Mains and sides

[swan_tower]

It’s the return of the Tin Chef!

As some of you know, I’ve finally started actually cooking, after thirty-some-odd-years of basically never doing it. I now have a nice array of recipes I like and can do, and enough confidence now that I’ll happily browse a magazine or cookbook and go “oooh, that sounds tasty, maybe I should try it,” as long as the recipe isn’t too daunting.

But almost everything I make is a single-dish meal, or if it isn’t, then we just throw some spinach on the plate as a salad. I’m still not much good at making a main dish and a side dish to go with it. Partly because that type of multitasking is still a little difficult for me — making sure things are ready around the same time, but don’t demand my attention at the same instant such that something winds up burning — but also just because . . . I have a hard time judging what things will go well together.

I know that to some extent the answers to this are a) it doesn’t matter that much and b) I can experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. But I’ve got a whole list of side dishes I’d like to try someday, and every time I look at them and go “I dunno, would that pair well with this main item?” I wind up going back to the single-dish things I’m comfortable with. So I put it to you, the cooks of my readership: how can I get better at this? I have two different “meat with balsamic + fruit sauce” main dishes I like — one chicken with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate juice, one pork chop with balsamic vinegar and dried cherries — and the fruitiness keeps making me second-guess whether a given side dish would make a good complement. And there are a lot of main dishes I haven’t even really taken a crack at yet. If I had some guiding principles for figuring out what combinations are good, I might experiment more.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[okrablossom]

This does not exactly answer your question, but Julia Turshen's _Now & Again_ is a book of recipes for meals as opposed to single dishes. Maybe a look through would give you some ideas about what tastes work together? (Also, the recipes are very tasty.)

[swan_tower]

Thanks! I think some of our cookbooks have sections like that as well; I should take a closer look at them.

[pameladean]

I don't eat meat, so apply the appropriate amount of salt to my suggestions. (I do eat fish.) When I see a rich, sweet, tangy main course like the ones you describe, I think of roasted or steamed green vegetables with just a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Multi-grain rolls or roasted or baked or mashed potatoes sound good with those as well. I did a quick search, and several people discussing pork chops with cherries and balsamic vinegar said they served them with steamed asparagus and buttered noodles.

I'd also be very interested to try sweet vegetables like sweet potatoes or carrots, or both, to see how they tasted with the fruity main dishes. Turnips, too, if you like them; they get very sweet and caramelized when you roast them. Or if you want a contrasting flavor and like cruciferous vegetables, roasted Brussels sprouts or cabbage or broccoli, with some kind of roll, or pasta, or grain dish, or noodles, could be very good.

Most cookbooks will have some kind of section about putting together a menu. Unfortunately all the ones that come to mind immediately are vegetarian cookbooks, so they don't help much here. In general, though cookbooks will usually suggest that you can either choose contrasting sides, whether the contrast is in texture, flavor or color; or complementary sides, where, if you make lemon chicken, you might put some lemon juice in your salad or lemon zest in the bread or rolls you make, if you feel like making any -- or lemon juice on roasted or steamed vegetables, for that matter. If your main dish has a lot of sauce, something drier and simpler could go with it. There are also strictly nutritional ways of putting together a menu, where you consider how much protein, how many carbohydrates, how many servings of vegetables you want to have for the meal.

It's possible to make a side that really does not go with your main dish, but it's not the way to bet. Most things line up fairly well if you don't make them all too elaborate. Where I have failed with sides, we usually just ate things in courses in whatever order we preferred, so dinner wasn't wasted.

And you can't really go wrong with salad and good bakery bread, if you feel stuck or don't have a lot of time.

P.

[green_knight]

Many yummy suggestions.
I came to recommend contrasting sides - sometimes meal planning is about what goes well together, and sometimes it's about what expands the available space in an interesting direction, so the aim isn't polar opposites but ... hm. Think orange and purple instead of red and green.

For a very complex main I would choose a simple side and vice versa.

[swan_tower]

The culinary equivalent of a color wheel would be great. But I don't know if it exists.

