Onion

Ranch Style® Beans are Min’s number one foolproof side dish for instant satisfaction every time. She says that if Andy Warhol had been a Texan, the Ranch Style® Beans can would hang in museums throughout the world. The chili pintos’ unmistakable label dressed in basic black with bright white Western lettering and yellow and red accents is as common a sight in Southwestern pantries as Campbell’s tomato soup ever was. These well-seasoned beans make an “appetite pleasin’” homey cornbread casserole with any leftover cheater meat.

No matter how much you like to cook, everyone gets stuck in a rut. When you find yourself making the same old things, it’s time to cook out of your comfort zone. For us, this means a trip to any international market where one step inside we remember how much there still is to learn. The good news is that walking the aisles of the unfamiliar unlocks the secrets to many of the ingredients in our favorite restaurant dishes. The greens in the produce section alone will keep us busy for a year. We can’t shop when we’re hungry, so first we eat. Thankfully, the Vietnamese noodle bowls right next door energize and inspire our international shopping trips. Vietnamese noodle bowls are filled with contradictions in complete agreement—hot and cold, crunchy and soft, sweet and sour, rich and light. The bowls of warm thin noodles, cool leafy lettuce, bean sprouts, and herbs topped with any meat or seafood you like are perfect for leftover cheater meat. The sweet/salty/spicy dressing may appear way too complex for home cooking. It’s not. The international market has everything you need. Cooking out of your comfort zone will help you dissect the components and flavors of unfamiliar foods. Even if cooking Vietnamese at home sounds daunting, give this a try with leftover cheater meat just for the fun of better understanding how opposites get along.

Goulash may not sound flashy or stylish, but it offers lots of room for creative leftover cheating out of the vegetable crisper drawer or the freezer. Cheater beef chuck is the delicious traditional choice for goulash, but Ultimate Cheater Pulled Chicken (page 85) or Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork (page 54) make a respectable soup. The secret to goulash is the combination of sweet slow-cooked caramelized onions with traditional pungent Hungarian paprika or a little Spanish smoked paprika. Keep most of the paprika on the sweet side, or the soup will go from zero to sixty too fast for tender palates. Serve with a loaf of good crusty bread.

Good freezer management makes it so much easier to get away with two-timing. When the freezer door won’t close, we know it’s time for a couple bags of sauerkraut for an Alsatian choucroute (pronounced shoo-KROOT) garni. A French peasant dish from the Alsace region, choucroute garni means sauerkraut “garnished” with an abundance of pork products, or occasionally goose or duck. It’s the perfect freezer purge for using up all manner of cheater pork plus any sausages, bacon, or ham bones. Whatever you find in there will pretty much work with this dish. Choucroute (the sauerkraut) is traditionally slow-baked in a heavy casserole with slab bacon or a ham hock, carrots, onion, garlic, apple, and wine or beer. The seasoning mix depends on the cook (or the pantry), but usually includes juniper berries, bay leaves, cloves, black or white pepper, even cumin and coriander seeds. The sausages, ham, and other meats are added near the end of cooking. Get the bagged or jarred sauerkraut for the freshest taste. While the sauerkraut turns French in the oven, thaw the trove of frozen meats. A fruity, dry Alsatian Riesling is traditional for both cooking and drinking. French and German beers are also a good match. To complete the meal, add boiled potatoes and a green salad.

We’re sweet onion junkies and whenever beef is on the grill, so are a pile of onion slices. At first, we just served them with Mexican fajita feasts, but then quickly found that their sweet, salty, smoky, soft, and crisp qualities turned plain old burgers into chopped steak and added richness and depth to all kinds of meats. Now that we’ve become cheaters, so have the onions. Charred in the oven, these smoky sweet onions are just what cheater brisket needs on the side. Days later diced leftover onions end up in all kinds of meals like a weekend fridge scramble, hash browns, baked beans, and green beans. Georgia’s Vidalia onions are a big thing in Tennessee, and we’re seeing more and more varieties of sweet onions from Texas and Washington. Take your pick, but any yellow or white onion will do the job.

