The Lazy Genius Podcast - #75 The Lazy Genius Stocks the Kitchen

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

We’ve all seen the lists online. Lists of all the foods you should have in your kitchen so that dinner is always close at hand. But if those lists worked, you’d make more dinner more often and be less stressed about it. That’s why we’re going to talk about how to make your own list that works for your family and your lifestyle because I’m guessing a jar of roasted red peppers and grasini don’t make the cut.   Stuff Mentioned: The Lazy Genius Shops at Costco A few of my crowdpleasers: Change Your Life Chicken, Homemade Hamburger Helper, Japanese Curry Rice Graze, my favorite niche cookbook The Magic Question printable 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

Hey guys, you're listening to the Lazy Genius podcast. I'm Kendra 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 75. 75 feels like a thing, right? The lazy genius stocks the kitchen. You've seen a list, y'all. The essentials of what ingredients belong in your kitchen. Real Simple has a list. Or the Stewart has a list. Tons of the cookbooks on your shelves start out with a list of all the foods you should have in your kitchen. You should have in kitchen so that dinner is always close at hand. But if those lists worked, you'd make more dinner more often and be less stressed about it. So today we're going to lazy Janice your kitchen and figure out what needs to be in it. So first, we need to really define what it means to stock

your kitchen. Your kitchen. Because here's what it isn't. Stocking the kitchen isn't having ingredients for every meal at your fingertips. No. Stocking the kitchen is about having ingredients for your essential meals at your fingertips. Every list I've ever seen has a jar of roasted red peppers on it. I got paid to write one of those lists years ago and I put roasted red peppers on my list. I get it. But guess what? We don't use roasted red peppers that much at our house. Definitely not often enough to keep a jar that I'll open to use one pepper and then the rest of and get buzz on them. When you think about stocking your kitchen, your fridge and freezer and your

pantry, they're not going to look like anyone else's. I'm not going to give you a master stocking list because there isn't one. Every person cooks differently and uses different things. So those cans of chunk tuna in olive oil that Jamie Oliver told you to keep around that are super covered in dust and possibly expired, those don't belong in your kitchen if you don't use them. So here is our lens, our way of seeing what it means to stock the kitchen. Only stock what works. Only stock what works. Stock what you really like, what you actually use.

And what you know how to use. You have to know how to use it too. Only stock what works. So how do you know what works? You start with what I call brainless crowd pleasers. I talk about these a lot, especially on Instagram when I'm doing meal, plan Monday, but I will break them down for you again. Brainless crowd pleasers are your regular meals, the dinners that you run to when you're choosing dinner last minute. The meals you can make without

turning your brain on or reading too many instructions. And here's the crowd pleaser part. They please your crowd. Your crowd could be just you and the new Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime. Or your crowd could be you and your spouse and your kids. It doesn't necessarily mean crowd pleaser in the entertaining sense. It's not a crowd pleaser for an actual party crowd. It's just what pleases your crowd. And please doesn't mean unbridled enthusiasm. It's okay if everyone isn't jumping up and down, but it does mean that everyone is relatively pleased by the meal. So something you can make that is fairly easy or mindless and food that doesn't lead to a barrage of complaining from your crowd. So let's start with brainless crowd pleasers.

I encourage you to write yours down. Do a quick brainstorm of those recipes for you. It can be everything from beef stew with red wine that your mom taught you how to make when you were in high school all the way to frozen pizza. And I don't give you that scale from beef stew to pizza to communicate any sort of value. Beef stew is not better than pizza. Pizza is not better than beef stew. It's all just food. My point, though, is that brainless crowd pleasers can be able to.

as intricate, wow. That is a hard word to say. It can be just as intricate. I had to think about it again. You guys, I should choose another word. They can be as complicated, mm-hmm. They can be as complicated or as simple as you want, as long as they're mostly brainless and they please your crowd. So list those out to get started on stocking your kitchen. That is where you start. Our personal family list of brainless crowd pleasers. It includes spaghetti and meatballs, of course. Homemade hamburger helper, tomato soup and grilled cheese, Trader Joe's, orange mandarin chicken, and rice. Japanese curry rice. Ticamasa. Again, that goes on rice. Hot dogs and tater tots. Change your life chicken. Homemade pizza. Yaki Soba, which is basically a bowl of noodles, like sometimes you put stuff on top of it.

