Nourishment is one of the cornerstones of well-being. Cookbook authors Ivy Manning and Jill Lightner share ways to make food preparation easier– and more sustainable. Ivy tackles questions like how long it truly takes to cook an Instant Pot meal (is it really under 10 minutes?), while Jill offers practical tips for how to approach cooking from a more sustainable perspective while re-purposing ingredients in creative ways. And, don’t forget to check out their recipe collaboration below!

Jill Lightner: It’s great connecting with a cookbook author who also seems to work too much! We both had two books come out in 2018. For your Instant Pot Italian and Instant Pot Miracle: 6 Ingredients or Less, I’m curious how your recipe inspiration and development process worked. Did you start with basic ingredients like chicken, or was the starting point the abilities of the Instant Pot?

Ivy Manning: With Italian Instant Pot, I had recipes I wanted to cover from my travels and experience living in Italy. I’m fascinated by the regional cooking of Italy. I could have filled two books! Since I was familiar with pressure cooking and used to teach classes in it, I had a head start. With Instant Pot Miracle 6 Ingredients or Less, I got out a legal pad and tried to figure out dishes that would be fast, tasty, work in the Instant Pot, and included only 6 ingredients. No small feat!

I also focused on all the things the Instant Pot could do, like cooking full meals in the pot — where you cook a chicken and sausage ragu in the bottom of the and the polenta in a small pan set on a trivet about the ragu. It’s called “pot-in-pot” cooking and I was obsessed for months. I also explored stuff like one-pot pasta dishes from dry pasta, breakfast casseroles, cakes, puddings, and even ricotta. It’s an incredibly useful appliance; it’s not just for butter chicken.

IM: I had the same question for you, Jill. How did you come up with the idea for Scraps, Peels, and Stems?  Did you have a list of recipes for clever things to do with food scraps and go from there, or did you start with a list of all the brilliant tips and strategies for reducing food waste first?

 JL: Is “reactive recipe writer” a thing? The first set of recipes I wrote was after reading a guy’s cassoulet adventure that involved two days off work and hitting three or four specialty shops to drop over $100 on what I believe should be a really delicious pot of beans. I wanted people to understand the heart of dishes like cassoulet (or the even older cholent), so they could make really hearty dinners without it being a special occasion. I was also writing Scraps, Peels, and Stems at the same time as I was working with PCC Community Markets to write Cooking from Scratch: 120 Recipes for Colorful, Seasonal Food, and the result was that I found all kinds of leftover scraps to use. This is where I got really creative in finding a second ingredient in the “leftovers” — like using the brine from feta and mozzarella for meat marinades.

JL: Something I think people don’t always realize is how a massive part of the food writer’s job is simply staying organized. When I’m in the thick of recipe development, my kitchen gets a bit like a science lab thanks to timers and thermometers and at least two devices to track recipe changes. What’s yours like?

 IM: I am very organized. I make an Excel spreadsheet with all the recipes for a book with columns for whether it’s written, how many times it’s been tested, who I hired to test it a second or third time, and notes. It also has week by week tallies of completed recipes with a line graph, so I know how many recipes I need to complete in every week. It sounds super-obsessive, but it keeps me on track. Often, I only have three to four months to produce one hundred recipes or so. If I didn’t have that spread sheet, I’d be in panic mode all the time, it is a necessary detail. I don’t keep my computer in the kitchen, no. I have an office/guest room that’s painted a calm pink where I do my editing. I hate to admit it, but I still do print outs of my recipes on a clipboard and use a pencil to mark-up recipes as I’m testing. That said, it is chaos sometimes. I had three Instant Pots going at once during this second book!

JL: Here’s something related to that: how do you deal with seasonality in your recipe development? Personally, I’ve taste-tested heavy Thanksgiving dishes during a June heatwave, stood in the pouring winter rain to test grilled pork chops, and faced a two-week persimmon hunt hoping to find a vaguely ripe one before a deadline.

IM: That’s a tough one for me. My first book was called The Farm To Table Cookbook, and for that one I was fortunate enough to have almost a year to write and photograph it. But with other books, and more so with magazine assignments, I have to be that jerk in the grocery store buying tomatoes in January. I just try to focus on the fact that I’ll hopefully be helping other people to buy and eat good food in season down the road. If I can inspire folks to cook and make one less trip through a drive-through fast food joint, I’m doing my job.

IM: I’m curious, do you have a lot of extra food around when you are testing? What do you do with it? I have a raft of ‘volunteers’ that pick up meals from me, just because I need the refrigerator space and want to help out others. Do you donate a lot of food to friends and family?

