Brunch Dish: Spanish Tortilla

It's big, filling, cheap, and you can cook the whole damn thing at once: Spanish Tortilla is the best thing to make if you have some friends coming over for brunch.

The Spanish Tortilla recipe in How to Cook Everything is basically a big pile of potatoes, eggs and onions cooked together in one pan. You sauté some onions and thinly sliced potatoes until soft in a large skillet (it helps a lot if it's nonstick). The potatoes and onions cook together in a whole bunch of olive oil--one cup. It's a lot, but you drain it out before adding the eggs. After draining the oil, 6-8 eggs go in a bowl with the potato-onion mixture, and that goes back into the pan (add some of the oil that was drained before you add the potato-egg mixture to the pan. You just cook this over medium heat until the edges firm up. Then, using a spatula to loosen the tortilla from the pan, transfer it to a large plate, turn it upside down using another plate, and finally return it to the pan, thereby flipping the tortilla. Cook it for another five minutes or so, and it's done. This thing is damn tasty, and it can be served warm or room temperature. I want some right now.

Salty, Sweet, Tangy: Chicken Braised in Soy Sauce and Lemon, Roasted Vegetables

Here's a new favorite chicken recipe. It's really easy, and it uses barely any ingredients--probably lemons are the hardest thing in the ingredients list to procure, and those aren't very hard to procure at all. Bittman likens it to a "simplified teriyaki," but I think it's just the opposite: what you get here is something much more nuanced and complex than the gloopy sweet stuff that comes when you order teriyaki (of course, I haven't made the teriyaki recipe in How to Cook Everything, so who knows). Apologies to Julia, Alice and Talia who all came over to eat this one night last winter and never saw it posted on the here. It's just that... well... it was way, way, better this time.

Take chicken--either a whole one cut up into 8 parts, or any combination of parts thereof. Heat oil in skillet (you need to have a lid later on, so make sure that's not a problem). Season the chicken, then brown it in the oil, turning so they get nice even color. Remove from the pan.

Pour off most of the oil in the pan. Add garlic, let it soften, then add some lemon zest, cayenne, soy sauce, sugar, and water. Return the chicken to this mixture, letting it get nice and coated in the brothy sauce (or was it a saucy broth?). Turn the heat down so it bubbles gently, cover, and let cook for 20 minutes or so, until the chicken is done. Remove the chicken to a platter of some sort, stir lemon juice into broth, and serve with the chicken.

I also roasted some potatoes and onions to sop up some of the broth. This is a huge and easy weeknight meal, with leftovers that reheat damn well at work!

Low and Slow: Braised Anise-Scented Short Ribs

So, this recipe was one of the most full flavored, complex, rich and satisfying ones I have made so far. But overall, I think they're a little too fatty for my taste. I'd like to try the same recipe with a different cut of meat, maybe, because the combination of star anise, ginger, nam pla, carrots, potatoes, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar did really magical things.

This recipe is a variation on Short Ribs Braised with Mustard and Potatoes, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to include the potatoes or not; I decided to use them after all because it seemed like it'd make the dish more substantial, so why not? It didn't say to omit them outright, but the variation does sort of just ignore them. I was glad I included them, but I'm still not sure if I was supposed to.

Served it with the Roasted Red Pepper Vinaigrette from before.

Minimalist Wednesday: Fast Tomato Sauce and Grown Up Mashed Potatoes

Today Bittman took his spiel to the Today show to do a recipe very near and dear to my own heart: Fast Tomato Sauce, that endlessly variable recipe that was a key reason I started the Ben Cooks Everything project in the first place. He didn't call it Fast Tomato Sauce, but that's exactly what it was, complete with the toss-in-anything-you-like attitude. Matt and Meredith keep the obnoxious to a minimum, which is nice. And! Bittman says you can throw in the rind of parmesan cheese when making sauce and get a lot of flavor from that otherwise garbage-bound ingredient. Awesome.

Meanwhile, the Minimalist column in today's paper, which went online last week, is all about making mashed potatoes a little healthier and a little more interesting. Boil potatoes, add dandelion greens, olive oil (interesting substitution for the butter that I've got to try).

Both these recipes use a similar concept of using a lot of veggies (tomato sauce, dandelion greens), and a lot less starch than you usually would (pasta, potatoes). Mark Bittman: waning you off carbs. That being said, both of these (especially the mash) look tasty as hell. Are dandelion greens in season yet? I guess so.

As always, the NYTimes video is better, more informative, easier on the eyes, and with 100% less cheery morning talk show hosts. It is not, however, embeddable, so please enjoy below the Today show clip and click here or below to see the Times video.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Green Potatoes from Liguria [nytimes video]
The Minimalist: The Greening of Mashed Potatoes [nytimes]