What We Eat When We Eat Alone Part 10

SALT AND PEPPER.

4 FINGERLING POTATOES, SCRUBBED.

2 ZUCCHINI, HALVED LENGTHWISE AND CUT INTO 2-INCH SECTIONS.

2 LARGE CARROTS, PEELED AND SLICED INTO 14-INCH ROUNDS 1 HEAD GARLIC, CLOVES SEPARATED BUT NOT PEELED.

1 OR 2 BELL PEPPERS, CUT INTO LONG INCH-WIDE STRIPS.

1 LARGE OR 3 SMALL ONIONS, PEELED, CUT INTO WEDGES WITH THE ROOT ENDS ATTACHED.

2 HANDFULS CHERRY TOMATOES, STEMS REMOVED.

OLIVE OIL.

CHOPPED HERBS, SUCH AS THYME, ROSEMARY, OREGANO, PARSLEY.

1. Toss the eggplant with 12 teaspoon of salt and set aside in a colander to drain. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. While it's heating, wash and cut the rest of the vegetables and put them in a bowl.

2. Once the oven is hot, quickly rinse the eggplant and blot it dry, then add it to the bowl. Toss with enough oil to moisten, about 3 or 4 tablespoons, and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.

3. Spread the vegetables out onto a sheet pan, then put in the center of the oven and roast until they've colored in places and become tender, about 25 minutes, turning them once or twice while cooking. Remove and scatter fresh herbs over all. Serve hot or tepid.

Roasted Winter Vegetables Sometimes roasting just one or two vegetables is perfect. But it's also fun to have a mix, and you've got a lot of very tasty, rooty options during the fall and winter months. Like what? Rutabagas and turnips, winter squash, celery root, parsnips, and, not to be overlooked, Jerusalem artichokes. If they're available, take Laura Calder's suggestion and throw in a handful of cherry tomatoes.

Although the preparation is easy enough, it does take 45 minutes to roast dense roots that have been cut into large chunks. And because they do take a while, I suggest preparing enough to turn some into a roasted vegetable chowder-at least eight cups of prepared vegetables, as they will shrink to almost half their volume.

Two tips: To get lots of good caramelization, give your vegetables plenty of room so that they don't sit on top of one another. And if you think you'll make soup with the leftovers, include an extra carrot to use as a garnish.

2 OR 3 CARROTS, PEELED AND CUT INTO LARGE CHUNKS, THEN HALVED LENGTHWISE (OR LEFT WHOLE, IF SMALL).

1 RUSSET POTATO OR SEVERAL FINGERLINGS, SCRUBBED AND CHUNKED.

1 ONION, CUT INTO THICK WEDGES (KEEP THE ROOT END INTACT).

1 HEAD GARLIC, PEELED AND CLOVES SEPARATED.

1 TURNIP, PEELED ONLY IF GNARLY, AND CUT INTO WEDGES.

6 JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES, SCRUBBED AND HALVED.

1 LARGE PARSNIP, PEELED, CUT INTO 2-INCH ROUNDS AND HALVED, CORE REMOVED.

A HANDFUL OF CHERRY TOMATOES, IF AVAILABLE.

2 TABLESPOONS OLIVE OIL.

SALT AND PEPPER.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Choose a large baking dish or sheet pan so that the vegetables can bake in a single layer. Cut the vegetables, then toss them with the oil, and season with a scant teaspoon salt and freshly ground pepper. Tip them into the baking dish. Roast until the vegetables are caramelized in places and tender when pierced with a knife. Give them a shake or a turn every 15 minutes or so, roasting about 45 minutes in all. These are delicious just as they are when they come out of the oven. In fact, it's hard to stop eating them. But they're also delicious served with a garlic mayonnaise.

