What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [14]
A number of men like to modify canned soup. I am a fan of canned lentil soup simply modified, and I’ve also eaten my share of Amy’s organic tomato soup with additions of avocado, lime juice, sour cream, and other goodies. You can improve a lot of canned or boxed soups using this method. Or expand upon them, I should say, for you should start with a decent soup to begin with and then make it better.
Patrick of the polenta smothered with braised greens recommends doctoring up chicken noodle soup by mashing a clove of garlic, then “carelessly chopping five or six kalamata olives until the stones escape.” Next, he sautés these in a tablespoon or so of good olive oil, “until they begin to be noticed,” and finally dumps them in the chicken noodle soup and brings it to a simmer. “Let it simmer until it’s all bubbly, then turn off the heat for a few minutes rest. Crumble up soda crackers in a bowl and pour the hot soup over that. Yum!”
An even simpler way to enhance a soup, especially a bean soup, invariably involves such basic ingredients as a capful of extra-virgin olive oil, a few parsley sprigs (or another herb) chopped with some garlic, freshly ground pepper, and shavings of Parmesan cheese. Toast is also good served on the side or broken up and added to the soup.
Toast, in fact, has been known to comprise the main part of the dinner menu for more than one solitary eater. This particularly simple means to a meal came from a Spanish chef and guitar player we met in Madrid. His answer to our question? “Grill sliced bread with butter on both sides in a skillet. Serve it with marmalade.”
That’s it! Not much of a meal, perhaps, but satisfying, especially if you need to be nourished after feeding others. Being a chef, he’d probably already tasted a lot of food while at work, and he just might have wanted to sit down to something that wasn’t on the menu, wasn’t a sample or a leftover, and wasn’t a plate shared with others. Crisp, buttered pan toast and marmalade would do the trick. No artifice involved, no chance of failure, just a good, honest bite to eat.
Another man, not a chef, also turned to toast when batching it. He calls his recipe “Meat and Toast.” We were a little wary of it, but then, it wasn’t the only time we had heard of pairing bacon with peanut butter. Here’s what he says to do:
“Nuke four pieces of peppered bacon wrapped in a paper towel until crisp but still juicy, about 3 minutes in the average microwave. Meanwhile, toast a slice of whatever bread you favor until brown and good smelling, then slather it with crunchy peanut butter. Chew a bit of bacon, take a bite of toast, have a slurp of coffee. Ahhhhh.”
A panini machine has provided Patrick with an endless parade of good things to eat that are shelved between festive slices of grilled bread. Never inclined to make a regular sandwich, Patrick has taken to his panini machine with gusto. “Panini are warm and so much more satisfying to eat on a cold day than cold sandwiches,” he explains. “Plus you can make two kinds at once, and you can slice them and serve them as appetizers.” And you can forever improvise with the fillings. His panini with mustard greens and roasted peppers has become a house classic, along with one made of grilled cheese and roasted green chile. When we made the bartender’s grilled flank steak stuffed with mushrooms and more, we had a lot of the mushroom filling left over, as well as some Gruyère cheese. “All those fillings went into panini the next day and a day or two after that, and it was so good that now I make a version from scratch,” says Patrick.
A fried egg sandwich is another toast-based meal that has its avid supporters. I myself am a huge fan of fried egg sandwiches—those crisp slices of wholesome toast, a really