make scrambled eggs, you could make a tofu scramble. You could. I'm not sure if that's really what you had in mind when you wanted scrambled eggs. If you're using eggs in a recipe as a binder for meatloaf or in baking, there are swaps you can do. But yes, eggs are one of those things that are really hard to find a swap for. I do agree with you.

What about the other must-have ingredients? Are there things that we should get used to thinking of as fungible in the grocery store? When you listed the must-have ingredients, could chickpeas be cannellini beans, be turkey?

Could oil be something else? What's the key to getting yourself comfortable with swapping things in and out? So my whole goal with 40 Ingredients Forever is not for everyone to go out and buy these 40 exact ingredients. My goal is for them to see what is possible with kind of a capsule collection of ingredients. And one of the posts that I wrote for the sub stack shows

shows kind of a recipe that I would never make. It was a chef's recipe that had so many ingredients and had so many steps. And I went through and I explained what each ingredient is doing in that recipe. So let's say lemon. They're fruity and they're also acidic. What else can do both of those things? So I basically went through and explained what each ingredient is doing in a recipe and then what swaps I could make based on my 40 ingredients.

And the whole point of that was to show that everything kind of is fungible at a certain point. Everything you could probably, if you have a well-stocked kitchen, you could probably make do. How did you get to this point in your life? How did you grow up around food? How did you become a cook? How did you start to write recipes?

You know, I've never worked in kitchens. I didn't go to cooking school, but I had a mom who would cook all of my meals and it was just watching her. She didn't follow recipes. She just kind of moved through the kitchen, chopping, sauteing, seeing what looked good in her fridge. And that's really where I take inspiration is just seeing what you have and making something that you want to eat.

So I watched her a lot and then I worked at a book publisher where I kind of learned the structure of a recipe and what you need to express in a recipe so that someone could make the food that you're trying to make.

When you hear people say, I eat out so much because I can't cook. It's just too hard. I'm bad at it. It doesn't come naturally to me. Every time I go to the grocery store, I come home with stuff I don't need. What's your reaction to all of those excuses? Because we know they're all excuses. They are excuses. The tricky thing about cooking is there are so many reasons.

There's the parts of cooking, there's the deciding what to eat, there's the grocery shopping, there's the prepping, then the cooking, then the cleaning, and then the eating. So there are many moments where you can make a decision of how that step works best for you.

So when people say I don't like cooking, I ask them, what do you not like about cooking? Because if you don't like the splatter you have to clean up after you sear chicken breasts, like make a soup. There's no cleanup to that. Or if things feel too hurried for you, if you're making a stir fry or something, throw something in the oven and walk away and go do something else. So I think it's really about trying a lot of different ways of cooking and seeing what works well for you and then just doing that in as many ways as you can find.

I think that is such a good point. I realized a long time ago that the thing that I don't like about cooking is deciding what's for dinner. And so I don't decide, my husband decides. And this has just been our deal. He can't cook a thing. I mean, he probably could if he tried, he just doesn't try. But

I never have to decide what's for dinner, which for me is such a gift. I mean, he does also sometimes do the shopping or I'll do it if it's more convenient. That doesn't bother me. But just this pressure to figure out what to put on the table, especially during the pandemic, I could not...

I couldn't take it anymore. I was so sick of my own food. And that's when we really started relying so heavily on the recipes in the New York Times, including many of yours. That's when he just started sending me recipes out of the Times and I would make them. And it took that really heavy part of the equation out of it for me.

for me. He also cleans, which is nice. He doesn't load a dishwasher the way that I want him to, but I have learned to shut up about that. Which other parts of the cooking process bother people the most, do you think? I think you hit on a really big one, which is the decision-making part of it, which is the

what am I going to make for dinner? And I think if you go online, it can be really overwhelming. And what I would recommend and what I do is I look in my fridge and I see what is going to go bad first. It could be as simple as some dill that I should probably use and I start from there. So I always work

to use what I already have. And then maybe I have a protein in the freezer that I could defrost. So I start to kind of triangulate and see what will go bad the quickest and then what I want to eat. Are there things that you, in addition to your top five, are there things that you always keep in

in the freezer, for example, so that you know you can pull out a meal. I've watched you do this trick with your newsletter where you ask people what they have and then you sort of create dinner around them. What are you pulling from? Are you pulling an acid and a protein and a veg? Like, how are you thinking about this puzzle?

I always want to have a vegetable because I just feel better when I eat vegetables. I think protein is good to have, maybe not essential, but it really depends on you. I think a lot about texture. I think texture is one of those things that really is important to enjoying the food you're eating. Sometimes you want just soft bite after soft bite, like in a lentil soup or something like that.

