Well, if you add a bit of salt.

Start with a good tomato*, cut a slice or wedge, sprinkle a little salt, and take a nice, juicy bite. To the saltiness, the tomato adds all the other flavors we can sense: the tangy acidity, a mild sweetness, the bitterness of the seeds and skin, and an overall rich umami.

How could you make that better?

Well, they figured out how to make it better in Spain. And in the southern USA.

I first experienced this with Kate at the castle, when we arrived at breakfast to find a small plate of tomatoes at each place, next to the toast. We patiently watched our hosts sprinkle olive oil on the toasted bread, slice the tomatoes in half, and then squeeze the goodness of the tomato onto the bread. And a pinch of salt, of course.

Pan con Tomate is called pan tumaca (or pa amb tomàquet, or pa amb tomaca) in Catalan, which might be more proper since it (probably) originated in Catalonia. Most likely it was a way for peasants (because all the really good dishes come from peasant food, right?) to make the most of old bread, juicing it up with tomatoes and olive oil.

(Keep in mind, of course, that as prolific as tomatoes are in Spain, and Italy, they originated in the New World, and didn’t really start showing up in European cuisine until the 1700s.)

But we’ve left off one other ingredient: garlic. Some versions rub a peeled and cut garlic clove over the toast before adding the olive oil. You can also add some jamon or cheese if you like.

Some restaurants make/let you do the work of tomato squeezing and sauce spreading, while others do it for you. Others, like where they prepared the version below, simply wave the sliced tomato near the oiled bread.

I think No Rules is the best rule in cooking, so you can really pile on that fresh tomato sauce by grinding down the fruit (because tomatoes are technically fruit, right?) on a knuckle-busting grater, and spooning on as much as the bread can support. And you can toast the bread or not, it’s up to you.

Both the Squeeze and the Grater Methods leave you with the tomato skin, which I think is perfectly edible, albeit not pretty. For zero waste, you can put that on some bread and enjoy it, or follow this guide from Serious Eats to make tomato powder.

Not to be outdone, in the southern United States they developed the Tomato Sandwich. They replace the olive oil with mayonnaise — still with oil, but boosting the umami — and use slices of tomato and two pieces of bread to hold it all together, Earl of Sandwich style. (Truly, he didn’t invent the idea, but gets credit and naming rights for popularlizing it.)

A key part of the Tomato Sandwich recipe is not to add any other ingredients. A slice of ham, or bacon, or anything else completely voids the recipe. It will no doubt be delicious, but it will not be a Tomato Sandwich.

This is sometimes known as a Sink Sandwich, because it can be best enjoyed by eating it over the kitchen sink, with rolled up shirt sleeves, to minimize the mess.

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*This last thing I hate to even write, but these things all need really good tomatoes. I haven’t seen a questionable tomato in Spain or Italy, even in the grocery, but I know in the USA we have tasteless, tomato-shaped, why-even-bother “vegetables” bred not for deliciousness, but rather for sturdiness in transport.

The best tomatoes, of course, will come from your own garden, or as a gift from a friend with a garden. Next best are from the farmers market. After that you can hope to find heirloom tomatoes in the grocery, and lacking that, just fly to Spain.

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Buy me a coffee

Okay, great, but what does that mean?

No doubt “made with love” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But to me it has to do with time and effort.

This Lobio recipe from my friend Maria Sarkisyan provides a great example, as do many others. The recipe takes time. It’s not something you just throw together and suddenly you have a meal. It’s not something the comes in a flavor packet.

In this recipe, you start the day before by soaking beans. You need to plan this — that takes time, and effort, and if you’re putting time and effort into a dish like this you must love who you’re making it for, right?

But even if you skip that and use canned beans, you’re still investing time in this dish by cooking those onions, and by letting the whole thing simmer. Lovingly.

Teresa’s risotto starts with a stock that simmers for a long while. The sofrito in this sugo finto can cook for hours. It’s about tending the fire, coaxing the flavors, putting effort into bringing out the goodness of the dish.

