Single Serving

When you’re on the road, how quickly do you get sick of take-out and packaged snacks? For me, it’s about 30 seconds and/or four bites into my first mediocre buffet. That’s why I came up with three variations on one awesome recipe that you can make even in a basic on-the-go kitchen. Watch the video to see what I made.

WATCH NOW: 3 Polenta Recipes So Easy You Can Make ‘Em in a Hotel Kitchen!

At Extended Stay America, every room has a kitchen (not a mini kitchen, not a hot plate, but the real thing-equipped with a pot, a pan, bowls, utensils, a cutting board, and a knife-among other essentials). Inspired by the recipes guests were whipping up in their rooms, the hotel chain created the Cooking Away from Home Recipe Contest to let traveling cooks submit their best recipes for meals you can make on the road, without access to your stocked at-home pantry. You can vote for a recipe here.

So, what makes a recipe good for cooking when you’re not at home? Most importantly for me, the recipe has to require just a few ingredients, all of which are available at regular grocery stores, preferably in single serving sizes or at the self-serve antipasti bar or bulk section. If you plan ahead, you can pack olive oil, salt, nuts, and grains-like polenta. (Milk, sardines, almonds, butter, and beer each make an appearance here in part because of their single-serving packaging.)

Since polenta is kind of a blank canvas, I thought I’d encourage you to vote in the ESA contest by cooking on camera, showing off this cinch of a recipe for soft polenta and three great toppings, all easy to make on the road and enticing after a day of travel, meetings, or sight-seeing. Read on for the full recipes!

This post is sponsored by Extended Stay America. Read more about Away from Home Cooking, vote for a contest winner here, and share using #cookwithESA. If you’re excited to have a full-size kitchen next time you travel, book your stay at Extended Stay America. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that keep Big Girls, Small Kitchen delicious!

Make this right now. No, not to drink right now. There’s no instant gratification (or morning drinking) here. But if you want to be sipping these bright red drinks before linking arms, belting patriotic songs, and admiring at the fireworks on July 4th, you’ll have to start now.

That’s because this is no ordinary gimlet. I took a deep dive into DIY terrain and infused my own plain vodka with strawberry tops. After two weeks in my pantry, my little jar of booze had turned a deep pink, the once-fresh strawberries gone limp and their color dimmed as they donated their flavor and hue to the vodka. And so, 14 days after I started this project, I was ready to mix a drink.

I knew I wanted something simple after waiting so long (despite doing so little-infusing alcohol is surprisingly easy).

A gimlet normally requires nothing more than vodka (or gin), lime, and sugar. The generous amount of lime makes the drink taste like a sour, rather than a cocktail simply finished with a mere squeeze of citrus. Since I was already perverting the gimlet’s purity with berry vodka, I added a second dose of strawberry by muddling a few berries from a fresh pint with sugar-the berries, for me, really round out the drink’s flavor. After the muddling, the instructions include: pouring vodka, squeezing limes, and straining. Easy. Two drinks are ready for toasting to the U.S.A.!

I’m going to trust you with this recipe, goofy title and all. Do you have sisters? I have two, and when all three of us put our heads (and cravings) together, amazing recipes emerge. This is one.

Of course, I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but it was a long time ago. I definitely remember a sunny Saturday in high school. Katie, my younger sister, and I were reading on the deck, and we experienced that late-afternoon desire that comes from neither hunger nor tiredness nor thirst alone, but a combination of all three. Those, and the call of our sweet teeth. We set down our books and raced into the kitchen.

Was that the first Mocha Choco Loco of all time? I can’t say. The evolution from plain chocolate milk to Mocha Choco is subtle indeed-but crucial. The update comes in the form of espresso powder, an ingredient we always had on hand for making mom’s famous chocolate cake but never used for actual drinking coffee. That day, and many after, we dissolved cocoa, espresso powder, and sugar in hot water in our glasses, then poured in cups of milk, added ice cubes, drank up. This miniature cooking session was followed by us running around the house for the rest of the day yelling about Mocha Choco Locos.

You, on the other hand, might be wise to think of this as a simple, not-too-sweet, homemade version of the Frappucino. That makes a lot more sense than the internal sister name.

One of the reasons I make so many grilled cheese sandwiches is that they solve an essential cooking dilemma: what do I feed myself when there’s not much around to eat? The behind-the-scenes truth about the various tasty fillings come from the fact that there are often condiments in the fridge that I think will pair well with melted cheese. (Not much doesn’t.) Spicy pickles and pepper jack are a perfect match, even though they came together from hungry desperation.

So, delicious and gooey and indulgent as they may seem, grilled cheese sandwiches actually serve a boring function in my life: regular old sustenance. Not to undermine all their exuberant qualities.

