Laptop Lunches #99

Red and green bell pepper strips and a couple of cherry tomatoes with yogurt ranch for dipping, a silicone heart full of black olives, wedges of orange and kiwi, sour cream and onion noodles, and an improvisational chicken thing.

There comes a time, if you cook all your meals (more or less), and mostly only for yourself, that you will have a refrigerator full of tiny bits and pieces. Tiny bits and pieces are great, but sometimes you need to clear the decks. This lunch reflects a bit of deck clearing. The sour cream and onion noodles sounded like a good idea, and they were okay, but I think a bit of cheddar would improve them. I had a tiny bit of chicken and a tiny bit of leftover stuffing so I just tossed them together in the last cup.

See, cooking for one is, as Judith Jones says in The Pleasures of Cooking for One, a process in which one meal leads into the next, and so on, and so forth. So you freeze what you can and what you can't, you use in lots of things in a row--like a red bell pepper that keeps turning up in various dishes, or sour cream, or...you get the idea. You may well wish for smaller packages, but a bell pepper is a bell pepper, and those nice mini sweet peppers seem to only be sold in bags of two pounds each. But even at that, sometimes, the fridge seems to hold odds and ends from a dozen different meals (and probably does), so you try to begin again. I'm not letting myself buy those salmon filets until my refrigerator looks like a barren wasteland again.