You might think that something made with love wouldn’t come out of a jar, but lots of foods in jars are made with love, Amanda’s Clean Plate Pantry sauces among them. She takes time to make each batch, cleaning and preparing the ingredients, slow cooking the batches, filling each jar by hand.

And one last thought, that has to do with technique. Maybe the dish didn’t take too long, maybe it didn’t take a lot of effort, but maybe that’s because of the time the cook invested in learning the technique. Making perfect pancakes, grilling a perfect hamburger, crafting a perfect cocktail — minutes to do, but years to get the technique right to make it look easy.

And to prepare it with love.

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I don’t know what the pill was all about, but the directions called for eliminating most all carbohydrates — I could have all the bacon and eggs, all the steak, all the hamburger (no buns!) I wanted, though.

I couldn’t manage this for more than a week before I buckled and had a hamburger with the bun.

A couple decades later I read about a diet in Men’s Health magazine that was high in protein, low in carbs. The diet was basically the first two weeks of the South Beach Diet, where you eliminate basically all carbohydrates. You’re supposed to add back in fruits and vegetables after two weeks, but I didn’t. And I lost a lot of weight.

I was actually on a ketogenic or keto diet — you force your body into metabolic state where it burns fat for energy instead of glucose, because there’s hardly any glucose to burn. Once you get to a state of ketosis, it feels like the fat is literally melting off your body.

It’s just one approach to losing weight, and there are many. The Grapefruit Diet. Veganism and Vegetarianism and Pescaterianism. Intermittent Fasting. The Color Diet. They all work, to some extent.

We all eat every day, and guidelines suggest around 2,000 calories/day for women and 2,500 for men. Each diet replaces something that you eat with something else. Meat protein for vegetables, carbohydrates for protein, everything for grapefruit. And if you follow the directions, those trades can change your caloric intake, or how your body processes what you feed it, and you might lose weight.

And then, when you stop the diet and return to eating “regular” food — as I did after months of keto-ing — you go back to what you ate before, and your body puts all that fat right back. This is “yo-yo” dieting, because you lose it and then it comes back to you again. Lots of people have experienced the yo-yo diet, me included.

There’s also “cheat day.” This is when you’ve followed your diet for some period of time — you’ve been good — and now you’re going to have a gelato, or a hamburger with a bun, or whatever you’re supposed to avoid on your diet. You’ve been good, so you can have something bad.

But don’t you think healthy eating presents enough challenges without making some foods good/healthy and others bad/unhealthy. Or worse, making a “bad” food a reward for eating a good food. Endure the healthy foods so you can enjoy this unhealthy food.

I’d like to suggest instead, as Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” There are no good foods or bad foods, because, as Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Diet gurus will tell you different: Saturated fat will kill you. Or seed oils. Or milk. (A former colleage once tried to convince me that milk was unecessary and therefore bad because elephants have the strongest bones in the animal kingdom and they don’t drink milk. I reminded her that elephants eat trees and I don’t.)

Maybe some diets are really cults, with gurus who preach that their diet is the only one that works, and with followers to try to recruit other people.

I’m not a diet guru, but I am here, right now, to tell you there is only one diet that really works.

(And I’m not going to tell you it’s the Mediterranean Diet, although we’re going to take some deep dives into what that is and why it works for a lot of people.)

First, let’s rethink the term diet, and make it less about a special process or a time period when we eat or don’t eat something specific. Our diet as what we eat. It is our lifestyle. It’s not individual foods or dishes or meals, but what we eat regularly, all the time, including the foods you treat yourself with on cheat days. If you enjoy a gelato once in a while, that’s part of your diet.

And so, the only diet that’s going to work for you is the one you will eat for the rest of your life.

This is what I’m working on now. I’m eating less overall, I’m walking a whole lot more, cooking a lot more, snacking much less. I’m not eliminating carbs, but I’m being a lot more choosy about which ones I eat. I’m eating more vegetables and fruits, and using less meat. And I’ll continue to share what I learn along the way, from recipes to cooking techniques to great food I find.

