Lentil SoupAt core, lentil soup is just a handful of ingredients. I suppose the barest possible soup could be turned together from lentils, water, and a bit of salt. I would demand other things a necessities to the recipe. At the very least, some onions and some time.
Here is the simplest way we do it. We get out the stout pot, and put it on the stove, and let it get hot. While it fires, we chop some onion: one or two small ones, or maybe one big one. Into the pot goes some oil and then the onions, popping and spitting with the sudden heat. Here, then, is the tricky part: leave them alone.
The idea is to turn those onions in that little bit of oil into caramel. I am of the "no cover and occasionally stir" school, but I fret when in the kitchen. There are others who advocate a lid and no fussing whatsoever. However you do it, do it well. Let the onions bloom brown, until the scents are climbing the stairs.
Have at the ready some (perhaps 1/2 a cup) orange lentils, and four times some (perhaps 2 cups) or water at the ready. Pour a bit of water into the onion pan and as it sizzles away, scrape up the brown stuff on the bottom. Then: add the rest of the water and the lentils. Bring to a gentle simmer, put on the lid, and leave it be for a half an hour or more.
Most welcome on a cool day. Salt to taste.
Over the RiverThey are renovating Artur Montrevasso's house. I have never met him, but Marco knows him well. You can see his house from the kitchen, a bright fleck of white wash against the gold and green hill. At night, his house is brighter still, lit up like a white sun-candle against the darkness. Marco curses the light when he wants to look at the stars, and rings Montrevasso and speaks sternly to him. Sometimes the lights go out then.
We know that they are working on the house because of the noises. It is unclear what beasts of machines make them.
Some of them ring high. We do not hear too much of them; the sounds get lost in the treble air between there and here. Juliet says that the higher frequencies do not propagate as well. Marco says they do not come to us because the noises would rather spend their time playing with the birds, darting in the currents above the valley. I look at the raptors floating, and think of them diving on the high, thin machine wailings, thinking them mice or rats and then crashing through them, talons grasping nothing.
The low noises are worse. They come in deep thrums, sent down into the earth by the big engines to shake the soil and loosen the grapes. There is a pounder over there, too, sending out each minute a dull thump, so deep in the earth and the bone that it seems to come from all around and nowhere. If I am careful I can see it in my water glass sitting outside. They turn it off at night, but they begin early the next morning. This has not been going on for long, but it feels as if it has been a long time, and we are mostly used to it.
Lentil SoupLentil soup does not need to be plain. There are plenty of things that go very well with it that can be pulled down from the cupboard, some more exotic than others. Pretty much the only thing that it needs is salt, salt. Salt to taste, of course, but this is a dish that seasoning really wakes up.
Black pepper is good, I find. The stuff from the can will do, but it's better to grind the stuff from whole, right over the soup. White pepper works, too, adding a cleaner heat that can be most welcome depending on the weather.
Cumin is good here, too, and cumin is also a thing that is better done from whole seed. With whole seed, the cumin can be toasted first: put cumin seed in a dry pan over low heat, and occasionally jostle. When it smells right, it is done. We keep a coffee grinder around to grind the stuff (and other, similar stuff) up. It makes an amazing difference, and is magic in the soup.
I sometimes put nutmeg in, but I am strange.
The Cheerful LightThis year, we have been getting a box from a farm each week, filled with wonderful things. It has been a triumphant success. With the weather turning a chill shoulder, our weekly box is now beginning to sport squash, including a butternut. I quite like butternut: I use it where I can, in particular when a dish calls out for pumpkin.
It is also the time of year when our culinary (re)investigations turn away from the sunny foods of the Mediterranean, and on to the thick gravies and rices of south eastern Asian countries and the casseroles of this one. To that end, it was time for a send off in grand style: time to make squash ravioli.
We made sheets of pasta. We filled them with a mix of roasted butternut, parmesean, and nutmeg, and tamped and cut with the little tool I found in a dim corner of an Italian market. We heated butter and oil in a pan, and fried sage leaves until they were crisp. We poured that over the ravioli, and then more shredded cheese. We tore bits off the loaf of bread to sop the stuff up at the bottom of the bowls. We ate too much. It was tremendous.
Somewhere in there, too, someone made a cake. We might eat the cake tomorrow.
The Tidy KitchenI've been making a lot of toast lately. Toast to put under garlic, oil, and salt, or to prop up thick jam, or plain, to quell gastric disgruntlement. We have sampled many different loaves over these weeks, and I am still fond of toast. Toast is good stuff.
We also had a banana sitting on the table, lonely and needing to be et. I have made this experiment: ripe banana smeared thickly across good toast, dusted with cinnamon (and, if you like, a little sugar). It's tasty good.
The cake is good, too.