Posole (pronounced poh-SO-lay), a Mexican soup adopted by northern New Mexico, is all about the hominy—bloated corn kernels softened with an alkali. Purists will cook their own from dried corn, but canned hominy is a terrific pantry staple for making a quick soup. Pork is the traditional meat for posole, but we like it with cheater chicken and beef as well. Serve posole in big bowls with a side of thinly shredded cabbage, diced onions, chopped tomato, a crisp tostado to crumble in the soup, and a lime wedge. Punch it up with a little hot sauce. Every time we make a batch, Min always says we should make this more often.

Lots of barbecue joints in Tennessee do country-style vegetables other than coleslaw, barbecued beans, and potato salad. One of our favorites is a big pile of turnip greens doused with hot pepper vinegar to go with a side of pork ribs. We think vegetables are a critical counterbalance to rich smoky barbecued meats. Same goes with Asian barbecue. Swap the collards and turnip greens for bok choy or Napa cabbage flavored with garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. Serve this with Filipino Adobo-Q Chicken (page 94) and a big pile of fluffy jasmine rice.

R. B.’s childhood campout hobo packet memories have inspired many of our favorite side dishes. He’s put just about every vegetable combo imaginable in a foil packet on the grill. Without added water, vegetables steam in their own juices and roast beautifully over the direct high heat of the grill. Even better and easier than the grill is the even heat of a hot oven. If there were a hobo packet merit badge, R. B. would have definitely earned it.

The key to enjoying dense winter squash more often is a time-saving ten or so minutes in the microwave. By cooking them first, you avoid the anxiety and danger of hacking a sturdy squash or your finger in half. Or, look for packages of ready-to-cook precut and peeled squash in the supermarket. After cooking, the other trick is to scoop the flesh into a casserole where it’s easy to char evenly under the broiler in a couple minutes. This way no one has to negotiate an unwieldy squash boat, and everyone gets as much or as little as they want. Make the casserole ahead and you’ll be glad come dinnertime. The trio of squash sauces shows how well squash gets along with a full range of sweet to savory flavors. One sauce is traditional—buttery and sweet with pecans. The second is a sweet-savory exotic beauty blending spicy chutney, dried cranberries, and almonds. The third, a savory tomato, mysteriously brings out the sweetness of the squash without overpowering it. Serve all three sauces with any squash combo and watch everyone duke it out for a favorite.

This salad uses Oven Potatoes rather than fluffy, starchy boiled potatoes. The difference is that the potatoes, browned with the help of a little oil and cooked without water, are crusty, giving the salad a new texture. Dress the salad with either mayonnaise or vinaigrette. A little dry rub on the potatoes will add robust flavor and rusty color to the dressing, a perfect side for lightly seasoned meats and fish. If you’re serving potato salad with peppery rubbed cheater BBQ, season the potatoes only with salt and skip the dry rub. One dry-rubbed menu item per meal is usually plenty.

A spirited family debate one holiday season over the merits of sweet versus white potatoes prompted this compromise—colorful root vegetables all coexisting nicely in one big happy roasting pan. Frozen pearl onions are easy to use right out of the bag and make the dish look extra fancy. You can cook the vegetables early in the day and stick them back in the oven to warm before dinner with whatever’s cooking. These are delicious sprinkled with smoked paprika.

Min was first encouraged to make this dish when her fridge was jammed with leftover grilled corn on the cob. We liked this salad so much that now she doesn’t wait for a summer corn surplus—she cheats with a bag of niblets from the freezer. Frozen white shoepeg corn and frozen baby peas are two of Min’s constant freezer staples for ultraquick sides.

Since R. B. has expanded his blade assortment beyond an ax, a maul, and a cleaver to include a few kitchen knives, he’s more than happy to wield the Santoku for diced salad vegetables. This kitchen task is best suited for the detail oriented. Around here, that would be R. B., whose T-shirt collection is always impeccably folded, stacked, and arranged by hobby. Instead of limp baby weeds, we vote for a crisp head of chilled iceberg lettuce that cuts beautifully into bite-size pieces for serving with barbecue.

