Eat Drink Man Weblog

At my recent trip to the farmer’s market I picked up my inaugural batch of Russian red kale. Kale has a deep, green flavor. (One of my cookbooks calls it an “assertive green.”) The Russian variety has a reputation for remaining slightly chewy, even when fully cooked. Given deep flavor and toothsome texture, I opted to serve my Russian red kale alongside something hearty: the beef top round in the freezer.

Despite the name, a pot roast is a braise. In any braise you want to cook in a flavorful liquid accented with aromatics. So while I pulled my beef roast out of the chill chest I also grabbed chicken broth and a bag of pearl onions: the former to serve as the liquid and the latter as an aromatic.

I thawed my roast in the sink under cold water, just as I did with my beef back ribs.

When my roast was thawed I popped my chicken broth into the microwave to defrost.

I put a few tablespoons of peanut oil in my Dutch oven and let it sit, covered, over high heat. Any high-heat oil would do. The first step of any pot roast is to sear the meat. The second your room-temperature meat hits the pot it will pull out a lot of heat. But you’ll still have three other sides of roast to brown. So make sure your Dutch oven is holding as much heat as possible before you throw the meat in.

While my broth defrosted in the microwave and my Dutch oven heated over the stovetop, I prepared my aromatics. In addition to a bag of pearl onions, I grabbed a big carrot and two stalks of celery. Carrot, onion and celery together form mirepoix – the powerful aromatic triumvirate prized by the French. I also grabbed whatever veggie odds-and-ends were lurking in my fridge: ¾ of a red onion, and half of a red bell pepper. Peal onions already come bite-sized. Everyone else got a rough chop.

I grabbed a couple of potatoes and gave them a rough chop, too. When thrown into a pot roast, potatoes soak up flavorful liquid and turn into a delicious side that I would take over mashed potatoes any day.

Potatoes and aromatics.

I browned the roast on each side, going for a deep mahogany. The browned bits on the meat and in the pan ultimately dissolve into the braise and flavor everything inside, so I wanted as much brown as I could get.

We're here. We're seared. Get used to it.

When the meat was browned, I threw in all the aromatics and potatoes. Then I added ¾ of a cup of chicken broth, a half a bottle of beer, and pepper to taste.

Chicken broth and beer: the liquids.

I clamped on the lid and threw the Dutch oven into a 250 degree oven for two hours.

Now, it was time to tackle the kale. Since Russian kale is reportedly chewier, the first step was to lose the stems. Sometimes I like to mince the stems very fine, and sauté them with onions to serve with the leaves. But reports suggest that Russian kale stems are just too tough for this treatment.

Stemming kale is pretty easy. I just clasp the stem firmly in one hand and pull the leaf through the pinched fingers of my other hand, like I’m trying to wipe off a dip-stick. The offending thick part of the stem stays in one hand, the leaf in the other.

Russian red kale, sans stems.

Once stemmed, I tore the kale leafs into rough chunks, and then threw them into a large pot of boiling, salted water. I let the kale boil for seven minutes.

After seven minutes had passed, I strained the kale in a colander. I rinsed my once-boiling pot with cold water to cool it down. Then I threw the kale into the pot and filled with cold water to cover.

One handful at a time, I extracted the now-cool kale and squeezed the water from it.

When all my kale was cooled and dried, I set up my sauté station. I gathered one ounce of bacon, cut into strips, one small onion, minced, one clove of garlic, minced, my dried kale, roughly chopped, two tablespoons of chicken broth, and a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar.

A sauté moves fast -- make sure you have all your ingredients ready.

Over medium-high heat, I crisped the bacon strips. When they were brown, I fished them out with tongs and set them on a plate lined with a paper towel.

I tossed the onion into the pan, stirring until soft.

Next I added the garlic, stirring for about 30 seconds.

Then came the greens. I tossed the kale in the pan until it was coated in the garlic, onion, and fat.

Kale, coated.

Then I added the chicken stock, threw a cover on the pan, and killed the heat.

When my pot roast was ready to serve, I put the pan of greens over high heat for 2 minutes, to warm through.

The final step was just to plate everything and enjoy a hearty meal that took advantage of my local farmer’s market and helped clean out my freezer at the same time.

Pot roast over braised potatoes with bacon-onion Russian red kale.

