Spinach

Early February, icy-cold day. I find great spinach in the shops but little to go with it. I grab a bag of those factory-made vacuum-packed gnocchi that always make me feel as if I have just eaten a duvet. With cream, blue cheese, and spinach, they have a rib-sticking quality that would keep out arctic cold, let alone a bit of urban chill. Sometimes I just need food like this.

Crisp toast, lightly burned at the edges, with a cargo of melting cheese is to my mind the ultimate snack. Spike it with mustard and I am probably at my happiest, but I do play around with the genre too: a layer of apple or homemade chutney under the cheese; a few bitter leaves of chicory or hot watercress on the side; a few capers, maybe. Sometimes I take the recipe up a notch to give something that is more of a meal than a snack. Like when I trap a layer of cooked spinach between bread and cheese, or just mix the two together and give them a crust of toasted Parmesan. I could add that this is also a sound way of using bits of cheese that have accumulated in the fridge.

A huge pie, lighter and (slightly) less trouble than a lasagne, this is as satisfying as winter food gets. Even with top-notch chicken and heavy cream, it is hardly an expensive supper, and it feeds four generously (some of us went back for seconds).

The cream sauce of a vegetable gratin is something I like to eat with brown basmati rice, but barley, couscous, or quinoa would be just as suitable.

The classic Indian spinach dish saag aloo, where spinach and potatoes are added to spiced and softened onions, is often cooked a while longer than I would like it to be. Authentically, the spinach goes in before the potatoes, so that it makes an impromptu sauce. Delicious. But I sometimes make it less than classically, keeping the spinach almost whole and adding it last, so that it comes to the table singing brightly, more as an ingredient than a “sauce.”

There is no fish I can think of that doesn’t work with spinach. But where creamed spinach seems perfectly fine with a steak of halibut or haddock, the richer, oily fish such as salmon are more appropriately matched to the leaves in a simpler state. A mouthful of lemon salad, at once breathtakingly sharp, is more than at home on the same fork as a piece of salmon or a bunch of meltingly soft spinach. Bring all three together and you have a dish of extraordinary vitality.

The white sauce way. Yes, it’s a drag to make white sauce, but what you end up with here is creamed spinach of extraordinary solace and luxury.

Making creamed spinach without the traditional backbone of white sauce produces a quicker, greener, and slightly fresher-tasting result. It makes up in speed and greenness what it loses in nannying quality.

One of those soups that doubles as a main course, earthy, filling, and beefy. The soup relies on the onion to add depth and body.

I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The soup is velvety enough. It has become a staple in this kitchen over the last few winters; its warm nuttiness is always welcome on a steely-skied January day. Late in the winter of 2008, possibly having had one day too many of what Beth Chatto calls “dustbin-lid skies,” I changed the soup’s tone by adding a stirring of bright green spinach. As often happens, it came about by accident—a bowl of creamed spinach left over from a boiled ham lunch—added to the soup just to use it up. The magic in this soup is in the marriage of earthy cold-weather food and a shot of mood-lifting chlorophyll. Spring is obviously stirring.

Red lentils are quick-cooking beans, making them an obvious choice for last-minute meals. Their texture is starchier than regular lentils, and they have a light, sweet taste reminiscent of potatoes. For a creamier soup, add a dollop of Cucumber Yogurt (page 184). For a hint of spice, serve it with the Cilantro-Jalapeño Sauce (page 184).

This dish packs flavor with history. Take the word nanban, which refers to foreign influence in Japanese cooking. But duck is native to Japan, so what’s so foreign here? Back in the seventh century, the emperor issued a decree forbidding meat, and the country followed a Buddhist diet of fish and vegetables for more than a thousand years. Once Japanese started eating meat again in the nineteenth century, they called dishes like duck soba nanban—duck is something a foreigner would eat. It’s a convention that continues to this day.

Several years ago, my sister was involved in a very serious accident and nearly died. It was perhaps the most pure, absolute fear I had ever felt in my entire life. Mama and I were only allowed to see her twice a day. One morning early on, when our grief and worry were still overriding any desire to eat, a group of ladies came to the hospital and set up lunch. The volunteer explained that several of the local churches provided lunch and supper for the families of patients. It was real food, made with love and care. Pimento cheese sandwiches and individual slices of pound cake were hand-wrapped in waxed paper and homemade yeast rolls were delivered while still warm, shiny with butter. There were hunks of meaty pot roast bathed in dark brown gravy and a comforting combination of tender chicken and dumplings. The food was amazing. It was restorative, as much for the delicious taste as the real caring and kindness. It was without a doubt the most rewarding, healing love I have ever felt from absolute strangers.

Classic French cooking technique dictates that spinach should be blanched before sauteing. I learned the science behind the method when I produced a DVD with Shirley Corriher called Kitchen Secrets Revealed! Fresh fruits and vegetables are made from living cells. When heated, these cells die and fall apart. All vegetables are slightly acidic, and as the cells deteriorate and continue cooking, the acids leak out and turn the chlorophyll present in green vegetables brown. Miss Shirley (see page 191) calls this “mass death and destruction.” The French technique of blanching vegetables first in a large pot of boiling water dilutes the acids as they leak out, minimizing the amount of acid in contact with chlorophyll. Steaming is another excellent cooking method because as soon as the acids are released from the vegetables they wash away in the steam, limiting the amount of damaging contact with chlorophyll. Finally, stir-frying is a quick cooking and open technique, letting those acids evaporate, and limiting the time for the chlorophyll to lose color. If you don’t want to blanch spinach (or dandelion or chard) and still have it bright green, the trick is too cook it very, very quickly over high heat.

The first time I cooked a soufflé for my teacher, culinary authority and soufflé master Anne Willan, I opened the oven door to discover a lopsided, exploding disaster. Determined to learn, I cooked a soufflé once a week for months with the leftover bits of cheese from the cheeseboard. It was brutal, but I finally mastered the soufflé. That said, cast your fears aside: adapted from one of Anne’s recipes, this soufflé is the absolute perfect recipe for beginners because it demonstrates how easy soufflés are to make and to manipulate. Even if everything does go wrong, no one will know, as the soufflés are hidden under a glorious blanket of rich creamy sauce and melted cheese.

When we lived in small-town South Georgia, we used to travel to Atlanta to visit Aunt Lee, a stylish lady in the glamorous big city. Before we left Atlanta for home, we would stop by the Dekalb Farmer’s Market, which opened in the late 1970s as a small produce stand and has now grown into a 140,000-square-foot market, serving up to 100,000 people every week. There, Mama would buy the ingredients for this hearty salad to make after we got home.

So you think you don’t like goat cheese, huh? Well, have you ever tried it? This salad is a super tasty combination that is perfect for hot summer days when you don’t want to make anything warm. And, if you’re absolutely opposed to goat cheese, feta or blue cheese also works well.

Okay, I won’t lie to you, these take a while to make, but they’re so delectable and quintessentially Greek that it’s worth the time it takes. You can make these several hours ahead and serve them at room temperature or you can put them together and just bake them right before you serve them.