Olive Oil-Fried Lentils with Cherry Tomatoes and a Chile-Fried Egg by Alison Roman

Alison Roman is the slightly older, cool girlfriend I wish I had in college. 

Allow me to elaborate with a story about lentils. It was a cold, January night, and I was invited to eat dinner at a friend’s college apartment. She was a Senior, I was a Sophomore. I felt very cool as I left my dorm room to skip out on cafeteria food. Shortly after arriving, I learned that we’d be eating lentils. I nodded excitedly, while inwardly racking my brain… I had no idea what lentils were. She would now begin to prepare our meal, she announced with an air of nonchalant authority. Her first step was to chop an onion. How grown-up it all sounded. I wanted to watch her up close. She took a dull bladed knife and began sawing her way through the onion’s middle. Quickly, I began to feel an odd stinging sensation in my eyes. The more I watched her, the more intense the pain became as it spread to my nose and throat. It was a foreign feeling, and it scared me out of my wits. What was happening to me? I began shedding tears. She looked at me and said “The onion’s making you cry. You should go in the other room.” The instruction sounded strange but I didn’t question her. I spent a few minutes in her bedroom as the burning sensation slowly left, all the while asking myself what just happened. That was the first time I ever cried over an onion. 

But back to lentils. By the time I emerged from the bedroom, my friend had moved on to sautéing the onion and boiling a pot of lentils on the stove. We chatted a bit as I watched her intensely, trying to appear chill. She drained the lentils over the sink and poured them into the pan full of onions. After just a few minutes of pushing them around, with a few added dashes of salt, our dinner was ready. I didn’t know what to expect. I especially didn’t expect I’d be eating a bowl of practically flavorless, mushy green pebbles. For a brief moment, I wished to be eating rubbery pork tenderloin and green beans in the cafeteria. But then I figured that this was a good growth opportunity for me. I had to learn what real adults cooked eventually. I’d be there soon myself... For the next few years, this was my impression of lentils - soft, flavorless pellets, destined for a melancholy meal. 

That friend didn’t know what the heck she was doing with lentils. Maybe I should chalk it up to a lack of experience, and she’s learned better by now. Alison Roman, on the other hand. Now there’s a friend I wish I had in college. She knows quite well what to do with lentils…  

To hell with only a white onion and salt alone. Give me shallots, garlic, and burst cherry tomatoes! Give me a pool of olive oil and black pepper. Give me black lentils instead of green. Give me a hot skillet and time to get the grains all crispy. Give me red onion slices marinated in lime juice and fish sauce. Give me tender parsley. Give me a fried egg and chile oil! THIS, friends, is how to eat lentils. 

There’s so much more I could say about lentils. So many more anecdotes, stories, existential questions. Alison has a lot of lentil recipes, so I’ll reserve these for later. Spread the love, so to speak. 

Served with Ali Slagle’s Ginger-Lime Chicken.

30 recipes cooked, 195 to go.

Kimchi-Braised Pork with Sesame and Egg Yolk by Alison Roman

I’ll cut right to the chase. I couldn’t find the courage to eat a raw egg yolk. If egg yolk is the reason you’re reading about this dish, then I understand we must go our separate ways. If you’re here for the pork ribs, then read on my friend! 

This recipe contains two ingredients that I had never cooked with before: kimchi and gochujang. Kimchi is made of fermented and spiced vegetables, popular in Korean cuisine. Gochujang is a spicy paste, similar in texture to tomato paste, but much hotter, also a Korean ingredient. It took a little time to find both of them, but I eventually did at Whole Foods. (An Asian-food market would have worked too, but the nearest one is a little too far of a drive.) 

Like most other braised meat recipes, the pork ribs are first spiced and seared to get some good color on the meat and render fat at the bottom of the pot. That fat is then used to cook chopped garlic, fresh ginger, scallions and the gochujang paste. Then the meat is added back to the pot, along with kimchi and water, the braising liquid. Everything is simmered for roughly 3 hours on the stove until the meat is nearly falling off the rib bones. 

For all of the intensity of kimchi and gochujang, I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of flavor in this dish. It felt like the spices were too mild to really make an impression. Which surprised me! I tasted a bit of both ingredients before adding them to the pot, just to see what they were like, and my first reaction was to worry that they were too spicy. I was genuinely concerned that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the heat. But instead the opposite was true. My best guess is that there wasn’t enough gochujang, and possibly, some of the water could be subbed for broth. I’m still not certain that would do the trick, though. 

