Small Bites: Summer Sauces, Big Flavors, No Stove Required

Find fun and creative way to enhance summer meals with no-cook sauces in your Empty Nest Kitchen. Christine shares her tips and tricks on making flavorful sauces without turning on the stove, perfect for the hot summer months. You'll learn a simple framework using fats, acids, and flavor enhancers like fresh herbs. Christine also introduces her new mini-course, 'Just Add Sauce,' which provides detailed guidance on creating and remixing various no-cook sauces, emphasizing ease and adaptability for small-scale cooking.

00:00 Introduction to No-Cook Sauces

00:46 Why No-Cook Sauces?

03:16 The Basics of Sauce Making

05:01 Creative Sauce Ideas

08:24 Practical Tips and Tools

09:04 Challenge and Conclusion

10:49 Special Offer: Mini Course

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Transcript

0:01

You know, those dinners that are just fine, but maybe they need a little something. That's where sauces come in and in the summer, I'm all about no cook sauces bringing big flavor without ever turning on the stove. Welcome to the Empty Nest Kitchen where we're finding fun in the kitchen. Now that the kids have flown the coop, I'm Christine Van Bloon, a cooking teacher with over 25 years of experience here to show you tips, tricks, and joy in your kitchen, all while trying something new. Let's get cooking. Today I am gonna walk you through why no cook sauces should definitely be part of your summer rotation. And I want you to think about how we're gonna use some creativity, and I'm even going to give you a few ideas to get your own creative juices flowing without getting into the secret sauce that I'm gonna share in my newest mini course. But let's talk about this, you know, sauces. First of all, I am a sauce girl. Like my husband always says that where I grew up in South central pa, everything had a sauce on it. It's really true that everything had gravy on it, but everything did have a sauce, and I love sauces. You know, you can use a sauce to take protein and stretch it across multiple meals, or you can take leftovers and maybe bump'em up a little and make'em feel like something fresh instead of leftovers. And of course, they add tons and tons of flavor and they're really, really good for Empty nesters cooking for one or two because you don't have to make a ton of sauce. I mean, listen, I love a ton of sauce, but I'm really thinking here really fast, really easy, healthy-ish vibe sort of deal. And I want something that I can make without having to make a pan sauce and a pan sauce. Wonderful, right? You can saute some chicken and then throw some onions in and a little garlic in and deglaze the pan with some white wine or maybe even just some chicken broth. And then add some more chicken broth and scrape up all those brown bits and cook it down a bit. And if you feel fancy, you can throw a chunk of butter into it to, you know, make the sauce really rich and velvety. But that is not. Where we are, that is not August, right? That is October through March. And right now in the dog days of summer, it is about what is the easiest thing we can do? Can I turn on my air fryer, cook a couple of salmon filets and still have something to put on top of them that's gonna make them really, really great? So. Think of it as a framework. This is what we really wanna do because I know that you have got your creativity in there, but we do get a little intimidated sometimes because we don't wanna mess it up. Right? So what I want you to think of is we're going to use a fat. We're gonna use an acid and then we're gonna bump up the flavor. Now that sounds chefy, right? You've got it. You can do this because we call our oils fats, right? And acids. Well, I mean, that could be as easy as any kind of a vinegar or any kind of citrus juice. And then our flavor pop there. Fresh herbs, right? My oregano has got, I mean, it's basically going to seed right now, but I can still get plenty of oregano leaves off of there. The basil's still looking good. The chives, bless their hearts are still going, so you can make this as simple as doing some kind of a vinaigrette. I love a vinaigrette or really rich vinaigrette for maybe one of the bowls. You guys know. I love making bowls with farro and whatnot, but a nice vinaigrette could work really well with that. Little bit of Dijon mustard because it's an emulsifier, it makes it all hang out together. Little bit of vinegar, some finely minced shallot because shallots are, whisk that together and then stream in some olive oil while you're whisking. Salt pepper, boom. But we can also get into it and get a little funky with it. Texturally, right? We don't just have to do oil and vinegar. We can go beyond and use plain Greek yogurt. I'm actually super into the plain Greek yogurt now, and I found out that Wegmans sells it in a four pack. You can also buy the big container, but I'm finding for me personally, the four pack of the individual servings. Is perfect when it comes to cooking for just two of us, right? So you can use that yogurt. You could use some tahini, which is a ground sesame paste. You could do nut butters. Even an almond butter, right? Or even avocado. You could whisk avocado. And a mini chopper and a blender. That is really