Dairy Free

Broths are easy and rewarding, since homemade broth is always better than canned. You’ll use it constantly-even in place of some of the water in the recipe above to cook beans. Make a big batch when you have time and freeze measured portions in heavy-duty plastic freezer storage bags. With slight variations, this simple formula will work for chicken, beef, or fish broth. You can often get the needed bones or carcasses from your butcher or fish market. If you need to substitute canned broth for homemade, use one 14 1/2-ounce can for every 1 3/4 cups broth.

Barbecue has lots of definitions, but what it really means to us is lots of leftover piles of meat for new and different dishes. Barbecue dishes can be as versatile as you want them to be—they don’t have to include slaw and beans. Pulled pork that’s been lightly seasoned and smoked can go in any direction. R. B. is adamant about crisping the cooked meat in a hot skillet first. The meat takes on a new texture that’s great for sandwiches, tacos, and brunch hash. Here, soft tacos made with any cheater meat take on Asian flavors with a simple sweet-hot peanut BBQ sauce and some fresh fixings.

R. B. has discovered from his guitar teacher, Wayne Avers, that playing music is a lot like cooking. A solid background in fundamental scales and chords is the key ingredient for intuitive playing. As with cooking, the more you can take advantage of a basic, well-stocked pantry, the better prepared you are for cooking on the fly. For tortilla soup, a regular two-timing favorite, we have on hand onions, potatoes, celery, and carrots and cans of tomatoes, beans, and broth. With these ingredients, some seasonings, and some cheater meat, you’ve got dinner. Go lighter on the chipotle peppers for a milder flavor.

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.

For too long cauliflower has been confined to salad bars, vegetable medleys, and Velveeta sauces. Everything changed for us when R. B. roasted two cut-up heads in a foil packet on the grill. The transformation was amazing—instead of bland, white, and wet the florets were brown, nutty, and rich. Yes, cheese was involved. And some bacon. A nicely browned cheater oven version is just as big a hit and has become a dinner regular. R. B. prefers the cauliflower cooked really soft, not crisp-tender, but fix it the way you like. It’s good to go as is, or dressed up to suit the menu. Give our variations a try. Some are everyday good, others are fancy dinner-party style.

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.

Charring a pineapple slice steps it up from fruit salad and baked ham ornament to a more sophisticated salad sphere. Our sweet and savory charred pineapple salads are all great matches for any style of barbecued pork and run the gamut of pineapple possibilities. Pineapple is easy to char because you’re just adding some smoke and a chic look to the fruit, not cooking it. If you prefer groovy grill marks, use a ridged grill pan to sear in some lines. It takes about 3 minutes a side. For the classic charred diamond grill pattern, rotate the pineapple slices about 45 degrees on one side during the charring process. Skin and core a fresh one yourself, or find one all trimmed in the cut produce section.

Min’s Cranberry Fruit Salad is the result of her crusade to bring vibrant colors and crisp textures to those brown winter meals—including plenty of the cheater pulled and chopped meats. Bright cranberries and fall fruits make a drop-dead gorgeous salad with body, color, and crunch. Smoked turkey, chicken, pork loin, and brisket are always better with a bright accessory. Freeze extra cranberries in the fall to whip this up throughout the winter.

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.

Adding a little sugar to frozen vegetables is an old country kitchen trick for turning the clock back to summer. It occurred to us that revitalizing frozen corn in some sugar water is essentially a sweet brine. The other trick is plenty of butter, just like corn on the cob. The first time we tried this was for a winter cheater barbecue party with piles of cheater brisket, pulled pork, and hot drums. Everybody loved the cute little cups of peppery sweet corn. It tasted remarkably fresh and was loads cheaper than out-of-season fresh corn or frozen ears. Corn absolutely goes with every kind of American barbecue.