Split Pea Salad by Alison Roman

For a long time, actually my whole life, I thought split peas were simply green peas split down the middle. Sometimes things are allowed to be that simple, right? Turns out, I was sort of right. Split peas are green peas that have been peeled, dried, and then split down the middle. Split peas are grown and harvested differently than regular green peas, in a manner conducive to their drying and splitting. Personally, seems like a lot of effort to go into for some subpar grains (they don’t begin to compare to lentils or beans). And, other than split pea soup, does anyone use these split little guys in their regular cooking? I have doubts!

Alas, Alison has found a way to incorporate these oft forgone grains in a delicious salad that’s perfect for packing in school lunches and bringing to barbeques. Honestly, I’m here for it. 

I started by preparing the split peas. They needed roughly 30 minutes in boiling water to soften. I expected their bite to have a tiny mealy center, much like a lentil, but I don’t think that can be achieved without over-cooking them and letting them fall apart into a great green mush. If you want them to maintain their shape, expect their bite to resemble a slightly undercooked lentil. I combined the drained split peas with regular peas (I used frozen and thawed ones). Instead of letting my peas thaw over time on the counter, I stuck them in cold water, and they thawed within a matter of minutes. 

Next, I cooked some bacon low and slow. Ten minutes over medium heat was enough time for the bacon to render lots of fat and still get crispy, just the way Jordan likes it. The bacon fat became my cooking fat for the potatoes, which were baby dutch potatoes, quartered, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Fifteen or so minutes over medium heat was all it took for the potatoes to turn a golden, crispy brown. The trick is to avoid stirring them too much.

Before tossing the potatoes with the peas and bacon, I poured mustard and red wine vinegar in with the potatoes and coated them in the acidic liquids. The whole skillet -- potatoes, cooking fat and all, get tossed with the peas and bacon and create a wonderfully flavorful salad. Topped with fresh chives, this salad is better than any salad you’ll find at a deli counter. It can be served cold or hot, either is delicious. 

I’ve been eating this for lunch all week, and I’ve yet to grow tired of it. 

138 recipes cooked, 87 to go.

The Best Baked Beans by Alison Roman

According to my taste buds and preferences, these are the best baked beans. But they’re not your typical ketchup-y or brown sugar-y baked beans, and Southerners/Bostonians may have some serious qualms. Note: On my only trip to Boston in 2018, Bostonians were quite snooty to me and I didn’t appreciate their air of superiority. So I don’t particularly care what they have to say about these beans. (I’m speaking, of course, about a certain class of Bostonians, knowing that not all Bostonians fit into this class.) Southerners, you may speak freely about the matter. 

I like all kinds of baked beans, because I love beans, but I like these baked beans the best because they can go with any kind of meal during any season. They’re not barbeque specific, or only perfect for the Superbowl. They can be eaten just as well on a Thursday in August as a Monday in January. They're baked beans for any time of life. For example, I originally planned to save this recipe for the late Fall. But upon returning from vacation in late August, the weather outside being in the high 80’s, I found myself craving warm, baked beans. No sweater-weather needed. These beans were exactly what I had hoped for and scratched all my appetite itches. 

Here’s how I made ‘em. The first step requires cooking the bacon on a skillet over medium heat. You’re looking for fat to render, which takes a while – give or take eight minutes. Thinly sliced onions join the party soon thereafter and become caramelized in the fat over fifteen minutes or so. Garlic and thyme or oregano (I used oregano) jump in to release their fragrance, followed by 3 cans of cannellini beans, a cup of broth (or bean cooking liquid if you’re going the fancy dry bean route) and parmesan. Once seasoned with salt and pepper, the beans are baked with fresh bread crumbs on top until nice and bubbly. The whole process takes little prep, but a good 30 minutes at the stove. 

I ate these beans on their own, with Cholula, with bbq sauce, and with kale and lemon juice. There were enough beans to enjoy for multiple meals, and they made perfectly flexible and flavorful leftovers. The dish is totally customizable, too. Variations I might try in the future include: 

• Use pancetta instead of bacon

• Add red pepper flakes

• Use red onion instead of white onion

• Try a sharper cheese like pecorino

• Top with crumbled Cheeze-its instead of breadcrumbs

129 recipes cooked, 96 to go.