But I also recognize I’m going to have to go back to the US in a few weeks, and I’ll be again exposed to the things that throw me off track. For instance, I’m walking at least five miles nearly every day now, but there’s no way I can do that in the “real world.” But I can do three miles several times a week, and I need to stick to that. And maybe more when I can.

And occasionally, a hamburger. But no trees.

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P.S. This is the basic path we’re going to follow with The Cooking Solution, to be more healthy and eat more healthily. It’s a simple solution, a common sense solution, and it doesn’t take any fancy foods or meal kits or supplements. I think common sense works best.

But common sense doesn’t make money, which is why so many people have developed so many special diets and life hacks and tests and programs and supplements, so they can sell them to you.

I don’t have anything to sell. These posts are free, and always will be.

But if you think it’s helpful, if you think it’s valuable, you can support what I’m doing here — what I’m writing, and what my audience is reading, and the journey that we’re all on together. You can subscribe and get every post free, or you can be a paid subscriber and support the posts you and everyone else receives.

Whether paid or free, I appreciate every single subscriber and reader. Thank you!

But that’s another story.

Gazpacho is not soup, at least not in Spain. Well, mostly, but not always.

Okay, it’s complicated. As with so many foods, once you start diving deep to learn more, you learn the “authentic” version of something is a far cry from what we know of it today.

Because if we go way, way back, before the Roman Empire conquered the area, we’d find Spanish shepherds enjoying a mash-up of stale bread, garlic, vinegar, oil, and water, and calling it gazpacho. Only later did they add vegetables, making it an ideal way to quench their thirst and get the vitamins and minerals they needed to work in the hot Spanish sun. Of course they probably found it thirst-quenching and satisfying, and didn’t think too much of the nutritive value.

So gazpacho is yet another “peasant dish” that survived and thrived and is now enjoyed and known (mostly) around the world. The original farmers might have labored to crush and puree the ingredients with a mortar and pestle, while we can enjoy the modern convenience of a blender or food processor. Progress progresses.

In any case, you’re probably eating it wrong. (We did this before with coffee.) You’re most likely pouring it into a bowl and eating it with a spoon. What you should do, as our friend Maria told us at the castle, is keep a bottle in the fridge and enjoy it anytime by pouring it into a glass and sipping it.

Which is why, in Spain, you’ll find entire refrigerated sections dedicated to the many varieties and producers of the beverage.

Nowadays, “original” gazpacho contains tomato, red or green pepper, cucumber, onion, olive oil, vinegar, and salt. Sin pepino has less bite than original gazpacho because it omits the cucumbers. Tomatoes carry all the vegetable weight in salmorejo, which you make with olive oil, vinegar, and breadcrumbs, harkening back to that original peasant recipe (so maybe more authentic?). Fancy gourmet gazpacho adds ground almonds. Ajoblanco keeps the oil, breadcrumbs, and vinegar, with a bit of lemon juice, and leaves out all the vegetables.

So the Spanish (and Catalan) folks enjoy it by the glass, but they also add toppings, and sometimes, um, well, alright—they sometimes serve it in a bowl. Toppings include finely diced vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, and croutons, and possibly even bits of jamon/ham or flakes of tuna.

Here’s the recipe for Kate’s Spanish Gazpacho, which she made regularly at Tale to Table.

When you make gazpacho at home you’ll need to keep a few things in mind. First, it’s really all about fresh vegetables. Get them at the farmers market, or from your own garden. Buy vegetables from the grocery store if necessary, but it’s all about fresh veggies. Health benefits, remember?

Also, use good olive oil and good vinegar. You cannot make a good gazpacho from poor vinegar and even poorer oil.

I’ve been sampling gazpacho here in Barcelona, and was directed to Ametller Origen, a widely popular grocery (140 stores in Catalonia) that grows much of its own produce.

The creaminess surprised me—as if it was made from real cream—and I’m sure this came from the high-quality olive oil. Definitely two thumbs up.

Two last notes, especially for my American friends.