Roasted Vegetable Chowder With 2 to 3 cups of leftover vegetables, you can make a quart of roasted vegetable chowder. Here's how. Put the vegetables, except for 6 or so reserved carrot pieces, in a saucepan, add 3-12 cups water or stock and 12 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes. Puree. The chowder will be very beige and thick, not very pretty looking, but don't worry. Return the puree to the soup pan and thin with extra water or stock. To make the soup sing, stir in a quarter cup of cream or half-and-half, leaving it streaky. Taste for salt and add more if needed. Dice the reserved carrots and mince a little parsley. Ladle the soup into bowls, add the carrots, sprinkle with parsley, and finish with freshly ground pepper.

Salmon Chowder This makes enough for just one large or two modest portions since fish soup isn't something people generally want to eat three or four days running. Smoked paprika gives it not only a wood-fire flavor but also a rosy background hue. With the pink fish, yellow potatoes, and green parsley flecks, this is a pretty, spring-like chowder.

1 TABLESPOON b.u.t.tER.

12 CUP DICED ONION 1 CELERY STALK, PEELED AND CHOPPED.

1 SPRIG THYME OR A PINCH DRIED THYME.

1 BAY LEAF.

8 OUNCES YUKON GOLD OR RUSSET POTATOES, PEELED AND CUT INTO 1-INCH CHUNKS.

2 TEASPOONS EACH CHOPPED PARSLEY AND CELERY LEAVES.

12 TEASPOON SMOKED OR REGULAR PAPRIKA SALT AND PEPPER.

2 CUPS MILK, FISH STOCK, OR WATER.

HALF-AND-HALF TO FINISH.

1 CHUNK SALMON, CUT INTO LARGE BITE-SIZE PIECES, 4 TO 6 OUNCES.

1. Melt the b.u.t.ter in a small soup pot or saucepan and add the onion, celery, thyme, and bay leaf. Give it a stir, leave for a minute or two, and then add the potatoes and half the parsley mixture. Season with the paprika and 12 teaspoon of salt. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes or so, occasionally stirring.

2. Add the milk, stock, or water. Bring to a boil, then cover the pot and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Mash a few of them against the sides of the pan to give the soup body. At this point, enrich the soup with a little half-and-half or more milk, if desired. Taste for salt and also paprika, adding more if you want it to be smokier. Season with freshly ground pepper.

3. Lay the salmon in the soup, cover, and cook 5 minutes longer. Serve yourself a bowl and sprinkle with the remaining parsley mixture and an extra shot of pepper.

Blue Cheese Sauce This is a universal sauce, pure comfort food and anything but bland. Toss it with pasta, spoon it over a baked potato or polenta, use it generously with steamed broccoli or cauliflower, or more modestly with a steak. You don't need measurements to make this sauce, but it goes something like this.

Put 4 or 5 tablespoons creme fraiche or cream in a small skillet and crumble in about the same amount of blue cheese. Your cheese might be Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Maytag, or a chunk of Point Reyes Blue. All will work. Heat the cream-add a sliver of garlic if you wish-and mash the cheese with the back of a spoon until it melts into the cream. Season with freshly ground pepper. It probably won't need salt. That's it.

If you made more than you can eat in a sitting, refrigerate the leftover. It will congeal but will return to its sauce-like consistency when reheated. As for appearances, the more blue veining in the cheese, the dingier the sauce will look, turning bluish-grey. If it matters to you, chopped parsley can brighten its appearance.

Polenta with Blue Cheese Sauce Make soft polenta. Scoop a portion onto your plate or into a bowl, then use the back of a spoon to make a little depression. Pour the blue cheese sauce into the depression, then sprinkle on a few pinches of finely chopped parsley and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Crown it all with crisp and crunchy golden breadcrumbs, the same ones that go into the omelet with crunchy b.u.t.tered breadcrumbs.

Exotic Rice Pudding on Demand Imagine that you feel like something soothing for dinner, but something that's on the sweet side. You're not going to make a cake, but you might make a rice pudding. And if you have leftover white rice, you can make this pretty and unusual dessert. It's flavored (and stained) with saffron, spiced with cardamom, and dusted with green pistachio nuts.