JL: Wow, do I end up with extra food. I have a household of two, and basically every recipe is written for at least four people, so right off the bat, there are leftovers. I have great neighbors who happily eat everything and have two small kids, so they were really happy to stock their freezer. I’ve also got close friends in the neighborhood who were delighted to take extras — they’re already used to being guinea pigs for my recipe development, so it feels only fair to load their freezer with good things after some very questionable experiments! Lastly, my neighborhood Buy Nothing Group (they’re hosted by Facebook and part of a nationwide network; check around for one because they’re awesome!) is always super happy to take anything from loaves of quick bread to extra spices– or even a box of vegan egg substitute I didn’t end up using.

 JL: With your Instant Pot books, you’re brave enough to include total cooking times with every recipe, broken down by “active time” (for chopping and such) and “total time.” (I’m a coward and avoid doing that!) I know some home cooks who laugh about “active time” being pretty unrealistic unless you can prep vegetables as quickly as a professional. How do you go about making sure your times match the capabilities of less-experienced cooks than yourself?

IM: It’s especially important to include those times in my Instant Pot books because there are so many Instant Pot cookbooks out there that claim “chili in 8 minutes!”  Well, no, it’s not 8 minutes. It’s about 10 to 15 to chop stuff up, 8 minutes for the appliance to come up to pressure, it cooks for 8 minutes, but then it takes another 5 to release the pressure and finish the dish. So, I just wanted to give busy folks a realistic time frame for when dinner is actually going to be on the table.

IM: Jill, you were brave enough to cover another number: the dreaded “use by date.” You even include some really helpful tips on how long different foods actually last. How seriously should we take the “use by date” stamped on ingredients like milk? Do you sniff it instead of go by the date stamped on the side? How do they come up with those dates? Are they arbitrary?

JL: They’re not exactly arbitrary, but in some ways they’re worse than that! There is only one ingredient that has to have a date stamp in the U.S., and that is baby formula. Everything else is either directed toward the grocer (like for milk, that’s a “sell by” date there so they can restock in a timely fashion) or a “best by” which is nothing more than a quality recommendation and has nothing to do with safety. I strongly encourage people to just use their senses. Our eyes and noses know when food is going bad. It will look sludgy (like for salads) or slimy (for cheese), or smell cheesy or sour (for milk) or weirdly sweet (for meat).

JL: I frequently credit my diverse South Seattle neighborhood as a major source of inspiration — but not everyone is lucky enough to be able to walk to halal Mexican restaurants and Filipino bakeries. How do you discover new-to-you dishes and cooking techniques?

IM: Portland is a really great food city, too. I’m so blessed to be able to go out for top notch, creative tapas one night, and then an authentic Thai place the next. I also am a voracious reader and cookbook collector. It all gets absorbed, processed, and then I make my own recipes, based on what I want to eat or what the assignment is. I love obstructions and figuring things out, whether it’s homemade crackers, lactose-free cheesecake, or six ingredient Instant Pot breakfast casseroles.

JL: What are your favorite ingredients at the moment?

IM: I love butter made from grass fed cow’s milk, Ohsawa soy sauce (it’s unpasteurized and has an amazing umami flavor), and the pristine sockeye salmon from our community supported fisherman’s share.

IM: How about you? What’s your new food crush?

JL: Um, I’m going to go race off to look for Ohsawa soy sauce now– that sounds amazing. A new love of mine is the black chickpea. It is one of those ingredients that has been around for millennia, but I only just learned about them. They have really nutty flavor and suddenly I can make the chana masala I’ve always wanted.

IM: After reading Scraps Peels and Stems, I’m amazed at how many things we can reuse and save!  Roasted cauliflower leaves as a snack! Banana peels as fertilizer! Forever-bearing green onions! How did you discover so many ways to reduce waste? Is there an online community around this?

JL: I may be turning into more of a Depression-era grandmother than my grandmothers were. A lot of them were trial and error– like with cauliflower leaves, I was aiming for something like kale chips, but they were so good when they were still tender, I ditched that idea pretty quickly. And, planting sprouting garlic cloves was a whim after learning that local food banks have an ongoing need for fresh garlic. I wasn’t sure if it would grow, and it does, beautifully.

But online — particularly Instagram — I dearly love the zero-waste community. In general, they are a really encouraging and inspiring bunch, getting people to rethink a lot of the single-use items that surround food. Wasting less food is so related to the waste of the packaging, and the social justice imperative of fighting climate change. They really remind me how simple ideas can become fantastic new habits.