First, V8 vegetable juice is NOT gazpacho. It is a processed beverage made from concentrated (processed) vegetables and water. Maybe you can use it as a starter ingredient to make fresh gazpacho, but only because you’re putting in a good effort and drinking some sort of vegetable matter instead of a soda.

Second, if you’re thinking about adding vodka to gazpacho, just don’t. Please.

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It seems James Bond had safe boxes in banks and hotels all over the world. Jason Bourne for sure had at least one, probably more.

So when they find themselves without their necessities, they get to their stash and retrieve cash (in multiple currencies), fake (but foolproof) documents, keys to a car hidden elsewhere, possibly also a weapon.

Upon leaving Barcelona last fall, I stashed a cache. No currency or weapons, but things I knew (or assumed) I’d need when I came back. Office and kitchen tools and equipment and supplies. Some things of value, some things of little actual value I assumed would be easier to save than to repurchase.

A special thanks to Anna, who let me use part of her storage locker to store three boxes, and who helped me transport them to and from the locker when I left and returned.

I arrived in Barcelona early Monday, which I spent adjusting to the remodeled cat flat, greeting the kitties, and acclimating to the Mediterranean climate.

Yes, the kittens remembered me, after a few moments. Or maybe they’re just like this with anyone who comes in the door.

Tuesday I met Anna at the locker, where she needed to drop things off anyway. We retrieved my stash—getting things out of the locker requires climbing and minor acrobatics, which Anna has perfected—and I repacked them into a large suitcase to wheel back to the flat.

And there, when I unpacked the boxes and spread them out, I had a nice laugh, at my own expense.

Some of these “treasures” followed me to Barcelona from Italy, and a few originally came from the USA. (Looking back, I had a similar laugh when I unpacked things I transported from America after the holidays.)

As I said, some things I barely used, but when you need them, you really need them: transparent tape, a stapler, bandages, sticky notes, paper clips, notepads (please note how delicately I avoid the more-familiar trademark names). I may have used the little stapler three or four times last year, and maybe a foot or so of tape.

I use the European-outlet clippers for self haircuts and knew I’d need them again. The wifi hotspot was another large-ish investment, but I didn’t need it in Barcelona last summer.

Speaking of cats, the sticky rollers got put to use immediately.

But several items are critical, precious treasures I was really glad to see again. These are the things every cook needs, whether traveling or at home. Obviously this isn’t a complete list, and I hope you’ll share with us your personal additions.

Chef’s knife: I bought this knife at the market in Bra soon after I moved there, for just €10. It’s the sharpest knife I’ve ever used.

Professional chefs have their own precious knives, often rolled up in a special bag (which they pack up and take with them when they’re eliminated from Top Chef). I’ve never owned an expensive knife, but I’m grateful I found, and saved, a great (but cheap) one.

Paring knife: another market find, sharp as a, well, a knife, and critical for smaller work and more delicate cutting.

Ginsu knife: an iconic knife from the 70s and 80s, I own several of these indestructible tools, best for rough cutting or sawing, never for precision. Although you can get a really thin tomato slice using one of these babies.

Cutting board: inexpensive but critical to keep your knives from getting dull.

Digital scale: many recipes, especially those from a professional chef, use mass instead of volume. If your recipe requires precision, you need one of these.

Measuring cups and spoons: When the recipe doesn’t require precise measurements, but you need to be more accurate than just eyeballing it, you’ll need to have these on hand.

Cast iron pan: I was shocked—shocked, I say—I could not find one of these in Italy. Anytime you want to fry or sauté or even reheat pizza, use a pan like this. Don’t use it for slow cooking anything acidic, like tomatoes, but for just about everything else, this is the bomb. (I ordered this one online in Italy.) Oh, and a solid metal spatula, which over time will help strengthen the non-stick coating on the cast iron.

Cheese tools: Okay, not everyone needs these, but if you love cheese, you should have a box grater (also useful for fresh tomatoes), a rotary grater for hard cheeses like parmesan, and a cheese knife for soft cheeses.

