🥔 Food People, Parent Picks: Noah's Favorite Things
Cookbook author and food writer Noah Galuten on bean work, pita parties, and why the rice cooker is your new grill hack.
Food People, Parent Picks: we ask our favorite chefs, food writers, and industry insiders who we interview in our Order Up! Series to share the products, books, and bites they can’t live without.
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Earlier this week we sat down with Noah Galuten — cookbook author, TV host, and the chef behind I'm Legally Required to Feed You on Substack — to talk about feeding a family without pretending it’s simple. We covered the trade-offs of a Tuesday night dinner (pleasure, nutrition, money, time), why he’s a self-described fiber acolyte, and how he handles “no” at the table without making it a fight. If you missed it, Noah’s realness is worth checking out. Head on over here to read the full Order Up! interview.
Today we’re getting practical. Noah’s sharing the pantry and freezer staples that get him through a chaotic week, the rice-cooker-plus-grill move he leans on for fast family dinners, the one weeknight bowl his whole family actually eats without negotiating, and the comfort soup his kids always ask for when someone’s having a rough day.
Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?
Dried beans, dried pasta, and sauerkraut. I make my own sauerkraut when I can — it’s shelf-stable, healthy, and you can throw it into a turkey wrap in a pinch. I was raised to believe you should always be ready to cook for eight people who showed up in the middle of the night. I’m a mob wife about it — I want to be ready to make spaghetti pomodoro or pasta e fagioli for Fat Tony and his six cousins. So canned tomatoes are also always on the list.
Frozen peas are the best frozen vegetable — they freeze well, they cook fast, and in a pinch you can make a cacio e pepe with peas instead of pepper.
If someone has only grilled burgers and hot dogs, what’s the next dish to throw on the grill?
A pork souvlaki pita. Or chicken, or beef, or mushroom — whatever you want. It’s wild to me that people aren’t doing this more. If you think about a burger, you’re patty-ing meat, slicing onions and tomatoes, making a sauce, grilling, building a handheld with starch. Souvlaki is the same amount of work. Butterfly some pork chops, marinate in oregano, olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic. Make the tzatziki ahead. When it’s go time, grill the meat, grill a pita, and layer everything. People will be blown away.
Weeknight dinner you make in your sleep?
The easy answer is spaghetti with tomato sauce — can of tomatoes, done.
The real one is soborodon — Japanese ground chicken rice bowl. Ground chicken in a pot with sake, soy, and mirin. Stir it with four chopsticks. Spoon it onto rice. Fast, easy, comforting.
My “nutrition dad” version: I grate cauliflower (or buy cauliflower rice) and cook it right alongside the chicken. It takes on the texture of the meat, adds a ton of nutrition, and extends the protein. Almost one-to-one cauliflower to chicken. They house it. Soy sauce on top. The whole family eats it. [Check out Noah’s recipe on his Substack!]
One vegetable that’s better on the grill than anywhere else?
Broccolini. Especially in season, you get those little crispy edges.
Jimmy Nardello peppers are also incredible on the grill. They’re a sweet pepper, edible seeds, great raw or cooked, so you can get a blackened side on the grill quickly without overcooking. In the book I toss them in a red yuzu vinaigrette — red pepper fermented on top of red pepper. It’s a hit. (Corn, sorry, is at its best in a crab boil.)
Kitchen appliance that’s worth its weight in gold?
The rice cooker, no contest. You can set it hours ahead of dinner and it’ll have perfect, hot, fluffy rice waiting whenever you get back. It also reheats rice well. My kids would eat rice with soy sauce and cucumbers all day and be perfectly happy.
A blender is the other one, especially with picky kids. My wife and kids don’t love the skins on regular tomatoes, but cherry tomatoes have higher pectin, so blending makes a bright, fresh sauce that emulsifies fast and doesn’t need to thicken the way most fresh tomato sauces do.
A cookbook besides your own that you love?
Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art [Bookshop, Amazon]. It’s how I learned to cook other cuisines growing up, pre-blog era, when cookbooks were the reference point. There are obvious flaws in the publishing industry around who was historically allowed to write those, but the Tsuji book was foundational for me. I’ve evolved my own version around my taste over the years.
The other is The Woks of Life [Bookshop, Amazon]. Their book and their blog are incredible, and wok cooking is a secret hack for feeding a family. If you have a moment to mise everything out in advance, you can have a stir-fry on the table in four minutes.
Favorite seasoning or sauce?
Soy sauce. Easy answer. And an underrated one: Yondu. It’s a Korean condiment, and it’s a great way to add flavor to something, especially for vegetarians. Vegan fish sauce is honestly the best way to describe it.
Meal everyone in your house eats without negotiating?
That soborodon is a big one.
The other is my fiber dad turkey chili (it’s on my Substack). Red lentils dissolve into ground turkey and take on the texture of ground beef, so you get more protein, more fiber, more beans, less meat. Then I set up the condiment bar — chips, sour cream, cheese for them; yogurt, hot sauce, lime, cilantro for me. They put their toppings on and they eat the thing.
Comfort meal your family loves on a rough day?
Chicken soup. Always. I keep a vat of chicken broth ready for the moment somebody starts to come down with something, though that’s more or less constant now because my son’s been sick for two years straight thanks to preschool. The version I do is what I call Jewish-Italian chicken noodle soup, from my first cookbook: egg noodles (or sometimes shells), classic carrot, celery, onion, parsley, with Parmesan grated on top. The Parmesan makes everyone happy.