Recently in Savory Recipes Category

When a method works consitantly, I find I don't like to deviate from it. For example, I roast chickens at 425 degrees without basting, and am inherently suspicious of recipes that ask me to do otherwise. I cook bacon in the oven, burgers in my cast iron skillet, and salmon in a hot pan, flesh side down until crisp, then flip it and finish in (the apparently ubiquitus) 425 degree oven. I like my salmon about medium inside, and I've cooked it this way enough that I can sort of sense when it gets there, rarely letting it coast to well-done.

A few weeks ago, I came across some wild salmon with flesh so moist and pink, so well-marbled, it seemed unfortunate to subject to blistering hot stainless, too harsh, like slapping a kitten. I rembered a lovely dish I had last summer at Plouf where the salmon was poached in olive oil and served with succotash. It highlighted the salmon's buttery texture in a way I was anxious to emulate.

I poked around a little, looking for information on how to correctly oil-poach fish. I settled on the manner Anna Hesser describes in Cooking for Mr. Latte. She tells you to pour olive oil to almost cover the fish, put it over low heat, and to spoon warm oil over the top of the fillet once it begins to cook. She says it is almost impossible to overcook this fish. Ha-hah. My results were less ideal.

Last year, I saw a recipe in Saveur for a grilled chili and shallot condiment meant to accompany steak. "Ooh, tasty!" I thought, then I promptly put the magazine into the drawer of no return, a.k.a. the place I put magazines I someday intend to clip the recipes from. Someday, like, if I ever come down with an illness that leaves me bedridden for a month, because at this point, I'm so backed up nothing less than invalidism will give me time enough to do it.

I hadn't thought about the recipe in months when I bought a huge ribeye steak on sale and needed to think of something to do with it. I knew I'd sear in it my trusty iron skillet and divide it between Stephen and myself, but what should I do to guild the lily? I'd nearly made up my mind to whip up a batch of Stilton-Shallot butter when I remembered the recipe from Saveur, and went for a dig through the magazine drawer.

Lacking a grill, I roasted the chilies and shallots on the hot iron skillet. I laid the ribeye slices on a bed of spinach, arugula, and slices radishes sprinkles with sherry vinegar, and spooned some of the chilies over, letting the oil drip down to dress the greens.

Stephen and i found the results yummy, but it was, how rarely do I say this, almost too spicy for us. Perhaps we aren't the chili-heads we think we are, or maybe it's that I bought the chilies at a Mexican produce market thus was in over my head, but this simple condiment was a challenge. Thinking they were just jalapenos, I retained most of the seeds and ribs, and I left the peppers in fairly large pieces. Even with the strong flavors of the beef and greens, and the relief from an icy glass of hefeweizen, we still ended up with pink cheeks and runny noses and a burn that just wouldn't quit.

Cooking for a family of two has certain challenges. These are not the same challenges as those my mother faced for so many years. I don't come home from work and have to wrestle three kids, two of whom are picky, to a dinner they'll all consent to eat, but I've got difficulties of my own. When you're cooking for two, you eat a lot of leftovers. I find if I want to cook anything more complicated than a turkey sandwich, the effort involved to make six servings is no greater than the effort to make two. Of course, that means Stephen and I eat the same soup/macaroni and cheese/tomato sauce for the next three days.

It also means that we sometimes get our courses confused. For instance, a while ago Stephen was craving crab stuffed mushrooms, a typical appetizer-type item where a person might eat two or three. I made the whole recipe and we had them for dinner with a little salad. The pea and asparagus soup I made recently followed a similar pattern. I envisioned the recipe as sort of a sophisticated first course, but we ended up having a large serving as a light a but somewhat elaborate meal.

My mom called just as I was garnishing the soup and preparing to take the picture. I had just burned my arm and I was trying to get the photo before I lost all the natural light. I rushed to finish before the soup got inedibly cold. "Mom," I said, "I'm kind of in the middle of something, I'll call you back!" For a two-person family, that's about as frantic as it gets.

Mae West said that too much of a good thing is wonderful; I'm apt to agree. Rarely one embrace self denial, I'm often up for one more glass, one more scoop, one more kiss or one more chapter. Sometimes it gets me into trouble, resulting in headachy mornings, larger pants sizes, chapped lips, and sleep deprivation.

