Single Serving

I hesitate to admit this when I’m about to tell you to summon summer with roasted tomato panzanella, but I haven’t found as much displeasure in the weather this winter as I ordinarily do. New York City is the proud provider of freezing cold sunshine, and I have a hard time frowning on sunny days or during Prospect Park’s especially beautiful winter golden hour, even when the sun forgets it’s supposed to heat as well as brighten. We visited Lake Placid in January, which put cold into perspective and also reminded us that snowshoeing is a reason to leave the house, I discovered rosemary & fennel seed tea and expanded my mastery of textile arts (crochet, macramé), Alex got into mixing Manhattans, TV got better and better, and we braised a lot of meat. Winter! For two more days until spring!

In this spirit of optimism, I’ve been ordering the most unusual local vegetables I see on Good Eggs, like romanesco cauliflower and sunchokes, in an effort to celebrate what little the frigid ground can produce. It works out okay, or at least the crucifers and roots aren’t fatal to my outlook, so long as I splurge on herbs, too or dollop everything in green sauce.

That’s how I ended up with a lot of basil hanging around. I had opened up a can of whole tomatoes for these roasted oysters, and I roasted them without their juice, but with a lot of olive oil and salt. The oily juice I stored them in seemed like it really wanted to be soaked up in stale bread the next day, and then it hit me: a winter version of the epic summer salad was staring out at me from the fridge. I tore up some mozzarella (just the regular supermarket kind), marinated shallots, and poured balsamic vinegar. And then I cracked on an egg onto my plate of rich panzanella.

If you’ve ever wondered why some of us find food fascinating long after the dinner dishes are cleared, look no further than the case of curry.

When I say curry, you might think of a leaf, a paste, or a powder. You might begin to crave savory Indian stews, dream about bowls of spicy Thai soup, imagine portions of sauce-smothered Japanese katsu, or salivate after thoughts of German currywurst. You might even think of Singapore Noodles, an entry in the dry-not stew-like-curry list. All are valid food fantasies. There are a lot of curries!

Is it worth forcing yourself to try new foods?

If you’re a food-loving, not-very-picky grown-up who yet retains some vestigial culinary aversions, your powers of adulthood dictate that you never have to put olives on your pizza, raw onions on your sandwich, or milk in the glass next to your chocolate chip cookie. Once you’ve shed the serious vegetable hate or pasta-with-butter obsession you might have harbored as a child, I think you’re merely reasserting your independence by saying no to the dishes and ingredients you abhor. It’s one of the prime benefits of cooking for yourself. You eat what you love and avoid what wrinkles your nose or turns your stomach. All the nose-wrinkling in the world, however, won’t save you from culinary FOMA, which is what happened to me when every food person I admired claimed beets were great but I strongly disagreed.

Though I abandoned my Cheerios-only diet a long, long time ago, until a few years ago, I could still provide you with a full list of foods I didn’t like: mushrooms, beef chili and hamburgers, cheesecake, yogurt, and olives, among others. Those jumped into my likes column in the last five years. (I still won’t seek out ‘shrooms, liking cheesecake was hardly laborious, and it turned out yogurt just had to be full fat to be worth eating.)

The dislike inventory was condensing, but at the top of the list a longtime foe refused to budge. Yet, despite their jellied texture, muddy flavor, and hand-dying prep work, today I’m moving that entry over to the other column. Hello, beets.

Among the beet admirers in my world is the guy whose farm I buy from via my CSA. When this year’s autumn onslaught came in, I finally decided not to put my bunch in the trade-in box. Instead, I mounted a campaign to let beets seduce me. Here’s what I learned from the crusade.

Before I cool my jets about homemade chicken stock and how it can easily turn into soup for dinner, lunch, snacks, and breakfast, this quick thing: an island of poached egg, set on toast, surrounded by a sea of broth.

This is the kind of very, very simple meal you can feed yourself when there appears to be nothing around to eat. All that’s asked is that you had some small wave of productivity in the past week or two, a wave that led you to make a pot of stock, buy a loaf of bread, come by an egg, and score some Parm. That leads to a humble and truly delicious meal. It’s hearty, warming, and always makes you feel better.

In the soup-which, naturally, doesn’t have to be served for breakfast-you give the stock flavor by turning it into broth with the addition of salt, lemon, and pepper. Then you mount a little campaign for body, thickness, and depth. That’s from the toasted bread, whose starch thickens, from the yolk which seeps out, from the Parm, which melts, and from the olive oil, which adds richness and fat. That’s it. I hope you make this soon.

Whisper the word “detox” to me and watch as an immense, unexpected desire for French fries gathers steam. This reaction happens at all times of year, but I mention it now, in January, because you’re probably hearing a lot of mutters about “healthy” and “detox” and “cleanse” and then, like me, running in just the opposite direction.

Still, there are eras of overindulgence, and, after those months, I want food that’s simple and light. This appetite shift is natural, obvious, and far less intense than the contrarian fry craving. (To note: I have no problem with French fry cravings when they’re genuine, I just dislike the rebellious ones.)

But since I last about one day on substances like salads with lite dressing, overpriced juices, and low-carb anything without getting mad and contrarian, light food now means this nourishing and comforting soup. I’m not the first to rely on this slow-cooked rice, or its starchy brethren, for comfort and health. Whether you call it congee (China) or risotto (Italy), the stuff is delicious and life-affirming: my kind of detox.

