Lentils and Caramelized Onions with Angel Hair Pasta

When I was a kid I picked the onions out of everything: chili, spaghetti sauce, meatloaf; most meals ended with a loathsome little pile of onions on the side of my plate.

I'm still kind of picky about onions. I don't much like them raw, and I strongly dislike them undercooked. But I am crazy about onions caramelized in olive oil. My younger self would be shocked to learn that caramelized onions, brown, sweet, and melt-in-your-mouth tender, are one of my favorite things in the world to cook and eat.

For this week's cooking lesson I had three aims: to show Henry another great way to serve lentils; to teach him how to caramelize onions; and to convert my onion-hating son into an onion aficionado.

Mission accomplished for two out of three, but I was so busy devouring my meal (this dish is mysteriously delicious) that I didn't notice until washing-up time that Henry had arranged his onions in a tidy pile on the side of his plate.

The circle of life.

Lentils and Caramelized Onions with Angel Hair Pasta
Serves 4

3/4 cup dried green lentils, rinsed and drained
2 medium onions, cut in half and sliced thinly
8 ounces angel hair pasta (if you don't eat pasta, omit and double the lentils)
6 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus two pinches for cooking onions and pasta
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
pinch cayenne pepper, optional
parsley, chopped

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add lentils, reduce heat to medium and simmer 15 minutes or until lentils are tender but intact.

While lentils are cooking, caramelize the onions: Heat olive oil in a large, deep skillet, add onions and cook over high heat, stirring constantly, until onions start to sizzle. Add a pinch of salt, stir well, and reduce heat to medium-low. Cover onions and cook for 5 minutes. Uncover and cook 10-15 more minutes, stirring occasionally, until onions are sweet and delicious and you are tempted to eat them on the spot with a spoon. Resist.

After lentils have cooked 15 minutes, add angel hair pasta with a generous pinch of salt, and cook 4-5 minutes, until pasta is al dente. Drain and return to big cooking pot. Gently stir in caramelized onions, salt, pepper, and optional cayenne.

Serve warm, garnished with lots of parsley. If you have leftovers, this makes an excellent next-day lunch.

White Bean and Kale Soup

Think about that super simple song you adore, the one that is inexplicably huge, much more than the sum of its two chords and handful of lyrics.

Here are a few of my family's favorites:
Molly's Lips
The Street Where You Live
Wild Thing
Everyday People

I generally believe that less is more - in songs, in life, on drums, and definitely in soup.

But sometimes less is less, sometimes two chords and a handful of lyrics is dead boring or aggressively bad, sometimes simple food can be bland and depressing. If you've ever eaten a watery bowl of under-seasoned bean soup, you know what I mean.

But this is NOT that soup! I'm trying to teach my kids that vegetarian food can be totally satisfying and incredibly delicious, and that if you want to create something simple and elegant, you have to pick the right ingredients in the right amounts. Henry and I worked on this spicy concoction together, and it might not be as sublime as a Troggs song, but it is mysteriously bigger than the sum of its few ingredients, and on a slushy February evening it definitely made my heart sing.

White Bean and Kale Soup
Serves 4 (or 3 is you're very hungry or if one of you is a teenager)

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 huge, enormous bunch of kale, stems removed and discarded, leaves chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 or so cups cooked cannellini or navy beans (or 2 14-ounce drained cans)
4 cups water
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne*
1 teaspoon salt

*(Amount could vary depending on the spiciness of your cayenne pepper and your tolerance for heat. This made a fairly zingy soup, which Henry and I LOVED but it was a little too much for Jake).

Warm olive oil in pot over medium high heat, add kale and stir until it starts to sizzle - turn heat down to medium low and continue to stir for 4-5 minutes. Kale will shrink substantially.

Add garlic and stir 1-2 minutes.

Add beans, water, cayenne and salt, turn heat to high, and bring to a boil.

Reduce heat to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes.

Chickpea and Spinach Stew: Tight-Budget Cooking, Part 2

January marches on. So many beans, so little time. We had friends over for dinner midweek and wanted to make something slightly elegant that could be whipped up after work and that also fit into our monthlong mission to eat mostly beans.

Enter Chickpea and Spinach Stew, served with Israeli Couscous; quick, easy, yummy, and - though not exactly elegant - just special enough to serve to company. I'm a little in love with the chunky texture of Israeli Couscous right now, which I only recently discovered in the bulk bins, and I think it makes this dish a bit more interesting (and I've included a basic recipe for it, below), but plain old couscous or rice would be good too.

Chickpea and Spinach Stew 
Serves 8 (I'm making big quantities so we have leftovers for lunch, but this halves perfectly well)

4 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons paprika (smoked paprika is best, regular is fine)
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
4 15-ounce cans chickpeas, drained
1 lb spinach, washed, tough stems removed, chopped (or use baby spinach, no need to chop)
2 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt or more, to taste
Juice of one lemon or 2 tablespoons red wine or sherry vinegar

Warm olive oil on medium-low heat in a large pot, add garlic and spices, and cook gently for one minute.

Stir in chickpeas, coating them well with oil and spices.

Add spinach a few handfuls at a time. Stir well.

Add water and salt, bring to a boil, and simmer uncovered 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. You could make your couscous now. Or, better, get your kid or partner to make couscous and stir the stew while you take a quick shower and/or open a bottle of wine.

Stir in lemon juice or vinegar. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve hot on a bed of something.

Plain Israeli Couscous
Serves 8

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups Israeli couscous
4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Warm olive oil in a large pot, add couscous and stir for two minutes.

