I’ve been going a little hog-wild on the summer vegetables.

Well, not quite as much as I’d like — I still can’t choke down $5.99 a pound tomatoes, beautiful as they may be. Just a hint of mealy and I’ll feel guilty even looking at my wallet.

But fava beans, totally different story. I’ve enjoyed fava beans for ages partly as one of those delicacies you rarely toy with at home but love to order in little locavore-oriented restaurants along with your farm-raised whatever and a much-deserved glass of wine.

Anyway, I got over the precious factor and fell madly, deeply in love the day we arrived with Erminio for our annual visit to Davide’s fattoria in Panzano, in the Chianti. Yeah, I know, and it gets better. It was a beautiful day, and quiet, with only a few wine tourists arriving for lunch, a light mist over the vineyard (I am not kidding), and I was hungry, nearly salivating in anticipation of Davide’s mom’s grigliata or pappardelle con cinghiale. Or both. God.

Then here comes Mom herself, strolling out of the garden with a cheery ciao! and a basket full of fave, just picked, young, pert, so, so fresh.

Needless to say, we ate them all.

The second time I fell madly in love occurred only a few days later. (You can fall madly in love twice. It was in Italy, for god’s sake!) Dinner at Lino’s, always brilliant. Lino is a joker, but he does not fuck around with the food. I spoke bad Italian with Noriko, who’s been hiding out in Lino’s restaurant for years, learning Italian and very little English, cooking and serving, and refusing to return to her family in Japan.

We finished dinner and were relaxing with the rest of our wine as the last real customers trickled out when Lino sat down with a huge bowl of shelled but unpeeled fresh fava beans, chunks of crystally pecorino (a rare pleasure, as Erminio prefers the fresh and far milder cheeses), and a bottle of unmarked, weeks-old olive oil.

There is no better finish to a meal. I nearly cried.

So the fava beans are sort of near to my heart, and with their short, short season, I can’t help myself when I pass the bean and artichoke people at the market. Yes, they’re still $4.99 a pound, and yep, a pound of favas in their pods equals about four tablespoons of shelled and peeled beans (and yes, preparing them does take an ungodly 20 minutes or so), but I love them.

And I’m worth it.

So tonight, in honor of me, a play (courtesy of Biba Caggiano) on bucatini alla gricia, with bacon in lieu of guanciale, spaghetti in favor of the very difficult to eat gracefully bucatini.

How to make it? Put your water on and shell the beans (a couple of pounds). When you’re done shelling, the water will have boiled, so you can blanch the beans quickly, which will make peeling easier. Pop them out of their skins while the water returns to a boil. Now chop up an onion and a few strips of bacon, then cook ‘em up in that order in some olive oil. At the same time, start cooking your spaghetti.

When your onion is sweet and soft, and your bacon is near-crisp, add the peeled beans, the zest of a lemon (my addition), and lots of black pepper and stir it around for a minute. Add the cooked pasta with a little of its cooking water, toss with a large pile of freshly grated Parmigiano or Pecorino Romano, and you’re done. It doesn’t quite take me back to the farm, but it’ll do for now.

Fresh garlic really is something else, and made me realize how dessicated the stuff we normally store on the counter really is when we bring it home. Where peeling garlic for me is usually somewhat of a smash and slide operation, peeling the fresh stuff I brought home from the market last week was closer to a delicate undressing. Sexy, almost, and very tender.

Wow.

In any case, starving, craving something healthy, and lacking much else in the way of fresh vegetables, I tried Anya von Bremzen’s rendition of Castilian garlic soup, which is insanely easy, really:

Chop up some prosciutto or serrano, slice 6 cloves of garlic, and chop 4. Cut up a hunk of country bread into large cubes. (I was lucky to have the some leftover ciabatta I made last weekend. More on that later, perhaps.)

Sweat the sliced garlic and ham in some very nice olive oil for about 7 minutes until it smells wonderful, then add your bread, stirring to coat with all the now even more delicious oil. Off heat, toss the whole mixture with 2 teaspoons of sweet pimentón, then return to the heat and add 5 cups of stock.

Simmer for a few minutes, then add the chopped garlic and simmer one minute more.

To serve, you add a poached egg. Since I made the full batch of soup, and am eating that sucker alone (probably not all in one sitting), I poached the eggs right in the soup. A little salt and pepper, a glass of wine, you’re good to go.

Now my house smells fantastic, and I’m warm, cozy, and well fed. Can’t beat that at the end of a long, long weekend.

(See Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table for the recipe.)

I may not be good for much, but I can still make a sweet pasta dinner while rather drunk.

It’s delicious, and good for you, too — you just have to be lucky enough to find all these goods in your fridge.