But sometimes you want the contrast of a soft bean with a crispy skin fish. So I'm thinking about all of those things. And I realized that as I'm saying this, this is like a cook talking. This is someone who really like dreams in food. And this might be hard for a lot of people to put together on their own.

But I think if you start with a recipe that looks good to you and you learn how to adapt it to what you need, so thinking about what each ingredient is doing and then simplifying it from there, I think you'll find that cooking might be more enjoyable.

In preparation for this show, you asked for a list of the stuff that I keep in the kitchen so that we could play your game, which you call Show Me Your Forevers, I'll Make You Dinner. And granted, I think my listeners know I'm a pretty frequent cook. I like to cook more than I like to go out. And I do have a pretty large list of things on hand. I always have chicken thighs, which I like so much more than the other parts of the chicken breast.

I always have some frozen shrimp. I usually have salad stuff and lemon and garlic and potatoes and some canned stuff. I always have Rayos, right? When I go to Costco, Rayos is one of the very first things that I throw in my cart. Rayos and really big jars of Grey Poupon. I have a little cheese, usually Parm or Feta because it's not too hard on my stomach.

and diced tomatoes, some pasta, different shapes. Sometimes I make them together. What would you do with that? First of all, I love your list of ingredients. I would say if someone, to your question of how do you stock your kitchen, this is a great example of hitting all

all the categories of things. So you have frozen proteins in the freezer, so they won't go bad. You don't have pressure to eat them before they go to waste. I agree with you about chicken thighs. I think they're much more versatile. They're harder to overcook. I think you'll just enjoy eating them a lot more than a boneless chicken breast.

You have fresh stuff, but not too many. So there's not a ton of pressure for it to go bad. You have really assertive seasonings like lemon and garlic. And then you have things in the pantry that can be the base of a dinner, like canned beans or like rice. And then you have some accompaniments that are already like really flavorful from the jar. So you have less to do. I'm also a Ralph's Costco buyer. So we really are on the same page about that. Chicken broth too, parm and feta.

So for the sake of showing how to be flexible in a recipe, I thought I would mention a recipe that I wrote on my self-stack, which is called crispy lamb and lemon rice and make it with your ingredients. So you can do it with ground turkey. You can add garlic. You can skip the shallot.

So what you do is you sear the turkey, add some garlic, add chicken broth, the zest and juice of a lemon, and some rice. So then you cover it and boil it, and what happens is the turkey won't dry out because you're cooking it in liquid, but it still has flavor because you're browning it from the skillet. And then the lemon is infusing the rice, so it's really flavorful from the start. And then what you can do is once the rice is cooked, you can just eat it right from there, or you can add a little oil.

and sear the bottom of the rice, kind of like tadig or the bottom of a bibimbap at a Korean restaurant. So you have the texture of the crispy rice and then kind of the nicely steamed rice on top. And then if you want a vegetable, add some cucumbers or a green vegetable. That sounds amazing. If you were going to sear the rice, you take it out of the pan, put the oil in, and then put it back in, or you just mush it around? You can just drizzle it around the edges.

of the rice and the oil will kind of dribble down underneath the rice and we'll sear it. I learned the method from Samin Nasrat. She has a really great tadig recipe that is perfect, but this is kind of a simpler version of that. You put a lid on it. You put a lid on it when you're cooking the rice, but when you're searing the rice, you just let it sizzle.

Okay. And how long does it have to stay there? I don't want to ruin this beautiful dinner. The rice takes about 17 minutes and then the searing takes about five. You can just peek under and see if it's golden and that's it. It sounds amazing. Allie, as you can expect, I have more questions, but we are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about ways to make cooking take less time and those recipes that you can make over and over again. Average is not invited.

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We are back with Allie Slagle, author of 40 Ingredients Forever and the wonderful book, I Dream of Dinner So You Don't Have To. Your cookbook promises strictly 45 minute, 10 ingredient meals, although to your credit, you usually only use five to eight. What's the most popular recipe that your readers turn to again and again?

The first one that comes to mind is the one-pot chicken piccata with orzo. You cook boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cubes of it, brown it, and then you add aromatics like garlic and capers, and you cook the orzo right with the boneless thighs in chicken broth. I mean, it's actually very similar to that crispy rice I just mentioned to you. It sounds great. What's your favorite in the book?

