rfts's pumpkin soup for lazy people.

I've forgotten if you eat meat, but a very easy option for a quick dinner is a small pan-fried steak and one of those pre-washed salads.

Also, look into frozen vegetables. They're not ideal, no, but they retain vitamins pretty decently, and they're super easy to add to pasta or stir-fry. If you find frozen spinach *pellets* (as opposed to a single block), buy multiple bags!

If you want to go the premade route, Amy's Organic pizzas, mac n' cheese, noodles, burritos are all pretty good, though expensive.

my newest quick meal:

1. Prepare fusili pasta in one pot
2. In other, mix together 1 T butter (or more!), smooshed/chopped garlic to taste (I use 3 cloves), red pepper flakes, salt, pepper, diced tomatoes
3. Drain pasta, mix in with sauce.
4. Throw in a big bowl, add parmesan and drizzle with e.v. olive oil
5. enjoy while watching t.v./movie

oh, and i sometimes add a hardboiled egg(s)

A roast chicken takes about an hour, but couldn't be easier -- you can get perfectly decent results just heaving the damn thing in for an hour or so at 350, with a couple of sweet or white potatoes next to it, depending on your taste. And then you have leftovers. Likewise with the frozen veggies.

If you don't mind soaking the lentils in the morning, you can make an awfully easy lentil soup by sauteing a chopped onion and a carrot (and if you want, some chopped up ham or bacon or something), throwing in a bag's worth of soaked lentils and boiling until the lentils are done (half an hour? forty minutes?) Throw in a block of chopped spinach and a couple of spoonfuls of tomato paste, cook another few minutes until it melds together a bit, and eat with some good bread.

Saute a diced onion until soft, add cubed butternut squash and saute a little, add chicken broth, cook a little, add red lentils, cook until the lentils are falling apart, puree the squash by your favorite means (I generally just mash the pieces against the side of a pot), grate in ginger, jalapeno, and, at your option, orange zest (you can also add some orange juice). Eat with bread.

I also have a really big skillet which I use to make a reuben: Add sliced onions first, then rye bread for toasting, then yer meat (pastrimi is, of course, traditional, but I've had good luck with turkey reubens), swiss cheese, and sauerkraut. Assemble in pan then transfer to a plate.

The nice thing about roasting a chicken is that then you can boil the leftovers with a celery, an onion, and a couple of carrots to create a beautiful chicken stock for onion soup! And onion soup is the best thing in the world.

You can do something similar to the above with bacon (cooked first, in smallish slices, until crispy, using the fat for the onion), sage, and saffron in place of the ginger, jalapeno, and orange, and then (if, like me, you were out of lentils) serve it on brown rice. Eat with bread, or, if you're like me, an arugula/blood orange salad.

Mujaddarah has 5 ingredients, plus water, but it's really really good. Don't skimp on the salt or the olive oil. Pepper is nice too. If you feel extra lively, make a chopped salad (cucumbers, onions, parsley, etc.) with a lemon juice dressing to have with it.

"a celery"?

8. chicken stock for onion soup? What's wrong with you?

I'd second the roast chicken. I love roasting chicken, though I find high temperature delivers a better bird faster if it doesn't smoke you out of the house.

Also, with a chicken breast you can dredge it in flour, fry it up in butter, and then make a quick sauce by adding some wine to the pan and mixing in some mustard when the pan juices have mixed with the wine. This goes great with rice (get a rice cooker!) and a frozen or fresh veggie of your choice.

Also, almost everything tastes good grilled, and there's no mess.

Also getting chickens will enable you to make schmaltz, which will enable you to make gribenes (tip: don't buy gribenes from a mohel; too chewy).

You could just fly Spackerman out to NYC every now and then and have him cook you up a bunch of meals.

I was also feeling a little down-in-the-cooking-dumps recently and was inspired by, of all things, a Rachael Ray show.

She made pasta with a cauliflower sauce. I made it this weekend when Tia came over and we liked it. Here goes:

In a wide pan, sauté a chopped onion and a minced clove of garlic in a few tsps of olive oil. Meanwhile, wash and chop up a head of cauliflower. Add it to the pan and give it a toss. Don't salt it.

Meanwhile, make some penne or other roundish pasta.

Stir the cauliflower every so often, but allow it to get all caramelized and brown. When you're happy with the caramelization, add about a cup and a half of vegetable or chicken broth. Let it simmer until the cauliflower is seriously mushy. Allow some of the broth to steam away.

Using a fork or masher, mash up the cauliflower. (I just threw it in the food processor for super-smooth, but had to add more liquid to make it saucy.) Season it to taste with salt, pepper, and herbs. Toss the pasta in it.

The color is not very impressive, so I also made some sautéed zucchini coins and grape tomatoes, seasoned with thyme and a hint of raspberry jam. Mmm.

