Waste Not Gumbo
Associated with both Cajun and Creole cooking, gumbo is far more African than it is French, even if not all recipes use okra for thickening these days. This version is closest to a gumbo z’herbes than...
SUSTAINABILITY
Stews: A Classic Dish To Help You Avoid Food Waste
STEWS FROM SCRAPS
One aspect of modern, restaurant-driven food trends that I wish would disappear is how every year or two, a deeply traditional home-cooked dish—or even an entire cuisine that was developed by those in need, like that of Appalachia—gets reinvented, which typically means it becomes very, very expensive. It’s fine when high-end restaurants want to celebrate a style of cooking. It’s also important to preserve cultural traditions. But when it comes to the problem of food waste, it’s more important to have a general understanding of how those dishes evolved than to be too strict about following a modern recipe. The most lasting classic dishes [such as cassoulet, gumbo and cholent] were designed to use ingredients that were available in abundance or to reuse the odds and ends from cooking other dishes.
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