meatless monday

Just as, as a quarter-lifer, you start to invent your own traditions (Friendsgiving, Sunday Night Pasta, Latkes for Two), I think as I’ve grown up, I’ve reinvented my own comfort foods, too.

Lentils have fought and won for a spot on my comfort food list as my twenties have advanced. On cold nights, or cold rainy nights like the ones we’ve been having, a bowl of lentil soup steaming beside grilled bread or cheesy pita croutons satisfies both Alex and me like little else. Even the creamy pastas that had long been my go-to’s.

Because I’ve been cooking a lot of lentils recently, in my exploration of Middle Eastern cuisine for Sargento, I wanted to take the chance to share a lentil-cooking technique that might help make this healthful, cheap bean, a staple of the region, one of your comfort foods too.

Well, I bring you another grilled cheese today! It’s been more than eight months, a delay which would make very little sense to you if, like my frying pan, you could see a tally of my grilled cheese consumption.

Within the stringent bounds of the grilled cheese sandwich (must have: bread, cheese), there’s room for creativity. Some tweaks, like adding veggies, make the sandwich a bit more healthful. Others use up leftovers, like this timely Turkey Reuben. This one finds inspiration in the pages of Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem, a blockbuster in the Middle Eastern cookbook sector of the shelf. (No, really, it’s gone viral.) I was browsing my copy and found a salad of roasted sweet potatoes, halved figs, balsamic vinegar reduced to a syrup, and feta. The salad sounded good. Which meant it would be better, I thought, as a grilled cheese.

Though I usually roast my vegetables to a nice browned crisp, for this recipe, I left the potatoes a bit softer, which works better in a sandwich. The other elements of this Middle Eastern fusion-y sandwich? Balsamic vinegar, reduced with a bit of sugar into a syrup that’s equal parts sweet and tangy, and fig jam, to replicate the original flavors of the Ottolenghi recipe. Then there’s Swiss cheese, the sandwich’s delicious glue, and good bread that gets buttery and golden in the frying pan.

I always love to combine sweet and savory, but this time of year the combo is everywhere! At our Thanksgiving, we roast our sweet potatoes with brown sugar and butter, and I can just imagine slicing up a leftover potato and making this sandwich for a day-after sweet-meets-savory meal at which I’ll clearly be giving thanks to the Jerusalem cookbook, for yielding so much inspiration.

More sweet potato recipes:

Baked Brie & Sweet Potato Bites

Sweet Potato & Caramelized Onion Frittata

Here’s a fun part of my morning routine: realize, as I’m heading towards go-to-work time, that I haven’t packed a lunch; consider, as I dream of getting out the door on time, that maybe the take-out lunch options today won’t cost $12 and taste mediocre; and go back to the kitchen to improvise a brown bag lunch from the fridge. Leftover grains, extra roasted vegetables, a handful of nuts, some leftover chicken, and good grated cheese go into a travel Tupperware, and, hopefully, become more than the sum of their parts. Some lunches are good, even deliberate. Some are humble. I have a real affection for humble food, so usually my makeshift approach works okay.

Sometimes, it works out way better than okay.

One day a couple weeks ago, that routine produced this unbelievably delicious little grain dish. I had roasted cauliflower, I had cooked bulgur, and I had leftover salad dressing from a recent dinner. Naturally, I mixed this all together. At lunch, I went in thinking I’d be eating something humble but found I’d happened upon a flavor and textural synergy I didn’t expect. Perhaps it’s in the proportions: the grain and the vegetable sit at about equal levels in the final dish. Perhaps the success is some otherworldly manifestation of the Middle Eastern techniques I’ve absorbed during these months of experimenting with the region’s ingredients and methods. Or maybe it’s just a little narcissism: this exceedingly delicious salad is delicious because I made it, this morning, from almost nothing, and each bite helped cure the lunch blues.

This sponsored post is part of an ongoing collaboration with Sargento, called Flavor Journey. Throughout the year, with the support of Sargento, I’m exploring Middle Eastern cuisine–at home, in Brooklyn, at cooking classes, and wherever the flavors may take me. You can see the whole series here. Sponsored posts let me do some of my best work on this blog, and I only ever work with brands whose values and products mesh with the content I love to produce for you. Here’s my affiliate disclosure.

In seventh grade, during bar mitzvah season at my middle school, my friend Leora and I would stake out a spot near the kitchen and grab each hors d’oeuvres first. We knew early that the passed appetizers are often the best part of the meal. But we had a specific reason for filling up before the meal. For dinner, we’d as likely as not be served the kids’ menu, and we were seriously not interested in chicken fingers or mac ‘n cheese or other totally condescending offerings.

Funny that more than a decade later, I adore kid food. I’ll opt for a Shake Shack burger over a sit-down lunch nine times out of ten. And that’s why I loved Catherine McCord’s first Weelicious book and why today’s lunch recipe, which comes from Catherine’s new hardcover, Weelicious Lunches: Think Outside the Lunch Box with More Than 160 Happier Meals, has a place on a a blog for “big kids,” aka twenty-somethings.

Catherine understands the classics. I mean this is a recipe artist who can take a peanut butter and jelly and make it the best sandwich ever, tweak a pizza so it’s simultaneously fun and nourishing, and turn a normally monster-sized burrito into the ideal size for a child’s lunch-or the lunch of someone like me who struggles with the midday meal and is always trying to perfect it. The way I think about it, comforting kid food is the spoonful of honey that makes eating healthful and sustaining foods easier and more fun. Packing a crave-worthy lunch takes the drudgery out of the brown bag.

