The Dinner Files

One good friend just started a full time job after freelancing for years. Another friend has twins who are old enough now to eat real food so they’ve been trying to have family dinners most nights. Still another friend’s husband had a change at work and is no longer home in time to make dinner, which has always been his gig. In short, three friends in quick succession have asked for fast dinner ideas.

I’m going to try and keep them in mind in the coming weeks. Faster, quicker, easier. The fact of the matter is that I often cook that way and, due to some work-life circumstances this spring I’ll be cooking like that more anyway. At our house getting dinner on the table in a hurry often manifests in the form of pasta. Pasta with a lot of vegetables in it. I’m working on expanding that mindset (it’s difficult, though, since such pasta dishes are always a hit with all three of us).

This mushroom soba noodle soup is sort of a departure, right? Sure, it’s pasta and vegetables, but they’re in a soup! Hey, I’m trying here.

It may not be revolutionary, but it is delicious. Fresh, light, and perfect for this time of year when heavy winter foods don’t sound so great anymore but when you still need something to warm you up come dinner time.

Mushroom soba noodle soup

This noodle-y soup-y creation was inspired by a recipe for a mushroom hot pot in Japanese Hot Pots by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. It’s a great resource – especially if, like me, you like to make (and eat) big bowls of delicious.

4 cups broth (I used a mix of chicken and pork broth; one or the other or dashi would have been good, too)

1 cup sake

1/2 cup mirin

1/3 cup soy sauce

3 cups shredded Napa cabbage

1/2 pound shiitake mushrooms

1/2 pound oyster moshrooms

1/2 pound wild arugula (regular arugula or spinach would also work just fine, although with less bite)

1 pound tofu (firm, soft, silken – whatever you like) cut into three or four big pieces

1/2 pound soba noodles

some type of chile powder for garnish (we used ground ancho chile because it was in the cupboard)

Heat the broth in a medium pot. Add sake, mirin, and soy sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning – adding more mirin for sweetness or more soy for salt, if you like.

Add cabbage, cover, and cook until cabbage is wilted, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and trim mushrooms and cut into bite-size pieces if they are large.

Add mushrooms to the pot, cover, and cook until mushrooms and cabbage are tender, about 8 minutes. Add arugula, cover, and cook until the arugula leaves are wilted, about 3 minutes. Put large pieces of tofu on top of everything else, cover, and simmer until tofu is heated through, about 2 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook soba noodles in the boiling salted water until tender to the bite. Drain and divide between three or four large bowls.

Top noodles with the vegetables, one piece of tofu each, and broth. Garnish with chile powder, if you like. A few thinly sliced green onions would be tasty, too.

I am aware I just posted a soup with a fun little swirl on top. Well aware. People, it is cold in San Francisco. And buildings here are not properly insulated. And it’s a long and sad story, but I live in a house that lacks central heating. All I want to eat all day long during these bone-chilling damp months that pass for winter here is soup.

I have a feeling most of you know about the wonder that is barley bean chard soup – you cook up some barley (I boil mine in salted water until it’s tender to the bite which seems to happen in about 15 or 20 minutes), cook up some white beans (or use canned, but the canned ones are mushier – soak the beans overnight or use the quick soak method, then boil until just tender to the bite, add salt to the water and let them cool in the cooking liquid, then drain and use), heat those two things in some chicken broth, and add shredded chard leaves, cooking until they wilt. This soup is then most commonly topped with some grated Parmesan and some black pepper, maybe a swirl of olive oil if you’re feeling kicky.

When I made this, however, we had a small bowl of garlic- and chile-infused/cooked olive oil sitting on the counter – leftover from making pizza. I swirled it in. Divine. Perfection. Why the hell haven’t I been eating this for years?

And that’s how “recipes” are born.

Barley beans chard soup with a chile swirl

This soup can be as easy as dumping several cans together and throwing in a bag of baby spinach or as fancy-pants as making your own broth, cooking up dried beans, and growing your own chard. No surprise for regular readers, but I fall into that latter camp, although the chard I planted seems determined to stay at the baby stage, so we’re eating it in salads instead of working it into soups. Do you think it’s not growing bigger because we keep eating it? Maybe?

Note: You can cook the barley in the broth (you’ll need a lot more broth in that case), but I find it muddies the soup a bit – the barley releases starch and turns the whole thing cloudy.

1 bunch chard

3 Tablespoons olive oil

6 cups chicken broth (I like to make my own)

2 cups cooked white beans (or 1 can)

1 cup barley, cooked

3 cloves garlic

Red chile flakes

Cut white ribs out of green chard leaves. Slice stems crosswise as thinly as possible and set aside. Cut leaves into thin strips and set aside.Slice garlic into Goodfellas-style thin slices and set aside.