My family keeps a chest freezer in the basement. A chest freezer can be a wonderful investment. When my mom is throwing a banquet for a few dozen people, she prepares freezer-friendly dishes ahead of time. Stored in the freezer downstairs, casseroles, pies, and breads patiently await showtime for weeks. When mom’s deadline looms, she has fewer details vying for her attention. Hunters prize chest freezers because they provide a storage solution for an entire deer. But even if you aren’t ever going to pick up a riffle, a chest freezer can help you think like a hunter: when a supermarket offers meat or ice-cream at a heavy discount, you can load up.

There’s one problem. It’s easy to get seduced by the awesome power of the freezer chest. Leftover odds and ends are all too easily sent to sleep with the fish-sticks. Soon a petrified graveyard of your culinary past builds up. It can be daunting to reclaim your space.

Yet freezers benefit from an occasional cleaning. Every once in a while a freezer owner must buck up and empty the chest.

One solution is to buy a large cooler. A huge mass of frozen food packed in an insulated box should keep its chill long enough to defrost, clean, and re-engage a freezer. But such a solution does nothing to prune its contents.

My freezer is due for a cleaning. So today I took an inventory. I divided the frozen goods into six categories: protein, vegetable, pre-made, snacks, miscellaneous, and unidentified.

PROTEIN

• Frozen shrimp (about 1 ½ cups)
• Ground pork
• Ground beef
• Ground meat (unlabeled, presumably beef)
• Beef roast, top round London broil
• 6 oz salmon fillets (2)
• Omaha Steaks gourmet franks (one box)
• Thin-cut ribeye steaks (3)
• Meatless franks, assorted brands (7)
• Meatless bacon (one box)
• Bag of frozen chicken . . . breasts?

VEGETABLE

• Baby lima beans
• Succotash (half a bag)
• White pearl onions

PRE-MADE

• Borscht
• Vegetarian chili
• Shepherd’s pie, personal size (2)
• Vegetarian tortellini casserole
• Stouffer’s five cheese lasagna
• Zucchini-ground-beef-mushroom saute
• Mashed potatoes

SNACKS

• Twinkies (3)
• Skinny-Dipper ice cream pop
• Fruitcake

MISC.

• Yeast
• Refried beans
• Hamburger Buns, homemade (one dozen)
• Raw pumpkin seeds
• Walnuts
• Chicken broth (2 different containers)
• Box philo dough
• Premade pie shells (2)
• Butter (1 pound)
• Shredded coconut

UNIDENTIFIED

• Labeled “for Jan 3^rd dinner” (2)

There are two schools of thought on unidentified items. The first says you let them thaw out and let newly unlocked aromas aid in their classification. The second says you unceremoniously pitch them – if it was something wonderful, you’d remember, right? My approach depends on how much courage I can muster up on a given day.

After dealing with the unidentified items, I printed out my list and posted it on the kitchen fridge. As I plan dinner I now have a list of resources at my finger tips. When I deploy frozen goods to the dinner table, I can strike them off the list.

When I get serious about emptying a freezer I have three general strategies: “like attracts like,” “learn something new,” and “cooking game show.”

“Like attracts like” is the simplest stratagem – run down your list and group the items which naturally seem to go together. Hamburger buns and ground beef are a natural for hamburgers. Chicken breasts and chicken broth give you a head start on a chicken noodle soup. Pearl onions make a wonderful accompaniment to a pot roast. Ground beef, a pie shell, and mashed potatoes are the backbone of a shepherd’s pie.

If you include two to three frozen items in a given meal you’ll quickly go a long way towards reclaiming your freezer’s untamed wilds.

“Learn something new” uses a frozen item as a catalyst. It’s an especially useful tool to dispatch items in the miscellaneous category. All you need to do is select a troublesome item and free associate. To my mind “Philo dough” suggests apple tarts and spanakopita. I’ve never made a spanakoptia at home. It’s high time I learned.

When my culinary imagination starts to lag, I simply type an ingredient into google and see what comes up.

“Cooking game show” is the most daring of the freezer emptying strategies. I select three different ingredients and vow to combine them in once dish. Shrimp, salmon and walnuts might turn into an interesting dinner. Shrimp and flaked salmon tossed with toasted walnuts over pasta. Top with a good olive oil and some parmesan cheese, or a light cream sauce. Or walnut crusted salmon with shrimp kabobs on the side.

Some combinations set you up for failure, so don’t be afraid to roll again. Coconut, refried beans, and gourmet franks do not strike me as a solid foundation. (An inventive fusion cook might prove me wrong.)

Some of my freezer adventures will no doubt turn into leftover theatre articles. Now you know what half-baked outlines guide my quest to turn yesterday’s dinners and bargains into today’s delicacy.