good, especially if you wanna do something green. Goddessy. But in addition to the texture, you also, you know, we need it to taste really good. So that's where those fresh herbs are coming in. Of course, you can do some garlic. I actually am into doing the garlic on my microplane. Grater. I love that. Be careful though, because those suckers are sharp. But a little zest too, like a little lemon zest. It is really, really good Now. Let's think about our concepts here because we're not really. Dealing in exact formulas. You guys know. I always say it's a meal, not a mortgage. And I figure we're all gonna live to be a hundred. And if we do that, we come back to that figure of eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 109. Thousand meals in your life. So if you get a sauce wrong one day, really in the scheme of things, it doesn't, it doesn't have that big of an impact. So think about it as sort of a concept, like you can do that yogurt and you can make it a drizzle, right? You can add things to it. To thin it out, you could do water, oil lemon juice might add too much tart because yogurt has some kang to it anyway. But you know, a tiki is yogurt and garlic and dill and cucumber. Easy. You could go back and try one of those vinaigrette and load it with fresh herbs. I mean, load it. My thyme and my tarragon are growing pretty well as well, so I would totally do that. Or you could even do, I don't know if you've ever had the sesame noodles at Chinese restaurants. I haven't seen them on menus for a long time, but when I lived in New York, it was one of my favorite, favorite things because it. Didn't have peanut butter, right? We always called'em peanut butter noodles. But really sesame has that great nuttiness, so you can use any kind of a nut butter to make a sauce just like that. And those tend to have a lot of viscosity. And because you're dealing. With that richness of of a nut butter, you can hit it pretty significantly with some acid again, right? Think white wine vinegar or white vinegar or lemon juice or something. Oh, lime juice is really good. And these are all things that. If you do not have a mini chopper as an Empty nester, listen, I am not a proponent of spending any money. We don't have to spend. I would much rather spend my money on doing fun things and going out to fun places. But you know how I feel about the air fryer. And I will say that just a little mini chopper is so great because. When you take it apart, the pieces all go right in the top rack of your dishwasher. And to me, that is exactly what I want for that because cleanup is part of the, part of the whole thing that we're dealing with. So here is a challenge for you for this week. Try to make a new sauce, like just something you're already cooking. So I make a lot of salmon filets with an arugula salad with a vinegarette. I might do like a TKI kind of sauce instead, and do the yogurt and the lemon and the dill and maybe a little olive oil and, and taste it. When you do this, taste it kind of as you go. Like don't be married to the recipe. It's just sauce. It's just sauce. So give it a little taste here and there as you're going. And I do like to kind of season as I go so you can add a little solid beginning, see if you need it. All that good stuff now. Just remember that when we're doing a no cooked sauce, no cooked sauces typically don't wanna be heated. A lot of times they're gonna break on you and you're not gonna get a good result. It's that. If you heat up that yogurt sauce, it could separate. When chefs talk about a sauce breaking, it basically means it separates into its individual components, so when you're thinking about these sauces, think about using them in cold applications, or if you're pulling a piece of meat out of the air fryer or a piece of fish off the grill or something like that, you can sauce it there, but it's not something where you would wanna have the sauce on the grill, if that makes any. Sense to you You're not gonna use it as a marinade, you're gonna use it as a sauce and you know I've got something special for you.'cause I always do. But if you are loving the idea of the no-cook sauces, but you want a little help pulling it all together. Ta, I have got something special for you. I have just launched my mini course. Just add sauce and it gives you a full framework to kind of mix and match and remix sauces all summer long. Now listen, the video is not super exciting because, hey, I'm a cook. I'm a teacher. I am not a videographer, but I promise I'm working on it. It is so quick and fun. The entire course. It's all recorded. You've got five videos, they're each five minutes or so or less, and they are lickety split. I have got a sauce matrix. I've got remix options. I have got all of the things in there, so it's really fun and it's super packed with Mediterranean sorts of flavors. You can find a link in the show notes, of course, or you can always head over to Empty Nest Kitchen dot com to check it out. Oh, and let me tell you this, my delicious little mini course. 17 bucks. That's it. That's it. I poured my heart, soul, and yogurt into the sucker, so I hope you'll check it out. As always, I am so delighted that you took the time to listen. Let me know about your sauce success, and I'll see you in the kitchen.