1 CUP COOKED RICE.

34 CUP MILK A SMALL HANDFUL OF GOLDEN RAISINS OR OTHER DRIED FRUIT, SUCH AS CHERRIES.

A PINCH OF SAFFRON THREADS.

2 PINCHES OF GROUND CARDAMOM.

HONEY TO TASTE.

TINY PINCH OF SALT.

CHOPPED PISTACHIO NUTS.

1. Put the rice in a small pan with the milk and raisins or other dried fruit. Bring just to a boil, then lower the heat. While the rice is gently simmering, add the saffron threads, cardamom, honey, and salt. Cook until most of the milk has been absorbed, 10 to 15 minutes.

2. Transfer the rice to a pretty bowl, drizzle on a little more honey, and garnish it with the chopped pistachio nuts. If your rice absorbed all the milk and you want more liquid, add more milk or consider adding a few spoonfuls of yogurt.

Celery and Olive Salad This crisp, crunchy dish can go from a salad to supper if you added some flaked tuna or salmon, a hard-boiled egg, a boiled potato, or all three. The pale inner stalks of the celery are most delicate. If using the larger outer stalks, run a peeler over them before chopping to eliminate the strings. For olives, use green ones. If you buy them unpitted, make sure they're large enough that you can easily slice off their flesh.

1 CUP SLICED CELERY.

2 TEASPOONS FINELY CHOPPED CELERY LEAVES.

5 LARGE GREEN OLIVES, CHOPPED.

1 TEASPOON OLIVE OIL.

SALT AND PEPPER.

Toss the sliced celery with the celery leaves, olives, and olive oil. Add just a pinch of salt, especially if the olives were packed in brine, and a little pepper. Toss again and serve.

A Gla.s.s of Zabaglione A warm, boozy concoction, zabaglione is usually served as a voluptuous sauce spooned over fruit. But some view it as an afternoon tonic. Regardless as to where it fits into your day, it takes about 3 minutes to make and is indeed delicious over strawberries and other fruits. You can, however, just eat it plain.

For one person you'll want to halve the usual 4-yolk recipe, which is possible to do. If you want less than that, you might eat half and have the other half the next day, chilled. You can use any alcohol, but Marsala is cla.s.sic.

You'll need a small pot for simmering water and a bowl that will fit over, but not in, the water or else you'll end up with scrambled eggs. You'll also need a whisk. Have a potholder handy should the bowl get hot.

2 EGG YOLKS.

2 TABLESPOONS SUGAR.

14 CUP MARSALA Get your water simmering. Put the eggs, sugar, and Marsala in the bowl, set it over the water, and start whisking immediately. Bubbles will appear, then more bubbles, then suddenly it will seem as if it's all foam. Keep whisking and the whole ma.s.s will turn to a creamy froth. Draw your whisk through the bowl and if you see any wine that hasn't been incorporated, keep whisking until it is. The whole process should take just two or three minutes. Pour the froth into a wine gla.s.s and eat it slowly with a spoon.

Spy Girls always get their fiances killed in the very first scene.

a femme fatale can't also be a loving wife and mother.

So she becomes a workaholic to get over Steve, Jeff, or Lance, sliding down elevator chutes cutting through plate gla.s.s windows carefully cracking the codes of illegal governments dressed in formfitting rubber suits and blue wigs.

Temporarily blinded with acid spray and shot through a shoulder and thigh, she still manages to somersault over the wall to grab the bars of the helicopter just as it lifts off secrets of nuclear fission in a disk tucked in her lace-up boots, keeping the world safe from people just like her.

At night, she dreams of rescue, of blending in with the crowd of being one more girl who eats ice cream for dinner whose purse is not full of explosives.

-Jeannine Hall Gailey.

