You Should Be Stacking Your Soup! Let Me Show You How.

I have seen the future of home cooking, and it has six faces.

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This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.

When I moved from a big city to a small town a few years ago, I faced a reckoning. While I was already preparing most of my own meals, I’d no longer be able to decide that I was too tired to cook or just sick of my culinary repertoire and opt for takeout or delivery instead. (My town in New England has about five restaurants, most of which close during the off season, when there aren’t tourists to fill them.) My friend Lucy, a genius cook who can easily improvise dinner for random interesting people she met at the beach that day, offered a recommendation. “Whenever you make something fabulous, make extra and freeze it, or just freeze one portion of it, so you always have something different to eat.”

Technically, nothing prevented me from following Lucy’s advice—which, I admit, might sound obvious to those used to the kind of freezer space you can have outside of a city apartment—but I never truly got the hang of it until I discovered Souper Cubes. These silicon freezer molds look like oversized ice cube trays whose compartments come in an assortment of sizes: 2 cups, 1 cup, ½ cup, 2 tablespoons, and a diminutive one designed for scoops of cookie dough. These trays produce perfect rectangles of frozen food that you can pop out of the mold, slip into a labeled freezer bag, then store with maximum stackable space-saving efficiency.

As their name suggests, Souper Cubes provide an easy way to freeze and store servings of soup or stew. Right now, I’ve got cubes of my favorite (but very labor intensive) chicken Dijon stew, of which I made a double batch weeks ago, as well minestrone and cream of broccoli awaiting the next time I spend all day crashing on a deadline or return famished from a lengthy expedition. I’ve also taken to making my own versions of the frozen dinners I used to buy at Trader Joe’s (the nearest one is now a three-hour drive away), like chicken curry over rice with some green beans tucked alongside.

Speaking of rice, I also use Souper Cubes to freeze ingredients and side dishes too time-consuming to make on the spur of the moment. I can whip up a stir fry in 15 minutes, but in the past, I’d bail on that plan because the brown rice to eat it over takes 40 minutes to steam. Rice, however, freezes beautifully and can be restored to fluffy perfection in a microwave. Chilling and then reheating it will even increase the amount of resistant starch in rice, reducing the blood sugar spike that follows the consumption of the freshly cooked grains.

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Cooking up a batch of dried beans can take half a day, but they do taste much better than the canned kind, especially if, like me, you splurge on a subscription to a fancy heirloom bean club. Many recipes call for one or two cans of beans, so when I cook up a whole pound (which makes around four cans worth), I freeze the extra beans in 1½ cup portions for quick use in the future as an alternative to canned. I’ve also got standardized portions of frozen pesto, cooked hominy, and even some gravy base left over from Thanksgiving stashed away for the next time I want to roast a chicken.

Granted, I probably could find cheaper molds, or just freeze portions of food in the storage containers I already have. But there’s something so satisfying about the uniform way my cubes of soups and stews and dinners fill up my precious freezer space like folders in a filing cabinet, clearly marked and ready to serve. With a little forethought and the help of my Cubes, I can feed my appetites for order and lunch at the same time.

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Miatamil

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