On Saturday I went to Baltimore’s 32^nd Street Farmer’s Market. I made out pretty well – I picked up a head of Boston Lettuce, a pound of Russian red kale, asparagus, and some strawberries so sweet you could smell them half a block away.

Asparagus is best when young; its stalks grow thicker and stringier as they age. Young stalks are thin and tender. The market had the thinnest asparagus I have ever seen.

I had a pork loin resting in the fridge in Alton Brown’s lime-chili marinade. Asparagus and pork play well together. (Bacon-wrapped asparagus is an hors devours classic.) Throw in some curried rice to provide a starch and dinner is served.

I started by tying and drying my pork. A butterflied pork loin presents more surface area to the marinade. And the added step of tying the meat back into a roast takes only a few seconds. And since oil helps transfer heat into the pork during a sear, I patted the roast dry with paper towels.

Next I seared the roast over high heat in a skilled with a tablespoon of olive oil. Once I had a golden brown exterior, I put the roast into a 350 degree oven with a probe thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the meat.

Sear your meat to get the most flavor out of your investment.

While I was waiting for my pork to reach 135 degrees, I deglazed my skillet with some sherry. I tossed my asparagus in the pan to coat with the resulting flavorful liquid.

Never neglect pan drippings: they offer supper-concentrated flavor. I used mine to coat the asparagus.

I transferred the asparagus and liquid into a microwave safe container for steaming.

Curried rice requires comes together easily – just make a normal batch of rice, but add two tablespoons of curry powder right to the water.

I had a little time left before my roast was ready. I decided to fry some bacon. I wanted to toss crumbled bacon over my asparagus in homage to the classic appetizer. When the bacon was crisp I softened some minced onion in the drippings.

When my pork hit 135 degrees, I let it rest for five minutes. While resting, it reached the desired 140 thanks to carry-over heat. I steamed my asparagus in the microwave on high for three minutes. When it was done I tossed it with the onion and crumbled some bacon on top.

Then I was done – roast pork with steamed asparagus with curried rice. Simple and delicious. I highly recommend Alton Brown’s marinade — the pork was juicy, tender, and just tart enough to make your mouth water.

Dinner is served.

I’m about to graduate. As I leave my dormitory and venture into the real world, I will become an apartment dweller once again. I’ve been contemplating what cookware I’ll need to gather in order to comfortably prepare food for myself. With the tools that follow you’ll be able to cook virtually anything you can dream up. Any one of these kitchen essentials makes the perfect graduation gift for an aspiring cook. They make wonderful wedding gifts that will find far more use than the fondue set of yore. And they are an excellent starting place for those who are dying to cook more, but don’t know how to begin.

In making my list I depended heavily on cooksillustrated.com. It’s quick and easy to sign up for a free trial. Once you do, you’ll have access to their whole catalog of equipment reviews. Cook’s Illustrated subjects cookware to a wide-ranging set of strenuous tests in their reviews, noting general performance and useful features alike. The Cook’s Illustrated “highly recommended” kitchenware I’ve bought for myself has never disappointed.

But if you don’t want to sign up, Amazon.com customer reviews are a good resource, too. Just avoid being overly influenced by the occasional bad review and try to pay attention to the overall force of the customer recommendations.

Knives and supporting players:

The knife is the most indispensable player in a kitchen. A clever cook can substitute ingredients. In a pinch, aluminum foil or parchment paper will make a wonderful cooking vessel. A grill or fire can apologize for a broken oven. But very few foods come into your house in the shape they will appear in your final dish. Knives are here to help. When you need a sharp piece of steel and you don’t have one, you have little recourse.

The Chef’s knife is the king of knives. It is long enough to handle big jobs without exhausting the cook. It will see you through slicing, dicing, julienning, chiffanading, butchering, and more.

The paring knife lies on the opposite end of the spectrum – it is short, stubby, and lightweight. You use it to “pare away” at foods until they are the right shape for the Chef’s knife to tackle them. You can take the bad spots off a bruised apple with ease; the small size gives you an enormous amount of control. You can dig eyes out of potatoes, and stems out of strawberries. You can quickly trim off the woody ends of mushrooms. Anything that would be unwieldy with a chef’s knife is a fine job for a paring knife.