That's a really hard question. The first thing that came to mind, maybe because it's so blistering cold right now, is the gochujang gravy. The idea is that it's a meat sauce, but it takes less time and it requires fewer ingredients because you use this fermented Korean chili paste to bring all of the flavor really quickly. The recipe from the times of yours that I find myself going back to again and again is the Greek chicken, which is...

Just delicious. When we talk about things going bad in the book, you talk about making pantry lurkers and produce on its last legs as much of the main star of the recipe as farmers market celebrities. What are the things that we should buy more of and what are the things that we should buy less?

less of or maybe not at all. I mean, when we are thinking about our grocery budget in this era where things have just gone up and up and up, and we hear that oft-cited statistic about food waste. First of all, the food waste stat with people who are hungry just bothers me every time I hear it. But it also, it's

If you were raised by parents who grew up in the Depression like mine did, you don't like to throw away food. You eat your leftovers and you enjoy them. What do you think we overdo it on and underdo it on? It really depends on the person, I think. What might be helpful for people is to spend a week or a couple weeks writing down everything they're really eating and seeing what...

trends there are what they actually eat really often and buying more of that and maybe then looking around their pantry and seeing what they're not using because I think it really depends on what you actually will end up eating

Okay, you're speaking my language. I don't think that you know it, but we are big trackers here. When we're trying to help somebody get their finances straight, we go through a backwards budgeting process. It's what we do in our Finance Fix coaching class.

classes because if you know where your money is going then you can make changes about where you want your money to actually go and this is I think very much the same concept what foods do you suspect that people will find they're buying that they shouldn't be buying they're probably buying a lot of snacks

And then they're probably buying a lot of takeout. And then when you think about what you would save just by cooking at home, I think it's an easy way to save a buck. It is, although for all of those reasons we were talking about before, people get nervous. They just get scared. For non-cooks or reluctant cooks or cooks who believe they can't cook,

How do you get them started? I would start really small. I would start with something you really want to eat. What was the thing that you grew up eating that you really love? Maybe it's Kraft Mac and Cheese, but opening that box is cooking. You did something. You know, you put a pot on the stove and you did that. And then maybe you might think about how to make it spicy because you like spice.

I think it's just really, really baby steps. I think, too, it's starting with recipes that are really simple. You should be able to read the recipe through and understand every step and that you feel like you can do it. So it's really about finding the recipe writers that kind of speak to you in that way.

Besides your own recipes, whose do you turn to? I think Sola El-Weili is really wonderful. She has beginner recipes in her book Start Here, but she also has more complicated recipes, but she outlines which are easy and which are complicated. I think either way, she's such a clear recipe writer that you feel like you can do anything.

Yeah, we love Sola. She was on the podcast about six months ago when her book came out and it was a treat. You shared a photo of the Brooklyn kitchen where you spent six years testing recipes for the New York Times and for your book.

Why do you think people feel that they need a big fancy kitchen before they can really get started cooking? That's a good question. You know, the thing about big kitchens is they actually don't make any sense to me because they're too spread out. You have to run around too much. I love cooking in a small space because it's more efficient if you think about restaurant kitchens. They're just really well laid out and you have everything that you need within arm's reach.

So I think it's just a matter of perspective. I prefer to cook in a small space where I have everything I need really close at hand. And what are the appliances that you think people actually need versus the ones that they buy?

So after I lived in that Brooklyn kitchen, my partner and I remodeled a camper van and we drove around the country for six months. So we built out a little kitchen in the back. So similar to the grocery eating tracking, I had to track what appliances I used most often. So anytime I would use something in my Brooklyn apartment, I would put in a box and then that would make it into the camper van. And really what made it in was a large skillet.

a good knife, a cutting board, a spoon. I think keeping kind of do a lot with just that. Yeah, absolutely. Although please don't ask me to give up my KitchenAid mixer because I really don't use my Cuisinart. I use my Cuisinart twice a year at the Jewish holidays. I use it to make potato kugel and I use it to make potato latkes and otherwise I don't use it and I probably could do those things by hand. But

But I really like my KitchenAid mixer. For a long time, I didn't have a blender, a food processor, or a mixer. The cookbook doesn't use any of those gadgets. Good to know. We don't have to spend up for that, just like my Mr. Coffee coffee maker that seems to do the trick every single day. Again, we're a money show. We talk about food because when...

I ask people or when I look at people's budgets to find the places where money is just flowing through their fingers and they don't know, it's pretty much always food. And even if it's not just food, food is almost always on the list. Besides just what are your

best ideas for saving money at the grocery store or saving money on our food budget in general? You know, something I've been thinking about recently, which maybe isn't a very clear way to save money on your food, but really is to kind of to share the responsibility of making dinner by having people over for dinner some nights and then being invited to other people's houses for other nights.

