There are a few recipes I try to always have prepped and in my fridge because they make me look like a culinary pro, even when I’m in a tight spot. They are all examples of front loading, meaning it takes time to make them up front, but they stick around for quite a while in the fridge and are ready and waiting when you need to cook fast. Let’s say you fly home from a trip; it’s late, you're exhausted and hungry, and there’s “nothing” to eat in your kitchen. You could call Doordash. Or, you could dig around in the fridge and find peppers marinated in olive oil, garlic, and herbes de Provence. Things are looking up. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Heat up those peppers, arrange some on a slice of toast, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. That’s good eating.

My shortlist? Off the top of my head, it’s a good idea to stock herb butter, tomato confit, stewed tomatoes & onions, homemade salsa, roasted eggplant slices and peppers marinated in olive oil and wine vinegar, fig jam, herb-infused olive oil, marinated olives, and homemade chicken stock. There are perishable grocery staples I always keep on hand, too, namely lemons and creme fraiche, to add acidity when needed to balance a dish. Carrots, onions, garlic, and shallots to flavor a dish. A big wedge of Parmesan from Costco.

I’m writing about this now because, even though I’ve cooked and eaten with a farm-to-table focus here in the Napa Valley for over three decades, it wasn’t until this past summer that I made a concerted effort to process and preserve every last scrap of produce from our garden; and in doing so, I found myself enriched with sauces/confits/pestos/salsas/romescos/marinated vegetables/chutneys that made cooking more of a pleasure. Some rotate in and rotate out, others become staples that I start to depend on.

From time to time I’ll build out my list and share in hopes that it inspires my fellow home cooks to bask in the pleasure of well-prepared, healthy food and good wine. To the home cook, all the work of buying, prepping, cooking, and cleaning may sometimes seem less a pleasure than a time sink, and virtue seems to be awarded to those, in our culture, who work the most hours in the office or gym and have pristine, unused kitchens and cupboards crammed with protein bars.

I cook because I consider food to be the best weapon in the front line of defending my family’s metabolic health, immune system health, cognitive ability, and happy mood. Now that we have an “empty nest,” my philosophy hasn’t changed. Possibly I spend more time in the kitchen now. When people my age stop buying whole milk, I think, “They’ve given up.” I mean this metaphorically, not literally. We should afford ourselves the same careful nutrition we would give to a child with growing bones; the fact that preparing food is an art and a pleasure is a bonus.

#1 Marinated Peppers and Eggplant

We recently picked all the end of summer crop from our garden, including tiny finger eggplants and peppers that hadn’t had time to turn red. Layering roasted peppers and fried eggplant slices with garlic, herbes de Provence, wine vinegar, and olive oil is a delectable way of preserving the bounty that can be used in so many ways: as an appetizer, side dish, on a pizza, in a pasta or risotto, etc. This is the sort of dish that can knock about in your fridge for far longer than the recipe tells you, but chances are it will disappear fast. Below is one way to serve the eggplant and how to pair it with wine.

Just one way of using fried, marinated eggplant slices.

2. Tomato Confit

Tomatoes slowly roasted at low heat in their own juices with olive oil, herbs, and garlic are my go-to for adding a layer of savory umami depth to any dish; even the olive oil has a rich, caramelized flavor that outperforms canned tomato paste or sundried tomatoes packed in oil. The confit lasts a long time in the fridge but can also be portioned and frozen. If I’ve cooked a rice pilaf, I’ll mix a tablespoon of confit in, not enough to turn it pink or to sauce it, just enough to enrich it. One night, it was growing late, and I had no dinner plan; I looked in the fridge and found a package of ground beef. I decided to make meatball subs by smearing tomato confit on one side of a bun and stacking meatballs and marinated peppers and eggplant on the other, then melting fresh mozzarella on top. In 30 minutes, I’d gone from “there’s nothing to eat” to “this is so good, you can’t buy it.”

Slow cooking at low heat transforms tomatoes into an umami flavor bomb.

#3 Herb Butter

I know, I know, I know. Compound butters. Mix blue cheese or sundried tomatoes with softened butter, roll into a log, slice on top of steaks. Somehow this never caught fire in my imagination. One night I made fried fish with a peanut/roasted red pepper/tomato confit romesco sauce and rice with herb butter from Chef Vivian Howard’s book Deep Run Roots. The flavors were so happy and fresh, but what really captivated me was her herb butter, maybe because it contains the zest and juice of a whole lemon, along with basil, mint, and parsley. I contrived to keep this on hand whenever possible; it will be my new go-to when Kristof brings home oysters for grilling, or for enriching couscous or rice. One thing’s for sure: I’ll never buy a box of pilaf with dehydrated flavorings again.