Amazon has a great deal on a chef’s knife and paring knife set: Forschner 8″ Fibrox Chefs Knife – NSF and 3-1/4″ Paring/Fillet Knife set

The chef’s knife scored top marks in Cook’s Illustrated test in every category: handle comfort, blade shape and sharpness, as well as slicing, chopping, mincing, and butchering ability. And they praised the paring knife for its “great flexibility” and “razor-sharp edge.” The set is shockingly cheap to boot. You get two excellent knives for less than $25 dollars.

A good knife is like your heart: it can only take care of you if you take care of it. If you want to get the most of your new knives, I recommend picking up the Victorinox Cutlery BladeSafe for 8-Inch to 10-Inch Knife Blades and the RH Forschner by Victorinox BladeSafe for 3-Inch to 4-Inch Knife Blades. I have absolutely nothing against knife blocks – but as a once-and-future apartment dweller I know that counter space is too often a precious resource. A plastic knife guard for each of your knives helps them keep their top-rated edge while affording you some storage flexibility. Throw your guarded knives in a drawer, and you can use your countertop for cutting things with your knives, rather than merely displaying them.

My sister once had a landlord attempt to withhold an alarming amount of her security deposit because of a tiny scratch on a countertop. Don’t let this happen to you. Get a Totally Bamboo Congo Parquet End Grain Cutting Board. Cook’s Illustrated prizes it for having the solid feel of a butcher block but the light weight of bamboo. Wood is softer than your countertop, so it will be easier on your knives. If that isn’t enough, wood is a terrible environment for bacteria; they die off within three minutes of being deposited on the surface. (That isn’t to say you shouldn’t always be tremendously careful about cross-contamination in the kitchen, but wood works with you rather than against you.)

Pots and pans:

A cast iron pan is an insanely heavy piece of hardware. The Lodge Logic 12-Inch Pre-Seasoned Skillet weighs 8 pounds. But that heft works with you. 8 pounds of iron holds onto a lot of heat. So when you want to sear a steak, cast iron offers enough heat to brown both sides. And that much metal is virtually indestructible: I guarantee you that it will live longer than you. Which is actually a great thing – a cast iron pan grows more “seasoned” with use. It grows more non-stick with age. Just make sure you read up on how to care for your pan so that you don’t fight against seasoning.

But sometimes you want food to stick the pan – the little stuck, brown bits are called fond. When you deglaze your pan fond becomes part of a flavorful sauce. Pick up an All-Clad Stainless 12-inch Skillet. Cook’s illustrated gave it top marks in performance, sauté speed, user-friendliness, and durability, as well as praising its balance and even heat distribution.

Both the above pans can be shoved into the oven – their handles are 100% metal. So as well as handling stovetop-to-oven projects, like the frittata, they can be used as a roasting vessel in a pinch. (If you are attempting a frittata make sure your cast iron pan is seasoned enough to release it easily – I didn’t.) I’ve roasted chickens in my cast iron pan and enjoyed delicious results.

An overflowing saucepan can ruin a cooking experience. If your pan is overcrowded it is almost impossible to stir without spilling. What should be painless turns laboriously slow and risks a disastrous mess. So if you have only one saucepan, go for volume. The All-Clad Stainless 4-quart Saucepan will easily cook rice, steam artichokes, and even make a small batch of soup, as well as tackling whatever sauce you throw at it.

For those jobs that a saucepan can’t handle, you need a Cuisinart Chef’s Classic 12-quart Stockpot. With a good stockpot you can make large batches of stock, enormous quantities of stoup, cook enough pasta to feed a family, and enough chili to eat for a week. This pot is durable. It has wide handles that can be easily grasped with an oven mitt – a good thing if you’ve been boiling a stock for 12 hours. And it’s cheap.

Accessories:

I reach for tongs almost every single time I cook. Tongs flip steaks in the pan. They fish broccoli out of the steamer. They turn braising meatballs around in their sauce. Almost anything you would want to do with your hands can be done with tongs, but without those nasty second-degree burns. Locking tongs stay shut in the drawer for ease of storage. OXO Good Grips 12-Inch Locking Tongs, like most items in the OXO line, are excellent. Buy them and you will use them every day.

A wooden spoon is humblest of kitchen tools. It is the only thing in my kitchen I am 100% confident I could build myself. But it stirs a sauce without scratching a saucepan, and if left in a simmering pot, can be grabbed by your bare hand without consequence. The Mario Batali 13-inch Wooden Spoon is praised by Cook’s illustrated for a comfortable handle and a shape designed to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of a pan.