Pork and mushroom lettuce wraps. Salmon and rice. chicken noodle soup. I could keep going, but that is where I'm going to stop because that's all I can think of right now. But I've also built up a decent arsenal of brainless crowd pleasers. My list written down clocks in about 25, I think, and I add to it all the time. And if you think about it, that's like a month of meals. I could repeat it exactly and never have to have a meal plan again. I don't, but I could. And sometimes I do lean really heavily. on those meals and not on new things when weeks are busy or I'm just tired. But if I look at my list, I see what I need to keep in stock in my kitchen.

Your brainless crowd pleasers are going to determine what you need to have in your kitchen. So for me, what do I have? What is essential? Canned tomatoes. I use them for spaghetti sauce, ticam masala, tomato soup, and pizza. Meatballs in a freezer for spaghetti. and the homemade hamburger helper, if I don't have any ground beef, like thawed. It's so easy to throw them in there.

Chicken stock or in my case, chicken base, which is the worst name ever, for flavoring tomato soup, hamburger helper, and the chicken noodle soup. I love Better Than Bullion. That's the brand. I get mine at Costco. I have an episode about shopping at Costco, and I list that as one of my, like, ride or die purchases there. So if you want to listen to that episode, by the way, you can also get recipes.

piece for some of those brainless craft leasters that I just mentioned. A lot of those are on the blog, so those will be in the show notes today. Okay, so other things I stock in my kitchen. Carots. Always carrots. I use them in a hamburger helper, tomato soup, curry rice, changelog chicken, chicken soup, and they are really great to like roast up really quickly if I want a side of vegetables, which we don't do a whole lot of like meats and sides. But if I need one, it's easy to do. onions are the same. I use those in more and more things than I use carrots. So I always have onions around. Actual products that I need for this list of brainless crop leasers. Like that Trader Jones chicken. If that's going to be a brainless crop loser, I need the chicken. I'm a freezer.

Curry rice flavor cubes that you can buy a target now. You don't even have to go to like an Asian market to get the things I used to make curry rice. Hot dogs and hot dog buns for hot dog tattered hot night. I also need tater tots. Um, pepperoni and all kinds of like dried meats and salamis for pizza and fancy grilled cheeses. I need rice for sure. I need pasta. I need yaki soba noodles. I need salmon in the freezer. I need heavy cream. I always have heavy cream for the hamburger helper. If I want my tomato soup to be creamy, um, the ticam masala, sometimes chicken noodle soup. If I want that to be creamy and of course I use that for my coffee and like whipped cream on desserts I'm making stuff.

But you get the idea. And then meat that I know that I use, right? That's like a little bit more expensive. You know, meat is more expensive. So I use a limited amount, not amount, but like different kinds of meat. So if those are on sale and I know I need them for my brainless crowd pleasers, I'll stock up a little bit. So when it's on sale, I'll buy some.

I only buy what I use though. I don't buy any meat that's on sale. I only buy what I would use for my brainless crab leases. pleasers because I want it to be brainless. I don't want to have like extra cuts of meat that I don't really use with my brain turned off because I have to turn my brain on and that is not my goal. So stock your kitchen based on what you actually make, not on what a like professional chef guru tells you. Now you can get really great ideas from other people's lists. It's true. Something might inspire you or offer a reminder of something that you actually really love eating but you haven't

thought about in a while. But it doesn't have to have to. It doesn't have to. It's true. It's It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. One of my favorite kind of niche cookbooks, it's a very specific kind of cookbook, but it's called Greys, and I love it. I love it, but I love it mostly for the writing and the mood, kind of like the mentality behind it. It's essentially a cookbook with recipes that are barely recipes because of how simple they are. But the concept is super fun. So basically, like, she's like, put out a lot of different kinds of things and enjoy your meal. like graze on them. So like salami and olives and dips and stuff like that. Now the author of this book is a food writer. She has access to like artis and cheeses and meats and breads and all the things.

