The Lazy Genius Podcast - #252 - How I Choose New Recipes

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

We’re always on the hunt for new recipes, right? We want variety and beautiful meals, and we think that repetition is somehow a sign of laziness in the kitchen. It’s not. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for new recipes. We all have different approaches to them, and today I’m going to share mine.   Helpful Companion Links Brainless Crowdpleasers 101 Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn Hope’s Table by Hope Helmuth Aarti Paarti by Aarti Sequiera Made in India by Meera Sodha Food sites I trust: Budget Bytes, Damn Delicious, and Our Savory Life Some Pub(lication) Crawl tickets are still available! Check it out here. Download a transcript of this episode.   This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Hi everyone. You're listening to The Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 252, How I Choose New Recipes. We're always on the hunt for new recipes, right? We want variety and beautiful meals, and we think that repetition is somehow a sign of laziness in the kitchen. It's not. Let me just be clear about that right now. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for new recipes. We all have different approaches to them. And today I'm going to share mine. And you don't have to copy what I do because that doesn't make sense. But hopefully my process can spark some ideas for your own. So where do we start with what matters? Of course we do. But there are a few questions I ask myself when I'm itching to add new recipes to my life. First, why? Why do I want new recipes in this season? If there are multiple reasons, which one matters most.

I'll be honest. Sometimes when I get that new recipe itch and I ask myself why I want new ones, the answer is drenched in shoulds because I should make more variety than I do. Because my kids should get used to trying new foods. Because if I'm going to talk about food as part of my job and write and release a book about the kitchen, then I should make more new food. stuff. Pals, those are not compelling reasons for me. So sometimes the search stops there. I'm trying to solve a problem that doesn't really matter. It's okay for me to cook a lot of the same things.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And it's more stressful for me to add new recipes and the expectations and time that goes with them to my life when the reason isn't important enough to merit that shift. Does that make sense? Only pursue something if it really matters. So that's my first question. Why do I want new recipes in this season? If there are multiple good reasons, I choose the one that matters most so that I can have an engine for my decision making, right? We have to pick the thing that matters most. I have recently been in a place where I do want to add some new recipes. And the thing that matters most about that is that I want to occasionally be more excited

when I cook. I love cooking. I love being in the kitchen. I love watching something come together in a pan. But because we cook a lot of the same things and because a lot of those things are convenience driven, like Trader Joe's Mander and Chicken, there's not a lot of creating going on. So I'd like to add some new recipes so that I can enjoy that cooking spark more often. Second question, what matters most about how I'm using new recipes?

Are you looking for new dinner or lunch recipes? Are you thinking of incorporating them super often or just occasionally? Will new recipes only exist on weekends when you have more time? or does that actually not make sense because weekends are usually when you enjoy takeout? Think about how you're going to use these new recipes, how often you'll incorporate them, and when. What matters most about that? For me, it's that there is not pressure or a system I have to follow.

That might be surprising because I'm so in love with systems, but I only like systems when following them gives me life or the system itself gives me space to enjoy life somewhere else. Saying that I'll make a new recipe every Thursday is a recipe. Ha ha! Get it? For no new recipes on Thursdays. Or any other day really, because regularity and systemizing aren't the point for me. Just having ideas is all I need.

So my how is simply having new recipes in the same place where my brainless crowd pleasers are listed so that when I'm making a meal plan for the week, I can decide right then if a new recipe makes sense at some point during that week. That's what matters most about my how. So first ask why, then ask how. Third question, what kind of new recipes do I need? What do they need to be? I know I want recipes that spark fun for me in the kitchen, and I need them to be easy enough to fit any day of the week. So what kind of recipe is that for me? Probably something that can be spread out over a day or so, like with marinated or slow-cooked meat that I can work on a little ahead of time, maybe something with a flavor that's a little

different or more robust than flavors we normally use. For example, we love generalized Asian food. My husband was born in Japan and we love a lot of Japanese food. We also love Indian food, Chinese food, Thai food, anything with a profile of flavors that includes ginger or garlic or spices or soy. Now, Asian food is wildly different. Wildly. If you dig deep into Vietnamese cuisine versus Chinese cuisine versus Japanese cuisine versus like a ton of other countries, you will find a million fundamental differences on how those foods are prepared. So when I say we like Asian food, I want to be clear that I understand to a point the wide spectrum of what Asian food is. Basically, I mean we like rice, ginger, soy sauce, and like some