The whole thing was extremely tasty, fun to make, comfortingly wintery, and low in fat.

Saute an onion in olive oil, dump in a bunch of spinach to wilt it, then add black-eyed peas, salt/pepper, and hot sauce. Stir and heat for a few minutes, then serve over cheese grits.

It's the shit.

Do you have a slow-cooker? If you do, I have more suggestions.

I second everything Jackmormon said.

You can do a stir-fry pretty easily. Cook rice. While rice is cooking, chop up meat or tofu. Mince some garlic. Pour sesame oil in a pan. Let it heat up. Put in some crushed red pepper, ginger, and the garlic. Add the meat/tofu. Root around in the freezer for the frozen veggies. Add some veggies. Stir around until everything's cooked. Serve over rice.

11.--I left that article for you, Ben. Did you not appreciate my offering?

12.--Respect mah authoritah!

"a celery"?

Celery = fellatio.

Also, rutabagas roasted in olive oil and salt are fantastic and wintery.

Chilaquiles are good too, though surely not health food. They can be assembled from 5 storebought ingredients:

1. Good tortilla chips, or some corn tortillas. Stale tortillas are best.
2. Nice salsa verde. I have a bunch in the freezer from when I bought all the tomatillos in Ohio last summer, but from a jar is perfectly good.
3. Corn oil or olive oil
4. Broth out of a box
5. Cheese

Optional: chopped onions, an avocado, sour cream, that kind of thing.

If you're using tortillas, tear them into strips and shallow-fry them until they're crispy. Set on paper towels. If you're using tortilla chips, just hang onto them. Now take a big, wide pan and heat tablespoon or so of oil in it. Dump in about half a cup of salsa per person. Saute the salsa for a minute, then add an equal quantity of broth. Simmer for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the chips and cook for 3 minutes more, giving a stir now and then. About thirty seconds before they're done, dump the cheese on top. Add garnishes if you feel like it. Serve.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

While that's heating up, cook a half pound of spaghetti in salted water in an oven proof pot.

In the meantime, open a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of sliced mushrooms, and a can of tuna, draining as applicable. When the pasta is done, drain it in a colander and return it to the pot with the contents of the cans, a tablespoon of butter, a half cup of parmesan cheese, half a teaspoon of garlic powder and black pepper to taste. Bake with the lid off until a nice crust forms (15 minutes or so).

Voila: Spaghetti con il tonno e la crema del fungo.

That link is great, Jackmormon, especially the 'generic onion soup' recipe.

(My recipe uses butter, beef broth, onions, garlic, and red wine. And is amazing.)

For lunch, by the way, I had an omelette sandwich. Two eggs, mixed up with a little cream, salt, pepper, and fines herbes, fried with wee chunks of salami and parmagian cheese (it's what I had!), and served up on mustarded bread. I would have loved to put lettuce and tomato on it, but, well, I didn't have that.

19. the Les Halles and the French Laundry cookbooks both use beef broth. This has the beginnings of a culinary mystery!

To go back to #2, I do eat meat and yay everyone for the ideas so far!

Also, with a chicken breast you can dredge it in flour, fry it up in butter, and then make a quick sauce by adding some wine to the pan and mixing in some mustard when the pan juices have mixed with the wine.

A slight improvement on this is to add some olive oil to the pan with the butter -- it gets hotter without scorching, and tastes a little better.

22.--Chopper, that is impressively Midwestern. Do you have any Mormon in you?

23.--That link came from, I am embarrassed to have to admit, young w-lfs-n.

This thread is really starting to make up for yesterday's lack of pastries.

Here's a guide to making omelettes.

Also, if you're eating cold cereal for dinner because you don't want to cook, better you should have some dry sausage, some decent cheese, maybe some canned smoked fish -- whatever you can buy and have sitting around for weeks -- so when you don't want to cook you can cut up an apple, some cheese, some sausage, with some crackers or decent bread, and have a moderately festive picnicy sort of meal rather than eating cereal.

I am also a huge huge huge fan of doing a little cooking spree on a weekend afternoon, so that during the week I can just heat something up, and maybe make a salad to go with it. Curries and gratins both do very well for this sort of thing. Soups too -- nothing wrong with soup, with or without a grilled cheese sandwich.

28: My culinary upbringing was grounded in my mother's small-twon Ohio childhood. I forgot to add the frozen peas.

Seriously, I love me some tuna casserole. It's the comfort food I always return to. At Thanksgiving, I had some leftover homemade cream of mushroom soup (the result of a not-entirely-succesful attempt to make a fancy green bean casserole), and I made tuna casserole with that, aged parmesan, fresh garlic, and imported spanish tuna packed in olive oil. THAT was fucking good.