Sauté some chopped prosciutto or pancetta in a little olive oil until sort of crisp. Take it out. Add some chopped garlic, a bit of sliced onion, and when that’s soft, some half-moons of zucchini. When less than crisp, add a half cup or so of chicken stock, some pepper, and some salt, depending on how salty your meat is to begin with. Add a small head of radicchio, sliced thin.

Cook up your pasta, and when it’s done, add the pasta with some of its cooking water and a big splash (or three) of balsamic vinegar to your pan. Stir, add freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. (Avoid what I did and keep the cheese over the plate or pan, not countertop.) Eat and go to bed happier than before.

Cooking for one can make for a lonely night, but it can also be a nice occasion to make a meal I know no one else wants to eat. When I wasn’t single, I’d take one of my solo nights as an excuse to steam a bowlful of garlicky, salty, sloppy, delicious mussels, cozze, to enjoy with a nice hunk of crusty bread, which could never be enjoyed as a twosome. Weekend nights were almost better, really, because I had no need for next-day lunch leftovers. Today moules à la marinière and some frites just sounded like a good project and a nice payback to myself for staying in.

I’m actually not sure which came first: the mussels plan or my debt review. I realized tonight that with the money I’ve saved, I could actually pay off the heaviest side of my culinary school loans. I’d have to kiss my fuck-you money goodbye — and this is the first time in a while I’ve even had fuck-you money — but I just might be ready.

[side note: As I’m writing this, a culinary school ad appears on TV. Have you ever dreamed of being a chef? Don’t borrow.]

So when I pay off my loans, is my culinary education officially over? It’s been long enough, for god’s sake, and I can’t really afford to pay it off yet, but I’m half-tempted to hold on to the bills as some misguided grip on the tricks I’ve known and lost. At the very least, it seems like I need to dig back in to some of my lessons.

And wow, I really do need to practice. A lot. My frites sucked.

I soaked, dried, and parboiled, and I fried again in hotter oil. Should’ve worked in smaller batches, though, because they were sogg-o-rific. Sheesh. I had to make fries as part of my graduation exams, and I’ll tell you, I passed handily. I’m going to chalk it up to an off night. But at least no one was here to give me a hard time about it.

And I did eat the entire bowl of mussels. All by myself.

The lemons have gone berserk!

I found this one in Cooking Light years ago. It’s a perfect dinner for spring, or when you’re just really dying for the creamy comfort of mac ‘n’ cheese but feel too much self-loathing to ingest that much fat for dinner. Even better: It requires almost zero effort.

Note: I actually loathe cottage cheese, but it functions brilliantly here.

Pasta with Creamy Basil Sauce and Peas
(adapted from Cooking Light)

2 cloves garlic
1 cup lowfat cottage cheese
2 tbsp plain yogurt or light sour cream
1 tbsp nice olive oil
1 cup basil leaves (or if you do as I do and freeze it in ice trays, 2 or 3 cubes of basil puree)
large handful of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
salt and pepper
several large handfuls of sugar snap peas (the best!), snow peas, frozen peas, or a mix, trimmed
1 pound short pasta

Set a pot of well-salted water to boil. In a food processor, combine the garlic and cottage cheese and blend until smooth. Add the yogurt, oil, basil, cheese, and salt and pepper to taste, and blend again until smooth. Scrape the mixture into a large bowl.

When your water is boiling, cook the pasta until it’s nearly al dente. Toss in your peas, allow them to cook about a minute, then drain. Add your hot pasta with the peas to your serving bowl, mix well, and eat.

I like Portland! Finally got to spend a little time in the greenest city thanks to a little business trip (read: free plane ticket), and yes, those food magazines weren’t fucking around: It really is a wonderful food city. Not that I ate well the whole time (I drank, too…oh, and worked), but I did a pretty serious job of ingesting a solid cross-section of the city.

The first night we ate not nearly enough little bits of Asian-sweet calamari appetizers over lots of drinks. Counterpoint: Starving and mildly hungover the next morning, I inhaled an egg sandwich bagel with bacon. Then we had pizza for lunch. Yikes.

Wednesday night was the big team dinner at Andina’s. Sassy habanero-spiked passion fruit cocktails, addictive tapas (I had to push the little cheezy poofs away so as not to plant my face in the platter and humiliate myself), and then a perfectly cooked New York strip with chimichurri. But for my ballooning stomach, I was not ready to part with the accompanying parmesan tuile, but I had to make room for dessert: a peony-adorned goat cheese flan that was so astonishingly light and mild, I shamelessly licked the plate clean.

(Why don’t Americans understand the beauty of not-so-sweet cheesecake? The Italians get it, the Spanish apparently get it. Sheesh.)

In any case, I was thankful I ate so much when we retired to the bar. My flan helped absorb the booze. Lots of booze.