IM: All cookbook authors are met with fails from time to time. What seemed like a great idea on paper doesn’t always work out on the fork. (I, for one, am here to tell you that you can’t make hum bao dumplings in the Instant Pot.)  Is there any food that you couldn’t manage to save from the compost bin? Have you made peace with that?

JL: I once found a packet of tea my husband saved– he wrote “terrible” on it next to the date, and tucked it in our box of tea leaves. It cracked me up, but I realized I was getting a wee bit crazed on the topic. More recently, I’ve read about peeling chickpeas for perfectly smooth hummus and gave it a try. One, only do it if you have a chickpea intern; it is completely tedious. Two, I decided to try and salvage the skins by frying them in butter with some salt. When piping hot, they were like tiny potato chips. As they cooled, they started tasting like buttered paper. I looked up chickpea nutrition and discovered the skins are insoluble fiber– so they basically were buttered paper! Not my best idea ever.

But really, the goal with food waste as laid out by this program that the EPA and the USDA launched a few years ago is to cut whatever your waste is by half. We don’t have to be perfect, to drink terrible tea or buttered paper– we just need to be better than we are now. And that is doable for all of us, even the ones who don’t write cookbooks. I hereby promise you that your Instant Pot ricotta recipe will lead to zero food waste in my house. It is absolutely delicious.

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Beefy Taco Pasta by: Ivy Manning – reprinted from Instant Pot Miracle 6 Ingredients or Less (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

Serves 4 to 6

• 1tbsp olive oil
• 1lb lean ground beef 95%
• 1medium yellow onion chopped
• 1packet taco seasoning (3 ounces)
• 12 ounces campanelle short, chunky twisted pasta
• 4tbsp tomato paste
• 1large red bell pepper, chopped
• salt and black pepper
• 1 cup pepper jack or cotija cheese (optional)

Instructions:

1. Put the oil in the pot, select SAUTÉ, and adjust to NORMAL/MEDIUM heat. When the oil is hot, add the beef, onions, and 1 tablespoon of the taco seasoning and cook, breaking the meat into 1/2- inch chunks and stirring frequently, until the onions are tender (the beef will finish cooking under pressure), 6 minutes. Press CANCEL.

2. Add the pasta and stir to coat with the onions and beef. In a medium bowl or large measuring cup, whisk together 3 cups of water, the tomato paste, and the remaining taco seasoning. Pour the mixture over the pasta in the pot and stir gently to combine. Place the peppers on top of the pasta mixture. Lock on the lid, select the PRESSURE COOK function, and adjust to LOW pressure for 5 minutes. Make sure the steam valve is in the “Sealing” position.

3. When the cooking time is up, quick-release the pressure. Gently stir the pasta with a rubber spatula, scraping any browned bits on the bottom of the pot. Season with salt and pepper. The sauce will thicken upon standing. Serve sprinkled with the optional cheese, if desired.

Taco Seasoning by: Jill Lightner – reprinted from Scraps, Peels, and Stems: Recipes and Tips Rethinking Food Waste at Home (Skipstone, 2018)

This amount is enough to season one pound of ground meat. Once the meat is browned, add the seasoning and one-third cup of water. Stir gently, then simmer over medium heat for ten minutes, until the sauce thickens. Note: to use in Ivy Manning’s Beefy Taco Pasta, leave out the cornstarch/masa harina thickener.

Makes 3 tablespoons

• 2 teaspoons ancho chili powder
• 1-1/2 teaspoons onion powder
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 teaspoon cornstarch or masa harina
• 3/4 teaspoon dried oregano
• 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Main photo courtsey of: Ella Olsson

Photo of garlic courtesy of: Thomas Ulrich

Photo of beefy taco pasta by: Morgan Ione Yager

Photo of black pepper courtesy of: fxxu

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Jill Lightner has been writing about food, farms, and sustainability since 2001. She’s been a restaurant critic, recipe developer, a magazine co-editor for the largest member-owned food co-op in the U.S., and the editor of the James Beard-winning magazine Edible Seattle. Her latest book is Scraps, Peels, and Stems: Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home (Skipstone, October 2018). To learn more, visit: jillightner.com and follow Jill on Twitter and Instagram.

 

Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon based food writer and author of 8 cookbooks including Instant Pot Miracle 6 Ingredients or Less, Instant Pot Italian, Easy Soups From Scratch with Quick Breads To Match, Williams Sonoma Weeknight Vegetarian, Better From Scratch, Crackers and Dips. Her work appears in Clean Eating, Fine Cooking, and Fitbit.com. Visit her at www.ivymanning.com and on Instagram.