In Weelicious Lunches, the burrito is a really simple wrap, a bundle of refried beans and gooey cheese easily assembled at home and microwaved at work until melty. I added a quick Brussels sprout hash made from slivered sprout leaves seasoned lightly with some chipotle chili powder and cooked until just tender.

I’m always curious about what other people eat. When I meet the all-too-common New Yorker who says “I don’t cook,” I always ask what he does for meals, out of a genuine (if naive) curiosity (because I know all the reasons that cooking can be a pain when life is busy). When I meet people who do cook, I plaster them with questions too. Do they cook every night? On Sundays for the week? How do they deal with grocery shopping and planning? Maybe this is market research, but mostly I’m just annoyingly inquisitive.

(If you’re a New Yorker who doesn’t cook but wants to, you probably need a coach.)

My questions have often led me to new insights about what you guys, my audience, want. I’ve also received recommendations for recipes I never would have thought of. Like when a friend pulled her copy of Plenty from the bookshelf one afternoon when we were over and turned it to Ottolenghi’s recipe for roasted vegetables with vinaigrette, and I had my own moment of cooking confusion. “What do you serve them with?” I asked. Maybe some quinoa, she replied, but maybe not. Wondering if roasted vegetables alone could comprise dinner, I went home and made the recipe for Alex and me. We did pile our veggies on top of quinoa, but it turned out we didn’t have to. These vegetables pack both flavor and substance, and they’re really tasty.

The real epiphany in this recipe is dressing roasted vegetables after they come out of the oven. You may question dressing something that already has been tossed with olive oil, but the way the vinaigrette soaks into the hot fennel, onions, sweet potatoes, and carrots will make you forget your questions. That addition of flavor (and calories) is also what bumps this up from some side dish to the status of a vegetarian main.

I rode across the Manhattan Bridge four times on Saturday. I’ve always confined my biking to Brooklyn, its less-trafficked bike lanes and provincial Prospect Park loop; in Manhattan, I’d usually rather be a straphanger or a pedestrian-but four years into riding here, I’m fully obsessed with my bike to the point where I can confront my fears of big city trucks and taxis and bike traffic. Also, my two Saturday missions were on the Lower East Side, a short sprint from where the Manhattan Bridge spits us two-wheelers out on Canal.

I’m now assured that riding across the Manhattan Bridge counts as a quintessential New York City experience as much as the walk across the the far more touristy (and prettier) Brooklyn Bridge. If you’ve ever sat on the Q train at sunset, you’ll know about the view. Biking brings an extra feeling of floatiness to “one of the greatest cheap visual feasts in America,” as well as the thigh burn that results from the slow climb, which makes you feel as though you’ve earned the view, and then Manhattan.

On Sunday, after all that exertion, I was hungry, even after brunch. I’ve heard this happens, that when you exercise a bunch you crave healthful meals, rather than any old junky calories, and really nourishing food did come out of my kitchen this weekend.

My Middle Eastern flavor journey fit in perfectly with these cravings. The food of Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Iran contains richness from olive oil and nuts and rib-sticking bulk in the form of healthy lentils. I’ve already mentioned red lentils in my post about Smoky Red Lentil Burgers, and last night, we had Claudia Roden‘s Creamy Red Lentil Soup, no matter that it’s August. (Fall is coming.) The creaminess derives from the silky sautéed onions and the red lentils, which are cooked about thirty minutes past the point when you could technically eat them, until they’ve burst and disintegrated and begun to act as though they’ve been treated with an immersion blender. The non-necessity of the blender makes this incredibly easy to make.

The pita croutons are my cheesy addition. They deliver the cheesy crunch that even the best-ever soups tend to need.

The pinnacle of summer arrives when you can make dinner from the farmers’ market. I don’t mean dinner’s side dish or the base of your peach crisp. I mean dinner from start to finish.

You need two criteria met: a well-equipped farmstand, the kind that sells local bread and some cheese; and the arrival of heirloom tomato season. I say this because no summer meal is worth its salt unless it includes at least one variety of local heirloom tomato.

Even though we’ve passed summer’s midway point, we’re still at the beginning of peak tomato time. I haven’t seen a ton of Brandywines or Cherokee Purples yet, despite rummaging through the boxes at my favorite farmstand as early as I can get out of bed on weekend mornings.

Instead, when I put together this recipe to highlight heirloom tomatoes as part of Whole Foods’ campaign to shout about tomatoes from the rooftops, I opted for Sun Golds, little yellow-slash-orange globes of sweetness. They’re sweet and a little tangy, and they pair beautifully with cheese-in sandwiches or on pizza-but I wanted a more farmstand-y meal than just pizza.

So, I grabbed a few stout gray zucchini from the stand, halved them, and scooped them out to turn them into little boats, also known as summertime pizza crusts. That’s when, looking at the rest of my market yield, fresh onions and garlic and mozzarella, I decided to throw together a margarita pizza-inspired filling headlined by my Sun Golds. Inside these “boats,” you’ll find those sweet baked tomatoes, flavorful breadcrumbs, sweet summer onion, basil, and more.

Whole Foods has tremendous rescources for enjoying your tomatoes, as well as tons of fabulous tomato recipes. My favorite is this Heirloom Tomato BLT!

I wrote this sponsored post in partnership with Whole Foods to make sure you guys didn’t miss the glory and deliciousness of heirloom tomatoes. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that help inspire BGSK’s content!