In case these photos don’t speak for themselves, here’s what’s afoot in this dish. Three kinds of beans (lentils, chickpeas, pinto); noodles; spinach; dill; turmeric and cumin and fresh chilies; cilantro and lime. And toppings galore! Caramelized onion, toasted walnut, and a dollop of sour cream.

This is not a soup for the supermarket faint of heart. You will be doing some shopping; you will be doing some prepping. But it will all pay off, I promise, in the most gloriously restorative, most unendingly surprising soup, redolent of spice and full of good things — things that both taste good and are good for you, which is what we all need this time of year.

How can a soup be surprising, you might ask? A crunch of walnut here, the silky richness of caramelized onion there. Have you ever seen toppings like these? And, while sour cream is a pretty typical topping on your average chili, I can’t say I’ve ever seen sour cream on a soup like this — one that is more stock-based, more liquidy. And the things is, it works. Beautifully.

This is, however, a dish that takes some doing, as it can be a little difficult to keep track of this many ingredients in your kitchen. So choose an afternoon when you have some time and mental space free, lay out all your ingredients, and just enjoy the process. It will respond in kind.

Persian New Year Noodle (and Bean) Soup

Makes 4-6 servings

Adapted from 101 Cookbooks, originally from Saraban: A Chef’s Journey Through Persia

Ingredients:

Soup:

- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 onion, thinly sliced
- 2 long red chilis OR green serrano, finely chopped
- 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 8 cups good-tasting vegetable stock/broth
- ½ cup yellow split peas or brown lentils
- 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas, rinsed if using canned
- 2 cups cooked pinto beans (original recipe calls for borlotti beans, but I couldn’t find them, and the Internets said that pintos were an okay substitute)
- fine grain sea salt
- 120 g thin spaghetti, fresh or dried
- 3 1/2 oz / 100g fresh spinach leaves, finely shredded
- 1/2 cup finely shredded cilantro leaves
- 2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

Toppings:

- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 1 large onion, thinly sliced
- sour cream or creme fraiche
- handful of toasted, chopped walnuts
- 1 lime, cut into wedges

1. Heat the oil in a large, thick-bottomed soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion and the chilis and cook until they soften, or until the chilis start to smoke so much that you just have to get the stock in there.

2. Add the spices and cook for just a few seconds (anywhere from 10 – 30) for them to toast, then stir in the stock. Bring to a boil and add the split peas/lentils to the pot. Cook until they are just tender, about 25 minutes. Stir in the cooked chickpeas and pinto beans. Once the beans have heated throughout, season with salt to taste.

3. Meanwhile, prepare the toppings. Heat the olive oil and butter in a large frying pan over medium heat along with a couple big pinches of salt. Cook the onion, stirring occasionally, until golden and caramelized, 8 – 10+ minutes. Set aside.

4. Just before you’re ready to eat, add the noodles to the simmering soup and cook until al dente. Stir in the spinach, and cilantro and dill. Taste and adjust the seasoning to your liking.

5. Serve right away, each bowl topped with a big spoonful of caramelized onions, some creme fraiche, a sprinkling of walnuts, and a squeeze of lime.

I love cookbooks. I collect cookbooks. Sometimes, I read cookbooks in bed before going to sleep. I have been gratified in recent months to realize that a number of people also treat cookbooks as literature, but then I had this realization: I was only using them as literature.

Somehow, despite having already accrued 34 cookbooks here in Minneapolis (in addition to the maybe more than 100 I have at home in Berkeley), I never cook out of cookbooks anymore. Blame the internets. Somehow, somewhere along the way, cooking out of a book became a rarity for me, and one that seemed like a greater undertaking than pulling a recipe from the world wide webs. This was, of course, totally irrational: recipes from cookbooks don’t, by definition, take any more effort than recipes from the internet, plus most of the recipes I get from the internets came from books originally.

So, I decided to reacquaint myself with my cookbook shelves, beginning with this wonderful, Wonderful stew from my beloved, Beloved Jamie Oliver.

I love Jamie Oliver, and whether it is cool to love him or not, I don’t know, but I credit him with the beginnings of my interest in cooking. Well, him and my mom (who truly deserves the credit), but Jamie is the one who taught me that you don’t have to measure most things, that you don’t have to pull parsley or cilantro leaves off the stem, and that you can juice a lemon directly into a dish, using your fingers to catch the seeds.