25.--I have a guess about the mystery: onion soup used to be food for poor people, but during the 20s-30s, when wealthier people went slumming in the foodmarkets of Les Halles after a long night drinking, onion soup became somewhat fashionable. A posher version of onion soup, with the more expensive beef broth, began to migrate to other countries, while the peuple de Paris continue to make the cheaper version, convincing themselves along the way that it was superior.

One of PG Wodehouse's improvished but worthy young men wants someone to give him money to start an onion soup bar in London somewhere. I've forgotten which of the bijillion novels he's in, but I think it's an early (30s) one.

31: Hear, hear! The whole reason I got into curing my own pork was to always have it around the house.

22: I can't stand cream of mushroom soup or canned mushrooms, but that sounds like a degenerate version of something delicious. I wonder if I could reverse engineer it -- substitute a cream sauce and a whole bunch of mushrooms for the soup.

If you want something that will take a little longer, but is guaranteed tasty and super-easy to prep and will choke your arteries to death with one hand and could totally be taken to a potluck, try this:

Preheat the oven to 325 (I think? Crud, I'm not sure, but it sounds right and it's not my fault if you die of the salmonella.)

Take a smallish casserole dish. Throw some skinless, boneless chicken in the bottom. Salt & pepper the chicken.

Slice up some swiss cheese and throw a few chunks on top of the chicken. Be generous or stingy as you wish.

Open a couple of cans of cream of chicken soup. Dump them into a bowl and stir in a half cup or so of white wine. In turn, dump this on top of the cheese on top of the chicken, coating evenly. You may need more than a couple of cans of soup. I go 1/2 cup wine to 2 cans soup; scale appropriately.

Dump breadcrumbs out of a bag of store-bought on top of the soup/wine stuff. Drizzle a little melted butter on top.

Bake for 45 minutes or so, a little longer if the chicken's not quite done.

Serve with rice.

It is not anything like healthy, but it is tasty! A faster, possibly healthier vegetarian version is easily done by subbing big pasta of some variety in for the chicken, using cream of mushroom soup, throwing in some sliced portabello/a (I can never remember how to spell it) and baking just long enough to brown the breadcrumbs on top.

Ah, 33 answers 36.

A more serious convenience dinner suggestion:

Cook some spaghettini (angel hair).

Finely slice a clove or two of garlic. In a skillet, heat maybe three tablespoons of a nice olive oil. Add garlic and red pepper flakes to taste. After a couple minutes, add a can of baby clams and maybe half of the juice from the can. Let those cook while you drain the pasta, then add the pasta to the skillet. Toss a few times, then sprinkle with coarse sea salt and garnish with some finely chopped parsely. Yum.

36/38: If you do a cream sauce, don't forget the sherry--it's what makes the cream of muchroom soup pop. I used Lynn Rosetto Kasper's recipe. Fucking awesome.

Here's what I've been making lately, in a big batch, so that I'll have leftovers for a few days.

Ingredients:
Pancetta (or bacon)
Boneless, skinless chicken
Bell pepper
Onion
Basil
Non-stringy pasta of your choice

Chop everything up, fry the pancetta until it's crispy (assuming you like it crispy), then saute the onion with the pancetta and pancetta grease.

Add some olive oil, make sure the heat is pretty high, and throw in the chicken.

When the chicken looks cooked and your pasta is about ready, add the bell pepper and basil.

I've been seasoning with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

Drain the pasta, dump it in with the other ingredients, give it a few stirs, and you're done.

Mmm, pancetta. So good.

Here's a pancetta dish I made a couple weeks ago, somewhat similart to ogged's:

Cook some pasta (one of the shapes that will hold a chunky sauce--e.g. shells)

Dice pancetta into largish chunks. Fry until crispyish, add half an onion, diced. When onion is soft, add cream and a little bit of pasta water. Stir until combined. Add some green peas and grated parmesan cheese. Add pasta. Season to taste.

This takes a little advanced prep, but just a little. And it really tastes like a fancy restaurant dish. You'll love it, or your money back.

Black Cod with Miso

3/4 cup mirin
1/2 cup sake
2 cups white miso paste
1 cup sugar

4 black cod fillets, about 1/2 pound each

1. First, make the miso: In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine the mirin and sake and boil for 20 seconds to evaporate the alcohol. Add the miso paste and stir with a wooden spoon until it dissolves completely. Add the sugar, raise the heat to high, and stir continuously until it has dissolved completely. Remove the pan from the heat and leave at room temperature until the mixture has cooled completely.

2. Pat the black cod fillets thoroughly dry with paper towels. Put them in a nonreactive dish or bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 to 3 days.

3. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Preheat a grill or broiler. Lightly wipe off any excess miso clinging to the fillets, but don't rinse it off. Place the fish on the grill or under the broiler and cook just until its surface turns brown. Then transfer to a baking dish and cook in the oven until the fish is just opaque in its center, 10 to 15 minutes more.

