smitten kitchen

Thanksgiving usually marks the end of my yearly fall fanaticism, and the beginning of the inevitable resignation to winter that goes into full-swing after the New Years. I’m no longer obsessed with the myriad of fall flavors, its squashes and medium-body soups and wines, I just want to stay warm. I hibernate, so to speak. I start cooking meals at home with more regularity; I find excuses to stay in.

After all of the holiday buzz this curried lentil and sweet potato dish landed exactly on that bridge, a lazy Sunday after a flurry of a holiday weekend. It’s from the New York Times Thanksgiving coverage two weeks ago, from an article by Melissa Clark about vegetarian dishes fitting the meal. But really, it had my name all over it, because the sweet potatoes were made spicy, not saccharine, and the Indian-spiced lentils and greens were exactly the health kick I needed after this weekend of heavy intake, with the ease of a one-pot meal. I don’t need a holiday dinner to find an excuse to make it.

I know it’s not easy on the eyes–heck, it would be a great contestant in an ugliest gourmet contest, but as Cathy so aptly notes, the best home-cooked food is rarely ready for its close-up. Honestly, it was so good, we couldn’t have cared less.

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I spent the summer in Israel when I was 15 years old, and while I know I did all of the expected stuff–day trips, stays at hostels and kibbutz, the big cities and the desert–one of the things that stands out most clearly in my memory is something sort of random–the way the Israeli kids dressed on hot days: black jeans and often long-sleeved shirts. I’d look at them, so covered, so dark, and want to scream. “Don’t you know how HOT it is here? I’m melting in my Tevas and tank top and you’re there wrapped as tight as you can in WINTER clothes.” Clearly this penchant for melodrama isn’t a recent phenomenon.

I feel the same way on days like we’ve had this week, when the air is so oppressively thick and stagnant (seriously, I think the breath I left on our front step last night greeted me there this morning) and I see people, probably dressed for important jobs in aggressively air-conditioned offices in these woolen suit layers and shoes with covered toes and sleeves (fine, I’m talking about Alex) and I want to melt for them at the thought of having to walk more than a block in such a getup. My Eastern European genes are inconsolable in this swelter, thus if you need us we’ll be over in the corner, hugging it out with the a/c this weather stops being such a brat.

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Considering that I was on a two year extended Indian cooking kick before I started this site, I find it odd that I have included but one Indian-spiced recipe in the time since. I’m not sure if others do this, but I tend to go in and out of food crazes — currently, the absolutely only thing I want to eat after the gym is tofu pad thai, which doesn’t sound so horrible until you consider that I hit the gym three times a week, and no doubt reverse its effects just as often. I’ve gone through similar phases with poached eggs (atop anything), dinners of asparagus and roasted tiny red potatoes (only), dumplings, and for two torturous months of Alex’s life, a certain Belgian Endive and Grain Mustard salad of Nigella Lawson’s I fiended for, even first thing in the morning.

The Indian cooking bender was no different. What I loved was that you would take the simplest ingredients and render them into hearty, filling and unbelievably healthy dishes, and blow your expectations of lentils out of the water. Their fiscal smarts also cannot be overlooked. Once we’d bought the six or seven spices we continually came back to, we’d stand flabbergasted at the register as our lentils, cauliflower, potatoes and peas came to a mere $5 — and created leftovers that were as good if not better than they were the first day. But the real Indian food addiction was those spices; once they got under my skin (and permanently stained several cooking implements), I couldn’t stop itching for more of them. I became, excruciatingly enough, a cumin seed junkie.

Two dishes from Sunday night brightly display cumin seed’s prowess. The former is actually the first Indian recipe I cooked for us; it was a undeniable hit and I’ve come back to it more than a dozen times since. I could eat it for days, and this week, with any luck, I just might. The second is from a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t used more often in the two years I’ve owned it. I hadn’t liked the first recipe I’d tried from there, and avoided its space on the bookshelf since. Well, this nonsense was kicked to the curb Sunday night, because the red lentils and cabbage are phenomenal, and I might just cut off this entry right now so I can get to scooping up the leftovers. Eerily, this is a gym night — might it be good enough to rescue me from Pad Thailand, and perchance, bounce my logged gym hours back into the progress zone?

Why the gratuitous pomegranate picture? When hunting through the fridge this weekend in search of food to apply eyes to, inspired by Amy Sedaris’ Craft Challenge, (what? I have hobbies!) I found this sad rock of a pomegranate Alex bought months and months ago, but when I opened it up, it looked as bejeweled and stunning as new. Also, as delicious.

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As you may have noticed, I’m not the kind of person who just throws together things in the kitchen without a map, compass, 637 glowing reviews on Epicurious or a friend’s sworn assurance, sometimes written, that a specific recipe is a guaranteed to blow the ennui right out of your taste buds. Sure, I’ll make small adjustments while I work on something to accommodate our personal preferences, but aside from pasta sauces, eggs and salad dressings, I rarely go it on my own intuition.

You see, my intuition has led me to all sort of unsavory places, in and out of the kitchen, though I’ll save the latter for another time, or say, encyclopedia volume. As for cooking, one time, my homemade oatmeal made me so violently ill, I had to cancel a date. (Though perhaps, that was some conniving intuition, after all, as it was not with Alex. Cue: swoon or nausea.) The milk, as it turned out, was not past is expiration date but most-definitely rancid. (The sniff test on all dairy products, from those from a friend’s fridge to restaurants with $40-entrees, has since been instituted, offended sensibilities be damned.) Another time, I tried to bread and pan-fry tofu - because how hard could that be - and created a dish that was so foul, just the memory of it has killed my hunger pains for lunch. So, as you see, these days I use recipes to anchor my cooking urges to a safe harbor.

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