Dinner
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Dorie’s Perfect Corn Chowder
It’s early February, and snow has covered the ground for weeks. Bundled up in scarves, hats, gloves, and snow boots, it’s hard to remember the feel of those late summer days when I first made this chowder, when the wind howled against the window, rain poured down, and I cuddled up with a book and a cup of tea. While those days just at the end of corn season are perfect for corn chowder, this recipe makes a hearty and comforting meal at any time of year. So let’s enjoy corn chowder as it gets colder and colder (and colder), since I don’t want to wait half a year to share it with you. (This recipe works great with frozen corn, so it really is perfect for the whole year – including these ice-cold January days.)
I’ve always loved all kinds of chowder, although clam chowder is a no-go for me (I’m allergic to clams). I comfort myself with lobster bisque, fish stew, and, of course, this delicious corn chowder. The source of its deliciousness is bacon, so for those who don’t eat pork, skip this recipe. (Please don’t try to make it vegetarian – it just won’t sing in the same way.) Though it’s not a topic I want to know more about, I am going to use this post to discuss pork production in the US.
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Roti Pizza (aka Whole Wheat Tortilla Pizza with Cheddar and Cilantro Chutney)
Every once in a while I come across a recipe that feels as familiar as if I’ve been eating it my whole life. These roti pizzas (which I usually make on whole wheat tortillas) from Priya Krishna’s cookbook Indian-ish, combine the types of food I loved as a teenager, a mixture of grilled cheese sandwiches and Indian food from Rajun Cajun, the best (and only) Indian takeout spot in Hyde Park. These pizzas – with the brightness of red onion, the saltiness of sharp cheddar cheese, and the tang and spice of cilantro chutney – bring together my favorite childhood flavors in a weekday work-from-home lunch (or dinner or snack).
One underrated ingredient in this – and most – recipes is salt. Salt is fascinating, such a minor but important ingredient in all food. It is key to everything we eat, yet we rarely think about it. It not only gives food its own salty flavor, but it also brings out the flavor in other ingredients. James Beard once asked: “Where would we be without salt?” To which Samin Nosrat answered: “Adrift in a sea of blandness.”
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Spicy Sweet Potato and Broccoli Rice Bowl
I love recipes that are adaptable – that can be made with whatever vegetables you have at home, that can be baked or pan-fried depending on your mood, and that always end up tasting delicious – even when you set off the smoke alarm while cooking. I now bake the vegetables, which is (1) easier, and (2) hasn’t yet set off a smoke alarm.
This recipe is from East, author Meera Sodha’s amazing collection of flavorful vegetarian recipes. (Check out her column in The Guardian for more great recipes.) I’m obsessed with this cookbook – as many people who I’ve evangelized about it to know. Every recipe is tasty and flavorful, but also simple, with never more than a dozen ingredients. It’s vegetarian food that never makes you feel like you’re missing meat.
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Sweet Potatoes, Lentils, and Spinach Red Curry
All of a sudden, summer has arrived in Chicago, along with a sense that we are returning to some semblance of normalcy. Instead of walking dates, there are dinners inside and out as we reunite with people we haven’t seen since before the pandemic began. There is a part of me that can’t believe this can resume: being unmasked inside when everyone is fully vaccinated, returning to travel, going out to dinner again.
While Covid has shown just how unpredictable the future can be, the need to cook meals each week remains constant. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been going into the office again, which means I need to make lunches in advance. This sweet potato curry is a go-to recipe for lunch – it travels well, heats up easily, and makes a filling meal. While this is really more of a winter stew (I intended to post it back in February, when it was still dark and cold outside…whoops), it’s good enough to eat at any time of year.
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Dorie’s Sweet Chili Chicken Thighs
In 1946, the United States Department of Agriculture launched the “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest. The goal of the contest was to produce “one bird chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.” Contestants had a year to breed and submit a chicken that fit this description.
This contest, thought up by the head of the largest supermarket chain of the time, the A&P, changed the trajectory of American chicken farming. Before the 1940s, chickens were often quite small and scrawny, with little meat on them. The fact that they laid eggs meant that chickens were often worth more alive than on the dining room table. Only when chickens were no longer able to lay eggs would a family eat them – and even then it was usually for a special occasion.
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Sweet and Sour Tofu and Pineapple
One evening a couple of years ago, I trudged through the snowy and muddy New England streets and arrived at my friend’s house for dinner, where she welcomed me with a dish that tasted like summer. The day had felt interminable, but then this wonderful friend was there with love, laughter, and a delicious dinner. As someone who at the time lived mainly on meatballs, Bolognese sauce, and a lot of eggs (fried, soft-boiled, scrambled, in ramen, on top of tortillas, on top of more tortillas), this fresh tofu dish was the best gift I could have asked for.