An easy pasta sauce variation that I like is based on Sicilian "melted anchovies": Saute minced garlic and maybe some onion or scallions in olive oil, then add a few (two or more) anchovies and mush them around until they dissolve into a brown paste. From there, you add your stewed tomatoes, a little tomato paste, a little red wine if you have it, and whatever Italian herbs you have around. The anchovies act like fishy MSG.

Ted Barlow, wow, I thought you were dead to blogdom. Good to hear from you, even if it is about a fru-fru dish.

That's "frou-frou" to you, ogged.

Here's a, um, more accessible fish dish.

Take a whitefish fillet. (Cod, scrod, sole, whatever, the white one that's not hideously expensive.)

Put fillet on a biggish rectangle of tin foil.

Chop up finely some of this sort of thing: red pepper, onion, tomato, dill, thyme, basil.

Add: Salt and pepper and lemon juice.

Roll up and seal tin foil.

Bake at, oh, 400 for about half an hour. Serve with rice, bread, or stewed spinach, if you feel like it.

When imagination and self esteem run low I cook this: Steak with Rocquefort and Parsley. Get a reasonably OK steak and make sure it's tender (i.e. a bit rotten). Blend some Rocquefort and some single cream: you don't need a huge amount of either. Fry the steak, then put it on a plate in the oven. Add the sauce ingredients to the pan you used to fry the steak in and stir well over a low heat, making sure to get all the flavour out of the pan. Get the steak out of the oven and unite it with the sauce. Garnish with some flat leaf parlsey and serve with some vegetables of some sort, and a robust red. Takes ten minutes.

If you have a bit longer, you could do this. Sautee some onions in a large shallow pan; chop some lamb into chunks and coat each piece well with a mixture of flour, salt and pepper. Add to the pan and brown. Turn the heat down and add three or four cloves of roughly chopped garlic; sautee for a few minutes longer, taking care not to burn the garlic. You could also add some chopped carrots at this point. Then cover with some (inexpensive) red wine and simmer for around 45 mins to an hour until well reduced. Serve with mashed potatoes and green beans, or something.

46: I second this. And you could always test the urban myth that you can cook the foil wrapped fish in the dishwasher, or in the engine compartment of your car.

44 - I was just talking about the underratedness of anchovies with someone this weekend.

Let's see. My "lazy" dishes, depending on what I have in the kitchen:
- spaghetti aio e oio
- spaghetti carbonara
- non-long pasta with fresh tomato sauce (fast, just cook down a can of peeled tomatos with whatever looks good)
- filled pasta with butter and sage
- any omlette
- any frittata, similarly
- black bean quesadilla, bulk version (1 can black beans, heat with onion and/or whatever salty meat thing, place between two flour tortillas in a pan, maybe with cheese)
- gardenburgers (ideally cooked in leftover bacon fat)

So black cod is whitefish. Interesting.

All these recipes sound delicious. Yet I find that, oddly, whenever I work up the nerve to cook something respectable, after purchasing all the ingredients I've somehow spent as much or more as I would have simply dialing up the local take-out place. Once you add in the time I spend actually making the stuff, plus the at-least-50%-chance that I'll botch something somewhere along the way, and, well, that's why I eat out almost every single night.

I think you're undercounting leftovers, and the way things get cheaper when you cook often enough that you aren't charging staples to each dish.

43: Add the miso marinade to the fish before covering in plastic wrap, no?

- 2-3 nice sweet italian deli sausages
- big bag of fresh leaf spinach (E. coli optional)
- a lemon or two
- orichette or other shelloid pasta

Eviscerate the sausages, break the meat down into small bits, and fry it up in a skillet with a tiny bit of olive oil. Once the meat is browned, throw the spinach on top of it. It should look like a freaking enormous amount of spinach when you first put it in the pan. It will shrink dramatically as it cooks. Halve the lemon(s), squeeze the juice in, add lemon zest as well if you're so inclined. Push the meat and spinach around in the lemon juice for a little while. Put it on the pasta.

It's probably healthier to cook. And it's amazingly good for morale - albeit in a slightly embarrassing army-like way - to eat a sensible hot meal you made yourself. I forget this regularly.

Speaking of anchovies, another quick'n'easy dish is Pasta Puttanesca:

Cook a bunch of spaghetti.

In a skillet, cook minced garlic until just soft in a tablesppon or two of olive oil. Add anchovies (to taste, I use most of a can). Stir until the anchovies have broken down into a paste. Add a can of peeled plum tomatoes, drained. Break up the tomatoes with your stirrer, bring to a simmer. Add a few glugs of of red wine and hot pepper flakes to taste. Pit some black olives, throw in. Drain pasta, dump in. Continue to cook while chopping parsely and grating parmesan. Take off heat, add cheese and parsley.

another quick'n'easy dish is Pasta Puttanesca

"Which is Italian for 'very few ingredients'."

