Potatoes, pasta, and the art of taking it easy
In the last two months, we put an offer in a house, backed out of the offer for a multitude of reasons, celebrated the holidays several times over with different sides of the family, got sick, got sick again, received our booster shots, and have now settled back into house hunting (Zillow is my new best and worst friend, depending on the day).
I am not very good at taking it easy — once I start feeling better after being sick, I will generally go from zero back to 100 pretty quickly. There is no gradual for me on the scale of Taking it Easy.
In light of the new variant, and that feeling of deja vu that we are entering Pandemic 2.0, though, sometimes you just have to make a big ole pot of bolognese and let it simmer for a few hours to appreciate how nice it really is to take it easy — how fortunate it is to be healthy, and that my family is healthy, and that bolognese exists in this crazy world. These are things that I do not take lightly, and as I was prepping my bolognese ingredients on one of the days that I was still sick, I had a brief clarifying moment of appreciation for all of these things and more. We made Half Baked Harvest’s Pesto Pasta Bolognese and it was incredible — would highly recommend and don’t skip on the pesto even if it seems like extra work because it totally makes a difference!
While we were sick, we also made a lot of one of my favorite meals: something I like to call Hodge Podge, which typically features three key ingredients — a starch, a vegetable, and a side. For us, the potato is a permanent fixture in Hodge Podge, as much for its storage life in the fridge as for its versatility.
A typical Hodge Podge meal means the potato in whatever variation we are craving (lately it’s been oven roasted wedges, which we dip in gochujang or ketchup), whatever other vegetable we have on hand tossed in olive oil and spices and also roasted (cauliflower and eggplant on rotation lately), and either slices of hearty bakery bread with butter or creamy polenta. Whatever you might call it, I’m certain that you’ve had a version of Hodge Podge yourself (fridge foraging is another common term for this type of cooking).
In other cooking news, I was gifted the new Korean Vegan cookbook for Christmas and have been loving flipping through the pages, marking recipes as I go to reference later on. In addition to being a gorgeous cookbook that could easily be added to your coffee table book collection, it is very accessible and home-cook-friendly. One would think that most home cookbooks are home-cook-friendly but you will find that some cookbooks feature recipes that span three pages and have a host of hard-to-find ingredients. I have a few of these that I only crack open when I am feeling particularly motivated and up for a challenge.
However, this is not the case with the Korean Vegan. I made my first recipe last night — an “Angry Penne Pasta” — that is a twist on a traditional arrabbiata sauce featuring Korean chile pepper, gochujang, and serrano pepper for twice the kick and triple the flavor. It required very little prep work and resulted in a cacophony of spicy flavors that had me going back for seconds, which should ultimately be the main goal from any good recipe. I inserted a photo below but am now pondering why recipes never look like the photos in the cookbook:
In any case, 2022 is now upon us and to circle back to Taking it Easy, this is top of my list for this year. Take it easy, cook more, and write about cooking more. Hopefully your 2022 will feature lots of delicious meals, and yes, it is OK to prepare only Hodge Podge meals if that’s your thing :).