What Every Boy and Girl Should Learn to Cook Before They're Men and Women.

"It is amazing to be able to customize what I'm making. I can decide that I like corn, so I'm going to add a lot, or I like my sausage cut differently than in rounds. Ah, freedom!"

Tom Anderson, young cook and medical student.

Garrett Berdan is a busy young man. "When I cook for myself," he says, "I want something fast, easy, and with very few ingredients. It's all about what I can do stovetop, under the broiler, whirled in a blender, or not cooked at all."

A desire for food that's fast and easy sounds typically American. You might be thinking chili out of a can, a tuna melt, that sort of thing. But here are some of Garrett's top choices.

Rotisserie chicken from his progressive grocer's deli with sauteed kale and soft polenta with Parmesan. (He makes a stock with the carca.s.s.) Cinnamon-scented quinoa with almonds and pine nuts, chili-and-garlic sauteed chard, all topped with eggs cooked over easy. Huevos rancheros with corn tortillas, (canned) black beans, avocado, chevre, and chipotle tomato sauce. Frittata with caramelized onions, spinach, and black pepper. A bag-o-salad (he prefers mache) for a grapefruit avocado salad with bacon-wrapped prawns. And finally, a smoothie with hemp seed protein powder, frozen wild blueberries, almond milk, and a banana.

After looking over his list, Garrett adds, "Geez, I think I need to slow down and cook more. I've gone all winter without anything braised. Darn!"

One conclusion we've reached while talking, writing, and cooking our way through this book is that it's good to know how to cook for oneself, and essential for anyone who wants to have some self-reliance in the kitchen and who wants to eat well. Think of Betty Fussell and how effortlessly she throws together her Mexican soup out of bits and pieces she finds in her fridge and what joy it gives her. Or Maureen, who looks forward to the adventure of cooking with new ingredients. And Peggy, who casually roasts a chicken for herself or makes spicy little Moroccan meatb.a.l.l.s for her friends. Then there are the food maniacs, like Cliff, who get a wild hair to make complicated little crepinettes on a Sunday afternoon, or Daniel Halpern, who thinks nothing of roasting a leg of lamb for his solitary dinner-and why should he? These pages are filled with people who have something they can cook, like to cook, and for whom the kitchen is not a daunting place to be at the end of the day. Rather, it's a place of relaxation and adventure.

Another reason that it's good to have a modic.u.m of skill in the kitchen is that you might want to share a meal with someone else someday-a friend, a colleague, a potential lover, even your parents. It's fun to impress those who reared you with your newfound skills. And parents would be doing their offspring an enormous favor by cooking good food while their kids are growing up, then making sure that their children learn to prepare even a few basic dishes and have some idea about putting whole meals together.

"The Boy Scouts," one young man points out, "do have a merit badge in cooking." But parents shouldn't depend on the Boy Scouts to teach their sons how to cook. Yes, they have the merit badge, but among its lengthy requirements is not one word about goodness, pleasure, or food being something to enjoy, whether eaten alone or with others. Boy Scout cooking is a sad, dreary doc.u.ment concerned mostly with dietary requirements and hygiene. And besides, why wait until boys are of Scout age for them to start cooking?

To ward off the inevitable questions one can't answer while your teeth are being cleaned, I asked my hygienist to tell me how her eight year old was doing.

"He is so excited about cooking!" she answered. "We have this wonderful program in school called Cooking with Kids, which he loves. I've copied all the recipes from their cla.s.ses and made a little book for Jared. He cooks eggs and oatmeal for breakfast for himself and his sister, and he helps me at night cutting up vegetables. He's so proud of what he can do. We all love this program."

But there are other aspects to Jared's cooking adventures that don't have to do with actual cooking. "It seems to have given him so much confidence," his mother explains. "When he's cutting up broccoli with a knife he feels in charge, and he feels creative as he tries cutting it one way and then another. Being in the kitchen has given him his own area of expertise that he's very happy to have."