of the other stuff. So what kind of new recipes do I need? I love. I love. I love. I mean, love to find a good marinated meat in a rice bowl recipe that's a little more complex in what I usually make, a marinade with a few different flavors or extra ingredients, maybe one extra step to preparing a vegetable that will elevate it and spark my cooking joy, an intentional move to develop flavor by browning or grilling or doing something that's more than just like putting something directly in the oven. Now, I love to put things directly in the oven. That is essentially how my family eats dinner most of the time, and it is essential for my sanity. But sometimes I like to cook, right? Remember, that's my why. I want to have a little more fun cooking on occasion.

And recipes that involve hands-on cooking with familiar, but slightly different flavors, are a win for me. So that's the kind of recipe I would look for. fourth question after why do I need new recipes how am i going to use new recipes and what do they need to be is how many new recipes do i want to find right now if you're just wanting to add two or three new recipes to a monthly dinner queue all you need are two or three new recipes you don't have to scour the entirety of your cookbooks or the internet to find every possible new recipe that might work for you ever. Remember, lazy geniuses start small. You can choose a new recipe or two or three or six. Knowing what I know about most of you listeners, I cannot imagine a

scenario where you would need to find more than, say, 10 new recipes at a time. And I think even that's pushing it. Most of us, unless we're living that Julie and Julia life where we're cooking our way through a cookbook, we're not going to incorporate multiple new recipes into our lives every week. It's probably too overwhelming to do that, right? So limit your decisions by naming how many new recipes you reasonably need in this season. When I went on my recent new recipe hunt, I found five recipes that I was excited to try and then I stopped. I was in the middle of a cookbook. I got Sparkly about a fifth recipe and then I closed the book because I set my limit to five. I don't need anymore.

There's always more to search, right? There's always more. There are always food blogs that have like four or 40 more pages of recipes that you haven't gotten to yet. But they're not going anywhere. Your time is, though. So ask how many new recipes you need to find and once you find them, be done for now. We'll be right back.

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process. Again, first I ask those four questions, right? Why do I need new recipes? How am I wanting to use them? What kind of recipes do we need? And how many? Once I know that, I know where to look. and I always start with my cookbooks. I choose a particular cookbook that is most aligned with the kind of recipe I need. If I am looking for kind of new ways to marinate meat or cook meat or just like think of meat, guess where I go, Mad Hungry, I have two Mad Hungry cookbooks by Lucinda Scala Quinn. If I'm wanting a whole meal, like the whole thing that's really simple, but comforting, I will probably start with Hope's Table by Hope Helmuth. If I'm wanting some new Indian recipes to add to the few that we already make,

I will for sure grab either Artie Party by Artie Sequera or Made in India by Mirra Soda. Different cookbooks meet different needs, right? So depending on the kind of recipe you need, you'll reach for a different cookbook. We all need opportunities to limit our options. And knowing the kind of recipe you're looking for helps limit where you're going to look. Now, I personally start with cookbooks and not food blogs, since most food bloggers play around with different kinds of recipes because that's the nature of creating content on the internet. It's just rare that a food blogger will have one kind of recipe or one style of cooking

that covers their entire site. But also, that's why categories or filters exist. I can go to Budget Bytes website and search for quick recipes, like literally it says quick, or I can look through their one pot meal category. I also love the Damn Delicious blog, and she has a whole category called Asian-inspired, which is like my sweet spot. My most trusted food blogger slash recipe developer is Brie McCoy. If I am looking for new recipes, I almost all. always check Bree's site first because chances are very good. She has something that fits my bill. And I trust her implicitly with flavor. Some recipes, even from food bloggers that I love, haven't been as successful as I'd hoped, but Bree has never let me down, ever. So I usually start

with cookbooks and then I check the internet, always trusting Bree, and then I have a couple of other blogs that I check too. Now, where do I put those recipes? This will not work for everyone, but I am very much an analog person when it comes to recipes. I have two large, unlined notebooks in my kitchen, one for baking recipes and the other for everything else. It's like I can't read a recipe on a screen. My brain just doesn't process it. So here's what I do.

