Step one

I'm just too frugal for my own good sometimes.  (My children might say "cheap.")  When I think of all the hot water I've run down the sink in my lifetime after cooking pasta, it hurts.  But I've done two things to minimize the pain.  First, I've taken to cooking my pasta in the same pot as the sauce whenever possible.  But that doesn't work when you're making enough sauce for three or four meals, such as whenever I make a red sauce.

Second, for those times when you have to cook the pasta separately, I bought a pot system which has an inner pot with holes in it.  Boil up the water, add the pasta, cook, and then pull the top pot out to drain the pasta.

That leaves you with a nice pot of boiling water, already enriched with some starch from the pasta.  So in the minute or two while the pasta drains, grab a pound or two of dried beans, put them into the water and return it to the stove to simmer for an hour or two.  If you remember to turn off the heat then, you have time to let the pot cool enough to go into the fridge overnight, and a good start on bean soup for the next day.

Oxtails my way

When we lived in Germany, we frequently ate at a small restaurant where Ochsenschwanzsuppe (oxtail soup) was on the menu all the time, and I loved it.  It was brown and smooth and rich.  Obviously there were vegetables in there somewhere, but nothing identifiable by taste.  For the last 40 years I've been wondering how you make it, but instead of trying to replicate that recipe I've taken to using oxtails in a very different way.

Oxtails come as two- or three-inch slices of the actual tail, with vertebrae and a spinal column through the middle, protected by a big slab of fat around the outside that needs to be trimmed off before you cook them.

Render a little of the fat, brown the meat, saute a lot of onions and a bit of garlic, put it all into a big pot, add a can of diced tomatoes and a half bottle of red wine, and let it simmer all afternoon.

Yesterday I still had some rosemary in a vase on the kitchen table from just before our first freeze of the winter (what was that -- ten years ago???) so that became the herb seasoning.  You could use any other fresh or dried herbs you have around.  Finally I found some cauliflower in the fridge and added two big hunks about 15 minutes before dinnertime.

The cauliflower got nice and pink from the tomatoes; the most effortless preparation of vegetables you can imagine!  I'm sure many other vegetables could be added the same way.

One thing I like about this dish is that you end up with leftovers that become a fabulous soup.  If there's any meat left, dice it up for the soup.  If not, just use the tomato-onion base.  Add some broth or water and additional vegetables if you want.  My default ingredient is quite a bit of cabbage, using the core and the thickest leaves cut into chunks.

Soup at the cathedral

Our guidebook informed us that despite the rich culinary heritage of France, nothing has ever emanated from Paris except onion soup.  Which we did not see on any menus.

Finally on our last day we ventured outside the city to Chartres.  And in a wonderful cafe in front of the cathedral we found (and ordered) onion soup.  Also a bowl of fish soup with the yellowest rouille I've ever seen.  Both were excellent.

If you're in Chartres, go to La Serpente, just outside the southeast door of the cathedral (around to the right from the main entrance).  Great food, inexpensive, and you can't beat the view.

Thinking out of the box

When I was a kid, making things out of boxes was a mainstay of our household cooking repertoire.  Don't think I ever baked a cake that didn't start in a box (I'd say that continues to this very day, except that I've given up either eating or baking cake).  Bisquick, of course.  Rice-A-Roni (I still cook that, or its virtual equivalent, except that I learned long ago to do it from scratch).

As I became a more sophisticated cook and a more suspicious and demanding consumer, I gave up practically everything in boxes.  Except for one, which I couldn't live without -- Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. It's a small box; two of us usually eat a little more than half a batch, leaving just enough for somebody's breakfast.  It cooks up quickly, 20 minutes in the oven.






















It is the perfect complement to chili or bean soup, which appear frequently on our menus.  And did I mention that it's delicious?

In the early postwar days, when cake mixes and similar "labor-saving" products first appeared, they were formulated so you just added water.  But then some marketing genius determined that women didn't want to just add water -- that made them feel useless and uncreative.  But if they had to add milk and an egg, they retained their feminine mystique of being good cooks.  (The next thing you knew, we had pudding cake!)

And so Jiffy still requires milk and an egg.  Which I am happy to supply.  I make it as corn bread rather than muffins -- easier to fix, easier to clean up.  In my nine-inch square pyrex pan, the bread is about five-eighths of an inch tall, just like a garment seam allowance.

I know I could make cornbread from scratch, and perhaps it would be one percent better than Jiffy.  But it would take five minutes longer.  So I continue with my obeisance to the 1950s.