Unlike baking, very few rules are hard and fast in cooking. “1 ½ cups onion, chopped” is something you can often eyeball. Even if you are a stickler at heart, volume measure is tricky. Smaller pieces of onion are more easily compacted into a cup. So unless you know exactly what “chopped” means to the author of your recipe, the measuring cup is just a method of estimating. But there are times when it’s nice to have measuring cups. Perhaps you are just getting started cooking, and need a ballpark of what one cup of minced carrots looks like. Perhaps you are just getting used to a recipe, and you want to get as close to the author’s intent as possible before you start improvising. Or maybe you’re making a batch of rice, where the regular, hard grains make volume measure a great tool. In those cases, you’ll want a set of measuring cups that are accurate with easy-to-read markings that won’t fade or rub off after use. The Amco 4-Piece Stainless Steel Measuring Cup Set was rated by Cook’s illustrated to offer “near-perfect accuracy” and features markings etched into their handles.

Liquid volume measure, unlike dry volume measure, is more accurate, and often more important to get right in cooking. When making things like rice pilaf or lentils, where you want the liquid to be completely absorbed by the dish, you’ll need an accurate, easy to read liquid measuring cup. The Pyrex Prepware 2-Cup Measuring Cup is the gold standard in this department. It’s made of durable tempered glass, which is chip-and-shatter-resistant. It features bold, bright red lettering which is easy to read. I grew up with one of these. I have a hard time imagining cooking without one.

Though a paring knife can do everything a vegetable peeler does, it takes a lot of practice to get the same, even results with the same blazing fast speed. The Oxo Good Grips i-Series Swivel Peeler enjoys the fine features of the rest of the OXO line: comfort and durability. But it also offers replaceable blades – a feature that will keep your peeler out of a landfill when it gets dull.

Overview:

Chefs Knife Paring Knife set: $21.99

BladeSafe for 8-Inch to 10-Inch Blades: $5.85

BladeSafe for 3-Inch to 4-Inch Blades: $2.60

Cutting Board: $39.99

12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet: $20.14

12-Inch Stainless Skillet: $123.90

4-quart Saucepan: 159.98

12-quart Stockpot: $69.95

Tongs: $12.99

Wooden Spoon: $5.99

Dry Measuring Cup Set: $7.99

Liquid Measuring Cup: $6.99

Vegetable Peeler: $10.99

Total: $489.35

Get started:

Dropping nearly $500 on cookware all at once can be a tall order. So feel free to start small – get the knives, their guards, and the cast iron skillet. You’ll be amazed at the difference a good knife makes, and a cast iron skillet is cheap and lasts forever. So far you’re only out $50.58.

Cheap cutting boards, saucepans, stockpots, tongs, wooden spoons, measuring cups, and vegetable peelers are almost always available at thrift stores like Goodwill, and The Salvation Army, as well as local yard sales, and online resources like craigslist. You’ll get what you pay for – I’ve had half a dozen goodwill saucepans crap out on me as their handles fell off. Dented pans don’t distribute heat very evenly; I have found myself constantly scooting food around a sub-par pan to take advantage of hotspots. But you’ll still be able to cook perfectly delicious food while you piece together your dream cooking set.

And remember to search the internet for one-pan-wonders to take advantage of the cookware you do have. Or consider picking up Two Dudes, One Pan: Maximum Flavor from a Minimalist Kitchen. It organizes its recipes by cookware required. It will give you examples of foods to tackle with your new favorite kitchen tool, whether it’s a skillet or a stockpot.

I apologize for my extended and unannounced absence. Last fall I returned to St. John’s College in a desperate bid to finally get my hands on a college degree. It was a plan so crazy that it just might work: in just under two months I stand to graduate. But academia has spent many a month drinking my writing juice to its dregs.

Luckily I just enjoyed a brief reprieve from the ravenous, inhuman thirst of higher education– spring break. I have treasured my time with Darwin, Enstien, Nietzsche and Tolstoy. But when I slid my backpack off my shoulders and parked my ass on the couch, I celebrated my vacation with my first love: The Simpsons.

In 1995 the Simpsons was solidly in its golden age. Bart learned the cost of selling his soul. Homer realized a dream of working from home through hyper-obesity. And in one of the show’s few enduring character developments, Lisa became a vegetarian. And now that I have season seven on DVD, I can obsessively memorize every joke just like I did in middle school.

But unlike my middle school former self, I now live in an age which offers us the world’s most ingenious and profound technical wonder: the DVD extra. And disc one of season seven of The Simpsons holds a wonderful extra indeed: Paul and Linda McCartney’s favorite lentil soup recipe.