As the days get darker and colder and social distancing continues unabated, we all need a way to pretend that it’s summer, even if just for a few minutes. That’s what this dish does. It combines crispy tofu with pineapple and a sweet and sour sauce that is both cozy and reminiscent of warmer times of year. This dish has recently become a staple in my family and has convinced certain people to eat – and even enjoy – tofu.
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Red Lentil and Split Pea Soup
Back over the summer, I had big plans for posting about Thanksgiving foods. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and I was going to embrace it like never before. I was planning to ask a friend for her recipe for bourbon-chocolate-pecan pie, post my favorite stuffing recipe (with hot Italian sausage and maple syrup), and look into the supply chain of cranberries. Unfortunately, none of that happened. (Things like work, Covid-19, and the election got in the way.) But I’m back, planning to post more regularly again, and wanted to restart with a warm soup for the cold December evenings.
I don’t know when I first made this soup, but it puts all other lentil soups to shame. I once made it for my friend Drew, who liked it so much that years later he still mentions it when we talk. (He also went out and bought lentils to make the soup – pounds and pounds of lentils. Two years later the remains of these lentils had started to sprout…but we made the soup and it tasted just fine with sprouted lentils.) What I’m trying to say is that if you are looking for a cozy pandemic soup, this is it.
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Vietnamese-Inspired Caramel Bluefish
This year, as the weather gets chillier, it’s more difficult than usual to welcome the fall. This fall doesn’t feel like a new start, as the fall often does, but instead feels like the beginning of a more difficult period of the pandemic, when gathering outside becomes less and less of an option. And so, even though it’s almost October, I’m posting a recipe about bluefish, a fish that conjures up images of summer and grilling and allows me to hold on to summer for one more moment.
There are so many ways to cook bluefish. You can marinate it and grill it. (A marinade of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey, and mustard, plus salt and pepper, is easy and delicious.) You can wrap it in aluminum foil and either cook it over the grill or in the oven, and then enjoy the soft and flaky meat, which turns almost white. You can eat smoked bluefish on crackers or as a pate. The world of bluefish is large and should be cherished. This recipe, from Melissa Clark, is cooked on the stove. It’s simple and can be made on a rainy day when you don’t want to go outside to grill. You just add everything to a pan, cook the fish in the sauce, and serve it. (You can also use other fish like salmon and mackerel for this dish.)
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Eggplant with Minty Tomato Sauce and Yogurt
The first year I lived in Berlin, my roommate and I cooked a lot. That year I learned to roast a chicken, not be scared of baking things I’d never heard of, and to put a lot of salt into pasta water. This dish – eggplant with minty tomato sauce and yogurt – was one of our staples, something we’d often make after coming home from a long day or for friends on the weekend. I’m not sure why, but I stopped making it for a number of years. When I decided to cook it this summer, I had no idea where I had gotten the recipe from. A quick google search showed me it is one of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes, which explains why it’s so good. I’ve always loved eggplant, and the combination of spice and cumin cut by the creamy yogurt is a great late summer dish.
There is a lot to say about eggplants, olive oil, and tomatoes, but today’s post focuses on spices, specifically cumin. Cumin is the second most popular spice in the world, just behind pepper. Historians believe that it was first grown in Egypt, along the Nile, where it was used in the mummification process. The Greeks and Romans also used cumin, although they associated the spice with greed. Cumin didn’t remain in the Mediterranean, but spread around the world. It traveled east to Persia and then to India, as well as west to Spain and from there to North and South America. This spread of cumin explains why it is found in so many different food cultures: Indian, Iranian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Mexican, Cuban, and many more.
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Saag Feta
The pandemic has given me a chance to explore some new cookbooks. There are a few that I’m really excited about, but right now I’m obsessed with Indian(-ish) by Priya Krishna. It’s a collection of “Indian-ish” recipes – think Indian with American influences – that Priya’s mother cooked while Priya was growing up in Dallas. The recipes are simple but tasty, the photos are beautiful, and it has even inspired others in my apartment to try out the recipes. Although I want to cook just about everything in the cookbook, there is one recipe that I have fallen in love with: saag feta. Priya (really, her mother), replaced the paneer with feta and the end result is delicious. The feta melts perfectly into the spinach, adding a saltiness that matches the spice and the spinach.
I could go on and on about the saag, but I’ll get to the point. I’m cheating this week. Instead of an ingredient in the dish, I’m going to discuss an ingredient that goes with (or under) the dish: rice. I recently learned that almost 85 percent of rice consumed in the US is grown domestically and was astounded. Sure, I knew that the US had once grown rice – although the US history I had learned in high school and college was woefully inadequate, I knew that enslaved people had been forced to work the rice paddies in the Carolinas, which was incredibly dangerous and deadly work, where malaria, yellow fever, and other dangers were ever-present. (Also, it was actually enslaved people’s expertise in rice cultivation, brought over from Africa, that made rice growing in the US possible.)
