Ingredients:
Serves 4
1 1/2 cups French green lentils (lentilles du puy)
1 imported bay leaf
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
2 sprigs thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups water
good quality Italian or French bread
1/2 cup Pecorino, shaved
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (or to taste)
10-12 fresh basil leaves, torn into pieces

Instructions:
1. Rinse and drain the lentils in a colander. Lightly crush the garlic with the side of a knife to remove the peel. Wait to tear the basil and shave the pecorino until you’re ready to serve the bruschetta.

2. Combine the lentils, bay leaf, 1 clove garlic, thyme sprigs, salt & pepper in a saucepan, and cover with the water. Bring to a boil, skimming and discarding any foam rising to the surface. Cover, reduce the heat to medium low and simmer 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the lentils are just tender but not falling apart.

2. Preheat the broiler to medium high and put the rack 6-8 inches below it. Cut 4 long, thick slices of bread. Slide them under the broiler and toast on both sides until they’re brown and crisp on the outside and a little soft on the inside. Rub the top of each slice with the remaining garlic clove.

3. Spoon the lentils over the bread, sprinkle with red pepper flakes, and drizzle with olive oil. Shave a few shards of pecorino over each slice with a vegetable peeler, and scatter over the torn basil.

I’ve been down in North Carolina with family over the holidays, doing lots of cooking. Since the weather was unusually warm the few days leading up to Christmas we decided to use the grill. We cooked brined bone-in chicken breasts with a mustard-herb crust one night, and 2-inch thick bone-in brined pork loin chops with a yogurt-herb crust another. We had the grilled meats alongside simple braised vegetables and big salads.

On Christmas it was pouring rain. We kept it simple but scaled it up to elegant, a classic old-school American dinner, a team effort. Here’s what we had:

Spanakopita
Strips of phyllo dough brushed with butter, dolloped with a mixture of drained and chopped baby spinach and crumbled feta cheese, rolled up like flags into triangles and baked at 350F until puffed and light brown.

Cheese gougeres
Buttery egg dough blended with grated gruyere cheese, piped onto a baking sheet, topped with a little more cheese, baked at 425F for 10 minutes until puffed and set, then at 350F another 20 minutes until golden and hollow in the middle. The gougeres and the spanakopita were good with Champagne.

Lump crab salad
Fresh crab tossed with olive oil, capers, dill, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and a touch of mayonnaise, served over buttery bibb lettuce.

Pureed potatoes, parsnips and celeriac
Peeled and diced potatoes, parsnips and celery root barely covered with water, seasoned with salt and pepper and simmered over medium heat until tender. Blended with heavy cream and unsalted butter until smooth.

Roasted beef tenderloin
Tied beef tenderloin seasoned with coarsely ground pepper and kosher salt, roasted at 425F until 125F in the thickest part, about 45 minutes. It rested, tented with foil, for 30 minutes then we cut it into 1/2-inch thick slices.

Fresh horseradish sauce
The accidental star of the meal. We peeled and finely grated a pile of fresh horseradish root. Tasting as we went, we blended it with what we had on hand: greek yogurt, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Pungent, hot, tart, tangy, and delicious alongside the beef.

Asparagus braised with tarragon and olive oil
Thin asparagus spears simmered over medium heat in enough water to almost cover, with a generous splash of olive oil, lots of fresh tarragon, salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

Artichoke bottoms stuffed with spinach
Blanched artichoke bottoms topped with sauteed spinach and fresh grated Parmesan, baked at 350F until tender.

Full recipes to follow.

On a grocery run for drinks and snacks yesterday, I saw a couple of bottles of something labled “Cornbread Nation Cuvée.”

I flipped the bottle around and saw that Mat Garretson — “one of California’s top winemakers” (Robert Parker, Jr.), “the world’s biggest booster of Viognier” (Wine Spectator), and “the high priest of Rhônes” (Swirl Wine News) — had created the label in honor of the Southern Foodways Alliance, one of our favorite organizations, one run by John T. Edge, one of our favorite food writers. Garretson donates $.50 from every bottle sold to the SFA.