Heat a bit of the olive oil in a soup pot over medium high heat, add chard stems and cook, stirring, until they’re soft, about 5 minutes. Add broth, beans, and barley and bring just to a boil. Add chard leaves and cook until wilted, just a minute or two.

Meanwhile, heat remaining olive oil in a small frying pan. Add garlic and cook, swirling a bit now and then, jst until the garlic starts to turn golden. Add chile flakes to taste (I use about 1/4 teaspoon) and take off heat. Let sit in pan until garlic just starts moving from golden to brown. Pour flavored oil in a small bowl to stop the cooking.

Serve soup with a swirl of browned garlic- and chile-oil. Take it one more step with a grind or two of black pepper.

I made this lentil soup from a vague memory of a lentil soup I used to make in college all the time. Whatever cookbook I got the recipe from has long since disappeared. You can use fancier green or puy lentils, but this soup makes fine use of the humble, cheap brown lentil. Make a pot, freeze the extras, save some bucks because there is nothing cheaper to make than a pot of lentil soup.

Slightly Spicy Lentil Soup

I used to eat this soup with cottage cheese, an idea I got from Jarra’s, an Ethiopian restaurant in Portland I went to weekly in college that served cottage cheese with its spicy lentil dishes. Now I serve it with a drizzle of fruity olive oil-garlic-parsley-lemon zest mixture. I can’t help but wonder what I’ll be serving it with in the 2030s….

6 Tablespoons olive oil (divided)

2 onions, finely chopped

2 stalks celery, finely chopped

2 carrots, finely chopped

7 cloves garlic, minced (divided)

1 small hot chile, minced (add more chiles for a spicier soup, but I didn’t need to tell youheat freaks that, did I?)

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons ground coriander

1/4 teaspoon ground cinamon

1/4 tsp. cayenne

3 cups brown lentils

5 thin slices ginger

Salt to taste

3 Tablespoons minced flat-leaf parsley

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest

Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium high heat in a soup pot. Add onion, celery, and carrot. Cook, stirring, until onions are soft, abotu 3 minutes. Add 4 cloves worth of the garlic and the chile and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about a minute.

Add cumin, coriander, cinnamon, and cayenne. Cook, stirring, about a minute.

Add lentils, ginger, and 8 cups water. Bring to a boil, partially cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook until lentils are very soft and starting to fall apart. How long will this take? That depends on your lentils and how dried out and potentially old they are – anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes. When lentils are done add salt to taste (I used about a tablespoon) and more water for a thinner soup, if you like.

Meanwhile, combine remaining garlic, remaining 1/4 cup olive oil, parsley, and lemon zest. Add salt to taste and let sit at room temperature until you’re ready to eat. Swirl some into each serving of lentil soup.

Note: For a creamy soup and more dishes to do, go ahead and whirl the whole thing (in batches) in a blender.

It is, perhaps, unfair to characterize this soup as a “clean the fridge” creation. It was really terribly delicious and satisfying – neither my dashing husband nor grade school son said anything other than “more please” about it – but I was using stuff up. Using it up fast. Using it up before I’d have to throw it out. So I hacked a hunk of bacon that had been sitting in the back of the freezer into pieces and put it in a pot and sweated out its fat – adding a bit of water now and then to keep it from scorching before all the fat had melted. While that went down, I sliced a small onion that looked like it was thinking about sprouting, chopped a small savoy cabbage that needed a few wilted outer leaves pulled off of it first, and diced a carrot that was holding its own but I couldn’t remember when it had made its way into the fridge in the first place, which is never a good sign.

All of this was sauteed in the pot with the bacon and a bit of butter and a bit of olive oil (I was hedging all fat bets) until they softened a bit, then I threw in the potatoes that needed some trimming as they were chopped, a bunch  of chicken broth, and brought the whole thing to a boil.

I simmered it all down, cooked it until everything was tender and the flavors had all blended together nicely – about 25 minutes or so, and served it up with some chopped parsley on top for color. So pretty! So fresh!

A whole grain baguette and two half-eaten hunks of cheese were placed on the table along with the soup and we had ourselves a tasty, frugal, quite French (although the potatoes would have been peeled and the whole thing likely pureed) dinner. And the fridge? It’s all ready to be filled, yet again.

I love a good French onion soup filled with slithery sliced of deeply caramelized onions and flavorful broth sharpened up by a splash of white wine and soup-sodded toasts of baguette and plenty of aged gruyere melted on top.