50: How do you make a frittata so that it is neither leathery nor fall-aparty? I understand the theory of frittatas fairly well, but the practice generally eludes me.

Another great thing to have is a rice cooker. Red lentils cook in a rice cooker, either along with rice or separately--but don't add too much water or your rice cooker will produce festive gushes of starchy water. One could cook, for example: some red lentils, the same amount of water, and frozen classy co-op peas to taste, or maybe some chopped cauliflower. Upon completion (when the lentils are mushy) one could top with those jarred "Indian" sauces one also gets at the co-op.

I also make this, a sort of risotto-by-orzo, a lot:

Boil a cup of water and add bouillion to taste. (The Rapunsel classy co-op bouillon is particularly good for this.) Or start with broth, if you've got it.

Add a half-cup of orzo and a third of a cup of red lentils. Simmer.

As the water absorbs, add more little by little until the lentils are either firmish or soup-like, depending on your preferences. You can also add chopped carrots or cauliflower mid-way through the process if the spirit moves you. I usually grate a little parmesan on top too, and serve it with bread.

Or okra! The convenience store guy told me about baking a dish of okra with onions and tomatoes and salt and pepper and olive oil, which sounds awfully good although I haven't tried it yet. I usually saute okra, and I'll eat about as much okra as I can get.

The edition of MFK Fisher's early books which contains How To Cook A Wolf and Consider The Oyster has some interesting quick receipes. (As well as some that will merely enlighten you as to the horrifying gastronomic practices of the mid-twentieth century.)

59: s/b "Rapunzel", and "starchy steam" is what you get from an overwatered rice-cooker.

Say, lots of good stuff in here. Pasta Puttanesca is definitely good and easy eats; I makes mine with capers in there too.

Here's one I've been doing a lot lately, easy and cheap to boot:

1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
several cloves garlic, minced
fresh ginger, peeled and minced (at least 3 tsps, but more is better)
1 cup-ish yellow/pink/orange lentils
broth or water
vegetable oil (I use coconut for the flavor, but olive is good)

saute the veggies in the oil a little until they soften, add the lentils & broth and cook until the lentils are done like you like 'em, around 15-20 min. You can mix in rice if you want to bulk up the recipe. Salt and pepper to taste, of course. I added some vermouth once, just for grins, and that was pretty good too.

59 - Really? What are you putting in your fritattas? And are you finishing them with the flip-for-stovetop or the imho more reliable put-under-broiler method?

59: I usually do OK by cooking the frittata just a bit on the stovetop, stopping while still a bit liquid, and then running it under the broiler to finish.

Puttanesca

"What did you call me?"

The broiler may be the key, here, since I haven't been doing that. Of course, this would mean buying a broiler-safe frying pan, which is certainly not impossible if I get my act together.

They're cheap. Cheaper secondhand someplace, but cheap new.

Eggplant Lasagna:

2-3 eggplants
1 tub of ricotta cheese
1 jar of tomato sauce*
1/2 lb ground beef
Mozarella cheese (Fresh is better, obviously, but the baggy stuff will do in a pinch.)

Assembly is pretty intuitive. Peel the eggplants; cut longways into ~1/4" slices. Spread ricotta on each slice and pile them in a casserole dish, covering each layer with meet, cheese, and sauce before adding the next. Cover the top with sauce and then cheese. Bake at 350 till cheese is golden brown (probably 30 minutes).

*I generally prefer to make my own, if I have time; however, nowadays there are a number of tasty (and inexpensive) store-bought tomato sauces. Just steer clear of Prego and Ragu (barf). Classico is relatively cheap and works well for lasagna. The $8-9 range is even better.

61: Yeah, capers! Completely forgot 'em, but they need to be in there.

Seriously, what's a comedy without capers?

Tonight I had a czech gulas. Simple and easy.

Fry some meat (any meat will do but fatty cuts of red meat are best), add some onions, fry a bit more. You can add some garlic if you like it.

Add some paprika and caraway seeds. Fry a bit. [By some, I mean 1 teaspoon or so of each, depending on taste]

Pour over stock (or water and a stock cube).

Cook until meat is really tender (up to 2 hours). Some time near the end, stir in some flour mixed with water and cook while stirring repeatedly to thicken the sauce.

Lots of freshly ground black pepper. Salt to taste.

Serve. Rice is good, or mashed potatoes. Some raw onions go really nicely with it.

It takes a long time but it's really simple and you don't have to watch it.