[swan_tower]

Thanks! I get the notion of contrasting in general principle; it's figuring out what would be a good contrast as opposed to a clash that I stick on. :-P And yeah, if all else fails, you eat your side first and then your main, or vice versa, rather than trying to have both at once. But the perfectionist in me wants to get a combo where each one adds something to the other element.

Bread is always an easy choice, but I'm trying to be better about not just defaulting to carbohydrates (which I will do at the drop of a hat). Planning meals based on nutritional content is a degree of attentiveness I'm not really up for yet, but I can at least try to include vegetables? (This is part of the reason I like single dish meals so much: I started eating more vegetables when I started eating foods that incorporate them, rather than having them sitting off on the side of my plate.)

[pameladean]

Yes, I got forced by health issues into considering the nutritional balance of meals and I can't say that it's a lot of fun; academically interesting but it doesn't feel like cooking.

And I'm a huge fan of roasted vegetables, but they do end up sitting next to the entree, so that's not ideal here.

A kind of one-dish meal that I really like is to take either a protein-based or a vegetable-based recipe, double everything except the protein or vegetable, and then add an equivalent amount of whatever isn't already in there. That is, you can start with, say, a shrimp curry, double all the seasonings and onions and tomatoes and so on, and then, if the recipe calls for a pound of shrimp, don't add the second pound of shrimp but just add a pound of green beans or cauliflower or whatever, or half a pound of two different vegetables. In Indian cookery especially I don't always find it necessary to double the oil, but it depends on the recipe. This removes the vegetables-on-the-side-of-the-plate problem that you get with roasted vegetables.

There are also sheet-pan dinners. I have no sheet pans and nowhere to keep them, but basically you just roast or bake everything on a shallow rimmed pan, adding things at various times depending on how long they need -- the recipe will specify this -- and season it all with the same things. I really want to try this but need to address storage issues first. Anyway, the vegetables and meat or fish end up all tumbled together; but if you are tired of stews, which is of course another way to get everything in one pot, there isn't much sauce, so it's a change of pace.

I could go on way too long, so I won't.

P.

[rushthatspeaks]

I like the Japanese algorithm: a meal should contain at least one food in each of the five colors, which are white, black(/purple/brown/very dark red), red(/orange), green, and yellow. It's really hard to achieve a five-color meal that isn't also nutritionally balanced and working well with itself. I've tried on purpose, and I mean it is difficult.

Sometimes it is too much work to wrangle enough ingredients/dishes for a five-color meal. In that case, the algorithm I use is Salt Fat Acid Heat-- every dish must contain any three of the above as a major element. I think those are all fairly self-explanatory, except that by heat I mean either capsicum/spicy, or served hot/cooked very hot, or both at the same time.

Short example of meal planning with each algorithm-- I'm writing this stream-of-consciousness, to show the process I use to get to a meal. If we're having Asian food, white is obviously rice, but I don't feel like Asian right now. Most white foods are somewhere in the starch family, so let's say mashed potatoes; cooked meat fits the purple/black color, so how about one of those meat-with-fruit recipes you mentioned earlier; well, the fruit takes the red spot, so I don't need anything else there, so that means I'm looking for green and yellow in my other side. So maybe a simple salad of spinach with sliced yellow tomatoes, or maybe zucchini roasted with yellow squash-- hey, I bet I could roast the squash in with the meat and fruit-- hey, I bet I could roast the potatoes in there too-- okay, now I've got a bed of both squashes and potatoes on top of which I do a meat that I've marinated in fruit and seasonings, so that's one dish in the oven, and that's that.

Other algorithm: Okay, I've got some meat I want to use as a main, and it's a fatty cut, so that's Fat. Might as well rub it with salt, and marinate it in some wine/vinegar and spices, which gives me the Salt and Acid. I'd also like a vegetable, so how about I render some of the fat while I'm cooking the meat, and then I can saute a veg in it, which is the veg's Fat. And I've got no heat really going on anywhere, so how about a little spice in that vegetable-- right, I have some green beans, so I'll saute the green beans in the meat fat with chili-garlic paste, and then either throw in some of the Himalayan pink salt or a splash of the really fancy balsamic vinegar. Bread on the side, done.

