The Tinned Fish Philosophy
Hello and welcome to the Tinned Fish Think Tank! This newsletter is a series of musings on food and recipe ideas from a twenty something baker turned white-collar worker with a simultaneous contempt for macaroni in a box and distaste for liberal elitism (aka tweezer cuisine).
So what do I mean by tweezer cuisine? And how did I come to dislike it so much? If you’ve ever worked with a Gordon Ramsey type you’d understand, but if you’ve ever come away from a meal at a restaurant with a light wallet yet still hungry –and probably with a bitter taste in your mouth – you’ve experienced it too.
At a restaurant, the delicate balance between not blowing the budget, ordering enough food to satiate your hunger, and selecting the dishes you’re actually excited to eat is something most people are familiar with. It’s also a ridiculous dilemma when faced with the fact that the purpose of eating is to feel full.
The insanity of fine dining is certainly of the zeitgeist. Noma is moving on and movies like The Menu are highlighting the new ways in which fine dining has been pulled out of the realm of nourishment and into the world of excess. In an era obsessed with wellness and self-care, people are strangely blasé about what they put in their bodies (and if you’re one of those people who would rather suck down protein smoothies, this newsletter probably isn’t for you). This is not to say that food should not be beautiful nor that it’s not important to care about what we eat. Quite the opposite, spending time – and yes, money – on what we put into our bodies is not only necessary for health and survival but an essentially human thing to do. The dinner table is a unique space which can force us to face an unfamiliar taste or an unpalatable opinion, encourages debate and forces us towards togetherness; food encourages us to share and listen.
This newsletter is not an attempt to tell you how to eat – everyone’s budgets, tastes, and nostalgias are different. If you like macaroni in a box, good for you (add an egg yolk, some butter, and a sprinkle of smoked paprika to your next box of KD and I promise you’ll never go back). But it is an attempt to bring simple yet beautiful food to your table without breaking the bank or wasting your time. I’m not going to say it’s effortless, but it is an effort well worth it. I promise.
Freezer Food
Who Says Freezer Food Isn’t Good For You?
As long as time immemorial, folks have devised contraptions to preserve their food through temperature control. Us suburbans only graduated from the ice box to the deep freeze around 1940. Fast forward to 2023 and you can find a freezer in virtually every North American household – what a beautiful time to be alive!
And no, I don’t mean go stock up on items from your grocery store’s freezer aisle. What I’m suggesting involves a bit more time and effort. A bit more bouje and, dare I say, pickiness.
My freezer is stocked with broths (chicken, parmesan, beef, fish), pasta sauces, stews, soups, pastry, sliced homemade bread, cookie dough balls, scone dough. All of it’s ready to be plopped on a baking sheet or thrown in a pot. Because every time I want a treat, I don’t want to have to make a batch of cookie dough. And everytime I want a slice of bread, I don’t want to have to clean a cutting board and a knife. And I know that at least once a week, I’ll look deep into my freezer and find a pasta sauce made with summer tomatoes or a soup made with last spring’s beautiful sun chokes – and i’ll send a little thank you to past me for thinking of future me with such care and thoughtfulness.
Investing time into cooking during the week – while still not being stuck in the kitchen for hours – is part of the tinned fish philosophy. But in order to make great food during the work week with minimal effort, your freezer has to become your new best friend. Who says freezer food can’t be good for you?
Tune in each week to find out what i’m pulling out of my freezer and for simple fancy meal ideas to pull you out of the midweek slump (we’ve all been there).
Love,
Charlie