Show Peggy Grote a virtually empty refrigerator, and she sees a feast. Her secrets will help you eat better. And they just may make you a billionaire.

by jay heinrichs • photography by brian kennedy • food photography by dave carlin

When I lived as a bachelor in Washington, D.C., I considered food to be more of a necessity than an indulgence. It sustained life, and it sustained my social life: I ate out most evenings, usually with women I met at work or the Y. On those nights when I stayed home in my efficiency apartment near Dupont Circle, I boldly cooked for myself

—if you can call what I did cooking. I made two basic dishes: hamburger in canned tomato soup and hamburger in canned mushroom soup. For variety, sometimes I shook a few drops of Worcestershire sauce into the tomato version. A dense head of iceberg lettuce made my salad. While waiting for the hot soup to turn the hamburger dark (it never occurred to me to brown the meat first), I poured a little salad dressing over part of the lettuce head and, leaning over the sink, took a big sloppy bite. “Bachelor salad,” I called it.

Needless to say, I didn’t entertain all that much.

But this story isn’t really about me. It’s about one of the most inventive chefs you could ever hope to meet. Her name is Peggy Grote.

Peggy is a soft-spoken genius who cooks for the wife of my wife’s boss, the dean of the Vermont Law School. To call Peggy a cook, however, is like calling Michelangelo a stoneworker. She concocts brilliantly simple meals with local ingredients, which she combines in novel yet balanced ways. I’ve spent many years eating on my expense account with lavish-spending advertising salespeople, and can honestly say I’d rather eat when Peggy is working the kitchen.

But what’s truly amazing is that she can make these terrific dishes out of virtually nothing. This 40-something woman reigns as queen of leftovers, the MacGyver of the kitchen. Like the inventive TV character, Peggy can take the most unlikely combination of down-at-the-heels, seen-better-days meats and vegetables, add a dash of spice, a dab of butter, a spoonful of raspberry preserve, and voila! Out of the kitchen emerges a meal fit for company.

Genie Shields, the dean’s wife, hired Peggy two years ago. The Shieldses entertain most nights, hosting law students, faculty and administrators, donors and friends. A personal chef doesn’t come cheap, but Genie said that Peggy’s frugality almost makes up for her salary. “She and I will go shopping together, and I’ll spend three times as much. I’ll buy these exotic ingredients, and too much of them, because I’m afraid we won’t have enough to eat. Peggy buys things in season, which are cheaper, and she knows when to stop.” More to the point, Peggy stretches what she buys. “I look in the fridge and see nothing,” Genie said. “Peggy looks and sees a feast.”

Example: One day, a week or so after Thanksgiving, the Shieldses had unexpected guests for lunch. “I didn’t think I had any food,” Genie says. There was stuff in the fridge, of course, but it was the sort you might put on a compost pile, not your dining room table: orange juice, some lettuce, a few oranges, old cranberry sauce, leftover turkey. Peggy whipped up a salad from the lettuce, turkey, and orange slices, added nuts she found in the pantry, and served the cranberry sauce on the side. For dressing she shook up the orange juice with olive oil. “This wonderful salad came out of the same refrigerator I had just looked in,” Genie says.

My family can personally attest to the quality of Peggy’s cooking, having eaten with the Shieldses a number of times. Her pork loin with “magic prunes”—she marinates the fruit in port wine and orange rinds and keeps the prunes in the refrigerator for months—turns a simple meal into something extraordinary, especially when she serves it with her mushroom risotto. (She makes a double batch to ensure leftovers.) Thanksgiving would become a world holiday if everyone on the planet could try her turkey breasts with herbs de Provence and her cranberry sauce made with onion, horseradish, and sour cream.

One night my wife, Dorothy, came back from lunch raving about the appetizer. “You should have seen what Peggy did,” she said. “I got there early to help out, and she and Genie decided at the last minute to make hors d’oeuvres. We looked in the fridge, and there were just some dates and a little cream cheese.” Dorothy reported that Peggy pitted the dates and stuffed the cream cheese into them. Then she cut up a few jalapeño peppers and stuck a tiny piece into the cream cheese of each date. “It was absolutely delicious,” Dorothy said.