When I'm looking for new recipes and I find one, I want to try, I list it in my recipe notebook with the following information. even if I own it in a cookbook. I still put it in my little recipe book. Okay, so here's what I write down. The recipe name, where I can find it, the book and the page number, because it's probably from a cookbook, those are all obvious. I also list what ingredients I need that I don't usually have stocked, approximate hands-on time that it will take, and then what I could do ahead of time. I make a little like bulleted cliff's notes list of what I need to know in order to determine if that recipe can fit into my life on any given week. Just writing down the title and where to find it isn't

enough. I need to know if I need to buy different groceries than usual or if I need to start making it earlier than usual by batching the research energy of these new recipes and writing them down as I search, I'm saving myself so much time when I meal plan by knowing exactly what I'm getting into on a Sunday night when I'm meal planning. Then if that recipe is successful, if I try it, if I try the new recipe, and it works, and especially if it's a recipe that I found online, I will write down the recipe in detail in my notebook so I don't have to look it up again. I don't want to use the internet, if at all possible. I don't write everything down. for new recipes that I might not make again in my notebook. So I will do it the first time by looking

at the cookbook or on the internet. But if the first go is successful, then I'll write it down. I'll write it down to that book. Again, I prefer, dare I say, need to read it off a piece of paper. It's just the weirdest thing. I don't know. That's why I love cookbooks. It doesn't matter. But if I make something that I really love, it's written down in a recipe notebook. Okay. So in that same notebook of new recipe discoveries is my list of brainless crowd pleasers. I also have my brainless crowd pleaser list in my planner for weeks that I know are too busy to add anything new. I have it in both places. That way, if I know I'm not going to do anything new, I can just do all of my meal planning within one book, like in my planner because the brainless

crowd pleasers are there. But for weeks that I can spend maybe a little more time planning or cooking that week and being a little bit more thoughtful and can consider a new recipe, then I will use my recipe notebook. And that's it. That's how I choose new recipes. You do not have to do it exactly this way, but I do think that asking yourself those four questions will be super helpful. Why am I wanting new recipes? Once you answer that question, the search might stop in its tracks, right? But if it keeps going, two, how am I planning on using these new recipes and my current season of life? What kinds of recipes do I need? And then how many? Your search will be so much easier that way, no matter where you look or how you keep track of them. If you can answer those four questions.

All right, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it's Tori Karras. I don't know how to say your last name, Tori. You've been around so long. I should know. I'm so sorry. She has been in the space a very long time. She has been such an encouragement to me over the years, literal years, and this idea I'm about to share with you is absolute magic. Tori sent me a DM and said this. My decide once. Whenever I plan to make change your life chicken, I always plan tomato soup the next night. I use the leftover roasted vegetables for the soup base, already seasoned, already soft. Not only does it make the soup extra yummy, but it's even quicker than quick. You guys, is your mind blown like mine is? This is beyond genius. Tori, you have just saved our lives.

Basically, all you need to do to make tomato soup is blend canned tomatoes with those vegetables. You can check to make sure it's seasoned well enough and then you just heat it up on the stove. Like, that's absolutely incredible. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to implement this. my own life. Job well done, Tori? Congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. Okay, everyone, thank you so much for listening. I hope this episode has given you more comfort and excitement when you think about adding new recipes to your life. Also, don't forget about the pub crawl. At the time of this recording, I don't actually know how many tickets we have left for the three live events. So you can check the lazy genius collective.com slash pub crawl to see. But we've

sure have space and our virtual party on March 22nd. That kickoff pub crawl event to celebrate the release of the lazy genius kitchen is free for everyone who pre-orders the lazy genius kitchen book out on May 3rd. Remember that you can buy the book in any form from any retailer, although I highly recommend the hardback version of this because of how often you're going to want to access it. And, okay, I need you to listen up. This is very important. You have to tell us you pre-ordered. You have to tell us the bookstore or the retailer that you purchased from is not in contact with us. We don't know them. So once you order, you have to go to the lazy genuskitchen.com and then enter your order information. Once you do that, you will get emails from us with ticket information

for that March 22nd virtual party, as well as other pre-order bonuses that will automatically be delivered to you. Again, that's the lazy geniuskitchen.com to enter your pre-order information, and then all the pub crawl event information can be found at the lazy genius collective.com slash pub crawl. Okay, that's it for today.

Thank you so much for listening, for being amazing, and for making this job an absolute pleasure. Until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it.

You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to becoming you wherever you get your podcasts.