…Not ‘kvetch.’ That’s what I do about the cold weather, especially in the South, where such things should not occur. Ghivetch is a traditional Rumanian/Jewish vegetable stew which is a staple of my family’s cold-weather kitchen.
Pack with veggies and vitamins and goodness, it’s hard-core comfort food that isn’t even bad for you. How’s that for a treat? The basic recipe is below, but I love to mess around with it, adding bacon (of course), or even veal or duck if you’re feeling ambitious.
1 cup thinly sliced carrots
1 cup fresh sliced green beans
1 cup diced potato
1/2 cup sliced celery
2 diced medium tomatoes
1 small yellow squash, thin sliced
1 small zucchini, sliced thin
1/2 red onion, thin sliced
1/2 cauliflower head, chopped
1/2 cup julienned sweet pepper (or fresh paprika, if you have it)
1/2 cup thawed frozen peas
1 cup beef stock
1/3 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bay leaf, crumbled
1/2 tsp savory
1/2 tsp tarragon
salt
Boil your stock with the spices, and pour over veggies in a dutch oven. Bake at 350 for about an hour, or till done.
I like it over crusty bread, with a good pinot blanc.

You can’t always get what you want, the cliché goes, but I’ve found that I can usually improvise to get what I need. I wanted pho. Hot, spicy, sketchy-meat filled pho. Sadly, I’m 15 miles from the nearest acceptable option, in the middle of midterms, and flat broke.
Lucky for me, I had some (faux?) pho bullion cubes leftover from a previous (and abortive) attempt at making the stuff myself, so I wondered if I couldn’t whip up something close enough. What I ended up with only resembled the real thing in its flavor undertones and hot-soupness. I probably should have added some more star anise.
The good news is, despite not being what I really wanted, my soup was delicious and satisfied my craving for hearty comfort food. Here’s what I used:
2 pho bullion cubes (Chay brand);
3 cups water;
A bunch of mixed dried mushrooms;
Some frozen (thawed) veggies – snow peas, broccoli, onion, kale;
About a pound of frozen (thawed) mahi-mahi;
Hot red pepper flakes;
Fresh basil (about 10-12 leaves);
A splash of Mirin;
Some stale sourdough bread.
Yeah, I keep some strange stuff in my pantry.
Here’s what I did:
I boiled the water to dissolve the pho cubes, and reduced the heat to medium for a slow boil, adding the mushrooms. Then I added the veggies, which I’d resuscitated from cryo-stasis in the microwave, and the fish (thawed in a cold water bath and cubed). I let the mix return to a boil, and after a few minutes tasted it and decided hot pepper flakes were in order. So I added a few shakes.
While that boiled away (for about 12-15 minutes), I prepared my serving bowl by turning the bread (as I had no noodles handy) and making croutons – tear up and bake about 5 minutes at 450 degrees – and tearing the basil into it. When the fish was cooked through (flaky and white, not grey and hard or à poil as you’d eat it normally), I ladled some into the bowl.
I added soy sauce and fish sauce and sriracha, but even without them, the flavor was good. It would have been nice to have fresh lime and bean sprouts too, but oh well. I was happy! The sourdough was actually the nicest surprise: it really set off the soup’s flavors. Has anyone ever seen or made sourdough pasta? That might be a good thing for me to keep around.

Now that the weather is starting to turn cool, I’ve been thinking about earthier flavors and darker colors. And soups. I know that there’s a soup for any weather, but except for gazpacho, I want nothing to do with the stuff in summer. But recently I was treated to another Spanish soup, which is in my mind a perfect fall dish. I don’t know what it’s really called, but the friend who made it claims this to be “something I learned from my nan” says it’s from Don Quixote’s own La Mancha region of Spain. Why a Spanish girl calls her grandmother ‘nan’ is anyone’s guess.
Here’s the recipe:
4 cups beef stock
4 eggs
2 tbs olive oil
4 large peeled cloves of garlic
4 slices stale country breads (We used cibatta, which was good but maybe something more sour would be better)
4 tbs paprika
¼ tsp ground cumin
Preheat your oven to 450 degrees (F), and set out four oven-safe bowls.
In a saucepan, fry whole peeled garlic cloves in the oil until they are golden; set them aside. Fry your bread until it’s golden and set that aside too. Now, add 1 tablespoon of the paprika to the pot, let it fry a few seconds, and then add the rest of the paprika, cumin, and stock. Let it get hot but not quite boiling.
Crush your garlic with a spoon, and it back to the pot, along with some salt and pepper. Cook 5 minutes over medium heat. While that’s happening, break the bread up into bits into the bowls – one slice each.
Ladle the hot soup into the bowls (I recommend having them on a tray or something that you can put into the oven – it makes transportation easier). Break an egg into each bowl, and put the lot in the oven for about 3 minutes, until the eggs are set.
Enjoy!