The real winner, in my opinion, was Alison’s topping suggestion for an apple-radish mixture. Rice vinegar, apples, radishes, and red pepper flakes -- four ingredients I would not have thought to put together -- created a tangy, crunchy companion for the tender pork. I found myself just eating the topping alone, it was that good. I made Melissa Clark’s coconut rice and toasted sesame seeds to complete the meal.  

Similar to the Pork and Red Chile Stew, Jordan was a huge fan. He ate all of the leftovers for four straight lunches without a single complaint. I would prefer to put this one in the “Good To Try, But Won’t Make Again” pile, but the jury's still out on whether or not Jordan will be okay with that decision. 

29 recipes cooked, 196 to go.

Long-Roasted Eggplant with Garlic, Labne, and Tiny Chile Croutons by Alison Roman

If you follow Alison Roman, you know that her latest recipe, Eggplant Parmesan, is making some serious waves on the Internet. Ironically, I had already planned to make another one of her eggplant recipes on the day that her Parm became the latest “It” dish. I could chalk this up to coincidence, but I want to believe that I’m slowly being elevated to her culinary zeitgeist. 

Either way, eggplants are clearly the vegetable of this cultural moment, and I’m not one bit mad about it. 

My only prior experience cooking with eggplant is a poor man’s ratatouille. This long-roasted eggplant is most definitely a step up. More importantly, this recipe let eggplant be the star of the show. 

There are three elements that make this a dynamic dish: 

1. Eggplants cut in half and roasted cut-side down in a pool of olive oil. Alison instructs you to cut a few ½-inch slits into the meat of the eggplant before turning it over, presumably to help steam escape and ensure a more crystallized surface. Well, it worked. The eggplant was perfectly roasted, with a subtly crunchy exterior and endlessly creamy interior. If anything, this recipe made me believe that eggplant doesn’t need to just be a soggy, anonymous contributor to pad thai. (You know what I’m talking about, right? How many times have you had a veggie Pad Thai and someone asked - “what do we think this is?” referring to an unknown limpy brownish- yellow blob in the noodles, and you say, “maybe it’s eggplant?”) (Just me? Cool.) … 

2. Chile & garlic croutons, oh baby these were fantastic. Similar to Alison’s breadcrumb approach, torn pieces of fresh bread are toasted in olive oil in a skillet, but this time, she adds finely chopped garlic and a thinly sliced red chile to the mix. This added the right amount of heat to balance out the milky meat of the eggplants. Plus, I will always love the texture of a fresh crouton, no matter what it’s paired with. 

3. Labne with preserved lemon. I’ve still yet to purchase labne, and, I likely never will. Cow’s dairy does a number on my body, and I’m very satisfied with the Greek yogurt/sour cream/labne alternative of Goat’s milk yogurt. I mixed the yogurt with salt, pepper, lemon juice and quick-preserved lemon, and then spooned it over the bottom of the serving bowls. This tangy sauce is the base for the eggplant. 

Never before would I have said that I’d serve eggplant at a dinner party. This recipe changed my mind. I would absolutely serve this as a main course with a side of grains or roasted broccolini. 

Cheers to more eggplants in my future! A future, until now, I would never have imagined. 

28 recipes cooked, 197 to go.

A Very Good Lasagna by Alison Roman

I’ve already met my favorite lasagna, and her name is A Nice Lasagna (by Julia Turshen in Small Victories). We became acquainted one evening in a cabin in the North Woods of Wisconsin as snow fell quietly outside. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? We’ve learned each other’s love languages and speak them whenever opportunity strikes. She gives me gifts and acts of service. I shower her with words of affirmation and offer her the loving touch of a fork. We both share quality time, particularly with three of my dearest friends involved. For a short sweet season, these friends and I lived in Chicago. But in July 2017, we scattered to the four corners of the country. Now we come together once a year in October to stay up late and chat over red wine, pie, and of course, A Nice Lasagna. 

When I turned to nothing fancy’s pasta section and saw A Very Good Lasagna, I was skeptical. Could A Very Good Lasagna even approach the perfection of A Nice Lasagna? Only one way to find out. 

Allow me to evaluate A Very Good Lasagna through the only lens available to me -- a comparison to A Nice Lasagna. I’ll evaluate them on several key criterion. 

1. Sauce - It’s the best part of a lasagna and both sauces are truly excellent. Truly! And I’m quite particular about my tomato sauce! 

   1. Very Good - This sauce recipe calls for both crushed and whole peeled tomatoes. The whole tomatoes are squashed by hand, which creates a nice combination of small-medium sized tomatoes and some casual tomato juice. In true Alison fashion, anchovies add some salty umami. Finely chopped garlic and onion complete this well balanced sauce. One more benefit of this recipe is there’s no need to wait for the sauce to cool before assembling the lasagna because the noodles are parboiled (which I’ll get to, not a fan). 