Easy to make lemony herb butter elevates plain steamed white rice into something ethereal.

#4 Homemade Stock

Homemade stock or bone broth makes me look good - literally (well, OK, at least it helps and doesn’t hurt). I’m not someone who has the money or the ethos to visit the dermatologist or the plastic surgeon as I age; I figure consuming the hydrophilic colloids and easy to assimilate collagen in homemade meat stock is better for my skin than anything I could put on my skin.

Plus, always having stock or concentrated demi-glace on hand makes me look brilliant in the kitchen. Not only does gelatin-rich stock aid in digestion and nourish the body with electrolytes, minerals, and collagen, it also forms the base for delicious and easy soups and classic sauces that simply can’t be replicated with store-bought stock, broth, or excitotoxin-infused (MSG) bouillon cubes. Homemade stock is case in point of the link between the deeply satisfying pleasures of eating nourishing food and good health. Too often, people have been made to fear wholesome pleasure and to count calories, to the detriment of their health and vitality.

This is how I keep my refrigerator stocked with homemade stock at all times: every time I go to Costco, I buy two rotisserie chickens for $4.99/each. I tear off all the meat and freeze portions separately to use in various recipes (chicken chili, wet burrito with salsa verde, etc.) The stock I make from the carcass is like a bonus meal for free. I add the bones, cartilage, skin, and gelatinous juices at the bottom of the plastic bag to my Instant Pot. I add a couple rough-chopped, unpeeled carrots, an onion, some celery, a couple peppercorns, sea salt, a bay leaf, and a spoonful of wine or wine vinegar to help leach minerals out of the bones and into the stock. If you wanted, you could add leeks, chile peppers, or a little piece of cheesecloth with herbs and spices tied into it (cloves, garlic, parsley, thyme). Then I add filtered water to the point where it almost, but not quite, covers everything. I cook on high pressure for 75 minutes, then cool and strain. The sign of a good stock? Mine (pictured) is gelatinous even at room temperature. Refrigerate it, and it it’s solid.

Have you ever wondered why pediatricians recommend apple sauce and rice or wheat cereal as a baby’s first solid foods? I did. I began my research into healthy eating as a young mother decades ago in the context of someone living in Napa Valley foodie and winemaking culture, and much to my surprise, the delicious things I figured were vices turned out to be virtues. Homemade meat stock was one of my baby’s first non-breastmilk foods, and I served it to her in a little teacup so that she could feed herself, along with soft-cooked egg yolk from our chickens and frozen raw organic beef liver that I grated on top of the egg yolks. She never got the denatured, sugary, pureed fruits and vegetables in little jars that for some bizarre reason harbor heavy metals or the GMO, pesticide-soaked, hard to digest cereals that set a person up for a lifetime of food allergies. A great source of information on the health benefits of homemade meat stock is the Weston A. Price Foundation. Though you could just as easily ignore health benefits altogether and immerse yourself in the techniques of classic cooking; Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking has a definitive section on Stocks and Aspics.

#5 Stewed Tomatoes

Again, I find myself recommending and repeatedly preparing a sauce from Chef Vivian Howard, in this case her Stewed Tomatoes. It is remarkably different from any other tomato preparation, I think because of the ratio of caramelized onions to tomatoes. I find myself using this sauce frequently and in ways I wouldn’t use regular roasted tomatoes or tomato sauce; it’s lighter, sweeter, and just the thing on a breakfast sandwich, in a quesadilla, as a side with meat and potatoes, or as a bed for grilled shrimp. The ratio of 2 yellow onions, cooked in butter, to 8 tomatoes, is the heart of the sauce, along with garlic, brown sugar, red wine vinegar, chili flakes, and basil. After stewing, you mix in bread crumbs or a little cornmeal to thicken up the tomato juices. I think I got carried away (in the image above) and added a bit too much cornmeal, but it won’t be a problem, trust me. I’m thinking it will do nicely as a bed for seared scallops and a side of asparagus.

#6 Fig Jam

Bad charcuterie plates like the one I recently had at an airport wine bar make me sad. Overpriced condiments do, too. I recently saw a very tiny, very expensive jar of fig jam at a gourmet market; the “jam” was clear and pink, so I’m not sure where the figs went. Maybe it was a “spiritual” jam; essence of fig; idea of fig. But no real figs. Every summer, I make quarts of robust fig jam studded with savory shallots and rosemary from our sprawling fig tree; it keeps much longer than I let on, and it makes any cheese plate special. Add some to a roasting pork loin, pan-fried chicken cutlets, and more. What else could you do? Add it to a salad with balsamic vinegar, radicchio, prosciutto, and hazelnuts. Put it on a sandwich or in a quesadilla. I remember Kristof planting a tiny $3 fig seedling from the hardware store years ago; if you don’t have a tree, you can buy a basket of figs in season and make a bunch of jam that is not clear.