When Big Girls, Small Kitchen began, reasons to cook were at the forefront of our minds-and reflected in our categories. Were we early twenty-somethings cooking for ourselves, for others, for potlucks, or for the fun of baking? The type of cooking done in each situation is slightly different, to be sure, and the dishes posted here reflected that in their serving size, time or energy required, and money spent.

As the site and I grew up, I expanded the categories to reflect some of the different reasons I was finding to cook. Dinners for two. Lots of brunches for friends. The category situation got out of hand as I experimented with different formats. So I’m here today to tell you that I still think reasons to cook are as good an organizational schema for a blog like this, and that I’m updating the archives and creating some slightly revised categories, ones that touch on single servings, packed lunches, snacks, sweets, party contributions, weeknight dinners, and projects. This batch covers more terrain than plain old breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I think they still stand up for those of you who are here because you want to make home cooking your main source of food.

To keep all those categories going, I’ll be bringing in a few more contributors in the near future. (It seems like you’ve been enjoying Natalie’s posts, so I’m really excited about this change!) As I’ve been pushing my career beyond the boundaries of this site, it means everything to me to have some help in the kitchen here.

And, in the spirit of spring cleaning and updates: I’m also planning on making a few functionality tweaks to the site soon. Is there anything you’d like to find here, or a way you’d like to use Big Girls, Small Kitchen? Please let me know in the comments!

For now, I offer you this incredibly delicious pickle grilled cheese. Enjoy!

The last time I was at my friend Sarah’s house, I filched her copy of Provence 1970, a book about the couple of months a handful of American food writers spent in France at the turning (the author argues) of an epoch in taste. Many of the writers, like M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and James Beard, had already gotten to experience the shift from thinking of food as convenient to thinking of food as pleasurable. Really, they helped set that very swerve in motion, in part inspired by their shared Francophilia. France had offered them inspiration in this epicurean journey for so long, and yet now they’d stopped being sure if the country and the country’s cuisine were still as full of promise and discovery for them. In 1970, they were looking back to the U.S.

I love the feeling of a recipe developing in my mind. A little bit of this, a pinch of that-I can almost taste the combinations as I think them. They say if you imagine a yoga routine step by step in your head, you get a good fraction as flexible and calm as if you go through the poses with your actual body. Since I adore cooking and do its motions so much, when a recipe from my head comes into existence, the tastes and textures ordinarily resemble my unwritten, unmade version. Sometimes, though, the dishes come up short, like a lentil salad I made the other day to go with some crispy hake, where the lentils got overcooked and the toasted pine nuts didn’t add enough crunch to balance out the mush, and also the hake was barely crispy.

Sometimes, the actual preparation surpasses the fantasy, and that’s what happened with this breakfast shake, which I believed would taste like almonds, apples, and cinnamon and instead tasted like candy.

Candy! For breakfast! But I’m not actually talking Peeps and Peanut Butter Eggs.This is a drink whose added sugar content comes from a single teaspoon of honey and then just makes the most of all the natural sweetness of almonds, apples, ripe banana, and honey.

This afternoon, I’m going to sound like a hack selling some cure-all elixir on the street corner. This homemade, heart-warming, health-giving brew is so good, it’s worth the risk of like sounding like a shill, though.

I promise, this potion of minced fresh ginger slowly steeped into hot water, finished with spoonfuls of honey and squeezes of lemon or lime has cured me of: oncoming colds, indigestion, being freezing, exhaustion, and even the Sunday blues.

I first had a tea like this in a much richer variation, a thick, sweet liquid served hot in tiny cups. You could only drink a few sips, the tea was so rich and sweet, but the taste was so developed that when we looked at the recipe we were amazed to find just three ingredients: ginger, honey, and citrus. The instructions explained a lot. Those ingredients simmered for a long time, maybe even hours, until they reduced and the tea grew syrupy. In the end, I never made it this way-it was just a little too much.

When you need to drink a lot of tea-when you’re dehydrated or feel like you might be coming down with something like a spring cold-that syrupy stuff doesn’t do. You just can’t drink enough of it. And that’s the reason I started brewing a weaker version. The ginger steeps for at least twenty minutes, so there’s plenty of spice and flavor. I can’t explain what deliciousness happens to that flavor when you add the honey and lemon; that’s the moment the cloudy ginger juice goes from a simple tea to an elixir you might want to sell on a street corner, or at least tell everyone about.

The tea has become such a staple of my drinking life that when Skinnygirl Daily asked me to share a recipe inspired by my participation in the Healthy Habits Challenge, I knew it was time to post about the brew.