her able hands

I splurged recently on some new cookbooks because I hit a wall with my cooking repertoire this winter, and am bored senseless with my cooking library. I’ve wanted to bring Deborah Madison’s book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone into my kitchen for years now, but never wanted to fork over the $40. I ganked it on Amazon for $26 and I am so happy to hold that book in my own two hands. Produce season is almost upon us and this is the kind of book that I’ll be able to reach for when I come back from the garden with a basket full of whatever, look in the index for an ingredient, then choose between several simple, delicious recipes.

I did this the other night when I came home too pooped from a day of proofreading and mindless filing to stop at the grocery for some vegetables, even though I knew the coffers were just this side of empty (which I sorely wish my mind was right about now). I had pulled a jar of red lentils out of the cabinet the night before while searching for something else jammed in way behind it—a can of black olives for the pizza, I think. In classic Kelly form, I never put the lentils back in the cabinet and so there they sat when I walked into the messy kitchen, both glowing and glowering at me, huddled up with a dozen dirty glasses courtesy of the teenager who must always use a new glass for every drink no matter what. Not that I’m bitter about that fact or anything. Oh, no. Far be it from me.

So yeah, lentils. I remembered seeing a recipe for red lentil soup with lime while perusing the book that first day when I pulled it out of the Amazon box waiting for me on the front porch. I looked that up and did a quick fridge check. Yep. I had most of what it called for, so I got the lentils started. But first I changed into my fat pants.

Then I tried to figure out what to do with the two vegetables I had in any quantity: cauliflower and turnips (they of the I’m going to make another batch of pickled turnips this weekend purchase a month and a half ago). While flipping through the gratin recipes, I saw one for turnip and leek gratin with blue cheese, and one for cauliflower gratin. I love cauliflower mashed with blue cheese and knew I had a partial wedge of of that stuffed in the cheese drawer. I modified the turnip recipe (no leeks, added cauliflower, used less cream and I did end up running it under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp it up a bit).

The half head of lettuce torn into pieces and tossed with the last carrot, shredded and some garlic vinaigrette, and we had supper. Took about an hour and a half all told, and thirty minutes of that was just me poking around in the fridge hoping for more green. The boon was that I had a decent bunch of cilantro in there from last week’s shop and it wasn’t all black and slimy. That cilantro totally rocked the soup up a notch. No spinach, but I had a chunk of napa cabbage in there and I sliced that into very thin slivers and fried it up in butter, then added it to the soup. Also, no plain yogurt, but sour cream, which worked fine, though I think yogurt would have melded just a leetle bit better. Chris thought the soup tasted like something he would order in some exotic restaurant that he imagines must exist in another dimension. Sublime, I think he said. Man likes to be fed and when he talks all sexy with big words, I love to feed him.

The kids? Not so much. They hated it all. Too many sharp, strong flavors, I guess—a meal to put on the back burner for adult company. The kids will get pizza.

I love the fact that I have reached this level of confidence in the kitchen. It’s taken years of experimentation and scraping unfinished meals into the compost bucket to get to this point of freedom (not regularly, but you know, often enough to be uh…notable). Having good cookbooks has made all the difference in the world. And even more important, having friendships with other people who like to cook and like to talk about what they’re doing with their food that’s different and exciting.

I still have occasional dud meals, more this winter than at any time in my life since I first moved away from home. Let Chris tell you the story about my first independent, low-budget, starving student meatloaf sometime. Hoo boy. Let’s just say two pounds of cheap ground beef really shrinks under heat. We hungrily pulled that loaf pan out of the oven to find one and three quarter pounds of orange fat with a little quarter pound turd of not-quite-meat bobbing up and down in the middle of it. He still enjoys telling that one twenty one years later.

And because I can never buy just one thing on Amazon, I threw in three other books for good measure. But this post is long enough already. I’ll waste even more of your time another day to justify these purchases:

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning

Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick & Easy Indian Cooking

The Garden Primer Second Edition, by Barbara Damrosch

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