On Thursday, my workmates headed home, and Nicki wisely picked the fantastic Pok Pok as my real initiation into the local dining scene. Tsingtaos, sticky, spicy, crunchy chicken wings, and Pok Pok’s signature smoked chicken with sticky rice, coupled with brilliant company and even a lovely ride home — wow. I may consider returning to Portland for the wings alone. And the company, of course.

Friday lunch: fish and chips with John, starring a local IPA and fresh fucking halibut. (Is Oregon that close to Alaska?) Friday night, the pièce de résistance: Nicki picked out Le Pigeon — not much to look at from the outside, but a warm and cozy neighborhood-like place with an open kitchen, a bold menu, a disciplined chef, and a very nice waiter named Brian.

Nicki’s salad inspired my own (comparatively lackluster) grilled romaine when I returned home; my garlic noodles with snails and ramps made me nearly weep. (Nicki even tried a snail, which to her credit, are really not that pretty.) Another perfect steak for me, perfect skate for Nicki, and then, wow:

Near to bursting but so delighted by the menu and the company and the conversation and the wine and good ole Brian, I naturally responded with a chipper “Of course!” when queried on dessert. So we inspected the dessert menu, handwritten on the wall near our table.

Chocolate cake of some sort, something else lovely, but then, I shit you not, foie gras profiteroles. Now, even I had to pause on that one, and not only because I was unconvinced sometime vegetarian Nicki wouldn’t run screaming from the table at the mere suggestion. But egged on by our neighbors at the other end of the table, we went for it — and holy jesus, they were good! Warm profiteroles filled with a light foie gras mousse, drizzled with an amazing orangey caramel and sprinkled with a fleur de sel…um, yeah. And free Sauternes from the host, who accidentally hit me on the head with a plate. Portland may have made me gaga.

Saturday, and my last day in town, my charming new friend joined me for a brilliant finale: an old-fashioned Reuben, laden with housemade pastrami and sauerkraut, surrounded by hordes of gluttonous peers and 52 cups of coffee. No wonder I felt like crap that afternoon, but I could have loitered there for hours. (Why didn’t I? Questionable.)

So for at least a few days, I’m on a me-style cleanse, which has nothing to do with lemon juice and cayenne pepper cocktails (shudder) and everything to do with vegetables and good grains. I concocted this dinner in honor of Portland, and to linger a little longer over the small crush I developed there (who typifies all of the following): a little spicy, extremely attractive, great-smelling, hearty, and healthy to boot.

I winged the ingredients based on the contents of my fridge, and so can you. Just don’t blow off the tofu: You need to press the hell out of it, so it’s nearly dry, then stir-fry it in a very hot pan in a little oil until it’s browned. The outside will be crispy, the innards pleasantly custardlike. As when you cook meat, don’t skimp on the browning, or all you’ll have is limp soy. Ick.

Thai-Style Tofu Stir-Fry

1 lb firm tofu, pressed for 20 minutes between paper towels, then cut into large cubes
neutral oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
a couple of dried red chiles
a thumb-size knob of ginger, minced
two stalks of lemongrass, peeled to their soft cores and minced
2 red bell peppers, roughly chopped
two handfuls of sugar snap peas, destringed and halved
a handful of arugula (or any green)
soy sauce
fish sauce
lime
chopped scallions
cilantro, chopped
peanuts

Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a hot skillet until nearly smoking, then add your tofu, stirring every once in a while until nice and brown. Retire the tofu to a plate.

In the same pan, pour another tablespoon or so of oil, then send in the chiles, garlic, ginger, and lemongrass. Stir-fry for a minute or two until fragrant, then toss in your peppers and peas. Fry another couple of minutes, then pile in a handful of arugula. Add a few dashes of soy sauce, a few of fish sauce, and your tofu, and toss until the arugula wilts. Turn off the heat and stir in the juice from your lime, the scallions, and the cilantro. Serve over brown rice and sprinkle with peanuts, more lime juice, and some chili sauce, if you have it.

If you don’t make pasta for dinner at least a couple of times a week, you’re an idiot. Or you don’t have a day job.

It’s the only food that can take so many variations, so many sauces, pairs so brilliantly with nearly every food (meat or veg, and that includes potatoes), and can be prepared so quickly.

Nearly every cuisine has an equivalent of a starch with some delicious topping, but pasta is simply my favorite. And since I’m taking Italian classes on Mondays now, and I arrive home late and starving to death, it’s the ideal Monday dinner: fast, easy, Italian, delicious.

You’ve read that you can make a pasta sauce in the time it takes to boil the water. Well, that’s absolutely accurate. Here’s a good one to try when you need something quick and punchy. Vary at will.

