The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.

Cooks are incessant matchmakers, coupling ingredients with the zeal of professional marriage brokers. Driven by the notion that anything can be made to taste better in the presence of its ideal mate, we are always searching for the perfect flavor combination. We wheedle and taste-test and probe, but sometimes accident does all the work for us, leaving us with nothing in the cupboard but a bottle of hot sauce and some blue cheese dressing.

Legend has it that that’s exactly what happened to Theresa Bellisimo, owner of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, who, in 1964 was delivered an excess of chicken wings and decided to serve them in a glaze of hot sauce.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.

Cooked eggplant isn’t pretty. Cursed with the color of putty, its pulp is bland, at best. But cube it or slice it and goose it up with a bit of garlic or wrap it in a robe of tomato sauce, and this perennial wallflower blossoms.

Ironically, the culinary allure of eggplant comes from its dullness. Its innocuous color and mild flavor make it a perfect vehicle for any number of seasonings. Its meaty texture gives vegetarian dishes substance and its natural creamy consistency can thicken a sauce or a stew, without a speck of added cholesterol, less than half a gram of fat and barely an added calorie per serving.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.

Food snobs have been known to come to blows over whether a bouillabaisse deserves the label without rascasse, the bony fish of the Mediterranean that’s more skeleton than meat. There are heated debates slugging out the origins of pasta, and brawls determining whether an authentic cassoulet is the one from Castelnaudary, Carcassone or Toulouse.

But cooking is at heart a folk art, and we do it a disservice whenever we take its products too seriously. For the quality of a dish does not lie in the purity of its recipe or the authenticity of its ingredients, but in the way that it fits the taste, lifestyle and dining habits of those who choose to cook it and eat it.

I therefore advocate fiddling with classic recipes, or any recipes for that matter, that seem overly complex, expensive or time-consuming — which leads me to the subject of this week’s Sunday dinner.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

There is endless inspiration in the flavors of the Mediterranean — coriander and cumin in North Africa; lemon and mint in the Middle East; oregano, basil, fennel and lavender along the northern coast and the pungent stench of garlic and olives everywhere.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

Some foods are so simple in their construction, so ordinary in their form, so central to our collective culinary unconscious that we come to resent the fact that we have to cook them. Instead we leave the cooking to industrial giants, and in so doing we lose the knowledge that chicken isn’t naturally breaded in a bucket and salsa wasn’t born in a jar.

By bowing to corporate chefs to cook our favorite dishes, we relegate them to the world of commodities. Strained of all idiosyncrasies, they become streamlined to capture market share rather than the interest of the palate. Increasingly they lose their original value, until eventually it becomes impossible to convince anyone with active taste buds that these were once good foods.

Such has been the route of countless staples: tunafish, baked beans, chicken soup, macaroni and cheese — and the ubiquitous jar of salsa. Granted, commercially prepared salsa is convenient, and a boon for sparking a sauce or layering up a spur-of-the-moment taco, but fresh salsa is so easy to make and so much better than its processed counterpart that there is no excuse for not whipping up a batch when preparing a dish where salsa is featured.

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Photo: Merguez, Fennel And Preserved Lemon Stuffing (Cookthink)

The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

The spirit of feasting is in the stuffing. Though the roast may be grand and the good china gleaming, it is not in such opulence alone that a meal takes on the charisma of a celebration. But stuff the main course with apples and sage, cornbread and oysters or wild rice and cranberries, and watch the feast take flight.

Stuffing, by its nature, is mutable. Recipes may vary according to personal taste and cultural preference, but whether a stuffing is moist or dry, herbal or fruit-filled, chunky or smooth does little to alter the way it is made.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

London broil is a scam. Fabricated by meat marketers as a cosmopolitan moniker for flank steak, it has come to mean any boneless slab of meat, resembling flank steak, that’s flat and roughly rectangular in shape. Unfortunately it doesn’t follow that any meat that looks like flank steak, can be cooked like it.

The problem stems from the fact that flank steak is a completely unique cut of meat. Unlike other tough cuts, which need cooking in simmering liquid to soften their tough fibers, flank steak can be grilled just like a more tender loin steak. The reason is due to the structure of its muscle fiber.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

Unlike chicken or turkey, duck (at least the Pekin variety commonly available in the U.S,) have dark, fibrous flesh and a thick layer of fat running beneath their skin from neck to tail. Traditional roasting methods may melt the flab, but they can simultaneously turn the meat into jerky before it gets a chance to tenderize. Adding liquid keeps the roast moist and plush, but turns the skin into flab. The problem, then, is how to get a duck that’s crisp of skin, tender of flesh and void of fat, without ordering it in a restaurant.

There are many tricks for dealing with a duck’s contradictory nature, ranging from throwing it in a scalding oven and taking your chances, to painstakingly lifting the skin from its flesh with a scalpel-thin blade and a blast of compressed air. Unwilling to put up with such culinary antics, most home cooks end up avoiding the whole issue. But using a microwave to rid a duck of much of its fat makes roasting this challenging bird a breeze.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

Millennia before convenience items like bouillon cubes, dried garlic flakes and ramen, the Chinese were processing soy beans into a sauce so savory that it could turn boiled rice into dinner with no assistance. They mixed fermented soy beans with chilies and sugar and made hoisin sauce. They dried lily buds for mu shu and lotus leaves for stuffing. They fermented perishables, like oysters and fish into namesake sauces that they then used for dipping and to add color and texture to simple stir-fried dishes. They made scores of sweetly acrid vinegars, delicate enough to serve as a sauce all by themselves, and pungent enough to cut through the fat of fried foods with a fragrant splash.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink. (For more on this, read Andy’s introduction to the project.)

For this week’s Sunday dinner, poached salmon is served in classic style with a white wine sauce (albeit updated into a low-fat version by enriching the poaching liquid with yogurt rather than cream) and served with a warm portobello salad and braised asparagus perked up with orange juice and zest, garlic and walnut oil and chopped nuts.

The main technique involved in making this week’s dinner is poaching — a great technique that’s easy to master.

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