Food Channeling Peggy combines Yankee know-how with the soul of an artist.

Our daughter, Dorothy Junior, assists Peggy on occasion, and she once came back with a similar story. Genie wanted to serve strawberry daiquiris. But on the night of the dinner, Peggy realized they didn’t have strawberries—just raspberries. She decided to make raspberry daiquiris. She went to get the vodka, and there wasn’t any—just rum. “So Peggy invented this raspberry rum drink that was,” Dorothy continued, echoing her mother, “absolutely delicious.”

I recently asked Peggy how she would have advised me if we had met during my bachelor days. She didn’t even pause to think. “You could have put the hamburger soup on noodles and called it ‘stroganoff,’” she said. “Grate some parmesan cheese over it. Or take some tomato paste and garlic, mix it with the tomato hamburger soup, and put it on upscale noodles. Fancy noodles are all it takes to make it look really nice,” she added. “And use soy sauce instead of Worcestershire. Did the Worcestershire taste good?”

I shook my head.

“I thought so. Terrible combination. Did you keep cans of orange juice in your freezer?”

I nodded.

“Frozen O.J. mixed with vinegar and oil makes a great vinaigrette. You can marinate chicken, pork, or steak in it as well. The O.J. makes it tend toward Mexican food, so you can add chipotle to the mix.”

I asked what she would do with my bachelor salad.

“Cut the head of lettuce into quarters, add dressing, and sprinkle the thing with beer nuts.”

She was talking to a man who thought biting off heads of lettuce made the perfect salad. “That sounds complicated,” I said.

“More steps means more depth,” she replied—an epigram that would have sounded natural if she had ended it with, “young Grasshopper.” The main reason people hate to cook, she told me, “is that they don’t have time. And it takes time to cook.” Fast meals, of course, don’t taste as good as slow ones. And yet, the more time I spent with Peggy, the more secrets she shared that actually save time while turning a fast meal into a good one.

But this story isn’t merely about cooking. It’s also about frugality and making do. In other words, it’s about the New England Way of Life.

Peggy Grote grew up in central Vermont, the product of countless generations of native Vermonters. (“I think I may even have some Indian in me,” she says.) Her father was a machinist, her mother a homemaker. Peggy’s three sisters were older, and they were already grown up with families of their own when their mother left. Peggy was 16. She became the family cook, preparing meals for her father and even doing the entertaining when her sisters and their husbands and children came for the holidays every year. When she was 21, Peggy married a printer. She gave birth to two sets of twins in three years and worked part-time in the public school library when the children headed off to school.

Having a family of six would inspire thrift in anyone; but when asked about the source of her frugality, Peggy replied, “Mostly it comes from being a Vermonter.” She said this assuming I would understand, and, being a northern New Englander myself, I did. In this part of the country, if someone admires your shirt, you brag about how cheaply you bought it.

So you could call it frugality or just plain penny-pinching when Peggy makes a salad and then adds leftover vegetables from each dinner during the week. Or when she buys brussels sprouts, squash, and celeriac during the winter because they’re cheaper than the produce from California and Chile. Or when she takes leftover brussels sprouts and serves them with vinaigrette. Or when she takes whatever is available, cooks it up with eggs, and calls it an omelet or frittata. Or when she turns last night’s mushroom risotto into tonight’s risotto cake by baking it with bread crumbs and cutting it into slices. Or when she takes the pecans left over from last night’s appetizer and adds it to a green salad topped with bleu cheese. Or when she crumbles pieces of three-day-old lemon-almond cake over two-day-old chocolate mousse and serves it with marmalade. Or when she takes an herb mix left over from some past dinner, mixes it with cream cheese, and pipes it onto crackers.