Starring role for escarole

The lettuce family has many members, and not all of them are suited for salads.  One of my favorites is escarole, a coarse, slightly bitter green that really needs to be cooked to bring out its best.


















We were introduced to escarole at a fancy Italian restaurant in New York in 2000 when it came unbidden, the vegetable du jour alongside our entrees.  It was sauteed and dressed with something acidic, and we had to ask the waiter what it was.  We came home and started fixing it as a cooked vegetable, sauteed in olive oil in a frying pan and finished with a squeeze of lemon, a bit of white wine in the pan or a little vinegar sprinkled over the plates.

But a few years later I saw a recipe in the New York Times for escarole and beans, and it was one of those  moments that changed my cooking and eating repertoire forever.  I've made it so many times that it's been internalized; I don't need the recipe any more, and in fact it has graduated from a recipe to a concept.

That's an important step for people who cook like I do; I don't like recipes because (a) you might not have the right stuff on hand to follow them exactly and (b) you might not have your cookbook available.  It's better to have a concept, a general idea of what to do, but open to lots of flexibility as to specifics.

So here's the concept of escarole and beans.  I use it once or twice a month, pretty much whenever we can find a nice head of escarole at the store (not always).

Put some beans in a really big pot.  Canellini are best, and failing that, another white bean such as great northern or navy is next best.  Or heck, something red or yellow or black would probably work just fine too.  Canned beans are fine (Progresso and Bush both make excellent canned canellini) but if I have time I'd just as soon cook up a pot of dried beans from scratch.  Two cans of beans will generously feed two for dinner, but a pound of dried beans will feed two for several meals.

Season the beans with some mojo -- garlic, onions, anchovies, hot peppers, country ham, whatever you like.  If you're starting from dried beans, make sure to add enough salt.

If you want, put some other vegetables in the pot.  Carrots and celery seem obvious, but see what else you have in the fridge.  Add liquid to make a soupy consistency.  If I start with canned beans, I add a can or two of chicken broth.

To this point, basically you have made bean soup.  If you have a favorite way to make bean soup, by all means use it.

Now get your escarole.  Wash it, chop it into bite-size pieces, remembering that it will wilt and shrivel once it hits the hot soup, so the pieces can be on the large size.  You will think that you have enough of this stuff to feed an army, but not really.  I find that a big head of escarole will feed two of us for dinner, with enough green stuff left in the soup pot for another meal.

Dump the cut-up escarole into the pot, stir so the greens go underwater, and simmer for 10 or 15 minutes until the thickest pieces of escarole -- the white stems -- are not crunchy any more.

Serve as soup, or if you like, use a slotted spoon to fish out the beans and greens, leaving much of the liquid behind.  You'll probably still want to eat it with a spoon rather than a fork, but who knows.  I like to add grated parmesan cheese at the table, or stir in some pesto.

The leftovers are just as good tomorrow.

Secret ingredients

Don't you love discovering a secret ingredient?  Something that you would have never thought to add to a favorite dish, but after you taste it, you realize it was a really good idea?

One of my top ten in this category is black olives as an ingredient in minestrone, or any similar vegetable soup. 

I remember exactly when and where I discovered this secret.  We were in Cincinnati for the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, and on the way home we stopped at Pompilio's, a venerable old Italian restaurant in Newport, KY.  In the minestrone we discovered the secret ingredient and loved it.  Since then, I've often added olives to my soup.  They add a little salt and a lot of concentrated flavor, and they look pretty.

Pitted kalamatas, which I can usually get at the olive bar in my local grocery, are perfect; sometimes I cut them into halves, other times serve them whole.  If I can't find pitted, I'll sometimes get another fancy black olive and cut the pits out; it takes a while, but you need less because the pit-full varieties tend to be saltier and stronger.

Kale, the soup cook's best friend

Kale is one of the most nutritious vegetables around, as you might surmise from its deep green color.  A cup of chopped kale gives you more than twice your daily target of Vitamin A, a third again your daily target of Vitamin C, almost seven times your target of Vitamin K.  It has fair amounts of calcium and iron, more than in most other vegetables, and hardly any calories.  And it's cheaper than spinach, escarole or other comparable greens.

I am not enamored of the strong taste of cooked kale, but I just love it served raw -- not on a plate or in a salad, but in soup.

I like to cut away the thick ribs, then chop the leaves and pile them into a soup bowl practically to the top. 