Linguine with Sun-Dried Tomatoes

large handful of sun-dried tomatoes (dried, not the ones packed in oil)
2 large cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
a shake or two of chile flakes, or a crushed dried chile
3 medium slicer tomatoes (or a few more plum tomatoes)
olive oil (quarter cup or so)
handful of parsley, chopped
1 lb dried linguine
freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (fresh only)

Set a large pot of water to boil. Now we steal an idea from the brilliant Mark Bittman: Mince half of your sun-dried tomatoes, and cut the others in half so they’re more or less bite-sized but not too hard to fish out of some boiling water.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat, then toss in your minced tomatoes, garlic, and chile. Turn the heat to low so the garlic starts to soften but won’t burn. While that’s cooking, dice your fresh tomatoes. When the garlic has turned golden, add the fresh tomatoes to the pan — juice, seeds, and all — and a pinch or two of salt.

When your water comes to a boil, drop in the large pieces of tomato. Let the tomato pieces float around for a couple of minutes, then fish them out and add them to the skillet (that’s the other part of the Bittman technique).

When the water comes back to a boil, salt it heavily, then cook your linguine. When it’s nearly done, save some of the cooking water (in case your fresh tomatoes were dry), then drain the pasta and add it to the skillet, tossing with your now insanely delicious-smelling sauce and a little of the cooking water, if needed, plus the parsley and some Parmigiano-Reggiano.

(I used to forego parsley in many recipes, since I didn’t always have it on hand, but the parsley is really a beautiful touch here, adding both freshness and some lovely contrasting color. Try not to skip it.)

Serves 2–4, depending on how hungry you are.

PS: I would have included a picture, but I decimated the dish almost immediately.

When the girls informed me that they were all coming over on Saturday to throw me a housewarming party, I couldn’t really say no — especially since celebration for us really means a flimsy excuse to put on dresses, eat a ton, and get drunk.

The theme was all things français, and though told not to lever un doigt, I sort of couldn’t help it. So besides vacuuming, stashing away my stacks of as-yet-unread magazines, and mopping the kitchen floor, I decided to make some cookies. Small enough not to interfere with anything the ladies might bring over, but a contribution of goodwill…sort of a party favor.

The first selection, of course, was French macarons, because they’re Shelli’s favorite. I thank David Lebovitz for the fantastic recipe, which I fucked up royally. (My fault, not his. Macarons are easy to overcook, and when they’re chocolate, and you can’t go by sight….)

Anyway, they were fine when sandwiching thick layers of dark-chocolate ganache, and anyway, the girls would be drunk by the time dessert rolled out. Sometimes it’s just the thought that counts.

The real fun was the second round: lemon tuiles from Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. I love tuiles. There’s something truly masochistic about eyeing the hot cookies for a full minute after you’ve pulled them from the oven, betting yourself that that one is just set enough not to accordion up when you try sneak the spatula under its edges. And they are really cute after you finally ease them from the pan and drape them over a rolling pin. So curvy.

So the tuiles were sufficiently tasty and lemony, enough to offset the overdone chocolate macarons a bit, but then I faced the plating. How do you arrange cookies that look like Pringles?

Well, duh.

(With thanks to Elise, who boosted my ego immeasurably when she squealed “Pringles!” as I brought them out to the table. )

Most of the time, I come home after a high-stress day and simply collapse in front of the TV. Other days I immerse myself in composing dinner as pure distraction from the stuff I really need to finish up…before collapsing in front of the TV. Then there are the days when I arrive on a mission, angrily going about dinner prep not because I’m mad that I have to eat, but simply to prove to someone (intangible) that I am capable of doing something other than responding to email and cleaning up other people’s organizational disasters.

So tonight I’m winging it. The plan was fish soup with lots of croutons made from three-day-old leftover ciabatta, so I was thumbing through Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s lovely Cucina del Sole for ideas, when I suddenly remembered the eggplant I stashed in the crisper on Sunday. I could have gone the caponata route, or pasta, but inspiration actually struck. Creative energy, maybe. And leftovers.

So tonight I’m having stuffed eggplant. I sliced the smooth and lovely berry (really! coincidentally learned that from Alton tonight) lengthwise, scooped out the innards, and sautéed them in some olive oil with a bit of garlic and oregano. Into the mix: a couple of scoops of the leftover meat sauce from this weekend’s kaddo bourani (an Afghan pumpkin dish), some fresh breadcrumbs (thank you, ciabatta), a handful of chopped parsley, and a couple of spoonfuls of ricotta.

Good enough to eat with a spoon, actually, but instead I stuffed it all back into the eggplant, coated the whole pile in a bit of olive oil, and popped it in the oven to bake until soft.

Someone’s Mediterranean grandmother would be proud.