I don't know how helpful that is, but that's a demonstration of the general thought processes.

[pameladean]

The five-color algorithm sounds awesome. Sometimes I get tired of all the other reasoning.

P.

[swan_tower]

Hitting all five colors at once sounds like it might be more of an undertaking than I'm quite up for -- in part because I'm usually cooking for just three people, which means that fulfilling those requirements without making vastly more food than we need would be trickier. Doable, of course: it just means each dish needs to be multi-color. But when my parents are visiting my sister-in-law makes meals that are a main dish with two or three or four side dishes, and then full coverage is a lot easier to achieve. Still, it's worth keeping in mind -- thanks!

(Sadly, my husband is allergic to squash, which takes that whole family of easy side dishes right out of the running.)

Salt Fat Acid Heat . . . well, the spinach side salad fails on that front, I guess, because my sister and I tend to just eat the spinach (my husband is more likely to add a dressing, which generally provides both fat and acid). Heat of the spicy sort is unlikely to appear in my kitchen, since my tolerance for that is almost non-existent, but most of what I serve is done hot anyway.

[ursula]

I usually try to pick main dishes and sides from the same very broad part of the world. For example, chicken and pomegranate juice sounds Persian to me. I might try to combine it with a cucumber salad, or a Moroccan carrot salad, or a rice pilaf with saffron. The pork and cherries dish sounds Eastern European. Potato-based side dishes might work, though I'd be tempted to try a cucumber salad with a lot of dill. (I like crunchy salads!)

[swan_tower]

That makes sense! Though a lot of the things I've got on my list aren't clearly (to my eye) from any particular regional cuisine, or else they are, but I don't have any mains they'd match to -- for example, I've got several stir-fry East Asian side dishes, but then the mains I'm interested in trying are more of a vaguely European bent.

[ursula]

Can you just make two of the stir-fries (or double one) and call it a meal? Or are these particular recipes missing something (protein?) that says "meal" to you?

[swan_tower]

Protein or carbohydrates -- I'm not as much of a carnivore as I used to be, and have found a number of vegetarian dishes I like, but they all feature rice or pasta or couscous or whatever. And while I can dump something on top of a bowl of rice (and often do for lunch), I feel like just bell peppers and snow peas with rice, or green beans with rice, or turnips and carrots with rice, wouldn't quite register as a dinner.

[varidog]

I learned a vast amount by eating my own mistakes. That potato gloop? Yeah, I ate it.

Cooking is a lifetime, always learning thing. It's like writing. Just let me know when you're done learning that. I wanna hear it.

You'll never know it all.

You'll learn what you're up for. I love learning a technique, then going through variations based on that technique. When I'm not up for something, then I fall back on something familiar.

When I was a bachelor, I had my fridge challenge: what's in the fridge and how do I cook that? I love leftover cuisine, from fried rice to rice pudding to soups.

Over the last year, I learned how to make pasta and English muffins. I'm still not down with crumpets. They elude me. I've experimented with yeast-based waffles and muffins to good results.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, I'll definitely never master this -- especially since, while I've come to be vaguely interested in cooking, I'm not passionate enough about it to put lots of effort into mastery. Right now, it's milestone enough that I'm starting to be able to say "hmmm, I have these things in the fridge; lemme chop them up and saute them and dump them on some rice for lunch." For me, that's a lot of progress.

[mrissa]

Everybody else is able to do things consciously here, and I salute them for it. As for me, "oh shit this needs using before it goes bad" is one of my main meal planning algorithms. Which does require you to have Stuff You Buy.

But, like, tonight I am making lamb chops in ginger sauce, and oh shit the asparagus needs using before it goes bad, so I will roast that with garlic, and also the bread I made Wednesday is not getting any fresher. If we didn't have the bread I would probably fall back on the "what cooking implements are still reasonably free" question and make wild rice on one of the burners that was not cooking the lamb, or else some other kind of spiced rice in the rice cooker.