Vinegared Romaine with Sour Cream, Bacon, and Herbs by Alison Roman

I love salads. Give me a big bowl of greens with all the fixings, plenty of texture (there must be crunch!), tossed in a tangy, zippy dressing with extra on the side, and I will love you forever. Maybe not forever, but for that day at least. 

To me, a great salad has a lot going on, and the various parts must all work together and complement each other. Decadence is encouraged, and so is simplicity! As long as the salad has excellent fixings, textural variance, and each part contributes well to the whole, I will love it. 

With this criteria in mind, I’ll break down this excellent salad. 

All the fixings: The elements, rather, are as follows: ½ head of romaine per person, ½ shallot finely chopped and marinated in white wine vinegar with salt and pepper, sour cream with salt and pepper, crispy bacon, and herbs. First, the finely chopped shallots are placed in a small bowl with the white wine vinegar to marinate and slightly soften. Then the sour cream is distributed to each plate and swirled over the bottom. Each half of romaine is then spread over the sour cream. Next, cook the bacon. I chose a pre-cooked bacon from TJ’s that just requires some microwaving. I like this kind because it’s fast, it doesn’t smell up my kitchen, it’s very crispy, and the package lasts a little while in the fridge. The bacon, left in full strip form, is tucked in between the leaves, so as to peak out at you with a hint of decadence and a wink. The shallot-vinegar mixture is spooned over the salad and topped with lots of chopped herbs (think dill, parsley, chives, etc.). 

Textural variety: The milky sour cream provides a smooth counterpoint to the crunchy bacon, crisp romaine stem, and soft romaine leaves. Every bite has an equal opportunity to be both crunchy and soft. 

Complementary parts: This dish has several distinct flavor elements that balance one another perfectly: creaminess of the sour cream, salty/fatty pork flavors of the bacon, tangy/acidic bite of the shallots and vinegar, and the earthy depth of the herbs. 

I didn’t like my first Alison Roman salad, but this one turned things around. This one is also what Alison calls a “knife-and-fork salad”. Yes, exactly, you need to eat it with a knife and fork. Which personally I find to be a fun activity. I like cutting up my own lettuce and bacon and distributing each ingredient to form the perfect bite. Some might call this “playing with my food.” I call it “craft time.”

I’ve now eaten this salad many times. I love that I don’t need to chop the romaine or toss it before serving. The assembly is so simple, especially if you follow my bacon recommendation, and it’s full of pleasing flavors. I’ve made this for lunch, for guests, for a casual date night dinner, and for a midday snack. And I’ve gotten flexible with the ingredients. A couple of sliced cherry tomatoes. Shaved carrot. A different dressing. As long as the same elements of something salty/fatty, something creamy, and something tangy/acidic are at play, it’s bound to be a great salad. 

47 recipes cooked, 178 to go.

Bacon-Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Caraway’d Cabbage and Apples by Alison Roman

Imagine you’re in a grocery store, and you’re tasked with selecting the most average, inconsequential ingredient for every type of food. I know it’s a strange hypothetical but stick with me here. 

Snacks: saltines, Cheese: swiss, Cookies: Fig Newtons, Meat: ground turkey OR pork tenderloin, Veggies: definitely cabbage

Apples and bacon are excellent, but still, I was quite skeptical. Oh me of little faith. Leave it to Alison to turn dull foods like pork tenderloin and cabbage into something so fantastic. I ate seconds and thirds. I’ve never enjoyed cabbage so much. Unless finely shredded, raw cabbage doesn’t do anything for me. Sauteed cabbage is limpy and sad. But a roasted cabbage head gets tender in the middle and crispy on the outside, now that’s the kind of cabbage I’ll eat weekly! Okay, monthly. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. 

There’s not much more to this dish outside of the ingredients in the title, except for two that really pull it all together: caraway seeds and red wine vinegar. 