She has a partner who likes the process of food as much as she does and she has no children. Now I'm not saying any of those things in a disparaging way. It's just important to recognize that the way we eat often heavily depends on the kind of life we live. Right. Her book, has a list of foods essential to have in your kitchen. And half of them, I never have, and I rarely do. I rarely buy them. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life.

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I think they're called Grisini or something like that. There's a really, really long, crispy, crunchy breadsticks. She lists those as one of her, like, most essential ingredients. It's like you have to have these. Not only do I not have them, I don't even like them. I don't like them. So consider where you're getting your pantry or fridge list from and take it with a grain of salt. Be inspired, sure.

But stock up based on what you already make, only by what works. So figure out your brainless crowd pleasers and you stock your kitchen to make those things. Other stuff you can pick up as you need it. right that's what grocery lists are for now the last step in stocking your kitchen is having foods already cooked a little or like prepped somehow to make dinner easier uh if you follow me on instagram you've probably heard me talk about my magic question what can i do now to make dinner easier later that one question can change everything so let's look at the um at that answer based on your brainless crowd placers okay so for example um

Some answers to that question, they will work for everyone. Like, if you were to ask yourself, what can I do now to make dinner easier later? You could answer, anybody can answer. I can choose what's for dinner. Like, that's what I can do right now to make dinner easier later is make the choice of what we're going to eat for dinner. You could choose to clean up for breakfast or lunch so that making dinner later is easier because it's cleaner, those kinds of things.

But in terms of, like, actual ingredients and cooking tasks, you have to start from your list of brainless crowd pleasers. And that will tell you what you can stock up on, like in terms of halfway cooked or kind of mostly put together meals. Okay. So for my list of meals, just to give you an example, for my list of meals, a ton of them used diced carrots. So if I take two minutes to dice up a few carrots, they'll get used. They're going to get used. Or if you're worried about wasting diced. Like you could freeze them diced and it's not going to hurt them. It's fine. Or you could cut them into carrot sticks first, right? And then when you need diced carrots, you can like quickly run your knife through them to dice them. Like everything's done except for just the quick

to dice them. And then if you don't do that, you just eat them as carrot sticks as a snack, right? So if I chop up a carrot, I'm good. It's going to get used. Same goes for an onion. Not the snacking part. That was gross. But if you take a minute to dice an onion, especially if you use onion as a base in a lot of your brainless crowd pleasers, it's going to get used. Some other answers to that magic question. You can mix up a marinade for the meat that you're going to eat that night or the next night. You can rinse off some lettuce for a salad.

Great cheese. Pull out the ingredients for dinner and just put them on the counter next to the stove. When my kids were tiny, you're going to think I'm insane, but when my kids were tiny and always wanting to be held, like just you couldn't. put them down. It was really hard to cook dinner with one hand. It was real hard. In a way, I would help make dinner easier was to do things early in the day that needed two hands, like when I wasn't holding a baby. So, for example, if we were having spaghetti for dinner, which was a lot, I would fill the pot with water and put it on the burner, like at noon or something, because you

cannot carry a heavy pot of water and a toddler at the same time. You can't do it. And it would sit there for like five hours but it was ready to go with one hand when it was dinner time i could just turn on that gas man get that water boiling i would open the can of tomatoes because you cannot use a can opener with one hand i would open a can of tomatoes um i would tear open the package of pasta i would chop up a couple of cloves of garlic and just leave them there and all of the elements of dinner were ready for me even with one hand now you don't have to take the magic question quite that far, but it's a great thing to ask yourself. We don't always think about ways to make things easier or even think they're worth it. Like, if you don't have a toddler to carry,

is it really that big of a deal to fill up a pot of water when you get home from work? Maybe not. But if you think about your mentality at that point in the day, you're probably scattered, a little panicked because you don't want to make dinner or you don't know what you're having. You're oddly surprised that you have to cook at all because it just keeps happening. and you're at the end of the day and you're therefore done making decisions. So having one less thing to think about, having even one less decision to make of where the pot is and what you're supposed to do with it and how much water you're supposed to put in it, it works wonders to do it earlier.