Add water, salt, and pepper, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 10-12 minutes.

And hope that if you have non-vegetarian friends over for dinner and serve them beans they are as sweet and appreciative as our friends were - and take it as a high compliment when they ask for the recipe!

Pasta Fagioli: Tight-Budget Cooking, Part 1

January; the longest, brokest month, when the hit of Christmas is followed by the hit of tuition bills, and we squint into the horizon at a tiny, distant payday.

There isn't much we can cut back on in our household. We have one car and don't drive it often, we never take vacations, there's nothing we can do about our permanent mountain of student loan debt, and you can tell by looking at us that we don't spend any money on clothes.

But food, food we spend on. I'm hopeless when it comes to shopping at Whole Foods, where I can't resist the out-of-season organic berries (that come out to about one dollar per berry), the overpriced loaves of bakery bread, the imported tins of sardines, bottles of pomegranate juice, and pre-made frozen potstickers that could be got for less in an actual restaurant. My grocery bill makes me dizzy, and I can't take it anymore.

Time to eat more beans.

Good timing, actually, as Henry and I are concentrating on making soups and stews, and there are infinite possibilities for inexpensive and tasty bean soups and stews. We'll be exploring these over the next month.

We started with one of my favorites, Pasta Fagioli, and at about 3 bucks per serving (would have been even cheaper had we bought dried beans and cooked them, but we haven't had that cooking lesson yet) we're off to a thrifty January start.

Pasta Fagioli
Serves 8 (I wanted a big batch so we'd have leftovers for lunch - you can halve it)

4 stalks celery, chopped
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons tomato paste
4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 15-ounce cans white beans (cannellini or Great Northern), drained
16 ounces small pasta (bow ties, fusili, spaghetti broken into 1-inch pieces, anything)
minced parsley (optional)
grated parmesan (optional)

Warm olive oil in a large pot, add celery and garlic, and stir frequently over medium-low heat for 10 minutes.


Add tomatoes, tomato paste, water, salt, and cayenne pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

OPTIONAL: After it has simmered 10 minutes, blend mixture in a blender or with a hand-held blender. I don't usually bother with this, but Henry has a lifelong aversion to "ucky slimy bits" (cooked garlic, onion, celery, etc) and prefers his sauces smooth. I must admit that blending produces a pretty color and nice texture, but this dish is delicious either way.

Add beans and stir for 5 minutes, mashing some of the beans with the back of a spoon to thicken the sauce.

Add pasta and cook 10 or so minutes, stirring constantly, until pasta is tender. Mixture will be very thick - add a little more water if you need to.

Cover pot and let stand 10 minutes before serving.

Serve in big bowls, top with optional grated parmesan and/or minced parsley, and have seconds - you can afford it!

Fast Food

I have many, many reasons for teaching my sons to cook; some that cut really deep, some entirely self-serving, some purely practical, others philosophical, even political. I hope to write about them all, but the reason weighing heavy on my mind right now is this: I want to show my kids that cooking is no big deal, it's not a pain in the ass, not a drag to be avoided, but just a normal everyday thing that you do.

I'm thinking about it a lot these days because I worry that I don't always model this attitude. I work full-time, my partner does too, and 5:45 can find us all tired, hungry, tempted to stick a frozen pizza in the oven or order Chinese delivery. I will more than happily cut myself enough slack to do this sometimes, but during especially hectic times it's easy to over-rely on convenience food and take-out, and I don't like how I feel when we're eating like that too much, or what I'm communicating to my kids (that cooking doesn't fit into a busy life, that cooking is a lot of trouble...)

So I'm cultivating weeknight dinner ideas, looking for simple, from-scratch vegetarian meals that don't take much longer - or much more effort - than frozen pizza. Here's one, not the fastest one, but doable in thirty minutes, easy and adaptable, and particularly satisfying on a chilly fall evening:

Noodles and Vegetables in Broth 

8-ounce package udon or soba noodles

8 cups water

Approximately 3-inch piece of kombu sea vegetable (optional but highly recommended)

4 dried shiitake mushrooms

6 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons mirin or cooking sherry

pinch dried ginger (optional)

pinch cayenne pepper (optional)

1 lb spinach, washed and chopped - or use pre-washed baby spinach

2-3 medium carrots, sliced into thin rounds


For the vegetables and noodles: Put a large pot,  3/4 full of water, on high heat.

For the broth: In another large pot, combine 8 cups water, optional kombu, and shiitake mushrooms. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium, and leave to a strong simmer for 15-20 minutes while you prepare the noodles and vegetables.

When the pot of plain water comes to a boil, add carrots. After one minute, add spinach. Cook one additional minute. Scoop the vegetables out of the pot (don't dump the water out - you're going to cook the noodles in it) with slotted spoon or strainer. Set aside.

Add noodles and cook according to package directions.

Drain noodles, rinse in cold water, and divide between four deep bowls.

Finish the broth: Remove mushrooms and kombu. Discard kombu. Squeeze water out of mushrooms and slice very thin (discard stems). Return mushrooms to pot. Add soy sauce and mirin. Taste and adjust seasoning (add optional powdered ginger and/or cayenne pepper, especially if anybody has a cold), and heat gently until steaming.

Add cooked vegetables to noodles, pour broth over everything, and garnish however you like - seeds are good, scallions are good, toasted sesame oil is very good.

Henry took thorough notes on this recipe. I'm hoping to someday walk in the door at 5:45 to find bowls of hot noodles and broth sitting on the table, waiting for me. I can't help it, I'm an optimist.

I told you some of my reasons for teaching my sons to cook are self-serving.