Dice two (smallish, if you don't have the metabolism of a hyperthyroid weasel like I do) tomatoes and a clove of garlic. Toss in blender with some white wine and turn into a liquid. Pour liquid into small pot along with basil, oregano, granulated onion, crushed red pepper, salt, a little sprinkle of sugar, a dash of white vinegar, and olive oil and butter (not a lot of each, it's the combo you want, not a grease bomb). Cook down, pour over pasta. Takes about 20 minutes.

My household is vegetarian, so I use a lot of fake meats in my cooking. I like the Morningstar Farms (isn't that like calling your company Lucifer Dairies?) Steak Strips and Quorn Tenders in this, though I expect that real meat works just fine, too. When I lived alone, I used to use a lot of italian sausage, and sometimes I still add fennel seed to this recipe to attempt to recapture the taste (though I suspect my current supply of fennel seed needs to be replaced, as it's losing its potency).

Substitute saffron, tumeric, and rose petals for papricka and caraway seeds in the above recipe, and you get a simplified khorest.

Damn! 72 was to 70.

NBarnes, the Morningstar company is owned by Seventh-Day Adventists. I'm sure the name's Biblical significance didn't escape them, but I'm not sure where they were going with it.

71: Tofurkey Italian "sausages" would probably work pretty well in that, too.

73 - It's owned by Kellogg's. Was it founded by Seventh Day Activists?

I like the pots in 66. I might buy some to replace the irritatingly fragile and arguably poisonous nonstick cookware I have now.

Do it. Cast iron makes Ogged cry.

Here is a company history that links it with Adventists. No mention of Kellogg's as a parent company, although that could be a recent development.

a. 59 et al.: Never made a frittata as such, but I do tortillas espanolas (with tilda), which is pretty much the same thing, and yes, finishing with the broiler is the key, otherwise it overcooks at the bottom.

b. Yes, pancetta is the biz. The quickest and easiest thing is to chop a piece, say a couple of ounces and fry with an appropriate amount of onions and garlic (proportions are entirely to taste), then throw in about half a pound of frozen peas, cook till thawed and eat with chunks of peasanty bread. Takes about 10 - 15 minutes from coming in the door.

c. Improvisations on the theme of risotto are good, especially if you don't give a hoot about authenticity. I did one with chopped and roasted squash the other day, because it was cheap. It was delicious.

ever since my gourmand wife moved out, I have smooshed Trader Joe's pizza doughs into an adequate and on occasion delightful vehicle for vegetable delivery.

A pizza stone will prove a handy investment. I believe a baking pan will do the trick.

1. Sprinkle some flour on a nice clean counter and rollout your dough. It's easier if the dough is room temperature.

2. Put the dough in the over on way way high (500 or so degrees) for about ten minutes to get it crispy.

3. Sauce: you can use storebought spaghetti sauce, but I like to make my own. 1 6 oz can of tomato paste + 1.5 cups water plus 1/3 cup olive oil. Add garlic, dried spices, salt, pepper to taste. Makes enough for two pizzas.

4. Throw a bunch of stuff on top, return to over for another 10-15 minutes down at 400 or 450.

I like to use fontina cheese instead of mozzarella. If I use Tofurkey veggie sausage, I sizzle it up first, as nothing really cooks in that short a time. I've had fun with beets (no red sauce), frisee, good tomatoes, mediocre tomatoes, asparagus, and a great deal of Whatever's Around.

If you have leftovers, I like to scramble an egg and eat it on top of a slice. Yum.

I made a simple recipe last night with codfish and found it very tasty. Would have been tastier yet if I had not forgotten to season the sauce until the very end of cooking it; but even with that mix-up, very tasty.

Squash in risotto is great, esp. when augmented by sausage.

I have an onion (at least one), some orzo, Herbsaint, and chicken broth at home, and am thinking of getting a fennel bulb, a tomato, and some mussels or clams. Any suggestions for the futher jazzing-up of my prospective dinner made between now and the time I get home (in order to get the car to go to the store) would be much appreciated.

Here is a favorite easy dish from my non-vegetarian days. Makes as much as you like, to feed a ton of people or to make lots of leftovers. It was called "Italian Chicken" in my family, for no particularly good reason, and is mindlessly simple and tasty. It is also cheap!

Chicken thighs, skins on, please
Russet or Yukon Gold potatoes
Onions
Salt, pepper, herbs of choice (I liked rosemary and oregano)
Big old baking sheet with sides, AKA a jelly roll pan

Cut the onions and potatoes into equal-sized wedges, the long way -- about an inch or an inch and a half wide on the wide side of the wedge is good. Peel the onions, don't peel the potatoes. Put them on the baking sheet with the chicken, all shuffled together, in a single layer. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and herbs. Put in the oven at 375. Give a stir now and then, so the chicken drippings baste/oil the vegetables. When the chicken is done -- i.e. you stick a fork or sharp knife in next to the bone and the juices run clear -- you're done.

