Help me cook with seasonal produce

CHRIS FARRELL: Summer in Minnesota means an abundance of fresh, local produce. There are endless reasons to take advantage of it. It's healthy. It supports the local economy. It's delicious. And MPR News producer Ellen Finn wants to dive into everything the state's farms have to offer. But she's been struggling with food waste, so she reached out for some support from Jenny Breen, a chef and educator at the University of Minnesota. Here's her conversation in a new episode of our series called Professional Help.

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ELLEN FINN: This is pretty personal for me. I have had many CSA boxes, for example, over the years and always seem to find that I struggle to use up all of the produce I get, especially when it's something that I'm not used to, but want to get excited about, like kohlrabi, for instance. What do you tell those students when they say, oh, I almost don't want to buy more vegetables because I just know I'm going to have a failure a couple weeks down the road where things have gone bad?

JENNY BREEN: So the first thing I would say is, just roast them all up. Just roast everything. Roasting is easy and delicious for any vegetable, even kohlrabi. And then you have an instant thing to add to whatever it is that you end up making you can have on hand for several days and use in multiple ways. So maybe you're not making a dish. Because I think that's another thing that we get caught up in, is, look, I have to follow a recipe and make a dish. And then I need all the ingredients for that dish. And then I've got all these ingredients that I bought just for that dish, and now I don't what to do.

Instead, what I do is I think a lot in terms of formulas or templates. So I've got a whole bunch of vegetables, some protein, beans, eggs, tofu, chicken, whatever it is. I've got some kind of grain, and that could be your rice or your quinoa or your noodles or whatever. I even throw my potatoes in that category. And then I'm just combining them.

And usually, what I love to do is teach people condiments and sauces because that's the stuff that makes things good. And those things, again, you can make, have on hand, and then it's just really assembly. Throw them into a stir fry. You can pickle them. You can roast them. At the very minimum, if you can do nothing else, you can freeze stuff. Obviously, you won't make a salad with it, but you can throw it into a soup or a stew.

So sometimes, I'll have just a random assortment of leftover things, and I'll just be like, I'm just going to make a stew and then freeze that. So I just made a bunch of pesto, just put little blobs on a tray and stuck them in the freezer. And then I take those, and I put them in a Ziploc bag and label it. And then I've got those all winter long. So I can just pull out that pesto for pasta, or I can throw it in a stir fry or soup.

ELLEN FINN: Wow. Everything you just said, Jenny, is hitting the nail on the head for me. And yeah, especially my partner and I often talk about intuitive cooking. We just didn't really grow up in super cooking households. Last week, we got all this dill and mint. How exciting. OK. What are we going to do with it? Well, I guess, let's find these recipes. And now we have to buy all these-- oh, let's go buy a lemon. Oh, now I need to go-- oh, we don't have yogurt to make tzatziki, whatever it is.

JENNY BREEN: A lot of people feel tied to recipes, I think. And it's a blessing and a curse. Because when I teach, I will-- sometimes I'll be like, oh, I don't have this ingredient, so I'm just going to use this. Honestly, I think another thing that's really important is to build a pantry so that you are set up to make things without having to run out to the store. Oh, I've got a couple different kinds of oils. I've got some nut butter. I've got a few vinegars. I've got some lemon juice. I've got some honey. I can make a pretty good sauce.

You mentioned dill and mint. I love dill. When I think about mint, I think about Asian flavor profiles, some sort of soy and sesame and ginger combination. And then maybe whatever vegetables I have, I would turn into a stir fry, and I would use that sauce on there.

So you kind of-- I think you have to be willing to be, as you said, intuitive. And I mean, I deal with this. My husband for years, he will open the fridge, and he'll just be like, I just see ingredients. Now, I open the fridge, and I'm like, oh, I see meals, seven different options here for dinner, you know? It's like a muscle. You have to practice.

ELLEN FINN: Really, it ends up being all about the sauces and dressings. And you've mentioned pesto a few times, but what other sauces and dressings do you enjoy?

