thecounterintuitivekitchen

Sometimes, at the tail end of golden hour, if you are American and living in the Northeast in late winter and therefore darkness is about to swing your way like a sledgehammer, and someone has scheduled a 5:30 pm haircut for a kid who doesn’t want his hair cut, and your job is still sending out little tendrils of things to do and the other adult in the household is elsewhere, you can bet that various dense, beige foods left over from more colorful meals are marshalling at the front of the fridge, vying for your limited attention.

Leftover chicken, leftover pasta, leftover black beans, leftover calzone, even a leftover birria and grilled cheese sandwich. No colors. Not enough vegetables to matter. Everything looks like paste drying or what I imagine a lacrosse ball is stuffed with. It all gives insurance-company-waiting-room vibes.

At the same time, a teenager is growing a millimeter every ten seconds and needs to be nourished and the beige things have been knock knock knockin’ on heaven’s dooo-uu-ah ay ay ay yay yay which could either mean you compost what’s compostable and give the dog the old chicken or you adapt them for reuse and heat up a plate of dune sands for the group. I do the latter. It is a nutrition-free chewy carb-a-thon and everyone hates it, especially me.

To get away from such meals, I recently started focusing on multiplying the number of vegetables in dinners. I decided to make a vegetable pot pie, which the Modern Proper billed as a “savory vegetarian pot pie… full of mushrooms, herbs and veggies nestled under a golden puff pastry crust.” Reading the recipe, I saw that it involved a lot of milk, which is okay, but at times hard to square up: carrots and milk, for example, is a weird coupling. But also clam chowder, which I like, is shellfish plus milk, words that are hard to type in sequence, and yet that works. 

Making the pot pie is pretty easy, except for one thing. I own several glass measuring cups, and none of them help me measure. The red lines denoting measurements on one are very faded, the second one is metric, and the third is very large and thick-walled and the lines appear to change depending on the angle of your perspective, like a stereogram. 

The recipe calls for two cups of frozen peas, which I was defrosting in the largest confusing measuring cup, in water. Most of the peas slowly separated except for a nucleus of hyper-frozen peas that I kept poking at with a spoon. I got to the point in the process where the peas needed to go in the pan, and so I separated the fused peas from the other peas and ran hot water over them. I put in the thawed peas. Eventually, also some semi-separated peas. How many cups of peas did I start with? I do not know. Possibly three. Four? Two. Three? The ice casing had added bulk and dimension, but how much? By the time I had triumphantly defrosted the pea globe, I saw that a lot of peas were already in the pan. But I had more peas. If my goal was to have a lot of vegetables at dinner, and peas were a vegetable, why worry about too many peas? So the peas went in the pan. The final total amount of peas immediately overwhelmed the other vegetables, like the zombies of World War Z taking over Manhattan avenues. I considered removing some of the peas, and began to do so with a teaspoon, placing them on a clean plate. I regarded the removed peas and scraped them back into the pan.

The nice thing about this recipe is that you cook most of it in a cast iron pan and then layer the crust over that and bake it, so you don’t have a lot to clean up later. I had a box of puff pastry, which I was supposed to cut into many small squares and lay in a pattern, like an edible quilt, but I didn’t want to, so I flopped a rectangle of puff pastry over the majority of the filling, and then tried to cut pieces to artfully cover the rest. But it looked like an unsolvable tangram. Also, very many peas were visible in the seams of the crust, peeping at me like banshees waiting for the cover of darkness to scream from the garden that I was soon to die.

At this point, I was beginning to express my doubts about the pie to my husband, who suggested adding chicken. The thought of cooking chicken and then somehow tucking it evenly under the duvet of puff pastry, which would surely leak out all its butter by the time the chicken was done, was overwhelming and seemed ill-advised, so I stuck the whole thing in the oven.

I’ve been trying to cook with meat less often (sort of working), or with less meat (totally working – I have managed to make meals for four with a single chicken breast or the recommended amount of beef for half a person and a lot of vegetarian sides) or meat from animals that were locally raised and pastured (also pretty much working out). The no-meat meals are more challenging when they are not pasta, however, because my approach to vegetables as the centerpiece is either faux-Asian (Asian inspired?) or cumin-centric or dependent on heaps of feta cheese and thus unpopular with the youth. I thought the vegetable pot pie could be comforting.

The beauty of puff pastry, especially homemade puff pastry (it was not homemade on the day in question), is that it bakes up to be not a deadly beige but a warm golden color. So the pie looked pretty good when it was done, even with all the scraps of pastry circling the central pastry rectangle. 

The pie was served with a salad and a plate of raw carrots, because those always get eaten. After cutting through the delightful flaky pastry, each person received a spillway of peas in sauce. There were a few mushrooms and bits and bobs of other vegetables, some nice herbs, but mostly a great green bounty of peas that would be rolling about had they not been stilled by a thick roux. Some did break free and dot the table or the floor, and my son made a project of lifting them on a fork and tilting it while talking about this and that with his gaze trained quite obviously on the fork as he slowly adjusted the angle of it until they all fell off. “Whoops!” he would say. “Oh!” 

I started to think of it as FUBAR pie as neither child ate any. But my husband ate it and I ate it, even though… I also do not care for peas. I of course understood that making a dinner involving peas would cause me to eat peas, but I hoped the peas would shrink, or maybe code-switch within the pie while it baked, into something I might enjoy. Or I would just endure the peas, the way I do not manage or cope with but endure stress: while grimacing.

Later I realized I had maniacally scrolled past the recipe’s tip section, missing the part that says “If you’re using frozen vegetables, you can pour them directly into the skillet, no need to thaw frozen vegetables for our vegetable pot pie recipe.” But if I hadn’t thawed and strained the peas, I would have added quite a lot of ice to the pan, which is one of the few mistakes I have not made while cooking. The menu does not call for freezer burned peas, and those may have been what I used (because a thin purple rubber band whose only other job had been to hold four scallions together in a grocery store bin wasn’t up to the task of properly sealing a large open bag of frozen peas) or the peas may just have been “iced.” I don’t know. I do know that I will never care for or about peas as much as this person, Ruchi Bharani. But if you do, or if you wish to be mesmerized by how she exerts her will over very many peas, or if you just want to be put to bed with great gentleness, imagine you are in one of these little baggies of very many peas, which will be good for 6-8 months.