My better half and I split dinner meal prep responsibilities throughout the week based on who typically gets home first.
The nights prior to my turn, I usually ask if she has any preferences for the following day. Since her lunch normally consists of a hearty salad topped with chicken, her reply is almost always “not chicken”.
Of course, I do have plenty of “not chicken” recipes including:
- Pork Tenderloin Diablo
- Turkey Taco Bowls
- Chickpea Tomato Salad with Sauteed Salmon
- Sweet & Sassy Salmon
But sometimes chicken still finds its way onto the menu.
More often than not on weekdays that recipe tends to be Chicken Curry. Also more often than not, she’ll walk through the door and say, “Mmm, smells good,” even though she knows that the aroma wafting from the pan means it’s chicken (again).
And that brings me to the actual point of today’s tip (other than linking to past recipes which you might’ve missed).
Spice is the variety of life
Yes, I know that the actual cliché is: “Variety is the spice of life.” But I’m intentionally flipping the script today for a reason.
In the context of life, the original idea is that variety adds excitement to the otherwise humdrum monotony of repetition. While that’s likely not a new idea to anyone, it can be easy to forget—precisely because the statement has become so cliché—that the metaphor loses its meaning without spices and food. So in the context of food, the intention with the flipped script is to say that the simplest method to add variety isn’t about finding new recipes, but rather changing the spices we use in the recipes we have.
Check out this handy infographic from Precision Nutrition on how to “create the perfect meal” to see what I mean.
Although all the sample meals at the end include different primary ingredients, part of the genius of the entire process lies in step #3. By simply selecting a specific regional profile and adding a few spices and garnishes from the provided list for that profile, you can create an entirely different flavor for the meal, all other ingredients being the same.
Which, returning to my story, is why I can “get away with” making chicken for dinner when she also had it for the prior however many lunches. The ginger and curry powder (Indian flavor which contains cumin and turmeric) are different enough from the oregano and basil (Italian flavor) which she uses on her salad that the meals feel more like variety than repetition.
Putting it into practice
This week I’ll offer you a challenge/experiment to apply the idea.
Pick a protein, veggie, carb, and fat from the Create the Perfect Meal infographic linked above (although I’d also suggest being critical about your choice of oil).
Then pick three different regional flavor profiles from the list and, using the same main ingredients (e.g. protein, veggies, carb, fat), create the “same” meal with spices and garnishes from the different profiles. Obviously, there’s some overlap of spices between regions. So, preferably, choose regions with completely different spices or different spices from similar regions.
For example: cilantro, cumin, and lime (from the Mexican profile) and mint, ginger, green onion, and chiles (from the Thai region) instead of cilantro, lime and chiles (from both regions).
Last but certainly not least, enjoy the meals(!!!) and let me know the difference you thought it made (or didn’t)!
On a semi-related aside, this “same, but different” approach to creating variety in meals is the same (but different) kind of approach that also works with training.