Sometimes, my penchant for pleasure works out for the better, because not all of the things I hate to abstain from are bad for me. Take, for instance, my nearly baccanalian consumption of vegetables. I'm never content with five asparagus spears or a half cup of peas. I happily eat plates brimming with sautéed broccoli and mashed carrots, can go through a bag of mesclun in one sitting, and will eat a whole bunch of radishes with sea salt as a hearty snack. My passion for produce is especially obvious when it comes to pasta.

It depresses me to order a dish with a name like Penne with Mushrooms, Spinach, and Peas, only to recieve an enormous, America-sized pasta portion sprinkled with nine peas, six leaves of spinach, and two sliced mushrooms. When I make such a dish, I lean ever closer to a 1:1 pasta to veg ratio. It may not be classic or authentic, but I want the vegetables to be the star.

I have no patience for lunch. Unless we are talking me and a girlfriend, fancy salads, and maybe a naughty midday cocktail, the idea of lunch doesn't rouse me at all. I am exactly motivated enough to think of and prepare one interesting, reasonably healthy meal per day. Most of the other daily eating is just a trial providing little pleasure and much resigned eye rolling.

I always wanted to be the sort of person who could placidly eat a tuna sandwich or bowl of chicken noodle every day for a week. Or, even better, one of those truly blessed souls whose tummy rarely rumbles at midday, the sort who often "forgets to eat." Instead, I feel a slight hollowness beginning at 11:30 every day combined with a fickle desire for variety. This does not, of course means I have the interest or motivation to meet my own luncheon needs.

Cookbooks can be an addiction, a voyeuristic portal into an alternate culinary universe. With all those bright pictures and neat columns of ingredients, they present a world where oven tempratures never vary, dirty dishes disappear, and every chicken breast weighs exactly six ounces. I buy them like mad, read them voraciously, but hardly ever actually cook from them. I may pull them down for special occasion recipes, and I often use them for inspiration, but in the sauce-splattered and sticky-fingered universe I inhabit, they hardly ever come into play when just pulling together dinner. Even when I imagine that I am following a recipe, my sideburn growing, motorcycle riding, born to be wild side comes out, and inevitably, I stray from the directive.

However, yesterday I was tired. I felt cranky and unimaginative, and entirely opposed to creativity or invention. I had a vague fish leaning, more from an inclination toward speed than flavor or texture. "Fish," I thought, "easy. I need something easy to do with fish." I saw Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer on the bookshelf and reached for it, remembering that she rarely advocates working any harder than is absolutely necessary.

A beautiful African Grey lived in the hallway of my grandparents' house. Anyone daft enough to stick a finger in the cage would see the bird swoop from one end of the cage to the other in one swift jump, beak first, making for the wiggling finger tip, drawing flesh and blood right down to the bone. It was best to stay on this bird's good side. One did this by feeding him raw green and red chillies--holding the stem cautiously outside of the bars of course. He would snatch the chilli, eyeing you with the googly look of an addict, examine it: seeds, placenta (or, membrane), skins, and gobble the whole.

I was terrified, always imagining him to be a bit of a scary sadomasochist bird--but, as it turns out, birds aren't sensitive like we are to capsaicin--that chemical found in chilli peppers and ladies' handbags equipped with pepper spray. This means that for the innocent parrot, it was just a tasty, crunchy snack rich with vitamin C, pro-vitamin A, B vitamins, potassium, magnesium, and iron. And as a bonus for the chilli, the bird, munching his nutritious snack, inadvertently became a vehicle for spreading the seeds, which passed through his body whole. Perfectly natural.

As it turns out, I'm the girl who enjoys those endorphins released by the pain experience that is the chilli pepper. As it turns out, I'm the bird with masochistic tendencies.

Or, if I'm feeling respectable, Southeast Asian Beef Noodle Salad. Or, to be honest, Everything But the Kitchen Sink Noodle Salad. I like the first name best (borrowed, as it is, from Houston's Evil Jungle Thai Noodle Salad). Stephen calls it the John Coltrane salad; it's got layers, he says, lots of different textures. Maybe it seems a little chaotic, but there's a hidden logic waiting to reward the adventurous. No two bites taste the same, and all the disparate elements are tied together with a tingling acidity and slow burning heat.