This bowl holds more than two cups of kale, and you might not think there would be much room for soup on top of it.  But the instant the hot liquid hits the kale, it wilts and shrinks, so I was able to put almost two cups of soup into the "full" bowl.

At first you have to eat just the plain soup, unless you've left more room in your bowl than I did.  But as soon as you have eaten a few mouthfuls, you'll be able to dredge up beautiful green stuff from the bottom of the dish. 




It tastes great, and is one of the easiest ways I know to add serious vegetable material to your diet.  And it's fun when your food changes color in mid-meal.

By the way, I mentioned spinach and escarole earlier.  They both make wonderful soup additives too.  I add spinach raw, exactly as I do kale, but escarole seems to like to be cooked, so I chop it up and add it to the soup ten minutes before serving. 

Soup du jour

Last night's dinner -- bean soup with cauliflower and canned diced tomato -- looks a lot like the bean soup behind the title of this blog, doesn't it?  But it's different!






Soup du jour is one of my favorite meals. The plan can begin from scratch with a favorite ingredient, or emanate from leftovers or vegetables that should probably have been eaten two days ago. I tend to make up the plan as I go, but these basic concepts underlie my efforts:

-  Always start with chopping and browning an onion or two.  There is no kind of soup that won't benefit from that flavor, and it makes the kitchen smell great.  If you're running late on fixing dinner, the smell will make people think the situation is under control, even if it's not.

-  After you’ve browned the onion, garlic and other ingredients but before you start adding liquids, deglaze the pot with a little wine (fortified wines like marsala, vermouth or sherry are particularly nice). Stir around a little to dissolve all the good brown stuff on the bottom of the pan, then add the rest of the wet ingredients.

-  Always have a lot of chicken broth on hand. I’m happy with Kroger canned. Strangely enough, their “low fat” variety has less sodium than the “low sodium” variety, in addition to lower fat. Add chicken broth to anything that needs more liquid at the last minute.

-  Life is easier if you have one or two default seasonings that can go into most varieties of soup. My favorite is Penzey’s Galena Street Seasoning, a mix of salt, sugar, black pepper, paprika, nutmeg, sage, cayenne and red pepper. Ordinarily I shy away from any seasoning mix that includes salt, but you do need salt in most soups, especially those containing beans. Less than a tablespoon of Galena Street is usually all the seasoning you need for a small-to-medium pot of soup; you know it will have enough salt, enough heat, and enough flavor oomph without pesky blending and tasting.

-  Keep some dry, canned or frozen ingredients that you can add to soup at the last minute if your pot looks a little skimpy or somebody new shows up for dinner. For instance, diced tomatoes, various kind of beans, tiny pastas, olives, chicken broth. I don't usually have frozen vegetables on hand but a handful of corn, peas or edamame would do nicely too. Bacon, ham, pepperoni (turkey pepperoni if you’re feeling healthful) or other cured meats can hang around the fridge for a while and add both bulk and flavor.

-  Yesterday’s leftovers can become today’s soup. Start with onion, of course. Cut the leftovers into bite-sized pieces and throw them into the pot. You’ll probably need to add liquid (chicken broth, wine, tomato juice, milk, whatever). I also keep canned cream soups on hand (cream of onion or celery is a good all-purpose base; cream of shrimp is great for seafood or vegetable leftovers) as a base. If it still doesn’t look good enough to eat, add any of the things in the previous paragraph, or stick a small potato in the microwave for four minutes and dice it into the soup.

-  Sometimes it helps to put everything into the blender and make it smooth.  That also helps incorporate ingredients like cheese or tomato paste that might otherwise not be properly distributed throughout the soup.

-  Most soups improve with a grating of parmesan cheese at the table. And/or you can stir a spoonful of pesto into each bowl.

-  Many soups improve if you put finely shredded spinach or kale in the bottom of the bowl before you ladle in the hot soup. You can practically fill the bowl with greenery because it will shrivel to nothing in the hot liquid. It’s tasty, beautiful and nutritious.

-  Make bean soup in quantity, using at least a one-pound bag of beans.  It's no more work to cook up a huge batch than a small one, and after dinner you can freeze the rest in one-quart containers.  Then someday thaw out one quart of the soup and use it as a base for anything else you have on hand, like the half cauliflower languishing in my vegetable drawer last night.  It's surprising how many foods will play well with beans, and since the beans provide both bulk and protein, small quantities of leftovers will work just fine.