Spices and other ingredients: These are the “if you were stranded on a desert island” ingredients, although many are accidental. I brought my own seasoned salt for potatoes and eggs and just about everything else. Bay leaves, lemon pepper, chile pepper, and even some yeast (they seem to use a different type in Europe). Some I acquired in Italy and Spain. You probably have your own individual necessities.

(Yes, the flavor of many spices can fade out over time. I don’t like to waste them, though, so some I just use in larger quantities.)

Miscellaneous tools: tongs, corkscrew, bench/bowl scraper, scraping spatulas, pizza cutter, drink coasters, mixing bowls, and cork trivets. Cheap things I like to have on hand and use a lot, but not everyone needs them.

Paella pan: just like not everyone needs to have a paella pan. This was one of two I brought from the US to Italy—the other one I gifted, unused, to a friend before I moved to Barcelona. This one made paella for all of my sisters in Bra, and a couple for myself in Spain, and will get more use this trip as I learn more about authentic paella and take advantage of all this fresh seafood!

Certainly there are other tools required for cooking, like a saucepan for simmering and a stockpot for boiling pasta water and cooking soup.

What else would you add to the list?

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I remember hearing this as a child, as I asked for a second helping, from various adults who obviously didn’t understand how things work. When I got hurt — a scrape or mosquito bite, for example — my brain instantly got the message, and it didn’t take more than a second, so I couldn’t imagine…20 minutes?!

Turns out they were right…

Before my first visit to Italy more than 20 years ago, a friend gave me some advice, and I’ve shared it with everyone headed to Italy: eat as much as you can. The food is amazing, so very different from American food, for lots of obvious and hidden reasons.

On my sabbatical last year I followed that advice myself, so then it might surprise you that I still lost weight — significant weight, more than 45 pounds/18 kilos — even while surrounded by all that wonderful food.

Comedian Tom Papa says everyone is “either really fat, kinda fat, or trying not to be fat…and that’s okay.” We’re programmed from the very beginning of our evolution to seek out high-calorie foods, and now we’re surrounded by them. Plus, we’ve got a multi-billion dollar industry trying to convince us to eat more.

So if you think you’re overweight, it’s not your fault.

Let me be clear — I am not an expert, and I do not want to be a weight-loss guru. But I lost weight, felt better, started wearing clothes that hadn’t fit me in years, and had to buy new clothes. The smaller belt that replaced the one pictured above even needed another notch to make it smaller. I felt better, I didn’t get winded walking fast or climbing stairs. I was not as uncomfortable when it’s really hot out.

And to be even more clear, I ate really well, fantastic Italian (and then Spanish) food, things I made, things my classmates cooked (frequently non-Italian), and food from restaurants and shops. I used no tricks or potions or shots or pills.

But coming back to the United States, I was again exposed to American food and lifestyle, and I slowly but surely gained back everything I lost in Europe. I am headed back to Barcelona next week, and to be honest will be more than a little embarrassed when I see my friends there.

So here are some facts, musings, and ideas that I think made a difference for me, and they might for you. I continue working on them. Try them out for yourself if you like, and find what works for you.

• I stayed busy. I eat when I’m bored. When I was in class all day, listening and taking notes, I wasn’t thinking (much) about food. In Spain I similarly had busy days working on lots of different projects around town. I’m still busy here in the US, but in a different way, mostly working by myself instead of with others, with more opportunities to snack — and I work in a chocolate shop, for crying out loud…

• I avoided highly processed foods, and I still do. I never have any fast food, but also I don’t buy ready-to-eat meals. That said, Italian and European groceries have more real ingredients and less prepared foods than American stores.

• I ate smaller portions. We generally don’t check how many servings are in the package, nor do we weigh our portions. But we do tend to eat exactly we put on the plate, or the entire package, without thinking (unless we’re thinking about how we don’t want to waste anything, so we eat it). Also, don’t put the cooking pot full of food on the table — leave it in the kitchen, because that tiny bit of extra effort might be all you need to avoid the second helping you don’t really need.