Even jet-setting culinary dynamos like me can get into ruts. It’s just too easy to just grab lunch at the subway next to your job for months in a row. It’s quick. It’s edible. And you can get your food and eat quickly enough that you can still squeeze a trip to the drugstore in over your lunch break. But if you keep your mind open, you can always find a new excuse for a culinary adventure. If the dvd bonus feature from a cartoon sitcom can move me to make a batch of lentil soup, the world will never run out of excuses to play with your food.

And you couldn’t ask for a better playmate than the lentil. Lentils are cheap. Kept in an airtight container in a dry place they will last almost forever. Unlike other dried beans, they can be cooked without soaking. They have a hearty, fulfilling flavor that makes them seem almost meaty in a dish, so lentils are a wonderful asset to the vegetarian. But even with their heartiness, they don’t overpower subtler flavors, so they work wonderfully with floral notes.

The McCartney recipe had my mouth watering. But it was recorded in order to be included backwards in the rendition of Maybe I’m Amazed which played over the closing credits. As joke-backwards-recipies-which-must-be-shorter-than-television-credits go, it is a fairly impressive recipe. But it lacks punch in the specificity department.

So I turned to my two main culinary muses: Cook’s Illustrated Magazine and Alton Brown. The cook’s illustrated recipe for “hearty lentil soup” looked promising. It had volume estimations for the ingredients, which is always a plus. What exactly is a medium onion? It had a tiny splash of balsamic vinegar to be added at the end which sounded like it would introduce a wonderful tart note to the soup. But it lacked the celery that was featured in both the McCartney and Brown soups. Furthermore, Brown calls for Grains of Paradise, a specialty spice which I had just happened to buy off Amazon only a few days before. I decided to make a hybrid recipe.

JP’s Spring-Break Lentil Soup:

You won’t need a lot of special equipment. Bare minimum you could scrape by with: A cast iron Dutch oven, or large stock pot, a wooden spoon, and your favorite knife and cutting board.

2 tablespoons butter. (Substitute Olive Oil for a vegan soup, or 3 slices of bacon, chopped, for omnivores.)
8 ounces onion finely chopped. (That’s one large or two small onions, about one and
a half cups.)
5 ounces carrot finely chopped. (That’s two medium carrots, about one cup.)
3 ounces celery finely chopped. (That’s two medium stalks, about half a cup.)
3 medium gloves garlic, minced, grated, or pressed.
a 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes.
1 bay leaf.
8 ounces lentils. (That’s just over one cup. You can also eyeball half of a one pound bag.)
2 teaspoons kosher salt.

½ teaspoon grains of paradise.
¼ teaspoon ground coriander.

Stage One: The Softening

¼ cup dry white wine.
¼ cup sherry.
4 ½ cups vegetable broth. (Substitute chicken broth for omnivores.)
1 ½ cup water.

Stage Two: liquid

1 ½ teaspoons basalmic vinegar.
3 tablespoons minced parsley (about three handfuls of leaves.)

Stage Three: Endgame

General strategy:

The list of ingredients is divided into those three groups because there are three steps to this soup: soften, simmer, and endgame. Step one is designed to soften all your vegetables so that they offer the right degree of tenderness in the final soup. Step two introduces the liquids and in order to cook and plump up the lentils. And the endgame adds a flavor boost right before serving. I recommend prepping all the ingredients from step one before you start the dish – when you add garlic to the pot, it won’t need to cook for very long before your next step. It’s best if you have your tomatoes can open and ready to go, or else you risk scorching your garlic.

Place your butter in your large pot over medium high heat. Let rig heat up for a couple minutes until the butter has gotten hot. (If you have substituted bacon, you have to let the pot soak up heat until the fat has rendered out of the bacon – you’ll know you are done when the bacon gets crispy and smells delicious.) Add your onions, carrots, and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, for about two minutes.

You'll only need to stir occasionally

Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until it starts to give off its trademark, garlicly scent. (It should take about 30 seconds. Add the can of tomatoes and their liquid, and the bay leaf. Cook for another 30 seconds, stirring. Add your lentils, salt, grains of paradise, and coriander. Stir until the lentils are evenly distributed.

Just get everything mixed together

Cover your pot. Reduce heat to medium low. Let the lentils cook for 8 to 10 minutes. Add your white wine and sherry. Increase the heat to high. Wait until the wine begins to simmer. Then add your broth and water. Wait until the liquid comes to a boil. Partially cover your pot, reduce to low heat, and let the soup simmer for 30-35 minutes, or until your lentils are tender. Remove the sharp, inedible bay leaf. It has done its job.