I brought home two bottles — one red, one white — of CNC. I’m not sure where all the wine’s sold, but you can buy online direct from Garretson.

Also consider more direct support of the SFA. Near the top of our post-launch to-do list: make Cookthink a corporate member of SFA. Maybe you’ll join, too.

We love food and the joy of eating, and we don’t like to harp on nutrition. What, after all, is healthy? It’s hard to think of a meal as healthy in isolation. Health is more a question of habit over time.

I’ll admit to following the shifting body of reports that too often focus on the health benefits of foods in isolation. Trans-fat is better than butter…no, it’s worse. Fat is bad — oh, but wait — then there’s good fat, too.

Meanwhile above the trees, the recurring theme seems to have taken shape. It might go something like this:

Eat a wide variety of all kinds of foods, as close to the form they take in nature as possible: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seafood, meats, poultry, eggs, cheese, nuts, herbs, spices, tea. Eat fewer saturated fats and more good fats like those in olive oil, fish and nuts.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. What about proportions and amounts?

I find it helpful to visualize a plate, and fill it with more vegetables and whole grains than meat and seafood, with beans often standing in for meats. Because whole grains and vegetables have so much fiber, if you get the proportions right you’ll feel full and the “amount” issue will begin to take care of itself (as will many other issues).

What about variety? That’s the most fun part of the food equation, and the easiest to overlook (or maybe it’s just the most difficult to figure out). In his book On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee reminds us of a visible indicator of variety and health among plants:

There’s a useful guideline for estimating the relative healthfulness of vegetables and fruits: the deeper its color, the more healthful the food is likely to be. The more light a leaf gets, the more pigments and antioxidants it needs to handle the energy input, and so the darker the coloration of the leaf…

Other deeply colored fruits and vegetables also contain more beneficial carotenoids and phenolic compounds than their pale counterparts. Their skins are especially rich sources. Among the fruits highest in antioxidant content are cherries, red grapes, blueberries, and strawberries; among vegetables, garlic, red and yellow onions, asparagus, green beans, and beets.

The more color in our diet, the more of the beneficial things we’re getting, whether we know what they are or not. We borrow protection from plants. Colorful compounds protect them from daily life, and when we eat them they protect us too.

Health and enjoyment are deeply intertwined. We crave beautiful foods for a reason, we often intuitively know what to eat, and we enjoy foods that are good for us.

Sometimes stuff just gets in the way.

Leeks are underappreciated and underused. Their flavor is mellow, complex and more subtle than other members of the onion family, and they go tender and silky when cooked.

They’re known for their role in potato and cream-based soups (like vichyssoise) and in winter stews. They’re delicious raw and sliced thin in salads, stir-fried with beef (or anything, for that matter), simmered in water and served hot or cold with a vinaigrette, braised whole in wine or stock, or brought in anywhere you’d use an onion.

Leeks are dirty. They grow up building layers that trap the sandy soil mounded around them to keep them straight and white. So whether you’re keeping them whole or slicing them thin, clean them really well. A sandy dinner is a deal-breaker. Here’s one approach:

Cut off the tough dark green leaves an inch or two above the white part of the stalk. Save those leaves for stocks or broths.

Cut off the root right where it joins the white base, keeping enough fibrous material to hold the leek together.

Cut away and toss the coarse outer layer of green, exposing the tender green you can use.

Cut the leek in half lengthwise, either all the way through the end, or just below the end if you want to cook it whole (tied together with kitchen twine).

Swish the leek around under water, using your fingers to pull apart the layers. Look through each layer to be sure you find all the sand. This works under running water too.

Now just slice the leek crossways as thick or thin as you like. This is best for dishes like soups and stews where the leek will disappear into the dish. The longer the cooking time, the thicker the slice.

Or slice them lengthwise as thick or thin as you like. I like this cut for stir-fries.

If this is too much, you can take the short cut. Just prep them, sand and all, rinse them well in a colander submerged in a bowl of cold water, then pat them dry.

Now that you know how to prep them, try some of the delicious leek recipes at Cookthink.com.