It really does make dinner easier later. So when you take the magic question into stocking your kitchen, what it means to stock your kitchen, you can stock it with elements of meals you already make. So for me, that might be marinated meat for stir fry because I did not list that earlier, but we have stir fry a lot. Frozen tomato soup that I can just thaw really fast. Pizza dough balls. So I'm not always like, do I need to make pizza dough?

Like I'll make a big batch of pizza dough and then I'll put some in the freezer. Anything else that's like mostly ready and needs to be just heated up quickly. if you plan your meals a few days in advance, especially from that list of brainless crop leasers, if you wanted to, you could go ahead and like prep everything at once. You could chop all the carrots. You could assemble the grilled cheese sandwiches. So all they need is to be thrown on a griddle with lots of butter. You could chop up herbs for a hamburger helper and pasta sauce and rice bowls.

Just put them in a little baggy in the freezer. Not the freezer. The fridge. I guess you could put them in the freezer. Fridge is better in this case. when you work from meals that you already make, meal prep isn't as overwhelming because it already makes sense. You already do it. It's already kind of brainless. And you're not wondering, like, is everybody going to complain about this because it's something new. I'm not saying

don't cook new things. Not at all. Oh my goodness. But stocking our kitchens for new things just leads to rotten, dusty food. And nobody wants that. I love the idea of those meal prep services that give you a list of recipes and a shopping list and then a prep sheet to cook from. I think that's actually a really lovely way to do something to make dinner easier later. But a lot of times those services, they have recipes that are really varied, which I guess you want to a certain degree. You don't want like the same foods all the time. But that means they require a lot of prepping of a lot of different ingredients, some of which are new to you. but if you apply the same concept to your list of brainless crowd pleasers and plan just from them

at least mostly from them you'll have a shorter grocery list you'll have a good bit of overlap in the ingredients you use because most families cook from a smaller list of ingredients than you realize and that means your prep takes way less time you're not prepping eight different vegetables for five recipes you're prepping four different vegetables for five recipes so if It's like the motion is already going. You just have to chop up a few more rather than like dealing with another kind of food to figure out how to prep or chop or whatever. A lot of those services, they suggest like weekly prep times of two to three hours,

but yours could almost certainly be done in an hour or less. Now, you don't have to do that. You don't have to prep a week's worth of meals in advance unless it just sounds amazing and it works for you. But you can stock your kitchen with stuff you need from recipes you already. cook. And I don't like to use the word should around here too much, but I really do think you should start asking yourself that magic question. Start asking yourself whenever you have the quickest minute at the most random time of day. What can I do now to make dinner easier later? Sometimes the answer is obvious. Other times it is not. For the times that it's not, I have something for you.

If you head to the show notes at the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash stock, you'll see a place where you can put in your email address to get a free download of possible answers to get you started. You can stick it on your fridge. There's space on there for you to put your own ideas based on your own list of brainless crop leasers. So go get that.

Go to the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash stock to get your list of answers to the magic question, as well as links to a lot of the recipes I've mentioned so far. the cook the cookbooks i've talked about all the things um but remember this your kitchen it doesn't have to look like everyone else's in fact it shouldn't you won't get very far with getting dinner on the table if your pantry is full of cans and jars of stuff that you don't eat so make your list of brainless crowd pleasers and stock your kitchen with the ingredients to make those meals it's really

that simple to stock your kitchen like a lazy genius okay well that's all for today guys. Thanks so much for listening. And I hope that you come back next week where we are talking about meal planning. It's happening, you guys. You've been asking and it's happening. And if you already have your list of brainless crop leasers from this episode, you're going to be so ahead of the game. So high five to you. If you think about it, share this episode with a friend. And for those of you who share on Instagram and Facebook, it's just so kind. I'm so very grateful. And if you feel like popping over to your Apple podcast app and you want to click some stars on this show. That's a huge help too. Every rating and review, it makes it easier for this show to pop up for folks who are

browsing for a new show to binge. And if you're one of those people, welcome. Welcome. I'm so glad you were here. All right, guys, I'm Kendra. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you are 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. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.