• I tried not to eat while watching a screen. Studies show we eat as much as 80% more when we’re paying attention to a television or phone. This is hard, especially when I’m alone. But I try to be mindful of what I’m eating, and where I’m eating it. Chew, taste, savor, look around, talk to someone.

• I eat more vegetables, and I aimed to have some colorful vegetable matter with every meal. Truly, those antioxidants help digestion and reduce inflammation, and I’ll be writing more about that in the near future.

• I drank more wine and less beer. This would seem to be a challenge, because in the States I almost always had beer with my meals. Wine is considerably less expensive in Europe (and beer is mighty cheap, too), but again, those antioxidants, especially in the reds and rosé wines. But back in the States, I found myself gravitating away from wine and toward the higher calorie beer.

• I walked a lot. I never drove a car on my sabbatical, so it was only my feet and sometimes public transportation. I bought a cheap digital watch that tracks steps, and I easily exceeded 8,000 on a regular day, sometimes three times that. Here in the States I drive, and I park my car five steps from the back door of the shop. I averaged about 2,000 steps, until I recently re-started walking in the early morning to add in another 6,000 as many days as I could.

• I didn’t have a microwave in Italy, and didn’t use the one I had in Spain. Without it, I took more time to re-heat things on the stove, and could then better take time to enjoy eating it.

• I cooked as much as I can. I know exactly what I’m eating, because I invest time in preparing it. This is the number one reason, I think. And why I want to focus my future writings on helping everyone cook more, for themselves and for others.

There are (at least) three ways our bodies realize we’ve eaten enough. One is physically feeling the extension of our stomach, and that’s fairly immediate. The second is the result of a complex combination of actions like chewing and swallowing and tasting, which all signals that we’ve had enough.

The third way we realize we’ve eaten our full is through the hormone glucagon-like peptide 1, which we all know as GLP-1. As we eat and we’ve had enough, our gut starts to generate GLP-1, which signals to our brains and the rest of our body that we can stop eating.

And that process, from the start of making GLP-1 to the time it enough of it hits our brains, is about 20 minutes. Huh.

I’m headed to Barcelona next week for 7 weeks, and I’m hopeful my friends there will be kind about my weigh gain. I’m even more hopeful, though, that I can find and firmly reinstate the habits I need — wherever I live — to eat better and healthier, and maintain a better body weight.

But I also think Peter La Fleur said it best at the end of the movie Dodgeball, and to paraphrase him: You’re perfect just the way you are. Don’t worry about it. But if you’d like to lose a few pounds, try these tips.

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Remember the book Eat This, Not That? It started out as a column in Men’s Health magazine by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding, identifying the best and worst foods (in America, of course, where we have more than enough worst foods) and recommending one thing over another, sometimes surprisingly.

For example, a Chicken and Avocado Salad from The Cheesecake Factory restaurant clocks in at 1,830 calories and 130 grams of fat, while McDonald’s Big Mac is “only” 540 calories and 29 fat grams. If you have to make that choice.

The magazine column became a book, and then more books, and now there are a dozen books and a website, and a mini-industry, and probably thousands of recommendations to help you make more healthy eating choices.

It’s all rubbish.

Yes, it might be interesting to know which frozen mozzarella sticks are best, and which restaurant chain has the best spinach dip. But we’re really looking at the lesser of thousands of evils — if you want to eat healthy, you probably shouldn’t be eating frozen mozzarella sticks or restaurant spinach dip.

Not to mention how confusing it all is. Imagine the “best” answer to thousands of choices. Who wants to go to a restaurant or grocery store and then look up the best option for each food or menu item you want?

A much better book choice would be What to Eat Now by Marion Nestle. This 2025 book updates her 2006 classic What to Eat. (The link goes to the publisher site, but if you’re going to buy this or any other book, please go to your local independent bookstore.) From the publisher, “What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities?”

As far as making informed dietary choices, Nestle boils it all down to this amazing advice: You are better off paying attention to your overall dietary pattern than worrying about whether any one food is better for you than another.