Sunday night T is roasting a chicken with dill and garlic for our gluten-free guests, and so I will likely flash-saute spinach and make rice, and also probably cauliflower soup since it's a meal with guests and soup helps one of them with food needs. And berries. And then scotcheroos for dessert. But how do I come up with spinach instead of broccoli or peapods? Well...those other things would be fine too? Nobody would go home saying, "HOW could she put THAT with THOSE?" I do wish we had a larger oven or a double oven kitchen, because roasted potatoes would be better than rice, but I'm just not sure with an entire chicken that it'll fit.

Spinach-based sides would be great with fruit balsamic meats. Either flash-sauteed or as the basis for a salad. Roasted potatoes also.

[swan_tower]

I just mentioned above that I'm starting to get more comfortable with "what can I make out of the things in the fridge." It does occasionally turn into a daisy-chain -- "Kyle, can you get an onion while you're out" so I can saute that with the leftover cabbage and leftover kielbasa, but the onion is huge so now I have half a chopped onion, and what can I toss that into, etc. But that's okay. :-)

I think some of it might be that I'm locked into certain assumptions? Like, if I'm going to cook the spinach instead of just eating it raw, my brain goes SO YOU'RE GOING TO ADD GARLIC RIGHT. But . . . garlic with dried cherry balsamic sauce? I'm not at all sure about that. Or I've got a side I haven't tried that's bell peppers and snow peas with sesame seeds. Y/N/maybe? Potatoes, sure, those are good, I have a recipe I love for sweet potatoes with smoked salt and sugar -- but will that be too much sweetness? And what with one thing and another, I wind up making a single-dish meal instead.

[mrissa]

So I think one of the things is: if something is too much sweetness (/not enough spice/texturally too similar/....), it's just...it's not catastrophic. You still have a quite edible meal. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for sesame seeds. That's Shakespeare, that is.

[swan_tower]

Heh. Yeah, I know . . . but I still prefer to go in with some kind of guiding principle or logic than figuring things out by trial and error.

[cgbookcat1]

I go for a bare minimum of 3 colors, with 5 preferable. Echoing people above, finding sides in the same general region of the world does produce excellent combinations. Some of it's due to whatever is in the fridge, or what was on sale this week at the grocery. I find myself batch-cooking on weekends and simply adding those things together in new combinations during the week. Roasting brassicas with olive oil, S&P, and vinegar is easy. This past week I roasted beets with sumac and separately a pan of carrots, parsnips, and cinnamon/cardamom.

A spinach dish like this one might go well with either chicken recipe.

Original recipe at https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/161535/espinacas-con-garbanzos-spinach-with-garbanzo-beans/:

My version:

Ingredients
several Tbsp olive oil or to taste
1/2 onion, diced
several large cloves of garlic, diced or crushed
1 tsp crushed ginger (jar kind ok)
1 pound fresh baby spinach
24 oz canned chickpeas, drained
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
salt and pepper to taste
squeeze of lemon (juice from 1/8 lemon)

Directions
Sautee the onion in olive oil. When the onion is almost translucent, add the garlic and ginger. Stir thoroughly and add the cumin, paprika, and a bit of salt and pepper.

Add the chickpeas. Use a masher to smash some of the chickpeas. When the chickpeas are warm through, start adding handfuls of fresh spinach and sautee until everything is wilted. Squeeze lemon juice on top and stir, taste to amend spices, and then serve.

[swan_tower]

My sister (who lives with us) loves chickpeas and spinach, so that's going on the list of possibles right now!

[eldriwolf]

lots of good advice...

from the middle ages (SCA)
I learned - - 'Serve meat with what it eats'
( of course, chickens and pigs are omnivorous, so that does not help a lot...)

So, poultry and grain,(stuffing)
pork and fruit, roots, grain, greens
deer with Wild fruits and Greens, (apples, berry)

what is local, or in season, if you were out getting it
..and more sweet/spice than modern food

[swan_tower]

Interesting! That inclines me to try a root vegetable recipe I've got with some pork chops -- thanks!