I am alone in this love, at least at my house. The soup will get eaten, but no one else will be terribly excited about it. But a crisp chill has hit the air here in San Francisco, and warming soup was what I craved.

Working on the age-old combination of apples and onions (and the contents of our larder), I switched up the al-kee-hol in this soup – using hard apple cider instead of white wine – and was charmed by the sweet note it added. The rest of the household was thrilled. We also had little whole grain toasts topped with a cheese that is a lot like Camembert (the name was thrown out with the wrapper but it was sitting the fridge whereas gruyere was not) floating on the soup, which was a lovely combination (any soft, bloomy-rind cheese would be yummy). Next time I would take it one step further and use rye bread for the toasts – the sweetness of the soup can handle that extra flavor.

Note: Be sure to use a very dry apple cider. Some pear ciders are even drier and would work great too. This soup has a sweetness to it even with a bone-dry cider.

Cider onion soup

Peel and thinly slice 2 1/2 pounds onions. Melt 6 tablespoons of butter in a medium or large heavy soup pot over medium-high heat. Add onions and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring, until onions soften up. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, stirring when you think of it and adjusting heat so onions are cooking but not at all browning, until onions caramelize and turn all deeply amber from the inside and taste almost like candy they’re so sweet. Be patient, this process takes awhile – at least 40 minutes and up to an hour. Add 1 cup hard apple cider and bring to a boil. Add about 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock (I’m guessing plain water would work fine too) and bring to a boil. Add a couple sprigs of fresh thyme, if you’re so inclined, reduce heat, and simmer soup for 10 to 15 minutes. Taste and add more salt if you must.

Toast slices of whole wheat, rye, or other whole grain bread, then top those toasts with slices of bloomy-rind cheese like Brie or Camembert. You can float these as-is in the soup (the heat from the toast and the soup will gently melt the cheese) or broil these toasts to give the cheese a head-start. Some people will want freshly ground black pepper in their soup; some people will not. I found the sweet, peppery, cheesy combination divine.

“Why do we have to have soup every night?” Ernest asked last night as he spooned minted pea soup into his pie hole and my dashing husband and I discussed the fact that I’d roasted the chiles to make a cream of green chile soup just like the one we’d had Sunday night at Duarte’s Tavern* while we crunched on tomato bruschetta I’d made to go alongside the soup.

“Because I haven’t had soup all summer,” I explained with a bit of a laugh as I realized that I was eating – and serving – soup for the fourth time in five days with plans to make it five out of six, ” and I’m trying to recover from the daily allotment of grilled meat we had all summer.”

It’s true. We ate a lot of meat during our sejour in Minnesota. My parents eat very well. No stereotypical Midwestern casseroles or canned veggies. Fresh, crisp salads and homemade guacamole are served almost daily. But so is meat. Or at least some bit of animal be it beef or pork or chicken or fish. This is almost especially true in the summer, when the grill tempts us all with its siren song of delicious carcinogenic charred bits.

So I’m in a bit of recovery but Ernest is in a bit of withdrawal. He’s gone from getting his grandmother to serve him chicken wings for breakfast to a diet with more varied protein sources.

* Duarte’s is in Pescadero, about an hour drive south along the coast from San Francisco. They have great fresh fish dishes, awesome pies with super flakey crusts (the olallieberry is a favorite in our family), soul-soothing sourdough bread, and the best cream of artichoke and cream of green chile soups imaginable. And for people like me, who hate to have to choose, they’ll serve two soups side-by-side in a bowl (the similar textures keep them from running into each other – it’s brilliant).

As I wrote “depression friendly dinners” I was thinking of the economic recession-depression, but I realize that I had also cooked up dishes that would be quite comforting in the face of emotional blues and might even be able to tempt someone sequestered in psychological depression to take a bite or two.

I was just out to make use of the food we had in the fridge – making room for the next CSA box and avoiding wasting food. There was a last bit of salad – that got tossed with a vinaigrette, natch. But a bag of new red potatoes and a bunch of bits of cheese were hanging out in there too. At first I thought: potato gratin! But new red potatoes aren’t really the best for baking, they’re better for boiling or steaming. Just the teeniest bit of brainstorming and I remembered the magic that is Welsh rarebit (a.k.a. Welsh rabbit) – an ale and cheese sauce that is usually poured over toast.

Welsh rarebit

Boil or steam potatoes or any other vegetable that would be good with cheese sauce poured over it (so that’s pretty much anything, right?) or toast some bread.

Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is fully melted and stops foaming but hasn’t started to brown at all, sprinkle in 3 Tbsp. whole wheat pastry flour (or just plain old flour if you like, but even this bit of whole wheat added a nice nuttiness to the final sauce) and whisk to combine the butter and flour. Cook and whisk until you smell cooked rather than raw flour – it smells like pie crust. No sense of smell or don’t know what I’m talking about here? Try 2 to 3 minutes and you should be fine. While still whisking, slowly pour in a 12-oz. bottle of beer or ale. When you get a smooth mixture, cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce starts to thicken slightly. Add about 8 oz. of cheese cut into small chunks or shredded – an aged cheddar would, of course, be lovely, as would an aged gouda. I just used assorted bits from the cheese drawer. Whisk until cheese is melted. Add about 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce*, if you like, and 1/2 tsp. dry mustard. Add salt to taste and hot sauce to taste, if you like. If using potatoes, smash them a bit so their starchy insides can absorb the cheese sauce. Pour sauce over potatoes or vegetables or toast and garnish with freshly ground black pepper if you’re so inclined.

Maybe now you have some leftover boiled potatoes and some leftover cheese sauce. Sure, you could just reheat them both and have the rarebit all over again, which would be a perfectly fine thing to do. Or, maybe, like me, visions of potato cheese soup dance in your head. If you want to make those dreams a reality, first peel and mash the leftover potatoes – for a smooth soup run them through a food mill or ricer. Then bring a bottle of beer or ale to a boil in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the leftover (now very thickened) cheese sauce until everything is smooth. Stir in mashed potatoes and heat until hot. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you have some spring onions or green onions hanging around, slice them up for perfectly pungent and crunchy garnish. If you also have a chile you could slice that up and add it in with the onion for spicy delicious measure:

There, doesn’t that feel better? Or sort of virtuous? Whenever I don’t buy anything to make dinner I feel like I’m saving money. Sure, I realize we spent money buying the things I find in the fridge and cupboards in order to make the “free” meals, but it still feels good. It feels good to save the money, it feels good not to waste things, it feels good to come up with ways to use the things we have instead of mindlessly buying more more more.

* Full confession: I cannot say the word “Worcestershire.” I don’t know what it is. I add extra t’s and entire syllables. Every time I try to say it my dashing husband laughs his ass off.

We were a busy, rushed family last night. The farm box* was filled with the same-old same-old which is what happens – even in the Golden State – this time of year. The same-old same-old included juicy oranges, bright chard, and tiny freshly-dug Yukon Gold potatoes, so I’ll limit my complaints. The leek and cauliflower were put to use to make a lovely smooth soup. And the one sign of spring in the box – green garlic – was chopped, sautéed in butter and spooned atop the servings of soup. It was a lovely bridge: from winter to spring, from rainy day to cozy night.

* “Farm box” is what Ernest calls our CSA (community supported agriculture) box of fruits and vegetables we get every week from Terra Firma Farms. It is an apt description and, quite frankly, more direct than “CSA share.”

I’m still sick enough to want soup for dinner, but I’m feeling well enough to make the soup myself. So I went back in time, just a bit, to my senior year of college when I ate a lot of egg lemon soup. A lot. It was cheap, easy, fast, and delicious. I could also stomach it if I happened to be hung over or completely stressed out or not eating dinner until 2 in the morning, and one or the other of those situations was pretty much the case for most of that year. (And yes, sadly, all three were known to create a perfect storm of nutritional need on a fairly regular basis.)

Back then I made it using bouillon cubes, for which I still have a sick fondness. But last night I defrosted some homemade chicken stock as the base, which does make it seem more nutritional, you know? But trust me, it works just fine with whatever form of salty cube or canned broth you may have hanging around your kitchen.

While I was flashing back,  I went ahead and doused the accompanying salad in avocado vinaigrette – another throw-back to college days when my various hippie classmates loved nothing more than finding new ways to use avocado, and a few – like this one – were worth remembering.

Thai Food Express. It’s a restaurant. It’s also how I experienced dinner last night. A quick request for tom ka gai and maybe some noodles made from my sick bed and… voilà!, my dashing husband returned with  steaming tub of spicy chicken and coconut milk soup and two kinds of noodles.

Ernest, noodle-lover that he be, dug in with gusto. Too much gusto, it ended up. About half-way through his plate of noodles he started crying. The broad, flat noodles were, it must be said, a bit spicy. Quite spicy. The kind of spicy you don’t notice, however, until several bites in. And it takes just as long to dissipate.

Water, plain rice, milk, and yogurt were all offered as curatives. He preferred to sit and rub his lips and cry. I ate my soup and went back to bed.