Recipes from Cooking is Terrible

Selected Recipes from Cooking is Terrible

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Shitty Soup

This soup isn’t actually shitty—it’s actually nice, and I eat it a lot—but we started calling it shitty soup, and the name’s stuck.

For one person, bring just under two cups of stock to a boil.

Add about 2 Tbsp of pastina. When the pasta is nearly done (which is only like, two minutes), crack in an egg and turn the pot to a simmer. After about two minutes of simmering, add some sort of veggie—shredded carrots, fresh or frozen spinach, frozen peas—and let it cook for another minute. Tada! You’ve made soup.

You can change this up, and don’t have to include all three bits—pasta and a few veggies, or just an egg boiled in stock, is great, and totally a meal. I give all three components mainly so there’s a note about timing.

There are a million variations on this—add tomato paste or sesame oil, add other veggies, cook the egg to different degrees of doneness, etc. You can add a little cheese at the end, or a handful of (rinsed) tinned beans, or shreds of previously cooked meat. But at its most basic, broth + something else = soup, which is a meal that you can totally manage to make for yourself in under ten minutes, and then you can smugly tell the internet that you’re sure that what they’re having is nice and all, but you’re having homemade soup. And let’s be honest—most nights, this soup is not good enough to justify that, but who cares. Sometimes you gotta take what you can get.

 

Butter Bean Salad

Rinse and drain a tin of butter beans. Add crumbled feta and capers. Dress with lemon juice and olive oil.

Variations: Add quartered marinated artichoke hearts. Add chopped red onion. Add fresh chopped parsley. Add sumac to the dressing. (If you do all these things, you have a main course salad that is fancy enough to serve at a party, or to grudgingly take to the work potluck.)

Keeps in the fridge for three to five days.

 

That Couscous Stuff

This is my favourite lazy recipe. I took it to work for lunch every day for years, because it takes literally two minutes of prep. It’s real easy to eat at room temp, but is also nice chilled or warmed. It’s very forgiving.

Mix one part couscous—the small kind that looks like grains, not the larger kind that looks like pearls—with slightly more than one part stock or water, or water and a sprinkling of stock powder. You don’t even have to heat the liquid; cold is fine. (The proportions I use when I make this are 1/4 cup couscous to 1/3 cup liquid, but this’ll vary some with how hungry you are and how old the couscous you’re using is.) Add some olive oil and lemon juice. Add rinsed and drained chickpeas and some spinach, either fresh or frozen. Let it sit for at least half an hour before you eat it. It’s fine to make in the morning and throw into a bag to ignore until lunchtime.

Variations: Use other veggies instead of the spinach. Use leftover roasted vegetables. Add cheese—parmesan and feta are both good. Toss in some olives, or maybe some capers. Use salad dressing instead of oil and lemon.