JENNY BREEN: There's a basic formula that I start every class with, and it's just a fat. And usually, I'll use just an olive oil or an acid, so a vinegar or lemon juice, lime juice, and then something to emulsify, which also is going to add flavor. I'll usually use mustard and then honey or maple syrup. So those are my four basic ingredients. I've got my sweet, my sour, my umami, fatty, and then the emulsifier.

A really common sauce or dressing that I do is with toasted sesame oil and ginger and tahini and miso. And so I've still got those flavors going on, but it's a very specific direction that I'm going. And that tahini is emulsifying. It's also really nutritious. Every time you add nuts or seeds to something, you're adding a whole bunch of extra micronutrients, which is something we need, and protein and fiber. It's cool when the nutrition and the flavor are aligned.

I make cooked-down tomato jam. So it's tomatoes, but it's got some spice and some sweet to it. And then it cooks down into-- it's almost more spreadable than a sauce, but a really yummy condiment. So sometimes, if I feel like, oh, I got to do something with these tomatoes, that's what I'll do.

ELLEN FINN: You mentioned earlier building out your pantry. Just briefly, if you would, what would that look like for people?

JENNY BREEN: So yeah, a couple different kinds of fats or oils, a couple different kinds of acids or vinegars, canned goods like canned tomatoes, tomato paste, canned beans. Because you can turn that salsa into a bean salad, or you can make a quesadilla with beans in it real quick. Things like animal proteins, I would keep in the freezer. Perhaps just have a few different animal proteins if you eat animal proteins.

I usually keep eggs and tofu and cheese on hand and spices. Always have your aromatics, so garlic and ginger. Honestly, if all you have is garlic, you're pretty good. [LAUGHS]

ELLEN FINN: And, Jenny said, if a vegetable is looking a little wilty, and you think you've created food waste, instead of a tasty meal, don't give up just yet.

JENNY BREEN: Don't just assume because there's a few bad parts that you can't use that food that is normal. Just pick through it. Produce is pretty hearty. It grows outside, you know? It's tough. Really track what you put in the fridge. Some people have white boards on their freezers, and they write what's in there and what date. And this is a classic restaurant thing-- first in, first out-- where you're taking the oldest stuff and making sure it's in front because you might not remember to look in the back. We do that thing where we just shove all the stuff in the back of the fridge.

ELLEN FINN: I love the whiteboard idea. I might have to do that. Let's say, I use most of a cabbage for a big meal or something, but I have a little quarter of it left or a little chunk of whatever. There's just these leftovers that, often, I find, are the real stragglers in the fridge, where you know you don't want to just chuck it. What are your thoughts about what to do about those little things?

JENNY BREEN: That usually turns into a frittata in my house. It's just so easy and so delicious and versatile. And I just cook them all up, throw eggs in the pan, pop it in the oven, and I've got a wonderful breakfast or lunch or dinner.

ELLEN FINN: You might be wondering why we should go to all this trouble. Well, Jenny has answers.

JENNY BREEN: If there is one thing that we know is really, really, really good for sustaining your health and preventing chronic disease, it is eating whole foods. We know that. Buying and cooking in bulk is still the most affordable and, honestly, the most efficient way to cook. And it puts us in touch with the seasons. We aren't assuming that we're going to have really good, fresh spinach all year round. We're not. And so we should enjoy it when it's really good and fresh and picked today or yesterday.

ELLEN FINN: I truly feel very inspired right now, so I really appreciate it. [LAUGHS]

JENNY BREEN: Well that's my goal. I want people to be excited about making food because when you're excited about it, you can't really go wrong.

ELLEN FINN: That is honestly the key, is to be like, I'm excited to have this vegetable. What am I going to do? How am I going to eat it in a cool way? It's precious, you know?

JENNY BREEN: It's precious. I agree. It's one of my favorite things with teaching, which is when people don't feel excited about it, and then they eat something and they're like, oh my God, that was so good.

CHRIS FARRELL: That was chef and food educator at the University of Minnesota, Jenny Breen, talking to MPR News producer Ellen Finn for our series called Professional Help. To hear other Professional Help interviews, visit our website at mprnews.org.