This post originally appeared in the February 17, 2024 edition of The Move, pro tips and advice from Eater’s dining experts, direct to your inbox, direct to your inbox. Subscribe now.
I’m a boring home cook. I have just a handful of go-to recipes for lunch and dinner in my arsenal, most of which are variations on the “house meal” theme. To combat this, I went through a phase where I’d buy one random new condiment or cooking sauce each grocery trip — jarred simmer sauces, spreads, chutneys, or marinated veggies that could be thrown in for a new burst of flavor. As a hack, it worked in that the act of cooking felt more varied and surprising. But more often than not, after using a cooking sauce one or two times, the majority of the jar would be forgotten and left to languish in the back of the fridge. Thankfully, I’ve come around to a better, less wasteful approach: I source these fun, little add-ons from the “extra sauces” part of a restaurant’s delivery menu.
On delivery apps, most restaurants offer these small, $1-3 containers of the sauces or the extras that complement or accompany their meals: dipping sauces, salsas, gravies, aiolis, dollops of hot sauces, and dabs of house-made vinegars. The trick (and fun, honestly) is to think about how to apply them outside of that specific delivery meal, or outside their intended purposes entirely: It feels like channeling the deep flavors and uniqueness of a restaurant meal into my mediocre meal prep at home.
The top shelf of my fridge is littered with these tiny one- and two-ounce plastic containers: There’s a Calabrian chile crisp and a dill-forward ranch dressing from a local pizza cart; I don’t eat ranch with pizza, but I make sure to request a couple extra each time we order in for the next day’s salad. (The house-made chile crisp, more oniony than spicy, adds a bit of life to basically everything.) There’s the creamy, white gold barbecue sauce and “jerk”-like dipping sauce from a local rotisserie chicken joint; the former was originally intended to be eaten with chicken, but I get it specifically to use on oven-roasted potatoes later in the week. There’s usually a mole from the neighborhood tamale place (which is blessedly sold in a much larger, half-pint container), as well as side orders of curry, both of which I use as a simmer sauce for chicken thighs and serve with rice. This line of thinking works well for rounding your weeknight meals with fridge-friendly sides like pickled vegetables. I always, always order a side or two of kimchi to eat with the next day’s meal.
Coming directly from restaurants, all of these products are much fresher than anything that I’d find in a shelf-stable jar. While it’s definitely more expensive than getting a similar product off the grocery store shelf, having a few of these tiny containers at the ready allows me to use the smallest of details to elevate whatever I throw together. These restaurant-made treasures are enough to make cooking feel fun and spontaneous, and they motivate me to actually make dinner instead of reaching for the delivery app once again.