When the chicken is done -- i.e. you stick a fork or sharp knife in next to the bone and the juices run clear -- you're done.

This method of determining doneness is much preferred to sticking a fork in one's own ass.

A pizza stone will prove a handy investment. I believe a baking pan will do the trick.

Best of all: buy some unglazed tiles at a hardware store, then put an oven rack on the lowest possible rung and line it with them. You can leave them in all the time, and it will even out the heat of your oven, helping to eliminate hot spots, and makes a great pizza/bread stone.

Indeed, indeed.

I'm afraid I'm at sea for suggestions on what to prepare with bivalves.

Almost anything is improved with bacon, though.

Or ... swossage!

In the end I forgot to add the tomato.

I've tried Tofurky Italian Sausage in my sauce, but it really just doesn't work for me the way the real thing does, nor so well as the listed meat substitutes.

Quorn, though, takes up flavor nicely, and if I'm feeling ambitious, I've been known to toss some of it in a small skillet with olive oil, butter, white wine, fennel seed, crushed red pepper, granulated onion and garlic, little salt, and sautée to be added to a sauce later. Good times.

- Bag of pre-washed spinach, sliced almonds, shaved parmesan, delicious salad dressing. (Sass brand sesame-garlic is the bomb. Sadly, you can't get it on the East Coast.) Add toast and a glass of wine.

- I second the mujaddarah (cf. 10) but recommend carmelizing or crisping the onions for more flavor. Cumin and cinnamon are good additions. A side of yogurt with or without salt and grated cucumber.

- Black beans (can o' Goya, garlic, onions, white wine, the recipe on the Goya can is pretty good) & rice; add tortillas, salsa, sour cream, etc.

Cast iron makes Ogged cry.

Another calumny perpetrated against me. Cast iron is great, and I'll get some eventually, but I didn't feel like dealing with seasoning my cookware just yet.

That's probably for the best. Ogged barely knows how to season his food.

Also, super-easy, delicious tomato soup:

Warm some olive oil, saute 5 or 6 garlic cloves until golden. Add a tablespoon of paprika and cook for about 30 seconds (be careful not to scorch). Add a can of tomato juice (the stuff in the pasta aisle, not V-8), a cup of water or veg. stock, and a quarter cup of sherry. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Good with homemade croutons or plain ole saltines, maybe a little grated parmesan or cheddar.

Not your best work, w-lfs-n. But as a gesture of goodwill, I'll let you tell me how you'd like to be seasoned when we roast you on a spit at the next Unfogged meetup.

Don't resist, ogged. Seasoning cast iron is super easy. Plus, you can sometimes buy it pre-seasoned from the manufacturer (or just get it used).

Use someone else's seasoning? And then off to the potluck at the Turkish baths?

I'm going to bed, crazy people.

--what about heating up some pasta & jarred tomato sauce (classico is okay) & throwing in a few extras--black olives, prosciutto, sauteed mushrooms, bacon (not all of these, just whichever you like).

--sautee onion, garlic, tomatoes, jalapenos. Put aside. Then scramble some eggs, melt cheddar or jack into it, serve with tortilla & salsa.

Better if you add chorizo, though not as easy.

--quesadillas are even easier.

--sandwiches are less depressing than cereal. Turkey breast + pepper jack + avocado on wheat was a favorite of mine last year.

I've heard that the Lodge preseasoning isn't that great.

100.

At the risk of starting another fish war, kedgeree is wonderful if you can get smoked haddock. I cook it in a wok, otherwise following Elizabeth David:

1-3 smoked haddock fillets (she says three, but haddock seem to have grown since her day)
2tbsp Olive oil
1 medium onion
4 heaped tablespoons rice,
a little curry powder,
2 tablespoons sultanas
2 hard-boiled eggs
parsley
a lemon

pour boiling water over the haddock fillets in a bowl, and leave for three or five minutes. peel off the skin; break into chunks.

In the wok, fry the sliced onion in oil until pales yellow. Stir in a teaspoon of curry powder. Add the rice and stir it all around. Add the sultanas. Pour in a pint of boiling water, and cook steadily for ten minutes. Add the haddock chunks. Keep cooking until all the water is absorbed -- maybe ten minutes more -- stirring occasionally.

I serve it, and, if feeling gross, eat it, too, from the wok in which it has cooked. Top with the chopped eggs, parsley, and lemon quarters. Stir in some butter if you want to. Good with mango chutney.

This is very little work, quick, and tremendously remoralising. The mixture of sweet, sour, and slightly spicy is glorious.

And if you want a wholly exotic (ie French) taste on fast food, get hold of Eduard de Pomiane's "Cooking in Ten minutes", which is full of glorious practical ideas which will appear extremely exotic in DC. Very cheap, quick, practical food, none the less. Ten dollars from Amazon.