   2. Nice - Only whole peeled tomatoes allowed here, crushed by hand in a large bowl. (If you’ve never had the pleasure of crushing tomatoes by hand, then I suggest trying it soon! Just be sure to wear something you don’t mind getting squirted with tomato juice.) Then there’s garlic, salt, and the X factor ingredient: creme fraiche. I think adding a tangy, creamy cheese to the sauce itself is actually another level of genius. Sadly, this sauce does need to fully cool before use so that it doesn’t make the noodles soggy. Which adds another hour of preparation time. 

2. Cheese 

   1. Very Good - Fresh ricotta, fresh mozzarella, and shredded parmesan make a tasty, but wet and clumpy combination. It was hard to evenly distribute the wet clumps of cheese across the pan, not to mention messy. 

   2. Nice - The cheeses used here are much easier to handle and distribute - just shredded mozzarella and parmesan. The third cheese is the creme fraiche in the sauce. This recipe also calls for lots of torn basil leaves, which I missed in Very Good. 

3. Noodles - I went Gluten Free in August, and this was my first GF lasagna. I was very pleased with the GF noodles I found--I barely noticed they weren’t regular noodles. These long noodles are made with brown rice, and didn’t leave me feeling bloated afterward. Here they are for reference. 

   1. Very Good - Okay, here was my main sticking point with this recipe. Parboiling the lasagna noodles. The noodles did cook nicely because of the parboil, but it’s a pain to keep them from sticking and adds yet another step to the assembly. 

   2. Nice - No boil, no fuss, still cooks great. (Julia tells you how to make your own noodles, but I don’t have the time or patience for that.)

4. Layers

   1. Very Good - He has 4 layers, which is a beautiful thing! 

   2. Nice - Julia just tells you to keep building layers till you run out of room. But since the sauce is a bit chunkier, I’m usually only able to fit 3 layers in my pan. 

5. Leftovers - I don’t appreciate how noodles continue to absorb sauce as they keep in the fridge. Since I love sauce so much, I like to have extra to spoon over my leftovers. 

   1. Very Good - Uses every last drop of sauce in the lasagna. I appreciate the math here, but I wouldn’t be mad about more sauce. 

   2. Nice - There’s usually a cup of sauce left over to use however you see fit. 

The Final Verdict: A Nice Lasagna still takes the cake, but I’ll give it to Alison. Her’s was a very good lasagna. 

24 recipes cooked, 201 to go.

Buttermilk-Brined Chicken with Fresh Za'atar by Alison Roman

A buttermilk brined chicken is the first kind of whole chicken I ever cooked. Samin Nosrat’s famous buttermilk-brined chicken to be exact. Alison’s chicken asks you to be slightly more extra and throw some smashed garlic and shallots into the brine, but other than that, the recipes are nearly the same in concept. 

Brining a chicken requires no skill, only forethought. The effort is always worth it. Salty brines create a tenderized, juicier meat that stands squarely in opposition to every dry chicken breast I ate in the past. It’s because of buttermilk brined chicken that I’ve committed to always brining birds that I plan to roast, even if the recipe doesn’t suggest it. 

This chicken was pleasant, a good chicken. The flavor is subtle and nothing extraordinary, which means it’s versatile. Throw it on a salad, a sandwich, on noodles! Or eat it with some fresh Za’atar. I discovered early on in this project the magic of Za’atar, when I first made Alison’s butter-tossed radishes. Fresh Za’atar gives a delightful, salty-sour attitude to this bird, helping it really sing. I served this chicken with Caramelized Winter Squash, which I’ll write about soon. 

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A personal anecdote about buttermilk. For a long time, the very idea of buttermilk made me squeamish. My mother used to tell stories of being forced to eat unappetizing foods as a child. Her parents grew up in the Netherlands during World War II, a time when food was very scarce. So I understand why, out of principle, they made their children clean their plates. But I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of my mother, freckled with a bright blonde bob, sobbing at the table as she tried to swallow another brussel sprout. For this reason, my siblings and I were never fed the foods that so traumatized her. These included brussel sprouts, cabbage, lentils, and warm buttermilk. Yes, my mom was told to drink warm buttermilk. Apparently to my grandparents, this was a delicacy, and they couldn’t imagine anyone not craving it. But it made my mom’s stomach turn. For this reason, I shuttered at the very idea of buttermilk until I was 26--the age when I first made buttermilk-brined chicken. 

23 recipes cooked, 202 to go.