His books are beautiful and lush, brimming with beautiful dishes that frequently avoid exact recipes, providing guidelines instead. And, most recently, he is doing really, really good work with school lunches and the obesity epidemic in America. And he has a show about all that coming out on abc! He is my hero.

He is my hero because of all the extra-good stuff he does, but he wouldn’t be able to do all that extra-good stuff if he hadn’t laid a foundation of really really delicious food. A Jamie Oliver recipe has never done me wrong, and this stew was no exception. Hearty, smoky, and easy-peasy, to last for days and only get better as leftovers (smokier, more complex). This is like a really upgraded chili, all the more classed up with chopped hardboiled egg as a garnish, for a little contrast. Go make it, tonight, from my cookbook to your computer, and perfect for this inbetween time of year that’s not quite winter and not quite spring.

Chorizo and Chickpea Stew

Adapted from Jamie’s Dinners

Serves 8

Ingredients

-       6 oz. chorizo sausage, chopped

-       1 onion, peeled and chopped

-       1 clove of garlic (or more!), peeled and finely chopped

-       2 sticks of celery, chopped

-       2 bunches (maybe 1.5 lb) spinach, washed and chopped

-       1 – 28 oz. can tomatoes, with juice (either pre-diced, or you can chop them; also, JO calls for fresh tomatoes here, but it’s winter in Minnesota, and so that’s just not happening)

-       1 – 28 oz. can chickpeas, drained

-       5 cups chicken stock

-       2 oz. prosciutto (or Spanish ham)

-       hard boiled eggs

-       olive oil

-       salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot. Add the chorizo. Cook for a few minutes until fat is rendered, then add onion, garlic, and celery. Reduce heat and cover, cooking for about 15 minutes (without coloring the onions, though no harm will really befall you if they get a little brown).
2. Add spinach, tomatoes, chickpeas, and chicken stock. (Add more chicken stock or water if you think you need more liquid.) Bring to a boil, then lower heat and let simmer for about 40 minutes.
3. You don’t have to (but I did): Remove about a third of the soup and puree it in the food processor. This will make things more stew-y, rather than soup-y. Return puree to pot and give everything a stir. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
4. Remove from heat. Stir in prosciutto and 2-3 tablespoons olive oil.
5. Serve with grated (or finely-chopped) hardboiled egg on top.

This dish has been on my radar for a while, or, more precisely, since the Times published it on March 12, as a companion recipe to one of their first articles about Michelle Obama’s focus on getting America to eat better. They’ve since published article after article about her efforts to improve food in this country, particularly in the area of school lunch (and breakfast). They haven’t published any more recipes, though, I don’t think, so this is the closest you’ll get to a seat at the Obama’s dinner table for now.

One of the reasons this dish got so stuck in my mind, I think, is that it seemed too good to be true. Creamless creamed spinach?! Endorsed by Michelle Obama? Well, sadly it is too good to be true. Perhaps my addding some kale threw things off, but the whole thing basically tasted like wilted spinach to me, albeit with a little bit of a pureed consistency. Don’t get me wrong — it was good. But creamless creamed spinach this is not.

In the future, honestly, I might just forgo the pureeing step altogether and just wilt everything. But you know what? We don’t have a recipe for wilted spinach on FJ, I don’t think, and I love wilted spinach, so I thought I’d put it up anyway. The secret here is the impressive amount of shallots and garlic, which give the whole thing a pretty good flavor. If you are like me, though, you will feel an unstoppable desire to add some red pepper flakes at the end, too.

This, by the way, is an excellent dish for a dinner for one (with leftovers). I can never get enough wilted spinach, and when  you make it for company, it wilts down to so little that everyone ends up with only a few bites. When you make it for just yourself, though, you can achieve Popeye levels of spinach intake.

No Cream Creamed Spinach (with Kale)

Adapted from the New York Times
Serves 6, they say, but I’d say it makes a hearty three portions

1 pound spinach, washed and cleaned, stems pulled off

1 pound kale, washed, stems cut out and chopped (like with this chard).

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 shallots, minced

2 garlic cloves, minced

Salt and freshly ground pepper

red pepper flakes, to taste

1. Blanch half a pound of spinach, kale stems, and some kale leaves in salted, boiling water. Drain and squeeze out the excess water. Puree in a blender. Set aside.

2. In a large skillet, heat oil. Cook the shallots and garlic until translucent. Add the rest of the spinach and kale leaves. Toss and sauté until wilted. Fold in the spinach/kale puree. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.