Oh yeah, here's a Thai soup (pinched from Nigel Slater).

[paste]

handful each of mint, basil and coriander [cilantro I believe you call it]
couple of garlic gloves
grated rind of lime
handful of fresh chillis [I usually use about 4 or 5 decent sized green ones]

Whizz up in a blender till it's a thin, bright green paste.

[soup]

Fry about half the paste in oil
Add a can of coconut milk
Add a pint or so of stock [stock cubes work fine for this]

Cook for 10 minutes or so

Near the end, stir in some cooked meat, fish or shellfish, veggies, whatever. Frozen fish works too, just allow for time for it to cook.

Add the rest of the green paste, add a couple of table spoons of fish sauce, and the juice of the lime from earlier. Heat through for one or two minutes.

Eat.

This is awesomely good and you can put whatever meat, fish or seafood you have handy. Add chillis to the initial paste depending on your personal likes but it ought to be pretty damn firey. Quite fat juicy chillis work better than little tiny ones, though. So I go with more of the fat ones [which tend to be mild].

Since I know all of you are dying to know, I had poached eggs and toast last night for dinner. I also bought some grape tomatos at the store and am thinking about roasting them in the oven with some herbed feta cheese for dinner tonight.

Poached eggs and toast is a step up from cold cereal. Progress!

We had mustard greens, white bean, and sausage soup. God, I love my wife.

Oh yes, absolutely caramelize those onions for mujaddarah. Sorry, I didn't check the linked recipe closely enough.

Poached eggs are teh yummy.

If you can't get smoked haddock, Kedgeree is great, though different, with canned tuna.

Does anyone know how to rescue a poorly-seasoned cast iron pan?

On the unglazed tile tip - I've heard that often, but the two times I actually went to a hardware store and asked to see their selection of fine, unglazed tiles, the blank stares with which I was met were unrewarding.

I went to a Home Depot and just went to look in the tile section by myself.

99- tell me more.

110 Does anyone know how to rescue a poorly-seasoned cast iron pan?

Easy as pie. Scrub any rust/corrosion/anything that's not smooth off with some steel wool, and then re-season.

M/ M/ & I just did this with a cast iron Dutch oven and a steel wok, and both are now rescued and recovering at home with their families.

106: Ohboyohboy. Thanks for reminding me. That's going on the list of things to cook soon.

I just finished a bowl of Redfox's pumpkin soup (recipe modified somewhat, to include mirepoix, slightly less sugar and a pinch of sage) and heartily endorse it.

* Lentils Coriander

Brown 1 lb "sausage with character" in a large pot. Add two medium onions sliced into rings and sweat until translucent but not browned. Add about 2 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp ground ginger and 1 tsp salt and fry briefly. Add six cups of water, bring to a boil, and simmer for about an hour. When the lentils are cooked, add the juice of one lemon (and the zest if you're so inclined), mix thoroughly, and serve in bowls with sour cream and lemon slices.

* Spaghetti/Linguine Carbonara
[This is my version, there are infinitely many others]

Put a large pot of water to boil, then add 1 lb spaghetti or linguine; the meal will take about five more minutes than the pasta. Reserve about 1/4 cup of the cooking water.

If you have pancetta use it (guanciale is the official meat here) but frankly I just use bacon. Cut the meat into lardons -- matchsticks, more or less -- and fry gently in a large skillet until crispy. Turn off the heat and wait for the skillet to cool; this step is crucial though I don't know why. Separate three eggs, putting the whites a small bowl and the yolks in the serving bowl. Grate about two cups of parmesan into the whites bowl and grind a large whack of pepper (no idea how much, maybe about 1 tbs?) into the bowl as well, then mix thoroughly.

Just before the pasta is done (to al dente, natch), turn the heat on the skillet back up to medium-low. Drain the pasta, then add to the skillet with the cooking water. Pour the white/cheese/pepper mixture onto the pasta, then mix thoroughly until all the cheese has melted and the whites have formed little balls. Dump en masse into the serving bowl with the yolks, then remix thoroughly until the yolks have melted all over the pasta. Serve garnished with freshly minced parsley; this last is not optional.

* You can also give an easy puttanesca a whirl -- I recommend using anchovy paste instead of actual anchovies -- adding a small amount of tinned tuna to bulk up the meal. Other simple family favorites are seared tuna steaks with avocado salsa; swordfish steaks in a Sicilian tomato sauce (needs fresh tomatoes though); grilled steaks with a simple side-salad; flash-fried Moroccan chicken with cinnamon-scented couscous; and a Philippine chicken adobo. Recipes available upon request.

Woot.

Lentils Coriander

Where are the lentils?

Doh! How retarded. The missing step: add 1 lb of (regular green) lentils once the spices have finished toasting. Toast them for a minute or two, then add the water.