smitten kitchen

I’ve already admitted that I’ve been a bit of a slack-ass with the whole cooking dinner on a weekday night, or pretty much any night, thing lately. Since I would hate to deprive you of all of the whiny reasons I’ve been inundating my husband with for not even making half an effort, I’ve decided to translate a few into bytes for you: I’m tiiiiired. I’ve been working soooooo much lately. Traaaaveling too! If I start now, we won’t eat until tomoooooorow. Also: I’m sooooo tiiiiiiired. Charming, right? Bet you wish you were here.

But I think that the one-pot meal could be the cure for all of your kitchen ailments. Don’t feel like cooking? But look–it’s dinner in one pot! Don’t feel like creating a pile of dishes? But it’s just one pot! (And a knife and a plate and a spoon, but shh, I don’t want to scare you off.) Have a lot of people coming over? One steamed vegetable and an easy soup and you’ve got a full-blown meal! Everyone arriving at different times? It’s okay, the one-pot meal is very forgiving of tardiness.

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Ever since we had dinner at Ti­a Pol for the first time six months ago, I have been bitten by the tapas bug, and with little warning this wee hallway of a restaurant on 10th Avenue replaced Tabla as my favorite in all of New York City.

I didn’t know that there were any higher small-plate callings than the Floyd Cardoz’s boondhi raita, that is until I tried Alex Raij’s garbanzos fritos, and though it makes me sad to have evolved beyond my Bread Bar obsession, I feel strongly enough about these chickpeas that if you haven’t had them yet, you should close your browser, turn off your computer, get on a plane if you must, wait patiently through the forty minutes it will take just to sit at the bar because these babies will leave your up-to-then favorite bar snack in the dust so quickly, its tasty little head will spin. Be prepared for a fast and fierce addiction.

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My favorite side dish takes five minutes to make. It has only three steps. No garlic or shallots get minced, nothing gets topped with butter, and shockingly, it involves no truffle salt. It has only two ingredients, and the only reason I’ve held out this long telling you about it is because when I see a recipe that swears it will combine two ingredients in an entirely new and innovative way, I roll my eyes.

But this doesn’t mean that you should be limited by my jaded expectations. In fact, I’d be spectacularly sad if you were, because this is wonderful. Fantastic. It’s so fresh but deep, so simple but eloquent. I have craved it incessantly this week, and am certain I could eat it morning, noon and night.

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Here in the Northeast, where our winters get frigidly cold and our summers are known to snap into the high 90s for days on end, I have a somewhat sinister theory about the weather, and that is that it’s mocking you. It’s waiting for you to snap and when you do, it has a hearty laugh at your expense. Bust out the ski jacket, 20-foot scarf and Gore-Tex accessories the first cold day in October? Snicker, snicker. Sink down in front of the a/c with a bag of ice on your forehead the first 90-degree, 100 percent humidity day in June? Imagine the sun’s Mr. Burns-ian cackle, muttering “excellent.”

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but hoo boy, is it hot up in NYC right now–and it’s not even June yet, which means that it’s too soon to succumb to bowls of icy granita and dinners of frozen grapes and proscuitto-wrapped melon. Fold your cards now, and what will you do when summer really steps up to the plate (and God-willing, the Yankees) in July? Nope, no, can’t have it. But it doesn’t mean that tonight is not as good of a night as any to take a step back from the stove with something I fell upon two nights ago that was so gorgeously simple and different, I could imagine it keeping us cool all summer.

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It only took us over a year, but Alex and I finally had dinner at Tia Pol, a closet-sized gem of a tapas restaurant on 10th Avenue on Saturday night. We live so close, it’s embarrassing that we hadn’t eaten there yet, but the thing with the proximity is that every time we’ve popped our heads in, taken note of the mob of people crushed against the entryway and the “at least an hour and a half” wait, we’ve rationalized that we’ll go another time — later. Well, six months had passed since our last “later,” when on Saturday, so we decided arriving at the criminally early hour of 6 p.m. would outsmart the crowds. The laugh was still on us but the 45 minutes were well worth the wait, the tight space not claustrophobic but cozy on a freezing night as we snugged into a row of coats while drinking our first then second (mon dieu!) glass of their delicious sangria. At the bar, we couldn’t resist trying one of almost everything — marcona almonds, potatoes with aioli and hot paprika, ham-wrapped artichoke hearts with manchego cheese, deep-fried spicy chickpeas and thick, fork-tender white asparagus stalks again with that blessed aioli.

By last night, it had been a whole two days since our last dose of aioli and we needed a fix. Alex grabbed some white asparagus, red potatoes and salad greens on his way home and I began mincing garlic for the sauce. Oh, how easy dinner will be, I thought… And now you see where this is going. The first aioli started out splendidly, but at some point near the end, when you start drizzling the olive oil more confidently, it split and if there’s one thing that’s impossible to fix, it’s a broken mayonnaise. Frustrated as hell, I didn’t want to associate mayonnaise-making with failure and unhappiness, and forced myself to make another, this time in the food processor. I’ve seen Emeril make his in there often (say whatever you want about the man; he always makes his mayo from scratch), and hey, isn’t that what the little drip-spout is for? This batch not only didn’t break, it didn’t come together at all. Four egg yolks, two CUPS of good olive oil, twelve cloves of garlic and any remaining joy I’d had toward cooking that night went right in the trash. I was ready to write the evening off completely — never happened, nobody needs to know, let’s not dwell on these failures, okay? — but I still had those four egg whites and I got clingy, unable to part with another ingredient.

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