Being a frugal cook doesn’t necessarily make you a good one, though. Motherhood, Julia Child, years of studying Bon Appétit, and culinary school morphed her into the ideal New England chef. When the kids were little, Peggy watched Julia Child while the kids napped.

Peggy yearned to go to cooking school but waited to apply until the kids grew up. “On the first day of school, there was a welcoming ceremony for our class, and the woman said that our ages ranged from 17 to 38,” she said. “I was the 38-year-old. I looked around and everyone else was half my age.” Still, the classes were “like being in a live cooking show,” Peggy said. “Fascinating.” She graduated in 2002 with an associate’s degree after two years and went to work managing the food co-op in South Royalton, home of Vermont Law School. She used her new skills to cater for friends, neighbors, and even her daughter’s prom dinner. And she bartered with a local Community Shared Agriculture group, cooking meals every two weeks in return for fresh produce.

But this story isn’t just about cooking and Peggy. It’s also about invention. And while we’re adding ingredients to this little story, let me tell you a secret: The creativity you can learn from Peggy may very well apply to the working world as well. In other words, if you and I can plumb the imagination behind her date and cream cheese and jalapeño appetizer, we just might become billionaires. Or, at the very least, we’ll become better-fed regular people.

One winter afternoon, I drove from New Hampshire through postcard Vermont to the little town of Tunbridge, passing huge snowdrifts and red barns, negotiating an old covered bridge, and turning onto the snow-covered dirt road that bordered the Shields farm. Letting myself in (Genie had law students over for lunch), I found Peggy in the kitchen. She immediately put a plate of food in front of me, and the movement made her fork-and-spoon earrings dance.

The plate held a colorful salad made of pineapple chunks, mixed with bok choy and lettuce. “It needed more zing, so I added rice-wine vinegar,” she told me. A dark wedge of something accompanied the salad, making the whole thing look artfully simple. Peggy identified the wedge as a frittata (eggs, leftover black rice, sesame seeds, lemon grass). I wasn’t exactly feeling peckish, having just had a grilled cheese sandwich with soup and a milkshake at one Vermont diner and a coconut cream pie with coffee at a second diner, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Peggy that. Besides, her food was great. The salad definitely had zing, and dessert— leftover angel food cake with lemon curd and pieces of a blood orange—was enough to give anyone’s appetite a second wind, so to speak. “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“Salmon with horseradish cream and Granny Smith apples, and a cassoulet I served last weekend. Plus leftover sweet potatoes.” A cassoulet, she explained, is a sort of French casserole with beans, sausages, and other meats. Salmon and sausage don’t seem all that compatible, but Peggy said the horseradish sauce would tie them together, gustatorily.

“And dessert?” I asked.

“Chocolate and banana split milkshake shots, along with bite-sized pieces of brownies from a few days ago.” Tiny portions served in shot glasses are hot in trendy restaurants these days, and in Peggy’s case they make perfect sense. She can lay the shots out with coffee in the living room, and the guests can drink them while sitting in easy chairs—letting Peggy clean up and go home before the guests leave. “A shot glass can hold a great appetizer,” she said. “Put a shrimp in a shot of Bloody Mary.” Shot glasses also work well with a small supply of leftovers like soup. Serve three or four kinds in “flights,” as they call them in wine bars, thus turning leftovers into a tasting party. Brilliant.

“So do you get inspired when you see an unusual glass or plate?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, looking for inspiration at some shelves that held various kinds of crystal. “Take one of those big martini glasses up there. It can hold soup, or salad, or even mashed potatoes. You know how they salt the glass for margaritas? You could coat the rim with chives to go with the potatoes. Serve it in the middle of the plate with the meat and vegetable, or off to the side like a cocktail. Sweet potatoes! That would work even better. Put chopped pecans around the rim. Use maple syrup to make the pecans stick, then drizzle some syrup over the top of the glass. Or honey. Honey would make the nuts stick better.”

