The Smoking Kitchen

Alice Waters’s Luscious Grilled Cheese and Minestrone

In my previous life as a lazy cook, I would have grilled cheese and soup somewhere in the neighborhood of once every couple weeks. Generally, this was my fallback meal if I was low on supplies or needed to eat a quick dinner. The grilled cheese would be Brownberry whole wheat bread with muenster and cheddar cheese, and the soup would be canned. It’s not a bad meal, but certainly not one I looked forward to.

This winter has been the worst Chicago has seen in almost thirty years, so if you know how bad Chicago weather normally is, maybe you can imagine the soul-devouring frozen hellscape I’ve been dealing with for the past five months.

If you can’t picture it, here’s a photo I took out my front door earlier today:

The good news about this excrutiating cold - aside from the solace that since this winter was so unusually bad, it probably won’t be worse next year – is it that gave me an excuse to appropriately make a more thoughtful version of my fallback meal in mid-April.

Enter Alice Waters and her cookbook I love so much, The Art of Simple Food. I was fairly nervous about trying her minestrone recipe because 1.) I’ve never made soup before, and 2.) the recipe only calls for three cups of liquid, which seemed wrong. But I put my trust in Ms. Waters, took her hand, and she made my first soup experience more enjoyable than I’d even hoped it’d be. Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs. Robinso- er, yikes. Sorry, I was somewhere else.

Anyhow, the recipe involves the following intricate steps:

Put the vegetables in the pot according to how long they take to cook.

Usually, when I cook, I get bogged down in the details, especially if I’m making more than one dish. Before I even open the fridge, I pour over the recipes and figure out how I’m going to coordinate the various cooking times. This involves some advanced mathematics and an obsession with detail that tends to throw me into a blind panic.

However, I’m able to tell (more or less) when a vegetable is cooked without having to consult a stopwatch. As a result, I was able to pay less attention to the directions and more attention to the food. I had the new experience of feeling more like I was cooking rather than, say, putting together Ikea furniture.

The other promising change concerned my vegetable chopping. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I tend to cut things up however I damn well feel like cutting them up at the time, which usually means the pieces of diced vegetables end up as unique as snowflakes. This anarchic approach towards food prep is how I believe James Dean or maybe a young Marlon Brando would’ve operated in the kitchen and probably lends to me a devil-may-care aura that women who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s find irresistibly sexy (Alice Waters, I’m looking at you).

However, apparently there’s a functional reason to have your vegetables cut to the same size - so they all cook uniformly – so I allowed my mojo to take a hit and reluctantly researched online how to properly dice stuff. Let’s take a moment and admire my soffritto:

Yeah, I just said ”soffritto.” At least I didn’t say “mirepoix.” I’m not ready to be a person who uses that word. And not just because I don’t know how to pronounce it.

Dicing an onion is my new favorite thing to do. Instead of describing the process, follow this link to a clear, concise video on Chow.com. There are a lot of videos on this site, including a series of videos on a range of topics called “Chow Tips,” most of which are pretty useful and none of which are longer than thirty seconds. I recommend checking them out. Fair warning, though: If you watch more than three, you’ll be saying “Chowww tips” for the rest of the day. Chowww tips. Chowww tips. Watch and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Anyhow, here’s the next step, when I added garlic, thyme, salt, and a bay leaf:

Then I added some water and brought it to a boil:

Then green beans and leeks:

Okay, here’s where I panicked a bit because I had to seed and peel a tomato. I got the seeds out, but I still have no idea how to take the peel off. I also put in zucchini, which I fortunately didn’t have to peel.

This next step confused me a little, too. The recipe called for a pound of spinach. Do you know how much spinach is in a pound? A crapload, that’s how much. I used a half pound instead. I also put in cannellini beans.

The soup was basically done at this point. Notice all the liquid. Miraculous, huh? Trust Alice Waters.

A step or two back, I started getting ready to cook the grilled cheeses. Taster Number One cut up a loaf of bread, sliced the gruyere, and buttered the bread slices. I would punch a child to get to eat what’s in the following picture right now:

A few grocery trips back, Whole Foods was sampling Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter. In a surprising show of restraint, I didn’t buy any that day, but I wanted some for these grilled cheese sandwiches. My God, this is good butter. Eat this butter and you’ll feel like a stupid idiot for thinking the butter you currently have in your fridge is good. The cows that make this butter are apparently raised on grass, get daily udder massages, and sleep on memory foam mattresses.

Anyhow, Waters also recommends putting sage leaves on the bread before frying. Here it all is in the pan. I made a third sandwich, you know, just in case two wasn’t enough for Taster Number One and me.

After the sandwiches were done frying, I rubbed the bread with garlic, which is a nice technique to add to my repertoire. I now rub the rim of my drinking glasses with garlic, too.

Here’s the final meal:

Ah, the perfect meal for the middle of April! Tell me again why I moved to Chicago?