One-Pot Meals

French green lentils are plump and speckled dark green. They are very flavorful, hold their shape when cooked, and are good for making salads and soups. For this rustic lentil soup, the lentils are cooked until they are tender and can be easily mashed—longer than they would be for a salad. The yogurt garnish brightens the earthy flavor of the rosemary and lentils.

This is a good soup to make in the fall months when mature leeks are at their flavorful peak and are plentiful in the markets. It is a traditional French soup that is typically puréed, but I prefer it with a clear chicken broth and sliced vegetables.

This is the soup I always make when I want something comforting and restorative. This method easily becomes second-nature and is good for all kinds of seasonal vegetable soups: Soften the vegetables in oil or butter, add stock, and simmer until the vegetables are tender. Flavor with herbs, and, for a more substantial soup, add cooked pasta, beans, or, as in this recipe, chicken. Brothy vegetable soups are even better with a plate of garlic croutons (see page 37) to dip in the soup.

This homey one-pot meal is reminiscent of the stews you find in Tuscany and Umbria, which are loaded with vegetables, potatoes, and herbs. It’s a great choice if you’re looking for a dish to serve to a crowd; the succulent stew can simmer for a long time—the sauce just becomes richer and more intense—and it’s hard to believe you can get so much flavor from a relatively inexpensive piece of meat. Just be sure to use a Chianti that’s good enough to serve along with the meal.

Liguria is a coastal region in northern Italy known for its fresh seafood and many variations of fish stew, among other things. My version uses just white fish with lots of veggies so it is lighter than many traditional fish stews. It is still sophisticated and is made with white wine, which is a perfect pairing with seafood.

This is not a stir-fry but a simmered dish, easy and fast. The cooking time totals about ten minutes, and the preparation time is about the same, so be sure to start the rice first.

This is a classic spring or fall dish, times when you can get good, fresh turnips but don’t mind long, slow cooking. Here turnips and pork are both browned for perfect color and then simmered in a little liquid until tender. Don’t ignore the instruction to preheat the skillet for at least a minute, then allow the butter and/or oil to become hot, and don’t crowd the meat, or it won’t brown properly. Make sure the first side of the pork cubes browns well and that the second is on its way to being browned before adding the turnips. The turnips themselves are so high in natural sugars that they brown almost instantly and continue to gain color as they braise.

Miso is a superb thickener, adding a rich, creamy consistency when whisked into a small amount of liquid. With that in mind, it’s the work of a moment to turn the pan juices remaining after searing a piece of meat into a great sauce. My choice here is pork for meat and red wine for liquid; the combination resulting from these three ingredients completely belies the amount of energy put into the dish. Red miso (which is in fact brown) adds terrific color to the sauce and has the strongest flavor of all the misos; it’s also the easiest to find. Miso must be handled gently, because high heat practically destroys its flavor; so be sure to keep the heat low when you stir it in. For the pork, I prefer a bone-in chop, preferably from the rib end of the loin; it’s a little bit fattier than other chops, and these days pork is so lean that the extra fat is a benefit rather than a detriment.

The smaller the pieces you cut, the shorter the cooking time, but I wouldn’t make them too small or you’ll rob yourself of some of the satisfaction of eating them. This stew is also excellent made with lamb shoulder.

The charm of most braised dishes is that they result in succulent, tender meat and require little attention after an initial browning. The sad truth, however, is that most meats need hours—sometimes many hours—before they become truly tender. Not so with veal chunks taken from the shoulder or leg, which become tender in less than an hour and produce a superb stew. And the smaller the chunks of meat, the shorter the cooking time. (This is a very basic and oft-ignored general principle of cooking: spend a little more time with the knife and you sometimes spend a lot less time at the stove.) Smaller chunks have another advantage as well: in just a few minutes, enough of their surface area browns that you can move to the next step of the recipe. This guarantees a full-flavored stew—the browning step is not essential but very desirable—and reduces stovetop mess.