Don't forget to take out the bay leaf!

If you like your soup creamier, hit the soup with an immersion blender until it has the desired consistency. When you are ready to serve, stir in the vinegar, and all but one handful of the parsley. Dish into bowls, garnish with a pinch of the remaining parsley, and eat up.

Apologies to EDMW readers for my absence – a combination of travel and illness has kept me out of the loop. I’m beginning to feel like my old self again, so I’ll return to my goal of writing about food a few times a week. Please stop by.

Last week my mother conscripted me to whip up some tapas for her colleagues. Coming from her, dinner for six is getting off light, so I gladly obliged.

While Mom hit Wegman’s for some exotic ingredients, I got down to business with what we had on hand: Eggs, potatoes, garlic, onion, olive oil, salt and pepper. A Tortilla Española requires only seven ingredients.

It doesn't take much to make delicious tapas.

One of the most fascinating things about food is that it is perhaps the world’s greatest catalyst for innovation. Everyone on earth must eat, and all too often, there is not much food to go around. That fundamental truth has inspired inventions that have shifted the very foundations of society. Ariculture began as a cobbled-together collection of tricks to coax more calories from land, and went on to facilitate the world’s first cities. The development of beer allowed even the impoverished access to a safe liquid to drink, making it one of the world’s first disease fighting technologies.

But even on a much smaller scale, individual recipes can speak to man’s innovative spirit. Coc Au Vin is, at heart, a trick to make stringy, old rooster palatable. French onion soup delivers hearty warmth with only a handful of ingredients. But I cannot think of single recipe in the world that delivers more for less than a Tortilla Española. It is hearty, flavorful, and beautiful.

I started with this recipe, cut in half. I began by gathering all my ingredients. I weighed out a little over one pound of fingerling potatoes, on hand from One Straw Farm. Fingerling potatoes have more surface area per ounce than their bulkier brothers. Because the potatoes were destined to get peeled, they would be loosing more weight to the peeling than the full grown russets ever would, so I made sure to set aside a few extra ounces. Then I grabbed an onion, two cloves of garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, and I was good to go.

The trickiest part of the preparation was peeling the potatoes, but only because I own a mandolin. My mandoline turned a pound of potatoes into uniform 1/8^th inch slices in under two minutes. But she is a big, black monster that lives above my refrigerator because I only use her a handful of times per year.

A mean slicing machine

Cooks Illustrated recently gave the thumbs up to the Kyocera Adjustable Mandoline Slicer. It’s a mandoline that can fit in a utility drawer, affordably priced at $25. If you frequently find yourself in the need for thin, uniform slices of vegetables, you should buy one. Because it lacks a stand, a large batch of potatoes will begin to strain your grip, but the ease of storage more than makes up for it.

If you lack a mandoline, then just make sure to take your time when cutting the potatoes. Uniform slices cook evenly, preventing patches of raw potato in your final dish, and there’s no reason to rush.

No matter how you get there, even slices are the key

My potatoes were cut, so I quickly diced the onion and garlic. I beat three eggs and set them aside. I put a paper towel over a plate so that I could drain my potatoes. It was time to fry.

It's time to fry

Remembering my negative frittata experience, I selected a nonstick pan because I’d be dealing with eggs. I used my kitchen scale to measure out a half cup (four fluid ounces) of olive oil directly into my pan. Oil is a pain to wash out of measuring cups, so I use this maneuver whenever possible.

Following the recipe’s instructions, I alternated layers of potato, onion, garlic and salt into my pan. Then I reduced the heat to very low. Making this recipe is a lot more like poaching potatoes in oil than frying them. Every four minutes I flipped the potatoes around to make sure they were cooking evenly. There’s no hope of maintaining the potato strata after a flip, so I didn’t stress about it.

Layers of flavors

I fished out the potatoes and let them cool slightly before adding them to the eggs, for fear they’d otherwise scramble. I let the potatoes seep up the egg for a full 15 minutes. I used the downtime to gather my reserve oil, clean my pan, and re-oiled it.

Potatoes soaking in egg

When my potatoes had finished the egg bath, I cranked up the heat. I dumped the eggs in as quickly as possible and smoothed out the top with my spatula. After ten minutes, my tortilla was ready to flip. The layer of egg at the top of the pan was just begging to set up, and the toasty scent of frying potatoes filled the kitchen.