Greetings From Northern New JerseyI have a friend who does not entirely dislike flying. He prefers certain carriers over others, though: he likes those that allow you to dial your headphones into the air traffic control channel. He says he feels some comfort in being politely handed from tower to tower as he crawls through the sheets of air that rest on this land.
I am here in New Jersey, in that strange run up of nearly urban living. The sky is more open than I am used to, and the dialects are strange. I am afraid of the traffic, but I can walk nowhere. New York City, the engine of all of this turbulence, is a soft lob thataway. None of this really matters, and it is not the reason I am here.
For myself, crossing the state to get here, I found the hawks remarkable. The hawks glide shiftily over the Turnpike, taking turns and finding draft, majestic and overhead. What was strange was the precision of their regularity; the spread out with their territory, and for a while they became punctuated: a raptor for every five miles.
Would that I had had headphones.
Lentil SoupLentil soup can absorb some fairly astonishing things. I am coming to learn this, even as I recognize it as old knowledge; these are patterns repeated from my family's pea soup recipes, all from long ago.
If, say, you have a food mill, it can be useful to load up the pot of frying onions with carrot or celery or both. Let it all cook down, then add water and lentils, then run it through the food mill. Or add water and lentils and potato, and run it through the food mill. Or use good stock instead of water. Or all of the above.
Other additions do not require a food mill. Reserve some of the onions, fry them to a crispy gold, and sprinkle them on top. Swirl in small bits of kale, wilted from steam. My favorite is to peel and core a good tart apple, cut it to small pieces, and let it simmer away to nothing in the pot as the lentils cook in the liquid.
The Art of Making Art is Putting it on A TruckThe Carnegie Museum of Art is once again hosting The Carnegie International, filling good bits of itself with modern art of every diagonal stripe. The last time this happened was four some years ago. I do not remember all too much of the last one, but I can sum my memories thusly: there was a good deal of whimsey. There were pieces that were troubling, yes, but by and large it trembled with fun. There was a ping-pong table.
This year it is more grim. Even in the freshness of the experience, I cannot put my finger on too many instances of this. It may be that the art was unusually receptive to interpretation; it may be that my bent in so is what drove the dim mood of my experience. I do not know. Should you seek it, there are corners of whimsey. It is a recommended thing.
Back behind the Carnegie Complex, back behind the fountain of Mary Schenley sits the Frick Fine Arts building, an outlier of the University of Pittsburgh lower campus. There are many things in there, including the University Art Gallery. There are many things in there (for the moment), including the work of one Xu Bing. Also recommended, and bring short poetry with you.
SmashI have a cousin who is Dutch. He is of a similar scattershot bent to food as I, except perhaps he approaches the subject, as he does most subjects, with a wild fearless abandon. He is a far stomp from us, and we do not speak often, but when we do it is often of food.
He has given me a recipe for a Dutch dish. I do not know either the English nor the Dutch name for the thing, only the description: A Bunch Of Stuff Smashed Up with Potato. As you may gather, I do not have much of a recipe, either, past the title. It lends itself well to cold days and the usual bag of trick, however, and this is how we do it.
Roast some squash in the oven. While that's going, cut up an onion or some and a carrot or some, and get them frying in a little bit of oil over high heat on top of the stove. While they brown, chop up a some of potato, peeling as you like. In keeping with the wisdom of keeping all the flavor in the pot, put the potato in on top of the onion and carrots, add perhaps half an inch of chicken stock, slam the lid on, and wait. When the potatoes are cooked, scrape the (now cooked and cooled) squash from the skin into the pot and smash everything together with a masher or a fork. We like the kind of masher that has a kind of squared serpentine mashing implement. Add some chopped parsley, or some nutmeg. Serve hot, and heaping.
I have found that the work of the group Asteria is lovely Sunday cooking music. They are on the MagnaTune label; highly, highly recommended.
Tessellated HeresyGiven where we are (and where I am from, some several times removed) the colder weather brings to table cabbage. We sometimes make soup of the stuff, mounds of cabbage and sweet sausage in a clear broth. This evening we opted instead for stuffed rolls, as we had everything handy.
Then things turned strange.
It has been a while since we broke out the brick-red Korean pepper paste. It was reasonable to put the stuff with rice and cabbage, after all. We put some of that and a fantastic amount of minced garlic into the browning beef (with some soy sauce). We mixed the cooked beef into lightly parboiled rice. Instead of dicing green pepper into the mix, in went three hot peppers we needed to use. We rolled that in blanched cabbage leaves, covered it with tomato sauce (more pepper paste in that) and a dash of rice wine vinegar, and set it to heat to simmer.
I cannot imagine the geography of this dish. The tastes are stretched between the east of Europe and the east of everything, two disparate push-pins in the globe with elastic in between them. The air is not quite cold enough for it, yet. I look forward: they tell me it will get colder.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at pen@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.