This recipe which is vaguely related to the classic chili, combines chickpeas, meat, and spices and takes advantage of all of those assets. The cooked chickpeas are sautéed over high heat until browned and slightly crisp, and the pan is ultimately deglazed with the reserved chickpea-cooking liquid.

Few slow-cooked foods are as rewarding as beef brisket, which at its best is tender, juicy, and flavorful. Doing it right takes so long—my favorite recipe is a twelve-hour job—that, at least in my house, a brisket is made only annually, or even less often than that. That’s why I regret that I didn’t make my “discovery” of veal brisket sooner. It had just never occurred to me until recently that you could get a delicious, tender, relatively quick-cooking form of brisket by removing the bones from a breast of veal. Unfortunately, boneless breast of veal—which can also be called veal brisket and, like brisket of beef, is the flap that covers the front part of a cow’s chest—is rarely sold that way. But any butcher (and, yes, this includes virtually every supermarket butcher) can quickly remove the bones from a veal breast and present you with a flat, boneless, relatively compact cut that contains little fat and becomes tender in less than two hours of unattended cooking. Ask the butcher to start with a piece of breast that weighs four to six pounds. The yield is about half that, a piece of boneless meat of two or three pounds that will easily fit in a large skillet. (Consider asking the butcher for the bones, too—you’re paying for them, and they are among the best for stock making.)

When you’re making a pot roast, the vegetables you add at the beginning contribute to the development of the sauce, but those at the end draw on the sauce for flavor (like the turnip or rutabaga in this dish), often making them the best part. You can skip browning the meat to save time (and mess) if necessary. Yes, browning creates complexity, but there is so much flavor in this particular pot roast that subtle complexity is overwhelmed.

Serve the meat with a variety of garnishes, which you and your guests can combine any way you like.

Unless you’ve made your own duck confit, you may never have cooked duck legs by themselves; but in many ways they’re superior to both duck breasts and whole birds. They’re quite lean, and just a quick trimming of the excess fat is all that’s necessary. And, given proper cooking—that is, long, slow cooking—they become fork-tender and richly flavorful, reminiscent of some of the “lesser” cuts of beef and pork, like brisket and cheek. Finally, it’s easy enough to cook enough legs for eight—which is hardly the case with whole duck!

There is no more celebratory food than goose, but when it is roasted it is difficult to carve and can be disappointing. Braising it, especially with fruit, is a different approach that works brilliantly. Any dried fruit can be used in this preparation, but dried pears hold their shape better and are a little less sweet than prunes and apricots; there’s no reason you can’t substitute, however, or combine.

This dish is so fast that you must begin cooking white rice, the natural accompaniment, before even chopping the onion. That’s because it uses preblended curry powder, one of the original convenience foods, a venerable spice rub and all-purpose flavor booster. I like to use it in tandem with a twentieth-century convenience food, the skinless, boneless chicken breast. Even a breast from a good chicken is about as bland as meat can get, and one from the supermarket is not much more flavorful than unsauced pasta. Curry changes that quickly.

The sturdy texture of monkfish is ideal for roasting, but certain other fillets will give similar results: red snapper, sea bass, pollock, wolffish, even catfish

An Andalusian dish with a sweet, aromatic sauce. Do not use canned chickpeas here.

Once, for a special occasion, I produced potatoes Anna—a dish in which potatoes are thinly sliced, drenched in butter, and roasted until golden, the ultimate in crisp potato dishes—for my daughter Emma. This was a fatal error, because potatoes Anna are a pain to make, contain about a week’s allotment of butter, and were forever in demand thereafter. So I set about shortcutting the process, creating something approaching an entire meal. I cut back on the butter (when attacks of conscience strike, I substitute olive oil) and enlisted the broiler to speed the browning process. I figured that it would be just as easy to broil something on top of the potatoes during the last few minutes of cooking and, after a few tries, I found a thick fillet of fish to be ideal. The result is this simple weeknight dish that I now make routinely and one that even impresses guests.