She looked like she was having so much fun, I was tempted to go through all the shelves to see what other bizarre food-receptacle combinations she could come up with. But I reminded myself that this isn’t a food story per se. This story is all about inventiveness, and how you and I can get some and maybe use our creativity to get rich. “Can I lay a theory on you?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, looking doubtful.

“Creativity—the kind you see in cooking and in business—comes from an ability to identify a problem really accurately, plus a knack for combining unlike things. For example, you had an appetizer emergency, and you realized that the problem wasn’t that there was too little time to drive to the food co-op. The problem was that you didn’t have appetizers. So you combined unlike things: dates, cream cheese, and jalapeño peppers.”

“Right,” she said.

“So does that theory define creativity for you?”

“Not exactly. I would add visualizing. I see a plate, a bowl or something, and I visualize what can go on it. When you say ‘eggplant,’ I see an eggplant. Reading a recipe, I can see ingredients coming together and I can taste it and I can say, maybe this ingredient will go better with that ingredient.”

“Like Mozart in the movie Amadeus, where he takes a lame piano piece by Salieri and, after listening to it just once, replays it in this amazing way.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, giving me an even more doubtful look.

But we were getting somewhere, namely Peggy’s ways of being inventive. Let’s call it:

Peggy’s Law of Inventiveness
This Law involved three corollaries:

1. Simplification
A knack for identifying a problem with absolute clarity, boiling it down to its essence. An appetizer emergency is about appetizers, not a lack of food. Similarly, a lack of marketing capability in a small company may just be a lack of marketing capability, not a lack of in-house marketers. A consultant might solve the problem better than a recruiter would.

2. improvisation
An ability to smoosh unlike things together to create “hybrid vigor,” as biologists call it. Milkshake plus shot glass equals guilt-free dessert. Auction house plus Internet equals eBay.

3. vision
Visualization prowess, which comes from a deep familiarity with the business at hand—so deep that your brain turns into a modeling program. See a picture of pumpkin ravioli and mentally taste it as you envision changing the recipe. Or see a proposal for a new product and know exactly how your company could change it, market it, and distribute it.

As the afternoon wore on, though, Peggy revealed a fourth element. It came from a question I asked her: “How do you know which flavors go with which?”

“Flavors go by regions,” she said. “Thinking regionally lets you know what flavors to mix.” In other words, French, Italian, New England, Asian, and Mexican cuisine all have their own palette of spices and ingredients. “When you try to combine ingredients that go with different regions,” she added, “you tend to jumble everything up.” (For Peggy’s tips on what goes with what, check out her top 10 items to stock in your fridge at the beginning of this story.)

That means we need to add another corollary of inventiveness:

4. categorization
An ability to simplify situations by categorizing them. Add orange juice to your chicken, and that says Mexican. Which implies chipotle and chili peppers, not soy sauce—or Worcestershire sauce, for that matter. Put oregano and mozzarella on your spaghetti, and you shouldn’t go adding chipotle. How does this work in the business world? The greatest marketers have been brilliant classifiers. Did you see those Bud Light “Dude” ads? The ad agency, DDB/Chicago, took the precise measure of the demographic they were going after and determined that this desirable cohort of beer-drinking young males had the common trait of saying the word “Dude.” A lot. (If you missed the ad, perhaps you do not happen to be a beer-drinking young male.)

The talk of regional foods reminded me of a crisis I call The Mole Incident. “All right,” I said. “Let me tell you about my mole.” (That’s MO-lay, the Mexican dish, not the animal or the skin blemish.) It happened one Saturday afternoon when my wife was out of town and I was alone in the house. I suddenly remembered that I had been invited to a neighbor’s potluck supper that started in little more than an hour. I had agreed to bring a main dish, enough for eight guests. Opening the refrigerator door, I beheld a wasteland of rot and mold. The only edible object was a bowl of chili. Then inspiration struck: a half-empty box of Cocoa Puffs sat on the shelf over the refrigerator. I immediately thought of combining two unlike things; namely, Cocoa Puffs and chili. Mexicans have been mixing chocolate with chili peppers for years! The cereal would bulk up my chili just enough to suffice.