Osso buco means “bone with a hole” in Italian. It’s a basic stew traditionally made with veal shanks — cross sections of the leg including the bone and marrow, which give the stew body and unctuosness.

I ran into some fresh, local grass-fed beef shanks at the Dupont Circle farmer’s market yesterday, and decided to adapt the traditional osso buco recipe to beef. Here’s the general formula for all the osso buco recipes I’ve come across:

shanks (veal, beef) browned deeply in fat (olive or canola oil, butter) + aromatics (onion family, garlic, celery, carrots, ginger, spices) sauteed until tender + liquid (water, chicken or beef stock, wine, tomato puree) + herbs (thyme, rosemary) + the finish (fresh herbs, fresh wine, citrus zest, chile heat)

I had picked up some onions and carrots at the farmers market but had no celery. I keep a box of chicken stock and a few cans of tomatoes in the pantry, and had leftover thyme, rosemary, white wine and a few clementines in the refrigerator. This was going to be a traditional Italian osso buco with beef instead of veal and without celery, finished with rosemary and citrus zest for brightness.

Here’s the recipe.

I had just spent the afternoon trying to get a guy to tell me how he felt about his sixth generation apricot orchard going out of business. (Not good.) I hadn’t eaten since early morning and I was tired after a week plus in cars and motels. My socks were still wet from looking at plum trees earlier in the day, and I was, for the moment, lost somewhere around Tracy.

Then, having taken a random right turn because it felt like East, I drove around a corner and saw the truck. There was a line when I got there, most of the customers from the warehouse across the street. I told the owner I was from Alabama and was relieved to find some roadside ribs. He asked me about Ruben Studdard. We talked about fruit breeding, and then he read to me from the Bible just inside the order window.

In Birmingham under normal circumstances, the ribs would have been so-so. But yesterday afternoon, sitting in the front seat of my rental car, looking ahead to a midnight red-eye and a little bummed out at having dredged up nothing but bad memories in a guy who was trying to forget about apricots and just paint his kitchen in time for a Christmas party, the meat was just the right amount of smoky and sweet, and tender enough — I tested a bite using only my gums — to eat with no teeth.

Since I made so much vegetable soup on Sunday, I did my best to stretch it through the week. Soups, like stews, are better the next day. So Monday’s lunch was a straight up bowl, the soup’s best moment in its original form.

Tuesday night I tried my hand at ribollata, a Tuscan dish made by pureeing leftover minestrone with a little bread to make a thick, velvety porridge, served hot or even cold with a drizzle of olive oil. It was good — a nice change.

By Wednesday I was ready to transform the soup into a new dish altogether. I might have simmered the soup until thick and tossed it with fusilli or any other pasta from the pantry. Fresh chopped herbs, chile flakes and grated Pecorino would have completed the disguise.

Instead I took a cue from James Peterson, whose book Splendid Soups is an encylopedic survey of soup recipes from around the world. His suggestion for leftover Tuscan-style Minestrone:

Spread the cold congealed soup in a porcelain or glass casserole; sprinkle it with grated Parmesan cheese and some olive oil. Bake the casserole at 350F for 20 to 30 minutes.

I wanted to get it done quickly, so I relied on one of my favorite tools — a heavy 8-inch non-stick skillet that’s easy to handle and easy to clean. I heated 1 T. of olive oil in the skillet over medium-high heat, and added two slices of crusty bread.

When the bread was toasted on the bottom, I ladled over the cold soup to cover. I let the soup heat through and reduce until it was thick and the vegetables soft, and bound with the rich tomato-based sauce.

For the topping, I made a handful of fresh bread-crumbs by pulsing a piece of bread in the food processor. I tossed them in a bowl with grated fontina cheese and a little olive oil then sprinkled the mixture over the soup. I slid the pan under the broiler until the top was melted, bubbly and crisp in spots.

It would have been good alongside steaks or roasted chicken, but I settled for a simple salad and a glass of Beaujolais.