This completely fat-free side is the perfect counterpoint to rich meat. No matter the barbecue, Q-Cumbers will expand your side dish repertoire beyond the more conventional slaws, potato salads, beans, and corn. Q-Cumbers are best icy cold. Regular cucumbers may need their seeds removed, but the long, plastic-wrapped English/Japanese/seedless kind grown in hothouses are ready-made for thin slicing. Maybe it’s psychological, but the palate-cleansing effect of fresh vinegary sweet cucumbers is extra good in hot weather. Plus, you don’t have to worry about the mayonnaise issue in the heat. The jalapeños, while optional, are encouraged.

After moving to Tennessee, R. B. discovered that his favorite baked bean cooked without molasses was actually white. Simple white beans flavored with salty local country ham are a favorite at Nashville’s famous “meat and three” restaurants and at catfish joints all over Tennessee. A big slice of white onion on the side is a must. The other popular white bean garnish is a spoonful of sweet-savory chow-chow (cabbage relish). Chow-chow is available in the pickle section of Southern supermarkets.

The traditional yogurt-cucumber mix that cools Middle Eastern and Indian barbecue dishes operates the same way with cheater BBQ. This slaw is a natural side to Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs (page 96) and Cheater Q’Balls (page 129). When we have any leftover brisket, burgers, or turkey, it gets loaded into pita pockets with as much slaw as will fit topped with whatever hot Indian chutney happens to be in Min’s fridge door condiment collection at the time.

Back in the 1970s before the whole world was a mouse-click away, Min’s grandfather, Lee Almy, a guy who took his beans very seriously, had pintos shipped down to Carlsbad, New Mexico, from Cortez, a small town in the prized pinto-bean-producing southwestern corner of Colorado. He flavored these superior beans simply with chili powder and salt. Min’s dad, Max, adds a can of Rotel tomatoes and a leftover hambone when available and simmers them in a slow cooker. Min’s aunt Betty is a purist and cooks her pintos plain, seasoned only with salt and sometimes chopped ham. Aunt Sarah, from a long line of ranchers across Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, cooks pintos the way her mama taught her—unsoaked beans and a hunk of salt pork in the pressure cooker for an hour and a half. Then she simmers them with a little fresh garlic. Whichever way you cook them, serve with cornbread, sliced raw onion, slices of fresh jalapeño pepper, and the cheater meat of your choosing.

Back when our friend Claire Mullally owned Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, a ’50s-style ice cream and burger drive-in, she organized Sunday night parking lot jam sessions to drum up a little business in the cooler fall months. Where else but Nashville can you see Country Music Award and Grammy Award winners and nominees play for tips with no cover charge and a side of sweet potato fries? The jam band was complete when a cab arrived straight from the airport carrying Claire’s husband, songwriter/musician Greg Trooper, just landing from a tour with John Prine. The standing room only parking lot was rocking with loyal Dip families filling up on live music, behemoth burgers, and soft-serve sundaes. The only thing missing was a beer truck. Claire juggled the kitchen, the counter, and managed to sing back-up on a cranking cover of “Love the One You’re With.” Our version of the Dip’s guac burger is a beauty featuring a juicy beef patty adorned with cheese, a smear of guacamole, salsa, sour cream, tomato and onion, and jalapeño slices instead of pickles.

Our friend Adele Franzblau doesn’t see herself as a cook, but she cooks for her family every night and even has her own family cheater brisket recipe. She got it years ago for her son’s bar mitzvah, when Adele’s mother-in-law, Nancy, in Pampa, Texas, suggested Aunt Pat’s Smoky Brisket. Adele says she doesn’t even measure. She sets the brisket on a big piece of foil and seasons it liberally with garlic salt, a half bottle of smoke, and about the same amount of Worcestershire sauce. The wrapped brisket marinates in the refrigerator overnight. The next morning, the brisket goes into a 250°F oven to cook unattended all day. When she gets home, the house smells wonderful, dinner’s ready, and she’s a hero. Ultimate Cheater Brisket is similar, but with the added sweetness of a little onion and ketchup.