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Dear Miriam,
As Friday afternoons are getting shorter, I would like to make my Shabbat cooking more efficient. In my ideal setup, I would cook one set of foods on Friday and eat that for all three meals of Shabbat. However, the rest of my household doesn’t prefer leftovers. To please all of us, I’m trying to plan menus that use the same ingredients in multiple applications so I’m not cooking too many things, but everyone else still feels like they’re getting something new on Saturday. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Signed,
Investigating Interchangeable Ingredients
Dear Investigating,
My first suggestion is that the rest of your household needs to get involved in the cooking! If they don’t like what you have planned, then they need to contribute. You should be able to cook the amount that works for you and either get help or at least not get complaints. If they’re not quite ready to step up in that way, then you should find other ways to get them involved: brainstorming what they’d like to eat, helping with the shopping, cleaning up. Or, again, at a minimum: not complaining.
I encourage you to create the kind of written meal plans that lets everyone see that’s coming. They can see which foods are for which meal, what’s repeated, and what’s new. That way, if they’re not interested in eating kugel twice, they don’t have to, and they can even choose at which meal they want to eat it. While some of the responsibility sits with the person (or people!) cooking, some also sits with the people eating.
In terms of what to cook, though, you have the right idea of using a few things in multiple ways. If you’re making or buying challah for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch, you can use that and challah for Saturday night sandwiches. Sandwich fillings like tuna salad can be made on Saturday afternoon, or you can buy hummus and cream cheese and not have to make another new thing.
Cheese can be sliced and eaten with crackers. Veggies can be cut on Saturday, put on a platter, and served with dips. A green salad can have a new dressing. If you have pasta with meatballs for Friday night, make extra pasta and turn it into a cold salad for Saturday lunch. Roast chicken can be turned into chicken salad. If you have tacos on Friday, you can have taco salad for lunch. You could also throw ingredients in a crockpot Friday afternoon to have something brand new for Shabbat lunch without a lot of extra work. Cholent is of course traditional, but there are lots of variations, meat and vegetarian, and any soup or stew can cook the same way with only a little additional prep and chopping on Friday (as long as you have a solid understanding of your crockpot’s “warm” setting). And, as the days get cooler, this is a nice alternative to my “all salads” advice. Basically, hot foods on Friday make cold salads for Saturday as long as you have a plan and a small number of additional ingredients needed to make the transformation.
I also want to encourage you to think about strategy. What can you make on Thursday night instead of saving all the cooking for Friday? What can you ask guests to bring? What can you buy that adds some newness to a meal but doesn’t require you to make an additional dish? Can you keep some ice cream in the freezer? As the sun sets earlier and earlier, can you think of seudah shlishit (the third meal on Saturday evening) as more of a snack and then channel your inner summer camp memories and order pizza when Shabbat is over?
Shabbat is of course supposed to be joyful and you should all eat well, but I hope you can find a way to do it that works for everyone in your household without putting an unnecessary burden on you and you alone.
Be well,
Miriam