It's quite a jazzy salad, made up of riffs of hot and cold, soft and crunchy, spicy and sweet. The chile paste-laced dressing plays a trick on the tongue. It sneaks up, hidden behind vegetables and noodles. When suddenly you find your mouth warming up, it seems logical to have another bite, expecting the cucumber and mango to cool it. This, of course, only brings more chile dressing and more burn. An evil cycle, but a pleasurable one.

It was recently brought to my attention that, although I mention roast chickens all the time, I've never actually given a recipe. I'll seek to remedy that shortly, but first, I should mention something of my history with the dish. I more or less taught myself to cook through experimentation and hours spent watching Graham Kerr, The Frugal Gourmet and, Great Chefs every day after school. By the time I was thirteen, nearly every meal prepared in our house had passed through my mostly untrained hands.

As I got older, I began to apply myself with more direction, attempting to master specific dishes and techniques. In college, I wanted to learn to roast chicken. I began by researching the topic, and was thrown into confusion by the masses of contradictory information. To baste or not to baste? Breast up or breast down? Low oven or high oven? There seemed to be very little agreement, so I assumed that it must be tremendously difficult to produce an edible bird.

Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef helped to change my mind. Now, it can be argued that Mr. Oliver is almost a parody of himself, too cute and too buoyant to be taken seriously. Whether or not this is true, I still love his books. I actually cook from them regularly, sometimes a rare thing with important, glossy chef books. He focuses less on recipes, times and temperatures, and more on tasting, poking and not taking the whole thing so seriously. He convinced me that roasting a chicken didn't have to be stressful, and much of my own technique is borrowed from him. I'll give both my favorite roast chicken and later the slightly simpler flavored, lower effort version.

Poking around in my recipe collection the other day, I noticed I make a lot of soup. When I'm at home during the day and in search of lunch, often I'll get to poking around for things that can be simmered together. Soup suits me for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it serves as its own reward for keeping a reasonably well-stocked pantry. Homemade stock from the freezer, or even the canned stuff, plus canned beans or tomatoes, seasonings, and whatever vegetables are lurking in the fridge combine in seemingly infinite ways. My soups also typically have more nutritional value than my other go-to lunch, spaghetti with garlic and olive oil. They let me exercise another favorite habit of mine, namely, sneaking vegetables into things. I'm convinced most people, Stephen and I included, just don't eat enough vegetables. In college, I berated dorm-mates for their low produce consumption, warning of the inevitable onset of scurvy. It pleases me to slip spinach, peas, peppers, or zucchini into something I'm eating anyway. I think I subconsciously believe that if I eat enough fiber it will cancel out all the ice cream, but that's another topic entirely.

I've made soup twice this week already, and today's effort has yielded particular pleasure. I sometimes have issues with chickpeas. At their best, they soak up flavors and aromas like a sponge. They take well to Mediterranean, North African, Italian, and Indian ingredients, and can add either welcome texture or pleasant creaminess to dishes. At their worst, they're bland, floury lumps that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to tiny brains. I think this soup expresses the former.

Chickpea Soup

1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1 can whole tomatoes, crushed by hand and 1/2 cup of the juice reserved
1/2 onion, diced
1 rib celery, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 can low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon coriander
3/4 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4- 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika (optional, but nice)
1 small chunk parmesan cheese rind (also optional, but also very nice)
1 small pinch red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon ground mustard
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
Lemon juice, to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large sauce pan, add the onion and celery, sprinkle with salt and saute until the veggies soften. Add the bell pepper and garlic and continue to cook until the onions are translucent and beginning to color. Add all the spices and cook until they are fragrant.

Add the tomatoes and reserved juice, chickpeas, broth, and parmesan rind. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Or, if you're hungry now, cook it at a higher heat stirring often for 15 minutes. Fish out the bay leaf and parmesan rind.

At this point, you can eat the soup as it is, or puree partially or entirely. I removed about 1/3 of the soup (taking care to get more chunks than juice), pureed the rest in the pan with an immersion blender, then stirred the chucks back in. Season with lemon juice and black pepper.