Fran, whose children are long grown, writes that when her kids were ten and twelve, she had them make dinner one night a week. "They had to plan it, buy it, cook, serve, and clean up, but just for one night. On Ben's first night he made French fries out of the Joy of Cooking-perfectly," she recalls.

"I just did what it said," Ben explained to his mom, then foraged onward, eventually making crepes his specialty.

"This lasted only about a year, until the kids were too overbooked," she recalls, "but it made a lasting impression. They're not scared of the kitchen, and they had already learned the hard way that you can't start cooking brown rice fifteen minutes before you want to serve it."

There were some advantages for Fran, too. "I was going crazy every night, coming home late from work and then having to plunge into the big meal, which I usually hadn't even thought about, much less acquired. It took away that stress and I had the delicious feeling of walking into my own kitchen and saying, 'What's for dinner?' But it turned out that the lasting benefit was involving the kids in the real life process of feeding people-it was just invaluable."

Brooke Willeford, a young man who writes dialogue for computer games in Seattle, told me that he started cooking "partially because my parents thought it would be good for me and partially because they told me I could cook whatever I wanted to eat." That can be pretty exciting for a teenager. "There were a few meals of theirs that I didn't much like, but with a few tweaks I could get something I found very tasty. So my cooking started with pulling stir-fried beef out of the wok before the sauce was added or shifting some other portion of dinner into its own pot so that I could avoid some part of the meal that I didn't like."

Today, as the cook in his household of two, Brooke admits that their menus aren't always ideal. With his wife working on her Ph.D. and Brooke working fifty-hour weeks, there's the occasional frozen lasagna or the tendency to skimp on vegetables. "Still," he says, "we do a whole lot better than many of our friends, especially our bachelor friends, who tend toward takeout."

When Brooke finds himself cooking alone, he turns to foods that are as simple as possible-black beans, burritos, and quesadillas being favorites, along with his signature dish: chicken fajitas cooked on a George Foreman grill.

"I like this dish because I've never had a bad batch. I've had subpar ones, but even they taste pretty good, plus it's really easy." Then Brooke mentions other riffs on Southwestern foods and flavors. "I absolutely adore anything vaguely lime-flavored that I can roll up in a tortilla with sour cream, salsa, black olives, Cheddar cheese, and lettuce!" Clearly, tortilla-wrapped foods have become quite unmoored from their origins, but Brooke's repertoire isn't limited to Tex-Mex flavors. Compromise born of the wish to please another has its advantages it turns out. Brooke's wife prefers Mediterranean foods, so Brooke's repertoire has expanded to include dishes that aren't based on salsa, cheese, and beans. But regardless of what he's cooking, he credits those two nights a week his parents had him make dinner for giving him his sense of ease in the kitchen today and his ability to go beyond what he ate as a kid.

Tom Anderson is another young adult who cooks. Credit goes to his mother, Doe, for setting a good table and teaching Tom how to cook.

"I remember noticing when I was in the seventh or eighth grade," Tom tells me, "that dinner at a friend's house consisted of steamed carrots and chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It was pretty bland. I realized then how much better a cook my mother was. I think we took it for granted for a long time. But I've noticed it more since going to college and eating dorm food, which wasn't that bad. But let's face it, ma.s.s-produced food is nothing like home cooking."

Tom is twenty-three. He has been working in a laboratory in a Boston hospital and will be going to medical school soon. While some kids start to cook in college, for most it's not the moment. School is demanding and kids are busy. "Throughout school there was no time," explains Tom, "so it became a habit not to spend time on things like preparing food. After college and after moving into an apartment, I realized that I had time, but it didn't occur to me immediately to get up from my computer and cook. It wasn't until I saw myself ordering yet another jumbo chicken parm and a jumbo meatball sandwich to eat over four nights running that I called my mom and said, 'I've decided to start cooking. Could I come over for a tutorial?'"