I must confess, I don’t remember ever cooking with caraway seeds, and I couldn’t have told you, even remotely, what they taste like. So I did a bit of a deep dive. According to Wikipedia, caraway is “also known as meridian fennel and Persian cumin” and “is similar in appearance to other members of the carrot family.” Another site says it has a bit of an anise flavor. Based on those descriptions, I was even more confused. But when I finally got ahold of the seeds, I saw that they are practically identical to fennel seeds, just a darker brown and a bit finer. And as odd as it sounded on the internet, they did add a slightly cumin-y, licorice-y, anise-y flavor that complemented the salty pork, tangy apples, and bland cabbage. 

The final finish with vinegar, something Alison calls for a lot, made all of the dish’s elements feel lighter and brighter. It’s also what gave the cabbage the final flavor push it needed. (Small confession. In my old advertising job, I worked exclusively on a client that made vinegar. Their ads always talked about how vinegar could “brighten any dish,” and I thought it sounded like hokey advertising-speak, a little ridiculous. How could you actually “brighten” a dish, besides shining a flashlight on your food? But now, as I attempt to write about vinegar myself, I honestly can’t come up with a better word for how it transforms food. If salt makes flavors taste more like themselves, then vinegar brightens them. Fine, I was wrong!) 

This meal was the simplest main dish to assemble so far. Which served me well, since I needed to put it together quickly and transport it to a dear friend’s apartment to roast. Kailey and I spent the evening talking about how much this meal surprised and delighted us, among other fun topics like popular 90’s Christian rock bands. Jars of Clay, anyone?

15 recipes cooked, 210 to go.

Special Beans in Tomato Broth and Slab Bacon by Alison Roman

Special Beans are a long game kind of dish. The game takes little active time, but you have to keep your eyes on the special prize if you want to win. 

What makes these beans so special? Alison says it’s the use of dried beans. Yes, dried beans. I’d purchased dried beans only once before during the early pandemic grocery frenzy because all the canned beans were gone. That bag of black beans is still sitting in my grain basket, untouched. 

There’s an entire essay and multiple recipes devoted to dried beans in Dining In, so I couldn’t avoid them forever. But I was hesitant. Dried beans demand a lot of forethought. These special beans needed 2 full days of soaking before they were ready for cooking. Dried beans also require commitment. There’s no sure way of telling if they’ll fully soften, so you have to soak and cook them, hoping for the best. 

Where I live, dried beans other than black or pinto are hard to find. When I went on my sumac hunt, I came across a Middle Eastern market that carries 2lb. bags of dried large lima beans. So two days before I wanted to eat my special beans, I began soaking 1lb. of lima beans in cold water. 

This being my first time around the dried bean block, I was mistaken about what would happen during this soaking period. I was under the impression that the beans would become totally softened to the point they resembled canned beans. So soft that you could eat them straight out of the bowl without cooking them. Instead, soaking just loosened the proteins in the beans, helping them expand to their true size. The beans were still rather hard and needed to be cooked for several hours before becoming edible. 

This recipe is meant to make flavorful beans, and while they can be eaten on their own, they’re best used in something else (Alison suggests her Best Baked Beans or soup). By the time I finished cooking these beans, it was 7:15pm (again, long game), so I wasn’t about to whip up another recipe. I also didn’t have time to use them in something else the next day; I travelled to Cincinnati the next morning to see my BFF / designer of my website logo (thanks, Rachel!). 

On cooking day, I began by heating the bacon in my Dutch oven with a good bit of olive oil. The key here is not to brown the bacon, but to heat it slowly so the fat has time to seep out. It’s the fat you’re really going for so it can infuse the beans with porky flavor. By this point, there should be a lot of oily fat at the bottom of the pot, enough to soak a bunch of tomatoes, shallots, and heads of garlic. (Here is another example of an Alison recipe that requires minimal chopping, if choppin ain’t your thang.) Add in some anchovies, a parmesan rind, fresh herbs, and water, and you’ve got a flavorful cooking liquid to soften your beans. 

The beans spent a little over 3 hours on the stove before they were softened to my liking. I served them in their cooking liquid with homemade sourdough and herbed goat cheese. The cooking liquid doesn’t have a super strong flavor, so we added some more salt, and even a bit of lemon juice to liven it up. 

I’ll make these beans again soon and plan to turn them into Alison’s Best Baked Beans. But next time, I’ll plan for an even longer long game. I bet it will be worth it. 

9 recipes cooked, 216 recipes to go.