Weeknight Meals

Turn the Sweet Potato Soup Base into a meal with spicy chorizo, hearty chickpeas, and vibrant green kale. This makes a truly beautiful bowl of soup. If you’d rather keep this soup vegetarian, try the grain-based chorizo substitute from Field Roast, one of the first meat substitutes I’ve actually liked. It’s available in natural food stores in almost every state and through www.fieldroast.com.

I’ll admit to a tendency toward obsession, especially when it comes to food, as my experience with duck eggs proves. I bought my first dozen a few years ago at the Saturday farmers’ market at 14th and U Streets in Washington, D.C., and from the first time I fried one, I was pretty much hooked, buying duck eggs and only duck eggs and going through a dozen every week or two, at least while the ducks were laying. I’ve since veered back toward moderation, especially after remembering that these richer, more flavorful eggs are also higher in saturated fat and much higher in cholesterol. Still, I like to splurge every now and then, and this puffy frittata is one of my favorite ways. It also illustrates the magical properties of egg whites as a leavener; the simple process of separating whites from yolks, beating the whites to the soft-peak stage, and folding the two together results in a light-as-air texture, something between a frittata and a soufflé. Nonetheless, you can use these same ingredients in a more straightforward frittata; instead of separating the eggs, just follow the method for the Mushroom and Green Garlic Frittata (page 32). And if you can’t find duck eggs, chicken eggs work fine here, too.

I don’t make a habit of having potato chips in the house, because I really don’t have much self-control around them. But when I read in Anya von Bremzen’s go-to cookbook, The New Spanish Table, that chef-genius Ferran Adrià makes a tortilla de patatas (that glorious traditional Spanish omelet) with potato chips, I was tempted to buy some. That same year, 2005, my friend, chef José Andrés, a protégé of Adrià’s, also included a potato-chip tortilla recipe in his energetic book, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, so the decision was obvious. It turns out that this humblest of dishes, one of my favorites when I traveled in Spain, was perfectly easy to scale down to single-serving size. To justify its place on my dinner table, though, I added shrimp to make it a meal. Eat with a green salad or other crisp vegetables on the side. If desired, spoon some Red Pepper Chutney (page 17) on top.

This is a recipe for those of us who are so reverent toward farm-fresh eggs that we’ll stand at the stove for almost a half hour, stirring them like a fine risotto. It seems crazy as you’re doing it, especially since nothing seems to happen for the first 15 minutes or so, but your perseverance will be rewarded with eggs that have a texture beyond compare, unless you’re comparing it to, say, lemon curd, one of the most luxuriously textured foods I know. I refer to eggs done this way as a reverse custard, with more eggs than cream instead of vice versa. I call for the Red Pepper Chutney (page 17) as an accompaniment, but this is such a fabulous way to make eggs, you can combine them with bacon for something even more basic, or you can add any manner of seasonal vegetables, lightly steamed or, better yet, sautéed in butter. If, unlike me, you can’t imagine spending this much time on eggs for one, invite a few friends over for brunch, multiply this by four, and try it out on them. You’ll see.

I spend a bundle on mushrooms from a bountiful display at the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market just about every Sunday—but not in the summer. That’s because mushrooms are available practically year-round (many of them are cultivated), while tomatoes, corn, broccoli, and the like have a shorter season. So I reserve my mushroom purchases for when the bulk of the other seasonal produce has faded or hasn’t quite arrived. In the spring, I love to combine them with one of the items I spend all winter looking forward to: green garlic, basically an immature form of the plant, picked before it has fully formed its bulbous collection of cloves. You can use the whole thing like a leek or green onion (both of them in the same family), but it has the addictive taste of fresh, pungent garlic throughout. Since I also associate spring with eggs, I like to pair them with mushrooms and green garlic in a simple frittata. If you can’t find green garlic or want to make this in another season, feel free to substitute a small leek. Eat this frittata with a side dish, such as salad, bread, and/or hash browns, for a filling meal.

Behind the jubilant liquid tomato smile of pasta margherita lies an intellect of herbs and garlic. The one covering for the other is a seduction of sorts, an invitation that propriety prevents you from accepting too eagerly. Sprinkle your margherita with the crystalline sweetness of Fiore di Cervia, the fine salt from the balmy Adriatic flats south of Ravenna, and marvel as the tart-sweet play of tomato and pasta asserts itself. Ennobled by the salt’s fruity warmth, the sauce is freed of its ties to the herbs that first defined it. Eyes open, head borne aloft, your margherita is as beautiful in body as in spirit.

As a child walking into an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s North Beach district, I would put on a brave face and glue myself to my father’s side. A cacophony of sensations would accost my nose, my ears, and my staring eyeballs. The smell of stale red wine overlaid with steaming starch. Preoccupied waitresses shoving their heavy bodies through the thick yellow air, moving from table to table with armloads of bread and heaping plates of sea creatures smoldering under garlic and basil. Greasy overhead speakers thumping from their tattered baffles; a dishwasher roaring in the back; and overlaying all, the incessant thudding of a wooden mallet slamming a defenseless piece of chicken or veal. Indifferent to my concern, my father would smile. “Howard!” the restaurant owner would bellow, wading through the crowd to deliver a tumbler of red wine. And the two would launch into boisterous talk about herbs and oils and salt, my dad gesturing appreciatively to the monster with the wood mallet and saying, “Yes, yes, chicken very thin.” For much of my childhood, I thought the measure of a good restaurant was the ferocity of the butcher up front pounding flesh, and the ensuing experience of meat so wonderfully tender and mild that it melted away the world’s hazards. With a flourish of flake salt to accentuate the play of texture and savor on the palate, this paillard is quick, easy, and enormously satisfying. If you like, substitute veal cutlets for the chicken, using Italian parsley in place of the tarragon.

Mushrooms, noble as they may be, are not proud creatures. Poking their heads up from the loam, they stand humbly with a prepossessing calm that more or less begs us to pluck them. Fresh eggs, once you face off the fierce gaze of the hen and pull them from under her warm breast, are similarly good-natured, understated and half-smiling like the oval face of a Modigliani portrait. But dress the egg and the mushroom with a pinch of black truffle and the two rise up, swell with pride, and regale you with their tales of farm and forest.

If the restaurants that produce them are any indication, the superlative steaks of the world cannot be reduced to a simple formula. Consider Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte in Paris, where the brisk waiter actually serves you half a steak, then gives the other half to another person, and then, just as you are finishing the last bite of your first half, he brings you another half-steak right off the grill—a miraculous second coming. Consider Raoul’s in New York, where the experience of eating is suffused by an equally savory experience of sitting, drinking, observing, and conversing. The only way to rival these folks is to take matters into your own hands: an excellent steak, the best pepper, the perfect salt, and thou. Tomes have been written on how to cook a steak. Precious little has been said on how to salt one. To cook: start with a lot of heat, finish with a little. Do the opposite with the salt: cook with no salt at all, or very little, if you really must have some. When the steak is served, choose the most beautiful sel gris you can find and let fly.

Here, watermelon gives up its usual place at the table as a fruit and goes to work in a role usually occupied by its cousin, the cucumber. The melon is a lovely foil for the salty feta, tangy onion, and tart vinegar. It makes a refreshing and unusual salad for any summer brunch, luncheon, or dinner.

This bread is wonderful served along with our Baked Spaghetti (see page 76) and a fresh salad.

These pancakes are delicious with a dollop of sour cream.

During the winter months I recommend using canned tomatoes, but in the summer, don’t miss the chance to use vine-ripened fresh tomatoes.