smitten kitchen

According to my calendar — the one I believe I just looked at for the first time since last September, when someone made my life go all date- and timeless — the Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day this year. In New York at least, the Lunar New Year is an excuse to eat egregious amounts of fried rice, spare ribs and to make your way through Chinatown streets over piles of strewn red paper* from firecrackers. Valentine’s Day, however, is dominated by French food because what could be more romantic than copious amounts of wine, butter, cheese, steak and chocolate?

Or, you could stay in and have a little of both. That’s what this ginger fried recipe is to me, a classic Chinese dish, clearly reinterpreted by a French hand. For one, it has leeks, which although used in both Chinese and French cooking, I can’t say I’ve ever seen them caramelized for fried rice. Second, egg isn’t scrambled into the dish, but pulled out, fried whole and laid on top of the rice. There are other deconstructions too: the ginger and garlic are fried until crisp and scattered over the dish, like bacon bits from the Far East, rather than tucked within. And rather than cooking the rice in gobs of soy sauce and sesame oil, both are conservatively drizzled on top at the end like droplets of a pan sauce.

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So, I’m cheating. I really wasn’t planning on cooking just yet. You see, I spent a whole lot of the last few weeks of pregnancy honing in on cookbooks that focus on simpler, but uncompromised cooking (and I will absolutely do a post on these, soon), bookmarking the kind of recipes I could imagine assembling with one hand tied behind my back (or you know, holding a squawking newborn) and even banking a decent amount of recipes, such as that date spice loaf and the stuffed eggplant, and a few other things I have even told you about yet. And I don’t need to cook either: Our fridge is filled with homemade matzo ball soup, spaghetti and meatballs, endless bagel fixings, pickles galore, fruit, sandwich bread, lunch meats, milk for cereal and you name it (did I tell you our families were awesome or what?). Do you hear me? There is no reason on earth that I need to be pulling down the pots and pans right now. And yet I did. Because there was something — one tiny thing, perhaps — that I had not anticipated when I mapped these early weeks out in my head.

I am so freaking hungry.

Here’s the thing: When I was pregnant, I never had a huge appetite. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. Trying to figure out what to eat was an exacting process, to say the least. I’d eat perhaps half of whatever I had in front of me, and listlessly push the rest around the plate. I tried to woo my tastebuds with beef empanadas, migas and pasta but I have to confess: none of it did anything for me. It kinda blew.

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This, my friends, is all the evidence you will ever need that you can never go wrong with a Suzanne Goin recipe (also: that ugly food is the tastiest). Because despite having a horrible cold (not just any cold, mind you, but a Man Cold) all week, zero appetite, even less inclination to stand (upright! like on my two feet! how exhausting!) in the kitchen and cook and actually briefly calculating the food costs in my head of chucking the dish (already marinating) and trying it again another week, with Alex’s help we trudged on through and had this for dinner last night and it was amazing. Curative, even. I feel 50 percent better today.

So what’s all this about? Well, you start by braising leeks, which if you’re me, already has you sold. Amusingly, I was halfway into the leek prep when I had a vague feeling of deja-vu and you know what? I told you about these last year, to the day! Memory, what memory? Anyway, they’re unbelievable and seriously, if you’d like, you can stop right here. Serve them with some proscuito, a poached or sliced hard-cooked egg, mustard vinaigrette, some thick bread and maybe a sharp little salad on the side and you’ll be happy as a clam. Swap the chicken stock for vegetable stock and you can even make them amenable to vegetarians.

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Seeing as my parents were spending the afternoon at my apartment on Sunday so I could pilfer content for my site from their recipe box, I figured the least I could do was make them some lunch. And although it is not quite soup weather yet, I have not been able to get my mind off of a recipe I read recently, so soup it was.

Oh, but this is not just any soup. This will be, hands down and no contest, the easiest soup you have ever made. You’re not going to believe how simple it is, and what you get as a result–something so unbelievably hearty, you’ll never have room for your next course. It’s filling and healthy and warming and delicious and oh my god, I bet you just want me to cut to the chase already, don’t you?

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Every morning, I wake up and I have to remind myself that it is not spring yet. I push past all of the cute spring clothes I’ve overeagerly purchased and reach for one of the sweaters and lined pants I swear I have worn ten hundred thousand times since September and I was tired of them then: It’s not spring yet. I read food blogs from people in Paris and San Francisco, fawning over the new strawberries and colorful produce at their farmers’ markets and go to ours and see the same cabbage and potatoes (though I’m crossing my fingers for ramps today) as before: It’s not spring yet. And I honestly don’t know why I would expect to be spring in the first week of April when it is never spring in New York during the first week of April but still, I have never been more impatient for the world to warm up around me.

But last weekend it was at least unfrozen enough to take little walk that landed us at the Balthazar Bakery where we split the most mildly sweet and adorably tiny pistachio doughnut ever and picked a small boule of their “sourish” (their description, not mine) white bread and proceeded to forget about it (shame, shame) until it staled. Suddenly, there on the subway platform a couple days later I started scheming about a spring panzanella that would make me feel better about how far off warm weather seems.

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