#7 Shortbread Cookies

So, cookies are obviously not a sauce, but I aspire to always keep pure butter shortbread onhand as a staple in my kitchen, just the thing when someone stops by for a cup of tea or to serve as an easy dessert. (I’m especially obsessed with Dorie Greenspan’s savory cookies; she calls them cocktail cookies, but I think the reverse. There is great room for playing with pairing dessert wines and savory cookies.) I think of shortbread as a quintessentially “Napa” dessert, not overly sweet, and just begging for seasonal adaptations. There are so many elegant flavorings: Meyer lemon peel, crystallized ginger, lavender, tarragon and dried apricot, etc. The image pictured here is from Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for Pecan and Butterscotch Shortbread in Dorie’s Cookies, and the flavoring comes, not from nasty, artificial butterscotch chips or anything like that, but rather from the 2 tablespoons of Scotch that you add to the buttery dough.

I’m a reluctant baker, at best. Precision in the concrete world is not my thing; I’m more of a books and ideas person. “Close enough” peppers my kitchen vocabulary, and I’m known for brave substitutions. On top of everything else, Kristof and I have developed “winemaker palate,” meaning we don’t like overly sweet things, plus he’s allergic to eggs. Not the profile of someone who spends a lot of time in the kitchen baking? Paradoxically, it is. No one else is going to bake us low sugar, egg-free treats, so I’m learning to be a better baker. More patient. More precise. I’ve begun using a scale to weigh ingredients.

I was in the kitchen silently cursing Dorie Greenspan’s dough (why do we chill cookie dough, only to make it impossible to work, so that we then have to wait for it to thaw?), when Kristof came into the kitchen.

“Baking is so much like winemaking,” he said.

“How so?” I said warily. “Because I was just thinking how much I dislike baking. People who are really into baking are a different type; rule followers; there’s the whiff of the clinic and the dental chair about them. You know, like people who have special baking utensils that no one else gets to touch? Uptight people. Perfectionists. People with white carpets.”

“Precision and time,” he said.

“Good thing you’re the winemaker, then,” I said. “But you’re not uptight.”

“About the things that matter, I am,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I said. I’ve cringed when I’ve seen winemakers not pay attention to details that matter, like rainwater in their grape bins or dirty punch-down tools. But I’ve also seen micro-managers who make bad or mid wines. May we all be perfectionists about the things that matter and let those that don’t fall by the wayside.

#8 Marinated Olives

Thirty years ago when Kristof and I were first married, a scientist named Steve, a consultant at ETS Labs who developed their grape phenolic chemistry program, befriended us and cooked dinner for us a couple times. He gave us a recipe for marinated olives that I still make.

Kristof met Steve because he’d taken a job as the client liaison at ETS Labs. Kristof was just back from working two back-to-back harvests as a “cellar rat,” first in Napa Valley, then in South Africa, and he wasn’t ready to commit to winemaking as a career. The pay was bad, and he’d already had a few near death experiences, once cleaning an Archimedes screw, the other cleaning a tank. Working in an office may have been safer, but it made him so miserable wearing a tie and sitting in a cubicle, that he jumped back into production winemaking. However, he often says that he learned a lot about practical wine chemistry—not in a classroom—but rather working for the lab.

Steve’s recipe for marinated olives came from Rutherford Grill. You add olive oil, lemon juice, minced onion and garlic, chopped anchovies, shaved fennel, fresh tarragon and thyme, dried basil, anise seed, black pepper, and fennel seed to a mixture of two cups of cured black olives and two cups of cured green olives. To serve the olives, you drain them, warm them slightly, and splash them with balsamic vinegar. Homemade marinated olives are nice to have on hand. Warming them before serving is one of those details that matters.

A few years ago, Kristof decided to cure his own olives, a different undertaking altogether. Beautiful olive trees adorn homes, vineyards, and winery properties throughout Napa Valley, but harvesting olives is labor intensive, with no economic incentive, and olive fruit is mostly seen as messy and undesirable. With access to a mechanical harvester, Kristof decided to pick, sort, and brine a few pick bins full of olives. The question remained: would the effort be worthwhile when good marinated olives are easy to come by? Our verdict was that the freshness of home-cured olives made it a worthy, if laborious, endeavor. He marinated his olives in lemon peel, cinnamon stick, garlic, rosemary, and sweet red peppers. Delicious!

Always on Hand: Staples of the Wine Country Kitchen