(Watch out–the first five words of this article are boring, but it gets better from there.)
Health department regulations state that (See? I told you.) real hollandaise sauce must be re-made every hour at restaurants to prevent food poisoning. While this prevents you from contracting salmonella poisoning, it also means that most restaurants just use a hollandaise sauce mix in their eggs benedict instead of going to all the trouble to constantly remake the real stuff during the brunch rush. Here’s how to make Hollandaise Sauce yourself, at home, in your PJs, for less trouble than you’d take to find a parking space near a good brunch place on a Sunday morning.
Separate the whites and yolks of a bunch of eggs. (Three eggs per person is plenty, and you’ll have leftovers.) Do this by cracking them a flat surface, not a corner, which will drive pointy bits into the white. Let the yolk settle into one half of the shell and let the white fall out. Pour from one half-shell to the other–carefully–until the white is mostly gone. Pour the yolks into a metal bowl.
Whisk the yolks furiously until they are the consistency of cake batter. This takes awhile, so make sure you have spent the night with someone who is willing to do half the work for breakfast. They should be slightly lighter yellow than unwhisked yolks. Put the bowl over a pot of lightly simmering water (but not touching the water) and leave it there to keep warm, but not cook the yolks. Now slowly pour in some lemon juice (roughly two easy squeezes from a lemon half, I’d say) while still whisking rapidly to emulsify it. Whisk in some warm, melted butter the same way; clarified is good, but not necessary. Keep whisking until it is a consistency you want to eat, and add some cayenne if you want.
Next up: Grains! (Yawn. But I’ll tell you how to make coconut sticky rice.)

This week focused on salads, mushrooms, and vinaigrettes, which was great because up until this class I was proud of myself if I mixed my own Caesar salad rather than buy it in a bag. I could never figure out why my own made-up salads didn’t turn out well, but I didn’t care very much. I was salad-challenged.
I took that class six days ago, and since then I have eaten the following salad three times:
Panzanella, Or Italian Tomato Bread Salad
Chop up half a shallot and put in in the blender. Pour in a few glugs of sherry vinegar, and then turn on the blender. Then and only then, use the little hole in the top to sloooowly pour in about two to three times as much oil as you did vinegar, as the blender is still on….it should take you at least thirty seconds to add the oil if you’re doing it slowly enough. I used extra-virgin olive oil, basil-flavored olive oil, and then some canola so the olive taste wouldn’t take over.
That makes one ugly vinaigrette, so cheer it up a little bit by tossing in a slice or two of tomato. I used red heirloom tomatoes and they were perfect, but when I went to Whole Foods for more tomatoes (it’s an obsession) they were like $6.00 a pound, so I bought vine-ripened instead and they were lovely, too.
Rip up a few pieces of tough bread per person (I used a crusty baguette), and chop up another tomato (or two or three) into bite-sized pieces. Mix them together in a serving bowl, and pour the vinagrette over it, tossing as you go. Don’t soak the bread–just get it damp. If you didn’t use basil-flavored olive oil (and even if you did), slice up some basil leaves and stir them in. Finish with crumbled parmesan, and serve over spinach leaves.

So class last night focused on vegetables: specifically which kinds stand up best in which preparation. The preparations we practiced were:
Confit – tiny pieces cooked very slowly in a good amount of fat. Surprisingly, red cabbage prepared this way (with some granny smith apple bits) is absolutely luscious. (If my parents are reading this, they just laughed out loud at the idea of me liking red cabbage, because when I was two I flung red cabbage across a crowded restaurant. It was the start of my career being particular about what I ate, and also of being a little dramatic.)
Roasting – You know what this is: cooked in an oven, maybe with a little fat to prevent overdrying. Brings out the sweetness and softens veggies.
Braising – browned on the stove with oil and/or butter, then deglazed (scrape the pan with some wine) and cooked in a little liquid (like chicken stock) in the oven until tender. Surprisingly easy and gorgeous with fennel or squash. Add balsamic and honey to balance the flavors.
Carmelizing – used on onions, mostly. First, sweat them on low heat until soft, not allowing them to brown. Once they are completely soft, add some wine, deglaze, and turn up the heat so that they brown evenly.
Blanching – boiling briefly in salted water to season and seal in the color, then plunging into an ice bath to prevent mushiness. (I first became aware of this as the “shock and awe” method.) Also good for loosening skins without actually cooking the vegetable, like for tomatoes.
Gratinee – blanched, then stirred into a bechamel with grainy mustard and a little cheese. Contrary to what I figured before, gratinee does not mean “drowned in cheese;” it means “browned.” The browning comes from baking until bubbly, and maybe passing it under the broiler for a minute. (I’m not entirely sure how this even counts as a vegetable.) Our instructor did this with cauliflower last night, and it was sumptuous. I’ll be making that again this weekend.