Where I live, we basically eat at other people's houses two or three nights a week. And it's not a dinner party. It's really just whatever people are cooking that night. They just invite a couple people over. And then you don't have to cook that night. You don't have to do dishes that night. And you get to eat with other people. And I think if you get stressed out about cooking or the thought of doing it every single night, breaking it up with your friends is a really nice way to make it enjoyable.

I love that idea for a couple of reasons. I was thinking in answering a reader question recently about recipe quantities and portion sizes. And my two kids have not lived at home for quite some time. But I still often cook as much as I would if there were four of us rather than two.

knowing that there are just two of us. I do it by habit. I do it because that's sort of what the recipe demands. Often I'll freeze half and know that we have another dinner in the freezer. But what you just said reminds me of our COVID pod. My next door neighbors, we would have dinner with them a couple of nights a week at least. We weren't really seeing other people, but she would cook or I would cook or he would cook, not my husband. And

It spread the load, but it also, we really were not shopping for much more food. We were just sharing it. It feels like such a pleasure to do, and it's also just easier. So I don't know why you wouldn't do it. This conversation has been delightful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for talking with me. We're going to have a mailbag coming up later in the week where you answer questions from our listeners, which is fantastic.

What are we looking for from you next? Where would you like people to go to find more of you? I think my Substack is a really fun place to be if you like simple recipes with a lot of swaps, a lot of substitution ideas so that you can use what you have. The Substack is called 40 Ingredients Forever. Allie Slagle, thanks so much. Thank you. We'll be right back.

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And we are back for Mailbag. Katherine Tuggle is in the house. I so enjoyed that conversation. Are you finding your cooking a decent amount these days? I never stopped cooking. In so many ways, I never stopped living like...

the 21 year old journalist in New York making $35,000 a year. I cook everything. We do not eat out. People talk about like Postmates-ing everything in New York and how expensive it is. I've literally never done that. I would never pay $30 to have somebody bring me a $20 burger ever. I would never do that. I don't care how rich I was. So short answer is yes, I'm cooking, but I'm not cooking any more than I have literally done my entire adult life.

Yeah, I don't think I'm cooking more either. Although restaurant prices these days just have me thinking twice when I eat out at all. And for that reason, maybe I'll opt to cook to invite people in for dinner. I entertain a lot. You know that. I don't know. Particularly when it's cold out, I just don't want to go outside. So I end up cooking.

Yeah. Well, to your point on restaurant prices, my favorite restaurant in New York is Cafe Mogador. It's a Moroccan place. We've been there. Yes, we have. And I found it, I think, the week I moved to the city, which was in 2004. And the first thing I ordered is the thing I always order, which is the chicken couscous. And when I first moved here, it was $11.50. And this last weekend, it was $24. Yeah.

So it has more than doubled in price. Yeah. And I think that's just typical. And I am so not blaming restaurants. No. Restaurant, you know, food costs are up. The price of people working in restaurants is up. Benefit costs are up. It's all up.

And so, of course, you need to charge enough money to make a good living and stay open because we love our restaurants. But I'm just – I feel it when I go out. Yeah, same. Let's take a question. Yeah, our first question today comes from Tammy. She writes –

I have a question about cashback credit cards. My Walmart credit card has always been my favorite because I get 5% cashback on online grocery orders. I just got a letter that it's changing to 1.5%. So I'm looking for a cashback card that might give me anywhere near that much on grocery orders at Walmart. They're often excluded from grocery categories. Thank you. Tammy, we love our credit card points, don't we? And we get very strategic about how we're going to use them.

Based on this particular change and this particular card, I'm going to advise you to

rethink your credit card strategy. Walmart has clearly made two decisions here. They've made a decision to lower the cash back on the card that they make money from, which means that they are finding that they're giving too much back to their customers in this way. And they have

are opting out of the other grocery store cards because there's always a cost that gets passed along to the bottom line. So I would tell you to do two things differently. The first is to think about what else you put on your card. You may be better off with just a general cash back card that pays you cash back for

for more things. So Blue Cash from American Express, 3% at supermarkets, 3% at gas stations, 3% at retail. There are also cards that give you 1% to 2% back on

on everything that you buy. That may be a better way for you to go, particularly if there are other things that you could load onto your card and then not pay interest on them. The other thing that I might suggest, and I know that people have their favorites when it comes to places to shop is