I emptied the box of Cocoa Puffs into the chili pot and stirred, adding a powerful dose of chili powder. Then I dumped the mixture into a serving bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and....

“You didn’t taste it first?” Peggy asked.

“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t taste it at the party, either. So,” I continued hastily, “what would you have done?”

“Were there chocolate chips in the house?” she asked, ignoring the fact that I was supposed to bring a main dish. “And nuts of any kind? You could have mixed the Cocoa Puffs with the nuts and chocolate chips and made your own trail mix.”

At this point her employer, Genie, walked in. She had overheard my mole story. “All dessert requires is sugar, butter, and flour,” she said. “Mix them together, bake them in the oven, and you have shortbread.”

“Sure,” Peggy nodded. “You could then melt the chocolate chips and put them on the shortbread, crumbling the cereal over it.”

“Or take Dorothy’s candy canes,” said Genie, who knew that my wife puts peppermint canes on the Christmas tree and leaves them out in dishes year-round. “Smash the candy canes, mix it with melted chocolate, and crumble the Cocoa Puffs over it while it’s still hot, to make candy bark.”

Genie and Peggy clearly form a creative team, presenting another characteristic of inventiveness:

5. collaborators
Think Jobs and Wozniak.

All the while, Peggy was cutting up a head of celeriac for dinner. “Are we deconstructing the salad tonight?” she asked Genie.

They explained to me that deconstruction was another trendy thing. You serve the ingredients separately. Peggy likes to make a deconstructed salad of beets, lettuce, celeriac, and carrots, all in neat little piles with a Dijon vinaigrette (Dijon mustard, juice from a real lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper) on the side.

“No, not tonight,” Genie said.

Dinner, it seemed, was inventive enough already.

Alas, I didn’t get to eat it. The guests, Genie told me, were her neighbors: “a dairy farmer who’s not done milking till 7, a sheep farmer who gets up early and needs to leave by 8:30, and a third guest who raises dogs and has no special requirements.” I told her that I had no special requirements either, but she didn’t take the hint.

That night I came home to a refrigerator that didn’t seem quite so empty as it would have otherwise: some romaine lettuce, a picked-over chicken carcass, a tangerine, and some balsamic vinaigrette. I put the chicken and tangerine slices on the lettuce, sprinkled some dressing, and added crumbled walnuts I found on a shelf. Constructing this salad took me less time than hamburger soup would have, even if I didn’t brown the hamburger. I’m no Peggy, and never will be. But that same night, applying Peggy’s Law, I came up with a brilliant idea: a business book with recipes.

I’m looking for a collaborator.

Fresh lemons and limes The acid brings out the flavor of fruit, meat, and vegetables. Don’t use the bottled stuff. It’s bitter. Frozen citrus juice keeps for several weeks.	Frozen chicken breasts Cheap and nutritious, I cook them once a week in all kinds of ways.	Cheese Freeze pieces of cheese you’d otherwise throw out. Grate the frozen cheese on most anything.

Eggs If you have eggs and cheese, you can make a meal. Put any leftover vegetables in omelets.	O.J. Use the juice with meat or salad dressing.	‘Magic Prunes’ Marinate prunes in port wine and orange rinds. Add port every couple of weeks, and keep it on hand as a sauce on just about any kind of meat.

Dijon mustard Use it as a finish for meat sauce. Just boil down the meat juices, then add mustard. Also, use mustard as a meat rub before cooking.	Capers Put them on chicken and fish or in spaghetti sauce.	Jam Dab on top of cheese. Reduce meat juice with jam for a sauce. Use jam as a marinade. Add to whipped cream for great flavored mousse.	Skim milk Blend with frozen bananas and chocolate to make a low-fat milkshake.

Jay Heinrichs is Spirit’s editorial director and author of Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Three Rivers Press).