Not Fancy / Fancy

Last night I made a legume-y one-pot meal of the sort I used to make when I lived alone and was a vegetarian: lentils, sauteed carrots and onions, a can of stewed tomatoes, bay leaves, cinnamon, a lemon rind, and cumin seeds. I added some pasta stars at the end to soak up the extra liquid and because I was feeling silly. It had a vague, comforting flavor, unidentifiable as belonging to any particular cuisine but reminiscent of many.

I used to make things like this several times a week before I made any money and had someone else to cook for regularly. My standard 15-minute meal was adapted from a Joy of Cooking recipe: toast cumin seeds, then add oil and saute some sliced garlic and fresh ginger. Add curry powder and whatever vegetable or vegetables are on hand (really, anything -- I've used yellow squash, tomatoes, spinach, chard, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and more, one or two at a time, and with varying degrees of success) and saute that for however long it requires. Add a can of garbanzo beans and water and a bouillon cube or some vegetable stock. Let it cook down for 5 or 10 minutes. Take it off the heat and add some nonfat yogurt with a tablespoon of flour to stabilize it, plus any of the following: chopped fresh chiles, any kind of nuts, and green onions. In grad school this would often be my only meal all day.

I still make that dish sometimes. And it's good to be with someone who appreciates such simple, one-dish, pantry-based meals. Lawson sometimes makes his own single-person standard meal for us, which involves pasta with canned clams, canned tomatoes, and whatever assortment of canned beans, tuna, capers, olives, herbs, lemon, anchovies, or leftovers he happens to throw in. He happily took the leftover lentil hash to work for lunch today.

Tonight's meal was quite different. I bought a boneless leg of lamb...I've never cooked lamb, and haven't even eaten it very many times in my life, but I love buying something new and reading up about how to handle it. It was from the yuppie health food store, so it was grass-fed Australian organic lamb, and it looked quite lovely, but when I got it out of the package, it was the ugliest, most ragged cut of meat I'd ever seen. It looked like I had deboned it rather than someone with training in such things. So my plans for a neat rolled-up butterflied little leg roast had to be slightly recalibrated. Once I'd removed most of the fat (sheep fat is weird! Waxy and crumbly and firm!), I made a sort of tapenade -- oil-cured olives, capers, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, but with a bunch of dried figs as well, because I have a big bag I'm trying to use up -- and kind of clumped it in the frayed crevices of the meat, then tied the whole thing into sort of a tube with cotton string. It looked surprisingly presentable. While it roasted, I made saffron rice with onions and almonds...Mireille Johnston (Cuisine of the Sun) and Claudia Roden (A Book of Middle Eastern Cooking) have very similar recipes for it.

The meal was wonderful. I can still taste the brassy, strong lamb and the musky saffron and the sweet roasted figs. I was amazed -- I've never made anything that tasted like it. The lamb was too dry at one end, and had bits of gristle throughout, but the good parts were incredible -- tender and pink and very lamby. And the kitchen still smells so good.

In other news, I bought a can of venison cat food for Ronnie, partially as a joke since it cost $.20 more than the more plebeian cat food flavors, but fully expecting her to adore it, and she turned up her nose.