Who needs California? The winter pantry

It’s
become a dull cliché to say that the best cooking is that which cooks least,
starting with the finest, freshest produce. It’s kind of a French idea ripped
into California overdrive by food gurus like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame.
And well, yeah, great produce handled with a light touch usually results in
pretty good eats, but who didn’t know that? Also, where besides California do
we have access to the freshest of everything all year round? Sure, Wegmans
brings us fine produce from all over the world, but it’s often worse for travel
and prohibitively expensive.

Fortunately
for those of us living in wintry climes, people have been eating without fresh
produce for millennia. And in many cultures, that very restriction led to the
development of amazingly varied cuisine. Curious how many ways dried lentils
can be used? Spend a little time in India and find out. Dried beans and rice,
together, form the nutritional basis for many diets around the world, and
therefore we have countless, spectacular rice and bean dishes from which to
choose. Plenty of the world’s tastiest food amounts to taking a tiny bit of
protein and jazzing it up (think Creole stews or even sushi in Japan).

So,
in honor of winter, I asked some cooks to contribute recipes that don’t require
fresh ingredients. We decided to allow onions, potatoes, garlic, and winter
squash, all of which keep very well. But no easily perishable fruits, veggies,
or meats. The responses were most intriguing (and everybody wanted to cheat
just a little).

Marwan
el-Bejjani, manager at Sinbad’s, suggested an African peanut butter stew. He
says it’s easy, but tastes like you slaved over it all day. It starts with a
dark roux: melt 1/2 a stick of margarine until it’s clear, whisk in 2
tablespoons flour, and cook until it turns dark brown, stirring frequently.

Meanwhile,
sauté one large, diced Spanish onion in a cup of vegetable oil (don’t brown).
Add a couple of cloves finely chopped garlic, 3 tablespoons gumbo file, and 1
tablespoon dried basil, and cook about 5 minutes. Add a can of stewed tomatoes
and a small can of tomato sauce, and cook over low heat for 2 minutes. Dump in
a package of frozen, chopped spinach and half a package of frozen, chopped
okra. Then add two cups of chicken broth, one cup of smooth peanut butter, and
salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the dark roux, cook 15 minutes, and serve it
with rice made with chicken broth.

Ain’t
nothing wrong with using frozen or canned goods properly. Sure, you don’t want
to slice canned tomatoes for insalata
Caprese, but for cooking, a good Italian brand of canned tomatoes will be
better than fresh at least nine months of the year in our climate.

Paula
Wolfert provides a pile of ways to cook beans in her Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (and many other recipes that
would conform to these rules). I’m crazy about a Georgian red bean dish in
which you cook the dried beans slowly in stages, first by themselves, then with
lots of onions, then with hard spices like cinnamon and clove. When it cooks
down, you add bright flavors right at the end — lemon juice and pomegranate
molasses — and give it a day in the fridge to develop. It’s outstanding with
warm pita bread (write me at foodguy@rochester.rr.com if you want the recipe,
but you’ll never regret buying the book).

My
friends Laurie and John Perry always serve great food, and their caramelized
apricot-onion tarts sound outrageous. Get yourself some ready-made phyllo
shells to save some effort, or make your own if you’re ambitious. Cook half a
pound of diced bacon until just crisp, and drain, reserving a couple
tablespoons of the fat in the pan (bacon, being a preserved meat, is within my
rules).

Add
about 2 pounds of Vidalia onions, cut into 1/4 inch slices, and 1 tablespoon
sugar, and caramelize over medium heat (about 40 minutes). Add 1/4 cup brandy
and stir. Then mix in the bacon, 1/2 cup finely chopped dried apricots, and
salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste. Cook until all the liquid
evaporates. Add 2 tablespoons fresh Thyme leave — if you have them… yeah,
that breaks the rules — and remove from the heat. Put one slice of Taleggio
cheese and about a tablespoon of the onion mixture in each shell, sprinkle with
a bit more fresh thyme, and bake at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes. Can’t you
just smell them?

Independent
radio reporter-producer Isobel don’t-call-me-“personality” Neuberger always has
tasteful recipes, and though I attempted to avoid the French, she reminded me
that potatoes Lyonnaise fits within the rules. What could be better than
onions, butter, salt, pepper, and potatoes, cooked gently in a gratin dish?
Again, e-mail if you want Isobel’s recipe (which comes from Classic Home Cooking by Berry &
Spieler).

There
is no cooking challenge that grilling champs Dan and Betty Nolan won’t meet.
Dan sent two soup recipes that he was able to modify to meet the criteria. For
tortilla soup a la Dan, start by cutting 4 corn tortillas into strips, and then
baking them for 10 minutes at 350 degrees. Set those aside, and soften a
chopped onion and a couple of ribs of celery in a tablespoon of olive oil (a
red bell pepper would be nice if not for the rules). Add a chopped garlic clove
and soften it (about 2 minutes), then add a can of tomato puree, the juice of a
lime, a can of green chiles, 4 cups unsalted chicken broth, marjoram, thyme,
cumin, and chopped jalapeño (available in cans). Bring it to a boil, reduce the
heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

To
serve, spread the tortilla strips in the bottoms of 4 bowls. Then add cubes of
Monterrey Jack cheese, and top it all with the soup. A grind of black pepper
and some fresh cilantro (which you don’t have) go nice on top. Dan also sent a
recipe for winter vegetable soup with barley, also available by e-mail.

When
I ask my itinerant chef buddy, Greg Duva, for this sort of info, he invariably
delivers in spades. In this case, he sent a recipe for a roasted root vegetable
stock that can be used in place of traditional, meat-based stocks. Root
vegetables like carrot, parsnip, and turnip are great in winter not only
because they keep so well, but because they have such deep flavor.

To
make his stock, Greg roasts all those veggies, plus onion and garlic, in a
roasting pan lightly coated in olive oil. Roast at 425 degrees for about 45
minutes, turning the vegetables once or twice. “This gentle caramelization of
the natural vegetable sugars is what you are looking for,” Greg says, “the
process by which their rich depth of flavor is concentrated and released in
place of the meat juices which flavor traditional brown stocks.”

When
you’ve got them roasted, put them in a stockpot with tomatoes (canned, if you
want to stick to the rules), bay leaf, thyme, and peppercorn, then cover by 2
inches with cold water. Simmer gently for a couple of hours, then strain twice
to get all the solids out. Drop me a line if you want a more involved version
of the recipe and Greg’s instructions for turning the stock into a demiglace.

Pasta,
of course, is a dried food. But don’t forget about grains. In addition to rice,
you can do great things with bulgur, corn, and barley. And nuts are great in
winter. Dried and smoked meats and fish are just fine year-round, too. And if
you must have fresh vegetables, Brussels sprouts are still growing and better
than ever when the weather gets cold. Keep warm, and keep eating well without
going broke or subsidizing California farming.

This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.