In Thailand, kao tom appears at breakfast-that’s where Alex and I first tasted, and adored, bowls of the gruel. Now, I make rice soup for any of the three meals. Since we returned from the trip two years ago, I’ve experimented with recipes, and recently, I hit on a flexible version that tastes right and isn’t too complicated or ingredient-rich to make on the regular. (I owe a lot to this recipe.)

To make rice soup, you need to make two elements: cooked rice and homemade stock. I try to have both ready ahead of time so that rice soup itself takes about 15 minutes start to finish.

Instead of fluffy rice with sought-after separated grains, you want the rice for rice soup to be soggy and clumped together from being cooked in three times as much water as usual. The water-logged grains are both starchier and thirstier, and they combine with the broth to make a thick, unified soup. I make a cup or two of rice around the same time I brew the stock. Then, I cook the soup itself fresh when I want it, in portions for one or two. At first, I used only white rice, but recently, I switched to brown.

I know that cooks pressed for time and space don’t want to hear about homemade stock, but this soup is not the same without it. In fact, these days, I make stock almost every week, and as soon as I made simmering a practice instead of a chore, I began to cherish the process. For this soup, you don’t need the pot going all day: I make a light broth quickly, so the chicken meat doesn’t dry out too much, and I keep the vegetables to a minimum, so there’s barely anything to buy, wash, or chop. Store the soup in quart jars and you can eyeball the pour when you make kao tom.

As for the soup, now’s why I tell you how good it is. Grated ginger, garlic, and soy sauce turn neutral rice and stock into a punchy base for a poached egg whose yolk will thicken the broth when you crack it and eat, making the mixture truly filling. Chicken, salvaged from stock-making, helps with that too. Then, it’s all about the toppings: sesame oil enriches, kimchi brightens, peanuts lend texture, and Sriracha warms. One bite, and you’ll feel better. One bowl, and you’ll be pretty sure you can conquer the world. And how healthy is that?

A tadka is a seared Indian spice mix that lends aroma and flavor to a dish. More a technique than a recipe, tadkas caught my attention because of the way they invert the culinary formulas I usually follow, where you sauté aromatics and sear meat at the beginning of cooking, then end with lower heat and a cold garnish, like a squeeze of lemon juice or a sprinkle of sesame seeds. With a tadka, you turn up the flame just before you’re done.

In Indian cooking, which has serious layers of flavor, you’ll also start with sautéing, you’ll just end with it too. But in this leftover-inspired soup, you rely on the takda one hundred percent to save your puréed soup from tasting like (really good) baby food.

When I made this, I had two excellent containers in the fridge: one held mixed roasted root vegetables (carrots, turnips, parsnips, yellow beets, and sweet potatoes), the other homemade chicken stock. I was thinking that maybe after Thanksgiving you have similar leftovers? If not, roasting a sheet of vegetables and simmering chicken stock is a great activity if you want to eat semi-healthfully in between holiday meals. So, yeah, when I went to make lunch I had both these things, and I decided to combine and conquer. Into the pot went a scoop of my already roasted vegetables and some stock, and while they were heating up together, I took out the blender for puréeing, but I also thought: maybe I’m going to need a little more here to feel satisfied.

So that’s when the tadka idea happened. I’ve been stocking ghee at home, the nutty clarified butter that heats up really hot without smoking and is perfect for crackling whole mustard and cumin seeds, crumbled red chilies, and garlic, bringing out the spices’ aromas as a good tadka should. I ladled the soup, made the tadka, then poured the contents of my frying pan, ghee and all, into the mug, and, as I’d hoped, the topping gave new life to each spoonful.

You can make this pureed soup with any kind of vegetables you have around (even if they’re not roasted). Having one kind of starchy vegetable in the combo will give the soup a little extra body-almost a creamy texture-but it’s not necessary. The real necessity is to examine your color choices, choosing roots that won’t combine to make an unappealing brownish-green color. If you use reds, skip greens, for example. For this soup’s hue, I stuck to whites (parsnip, turnip), yellows (the beets), and oranges (sweet potato).

Last weekend, I ran around the field hockey turf at my high school, more than a decade after I first made varsity, in a last-minute alumnae game. Then all last week, I drove around northern California, visiting farms and other food producers. The common thread between the sporting life and the road trip? Hunger. And: its solution.

When we played field hockey in high school, snacks were never far away. Practice started with a granola bar, and games ended with orange slices and donuts. Likewise, before we set out on the road each day last week, I made sure the car was loaded with both gas and food. On the best day, we had cheese rolls and longan in the backseat, but at the minimum there were granola bars.

Granola bars: were they everywhere when you were growing up too? They served a purpose back at a time when I played field hockey daily, but as an adult desk-sitter, I mostly avoid the extra calories. When I snack, I skip the sugar and oats and go straight for the granola bar’s powerhouse ingredients, the nuts. Cashews, almonds, walnuts, peanuts: these are what pick me up when my blood sugar wanes and dinner’s still far away.

But what if we put back in just a little of the granola bar, cross-pollinating granola and walnuts. Would we get granoluts? GraNUTola? Granola nuts? Whatever you name them, that’s where my mind soon went, to a recipe that combined the most nutritionally dense part of the granola bar with a little bit of what makes good granola so yummy. The proportion is key here; instead of appearing every now and then, the walnuts and almonds anchor every bite, and the addictive, salty-sweet olive oil-maple granola coats them.

Eat these for a filling snack that’s not as sweet or carb-y as a whole granola bar, or use them to top your oatmeal. My next move is to repurpose them as croutons on a butternut squash salad salad like this one.

Do you snack? What’s your favorite-salty or sweet?