It wasn't until I read Rebecca Woods's intelligent and delightful BLAH BLAH book on whole grains that I understood my bean routine could apply equally well to whole grains. Instead of cooking just enough for tonight's supper, I make enough for two or three meals. Tonight's wheat berries might be the foundation for a cheese casserole with celery, broccoli, and canned tomatoes. Tomorrow's might make a sweet dessert pudding with fried apples and maple syrup. The next days miht get baked into a loaf of whole wheat bread, adding chew to the crumb and crackle to the crust. Or tonight's parched corn could partner with roasted red and green peppers to make the filling for a savory omelette, tomorrow's could enliven corn muffins, and the next day's could go into succotash.

Plain roasted vegetables are another example of foods that can be precooked en masse and then used over several days. Tonight's supper, let's say, is going to feature a heavenly dish from Darra Goldstein's <u>The Georgian Feast</i> (BLAH BLAH, date, page), roasted beets with sour cherry sauce. Oiling and roasting four beets takes almost no longer than oiling and roasting two, and then you have been on hand like mney in the bank to make cold roasted beets with the Greek garlic sauce known as skordalia or Laurie Colwin's pasta with beet sauce (BLAH BLAH, date, page). Starting with plain roasted turnips, you can have turnips with rice noodles and Thai green curry sauce one night, duck with turnips and green olives another night, and cold roasted turnips with Peruvian piri-piri the third. Roasting a whole winter squash could give you squash chunks with gorgonzola one night, Caribbean squash soup a second, and honey & vanilla squash custard a third. If I have room in the refrigerator I'll store the extra cooked vegetables there

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; if not, I'll nuke them in the microwave once or twice a day, just as I simmer my beans and grains to keep them from going bad

fermentation, anti-refrigeration, discuss

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Leafy greens don't take to roasting, but they take beautifully to wilting in a covered frying pan. Only recently I figured out that in addition to oiling the bottom and sides of the pan it helps to oil the inside of the top, so that the greens don't stick to the top before they wilt. Sometimes I wilt them whole, sometimes cut into long strips sidewise. A huge frying pan of greens cooks down into half a cup almost instantly, so I keep adding more and more greens till I've got enough to last me three or four days. My husband and I like wilted greens so much on their own or with a little garlic and lemon juice that I'm likely to serve them plain on two out of the four nights I get from a big frying pan full of greens. The first night will be wilted greens, the second long-cooked greens. The other two ights might be greens with raisins and pine nuts, Chinese-style greens with sesame oil and soy sauce, egg noodles with creamed greens, greens with cider vinegar, hard-boiled eggs, and slivers of smoked ham, poached eggs on warm wilted greens ... I could go on and on. I <i>do</i> go on and on.

On any given day, then, I'm likely to have a pot of beans, a pot of grain, some NOTE NOTE broth NOTE NOTE, several kinds of roasted vegetables, and some kind of wilted greens on hand. These are my convenience foods, the backbone of my cooking.