If I had been making a frittata, I would’ve had to do a lot of fancy spatula work to guarantee even cooking. But a Tortilla Española is super densely packed with potatoes, which, owing to their soak, are each coated in a thin layer of egg. The construction of the dish itself ensures even cooking without the cook’s poking or prodding.

I covered the pan with a plate, held it firmly in place with mitted-hands, and flipped the pan upside down. A beautiful, browned dome was revealed. Then I slid the un-fried side of the tortilla into the bottom of the pan to brown. Five minutes later, my tortilla was done.

A beautifully browned tortilla

When Mom returned from the market, she told me that everyone had called and canceled. I had accidentally made myself a wonderful dinner. I ate it with cilantro, Parmesan, and sour cream. Seven ingredients never tasted so good.

Dinner . . . for me?

A trip to a farmer’s market brought me face to face with some beautiful tomatoes. They were huge, far bigger than my fist. They felt heavy in my hand, like good produce should. And best of all, they were fragrant – sniffing the stem end yielded a pronounced, floral aroma.

My all-time favorite tomato application is panzanella, a tomato and bread salad. Tomatoes hold a lot of flavor in their juices, and dried bread absorbs the juices that leak out, making sure the flavor reaches your tongue. It’s a perfect summertime treat that should only ever be made with the freshest of tomatoes.

But I was at the farmer’s market because I wanted to make a nice dinner for a handful of friends that evening. Panzanella requires day old bread, and I didn’t have a day to spare. I could’ve approximated stale bread by toasting fresh bread cubes under the broiler, but in 90 degree heat, I didn’t want to fire up the oven.

It was time to improvise. Throwing together a recipe on the fly can be tricky mental exercise. My assets: local produce that would offer tremendous flavor with little coaxing. My liabilities: crippling heat that discouraged oven use, and a scant couple hours before my guests would grow restless.

The limited time meant that my other all-time favorite tomato application, gazpacho, was off the table. I prefer my gazpacho ingredients diced, not pureed. It can take me a couple hours just to get things chopped to my liking. And after the chopping, a good gazpacho should rest for a few hours so its flavors can mingle. Time wasn’t on my side.

The farmer’s market had fresh cumbers and red onions on hand, as well as an abundance of fresh corn. A corn salad could showcase fresh tomato, onion and cucumber. It could handle larger chunks than a gazpacho since it would be eaten with a fork, saving chopping time. And boiling the corn would use the stovetop, but keep the oven nice and cool.

I still needed a protein to feed my guests, so I was off to the supermarket. There I was able to grab some pork and a few more ingredients to round out my salad.

A good vinaigrette makes all the difference in a salad. A few months back I made a raspberry walnut oil dressing from Jennifer Joyce’s Small Bites – the walnut oil brought a wonderful, toasty richness to her peppered pear salad. I knew it could do the same to my corn salad. The market had a fig infused vinegar that I substituted for the raspberry. I also grabbed a lime to provide a splash of citrus juice.

The dinner was a success – the corn salad provided a wonderful marriage of fresh corn, cool cumber, and fruity tomato that was complemented by the walnut oil. It was a tasty partner to grilled pork tenderloin medallions.

Farmer’s Market Corn Salad

Serves 8-10

For the Salad:

6 ears of corn

3 large tomatoes

2 medium cucumbers

One large red onion

¼ cup walnut oil

2 tablespoons fig-infused vinegar

Juice of one lime

Salt and pepper to taste

Set a pot of salted water to boil.

While the water is boiling, slice the tomatoes and cucumbers into ¾ inch cubes and throw them into a large mixing bowl. Mince the red onion and add it to the bowl. Add a pinch of salt and toss. Set the bowl aside to rest.

When the water reaches a boil, add the corn and let it boil until it can be pierced with a knife with no resistance, about five minutes. Drain the corn and add it to an ice bath to cool.

By now the tomatoes will have given up some moisture – drain away the liquid: it would otherwise water down your vinaigrette.

Turn back to the corn. It should be cool enough to handle after only a little time in the ice bath. Cut each cob of corn in half, producing two shorter cylinders. Hold the cut end of the corn against your cutting board, and shave off the kernels, always moving the knife downwards, towards the cutting board. Place the newly liberated kernels into the bowl.

Add the oil, vinegar and lime juice and toss. Once the dressing is evenly distributed over the salad, taste before adding salt and pepper. Serve at room temperature. (Cold kills the flavor of tomatoes.)

I garnished mine with a handful of baby corn because I think it’s adorable. If you share my fondness for small things that look like larger things, it is something to consider.