"Sure. Easy for you."

I was describing a recipe to my bud Keith about a week ago, and I said that it was very easy and he should try it. He laughed and said "Well, sweetie, you're applying YOUR standard to it, so be careful about calling it easy."

Well, anytime Keith calls me sweetie, I melt a little, but I really was resolute. When I say that something is easy to cook, I mean it. There ARE dishes that I make that are complicated and require a fair amount of skill. But just about everything I cook is about getting something really tasty on the table that isn't too hard.

Now, that does NOT mean that what I cook doesn't take a long time. Some of my braises take four or five hours to finish. But this is unsupervised time, where I'm doing something like reading a book, writing, pretending to be busy, that kind of thing. But the actual "work" is done. The dish cooks itself.

I'm going to write today about two dishes I made this morning/early afternoon. And to see just how much trouble they were, I set a timer. I set it at 99 minutes ( the biggest number it allowed me to use), and checked how much time was left at the end. I finished in an hour, and then needed ten minutes at the end to finish things off. And what did I make? Well, I made a wonderful sweet potato soup, and a veal stew in cream. I'm gonna lead you through these, step by step, to show you how easy this is. I WILL make reference to equipment, and one of the most important things you can do is get good tools for the kitchen. It will make your job easier.

The soup, first. This is a slight adaptation of a recipe from a wonderful cook, Sue Torres. I'll tell you where I vary from what she does. First, I peeled and diced a yellow onion. You need a good, sharp knife that is bigger than the onion to do this, and you should have one. Sue calls for half of a white onion, but I didn't have one, and any time I have half an onion around, I never use it. So I chopped up that small yellow onion, and put it aside. Two cloves of garlic were smashed, and I got rid of the peels. Then, with my rasp grater, a teaspoon or so of fresh ginger. I thought about leaving this out. I'm glad I didn't. The house smelled wonderful, and the soup is better for it. I had a small bit of celery left, and chopped it all up, rather than the one rib that Sue calls for. Then, I had two pounds of garnet yams, and I peeled them and chopped them (Sue calls for sweet potatoes, and 1.75 pounds of them, thinly sliced). Finally, I peeled and chopped two apples. I THINK they were winesaps. Sue called for Galas, and I'm sure I didn't have those.

Now, this may sound like a lot of peeling and chopping. It's not. Try it. Do one at a time, take your time. It won't take you more than fifteen minutes and at this point, your work is really done.

I brought two tablespoons of vegetable oil up to the point where the oil was shimmering in the pot (much Mexican sauteeing calls for this step and it's really fascinating to see the oil ripple ). I put the onions, the garlic, and the ginger in and lowered the heat right away. The "blast" of ginger your nose gets will amaze you and you'll watch how beautifully the onions begin to cook.

Now, Sue doesn't call for the next step, but I think it's essential. Toss in a little salt. And stir this for about five minutes. Then, toss in the apple and celery, and cook for about five minutes.

Next, I added a step and I'll explain why, below. I squeezed about a tablespoon of tomato paste into the pot, and let it "fry" for a minute, before I tossed it into the veggies. This is a trick that Lidia Bastianich suggests. It's a good one. Then, the potatoes went in, and I stirred them with the oil and other veggies, and let it cook for five minutes . By this point, the apples had fallen apart, which is a good thing. Then, a quart of chicken stock and three cups of water went in, again with a bit more salt.

Here's the big change. Sue calls for a chipotle chili in adobo sauce. These come in a can, and there's way more than one. And they're spicy and hot. VERY spicy and hot. Once you use one of them , what do you do with the rest? If you're like me, you put it in the back of the fridge until you get a science experiment. I've seen all kinds of tricks for what to do with them, and I'll pass. Instead, I tossed in two dried chipotle peppers. Now you know why I had the tomato paste in there. I covered the pot, turned up the heat, and when it began to boil, I lowered the heat and let it bubble away, for thirty minutes.

So if you want to do just one dish, go back and add up how much time you've spent. There's the chopping and peeling time, so ten minutes if you're slow, and maybe fifteen minutes of active cooking. So, for 25 minutes of work, you're going to get a big pot of 2.5 quarts of soup.

I let this sit and when it was cool, I tossed one of the chipotles, and then pureed the rest. It needed a bit more salt, but that was it.

Not too hard.

while the soup was going , I made the stew. And this one is also easy. I had two pounds of cubed veal left over from the ossobuco feast, but you can buy veal stew meat. I had that ready, while I got the other ingredients together: a chopped onion (two tablespoons are called for, I'm not going to bother with that), and two branches of fresh sage and one of thyme (Marcella wants 18 dried sage leaves. I had fresh, so I used it), 2/3 cup of white wine, a generous 1/3 cup of heavy cream, a tablepoon of vegetable oil, and 1.5 tablespoons of vegetable oil. And in a plastic bag, a cup of flower and a tablespoon of salt.

Ok, here the only "work" you have to do is measure, and chop an onion. The only other thing you're going to do is pat the meat dry, and then put it in the bag of flour and shake. Make sure the meat is well covered with flour. Then, take your biggest pan, and put the fats in. Heat them up.When the butter melts, get the meat in. You should be able to get all of it in a 12 inch pan, and you SHOULD have a twelve inch pan. Brown the meat, and here, you take your time, but it won't take you more than about five minutes. Really. Take out the meat, and if there is no oil left (there probably won't be), add some more and add the onions, and the spices and sautee for about three minutes. Put the meat back in, and add the wine. Stir a bit, because there will be brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Now, lower the heat, and cover the pot. You should also keep a half cup of water on hand. You're gonna need it.

After fifteen minutes, check. You may see the wine all gone and the meat sticking. This is a GOOD thing. Pour in 1/3 of your water and stir up the meat and the brown bits. VOILA. You'll wind up with a lovely gravy. Your meat is not finished yet, so cover the pot, and come back in another fifteen minutes. do the same thing with the water, and then, do this one more time. After the third time, stir in the cream, lower the heat a little more, again, cover the pot, and let this cook for thirty minutes.

Again, go back and work through that recipe, and see how much work you were doing. Not a whole helluva lot. And once you've made it, know what? You've got the technique for beef stroganoff, for pork with posole stew, for lamb stew with vegetables, and a whole lot of other really good braises that you do on the top of the stove.

So , IF you wanted to, you could serve the soup as a first course, and then the stew, perhaps on a bed of noodles or pasta, or just by itself. What we will do is have them as meals on two different nights. The veal stew is DEFINITELY a company dish, and I wouldn't blink an eye about serving the soup to guests either.

You have plenty of food here, and really, while it took a bit over an hour to get everything finished, you really didn't spend too much time working.

Don't believe me? Come visit. We'll make soup together.

Keith, that means you. And if you call me sweetie while we're making it, you may see me blush as read as my beet soup and glow like a hunk of kryptonite.

And Mark, you sweet blond asparagus you, of course you can take out the chicken stock and use vegetable stock and eat it all yourself. And you can call me sweetie too.

But the two of you doing it together? Gee, don't know if I can handle that. My sensors may just fuse.