Our pal (and my neighbor) Alejandro Levins is giving away 800 bottles of small batch, artisanal olive oil. The offer lasts until December 15 or until he and his partner Michelle run out of bottles. Go here to take advantage of this offer and consider picking up another gift bottle (or sample box) while you’re there: http://AlejandroAndMartin.com/foodies/cookthink.html

Alejandro and Michelle import oil by the barrel from small family farms and other artisans around the world. They take great pains to baby these oils on their journey from their origins to your kitchen. They fanatically protect the oils from heat and light — two major threats to the quality of extra virgin olive oils — and they never sell to stores for fear that their product will not be treated with sufficient care. Instead, they sell only online through their website.

They also work to educate their customers about flavor profiles, acidity, harvest years and food pairing. I’ve seen Alejandro in action at tastings and local food events. The man knows and loves his olive oil.

On Sunday I decided to make a filling, nutrient-rich vegetable soup that I could come back to throughout the week. As much as I love to go minimal — choosing one or 2 ingredients and highlighting them with complementary tastes and flavors, this time I wanted to go maximal to see how many hearty flavors I could get into the pot.

Since there wouldn’t be any meat in the soup I compensated with umami, the fifth taste that satisfies our craving for protein. Ingredients with umami — beans, cabbage, tomatoes, mushrooms and parmesan to name a few — give vegetarian dishes a fulfilling meaty and round taste.

Of course you can experiment with different onions, cabbages, mushrooms, beans, tomatoes and herbs. Here’s the recipe:

What you need
1 medium yellow onion
3 medium carots (about 1/2 lb.)
3 large stalks celery
10 or so crimini mushrooms (4-6 oz.)
1 head cauliflower (about 1 pound)
1 red bell pepper
1 small head green cabbage (about 1 pound)
1 head dinosaur kale (1/2-1 lb)
1 oz. dried porcini mushrooms
6 cloves garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
1 28 oz. can whole peeled tomatoes
1 24.5 oz. can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
3-5 sprigs each of parsley, thyme, rosemary
6 basil leaves
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 parmesan cheese rind or chunk
4 1/2 quarts water
salt & pepper
1 16 oz. can kidney beans
1 16 oz. can white beans

key tools:
1 heavy stock pot (at least 9 qt.)

What you do
1. Peel and chop the ONION. Peel and cut the CARROTS into 1/4-inch rounds. Rinse the CELERY, cut off and discard both ends, and cut the stalks into 1/4-inch pieces. Cut off and discard the CRIMINI MUSHROOM stems, and quarter the caps. Cut out and discard the CAULIFLOWER’S core. Cut the florets and tender stems into 1/2-inch pieces. Rinse and dry the RED BELL PEPPER, cut off and discard the stem and white ribs, and cut the flesh into 1/2-inch pieces. Peel away and discard the CABBAGE’S outer leaves. Cut the head into quarters through the core, and cut out and discard the cores. Cut the leaves into 1/4-inch strips. Rinse and shake the DINOSAUR KALE dry. Cut the leaves into 1/2-inch strips. Rinse the PORCINI MUSHROOMS and cut them into bite-size pieces. Peel and mince the GARLIC. Pile the basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary and bay leaf together and tie them into a bundle with kitchen twine. Rinse and drain the beans.

2. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy stock pot (at least 9 quart). When it shimmers, add the carrots, celery and onions and garlic and season with a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally until the vegetables are soft, 8-10 minutes. Lower the heat if the vegetables begin to brown.

3. Increase the heat to medium-high and add the remaining ingredients (except the beans). Bring the soup to a boil, stirring occasionally. When it boils, immediately lower the heat to medium. Simmer, stirring occasionally, 25 minutes. Add the beans and simmer 10-15 minutes more.

4. Add more salt and pepper to taste. If you plan to add grated cheese (parmesan, pecorino, cheddar, whatever), remember that cheese is salty. At this stage you can puree some of the soup (in the pot with an immersion blender, or by transferring a few ladles full to a blender) to give it body.

5. I like to finish the soup after it’s in the bowl so I have the option of serving it differently each time. You can add fresh chopped herbs, a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon or lime, diced chiles, more red pepper flakes, croutons, all to taste.

I’ll post on how to use the leftover soup later.