but is considering a different store. So Walmart cut this benefit, but Target still gives 5% cash back on their Circle credit card. That's significant. If you're willing to switch from Walmart to Target, which may be asking too much, then you may be able to mirror those benefits. So that's just a two-

deep pronged approach to dealing with a question that doesn't have the answer that I know that you're looking for. I love that, Jean. I think that this applies to bank accounts, it applies to credit cards, like the rule of thumb is always shop around. Like even if something doesn't change year to year, it's worth looking to see what's out there to see to make sure that you're getting the best possible deal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you may decide that

you have enough expenses just to justify a different card or making a switch. But I would also keep your eye on the Reddit threads for Walmart. If they get a big enough outcry about this change, maybe they'll change it back. Definitely. Thanks, Jean. Our next question comes to us from Stephanie, who's wondering how to cut back on her grocery budget. Here's her question.

My husband and I have been married for over 25 years. My husband does most of the cooking and the grocery shopping. Nice. He's quite the catch. He says it's really his thing. He loves to cook and shop for food. For the past several years, we've been able to keep our food budget around 150 a week. And for most of that, we were a family of four. Now it's just the two of us. Our kids are in college or out of the house. We don't even do takeout. Before, we only ever got pizza once a week and we didn't go out much.

Anyway, our grocery bill has gone up to $200 a week. Are food prices just higher now? My husband insists there's nothing we can do about this, although he's never really gotten into things that would lower the budget, like planning meals around what's on sale, etc. On the one hand, I don't want to take away the thing he loves. On the other, this is an extra $200. Suggestions? Am I being unrealistic? So suggestions, yes. Are you being unrealistic? Yes.

Yes. Food prices, inflation on food has gone up significantly in the past few years. If you were reading the reports around the election, you know that the price of eggs, the price of milk, the price of meat, all of these things are being credited with one element of the Trump victory. People were just

feeling this and they were feeling it every single time they went to the grocery store so your husband has a definite point those staples are more expensive but are there things that he could do about it

100%. You mentioned meal planning and you mentioned buying things on sale. I think that the very best way to reduce your grocery budget, and you can't do it on things necessarily that go bad very quickly, like dairy products, like vegetables, but you

Things like chicken breast, yeah, you buy it on sale, you put it in the freezer, you take it out of the freezer when you want to use it, and you make sure that you are keeping your eye on that rotating calendar of sales that seems to repeat every five or six weeks. The other thing I would say is I wonder...

if he is still cooking for four, even though you are a family of two. And I wonder this because I found myself doing it when things were changing with my own kids leaving the house. I

didn't change the quantities that I was cooking. We ended up with significantly more in leftovers and sometimes those leftovers got eaten and sometimes those leftovers did not get eaten and that was just a lot of waste. And so if

If he hasn't quite adjusted his quantities and his recipes, then one way to just roll with the system that you've got in place is to cook once and eat twice. Make it your job or make it his job to take half of whatever it is he cooks and package it up, put it in the freezer so that you've got another meal that you can pull out in a week or you can pull out in two weeks.

I think there's probably a little of all of that going on. The other thing that you can do is just help him with the sales calendar. Look, I give a lot of credit to a guy who both cooks and shops, right? If he cleaned jackpot.

But that's okay. You can clean up if he's cooking. If he doesn't have the stamina or the interest to pay attention to the sales calendar, you pay attention to it. Tell him this is the week where we're going to buy these things and we're going to put them in the freezer and don't buy them next time because we've already got them. And over time...

I think those couple of changes will likely help. I love that, Jean. I also think now that it's just the two of them, Costco might be their best friend, right? Because Costco, first of all, Costco gives you two cards with your membership, which I think they mean to be split between like two partners. But my mom and dad have one card and my husband and I have one card. So we're using one membership between two households so they could split that with somebody. And I think now that it's just the two of them,

It's so easy to freeze things in packages of two. Like I know those Costco chicken breasts come in packages of eight or 10 or 12. It's usually divisible by two, like two portions. So I think, you know, he can still buy for the whole family if that's his habit, if that's his instinct, but then they can just start portioning that out for the two of them. Yeah, I learned to do that with the big Costco bags of shrimp.

So Costco sells the two pound bags of shrimp. We love them. They're delicious. But I would take half a bag out of the freezer, which was too much for us. We'd end up with leftovers. It's not so great the next day. And I started to portion the bag out when I get it. So it's already flash frozen. It's not going to unfreeze. But I'm portion controlling for my recipes in advance.

So smart. Thank you, Jean. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks so much to Ali Slagle for sharing why you don't need a million ingredients to make an amazing meal. If you love this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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