In other words, it's about your top-down approach to how you eat, rather than each individual food choice you make.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, offered a simpler set of rules for eating, in just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This proved too simple for some people, and Pollan followed it up with an entire (and wonderful) book explaining what “food” actually is, In Defense of Food. In that book, he suggested “Instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more a product of industry than of nature.”

Which leads to one of my favorite Michael Pollan quotes, “Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky, and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work.” He wrote this in Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, and it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Which leads me to my one rule for eating healthy. I refuse to even attempt to out-rule Pollan or Nestle or anyone else who’s written more and cooked more and learned more than I have. You should still read those books. This is just the rule that works for me, and it’s where we’re headed with The Cooking Solution.

Ready? Here’s the list of rules for eating healthy, the whole, complete list:

#1: Cook as much as you can.

You don’t need to fret over which restaurant salad is more healthy, or which frozen appetizer is better when you re-heat it in the oven. You just need to, as often as you can, cook your own food — junk food and otherwise — and in doing that, you’ll pay more attention to the ingredients you use, and as you do more of that, you’ll look more closely at the ingredients of the more-processed foods you buy, and hopefully even move away from the highly processed foods completely.

And I’m certainly not forbidding you to visit restaurants. But the more you cook, the more selective you’ll be about where you eat out (support local!), and what you select from the menu.

There are tons of other benefits to cooking, and we’ll visit them along the way. We’ll share some recipes, we’ll explore some cooking techniques, and we’ll learn a lot.

But it will all boil down to learning how to cook, or learning how to cook better, and making healthier choices, simply by cooking.

Thanks for being here.

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Hello and welcome to The Cooking Solution — life gets better when you cook! Paid and free subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here. I am working on TONS of projects (I post updates and other non-food essays on I Am Not Lost). If you’d like to subscribe, paid or not, you can follow this link.

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In cooking, it’s okay to have just one thing.

In the early 1990s comedy City Slickers, the rough and imposing cowboy Curly — played by the late Jack Palance, tells Billy Crystal’s character Mitch the secret of life.

“Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t.”

Mitch spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out his one thing. Curly dies, the city folk have to herd the cattle across the plains on their own, and hilarity ensues.

I love big, complicated recipes, but sometimes it’s nice to have something simple, the one dish I always have in my back pocket, something I can make without thinking.

As you first learn to cook and get familiar with techniques, it’s okay to have favorites. You’ll naturally have some dishes you gravitate to, and there’s no problem if you make it on the regular. That’s why we call it comfort food, right? This is the dish you put in your cooking rotation, maybe even weekly.

For me that comfort food is Pork

and Beans. It’s easy, delicious, nutritious (at least high in fiber), doesn’t take long, and honestly doesn’t require a lot of thinking.

This sort of resembles chili, but we avoid that label we can also avoid the beans-vs-no-beans argument. It’s thick and hearty, and makes use of that fabulous cut of meat I discovered in St. Louis: pork steak, which is simply a pork shoulder cut into steaks.

This “recipe” also works with just about any dry spice mix, of which I have many. (Too many, some would say.) When I make this dish I sort through what I have in the panty, as I recommended in the Open that Jar Night post, and pick what’s speaking to me at the time.

As you learn more about cooking and explore different techniques, keep looking for your one thing. I bet you’ll even

end up with more than one.

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(I am hopeful that you have one. It only takes two generations to lose “survival skills” like cooking. If your grandmother — stereotypically, yes — didn’t teach your mom, and your mom didn’t teach you, then you probably don’t do much cooking yourself. But I can also be hopeful for exceptions to that rule.)

I remember helping my grandmother make buttermilk pancakes on Sunday mornings. I’d measure out the baking soda and sugar and maybe buttermilk, and she’d do the rest. Then I’d watch closely while the pancakes cooked on the griddle, and carefully pop the bubbles with the corner of an old metal spatula.

I can also remember a grade school-age cooking class, but I only remember being shown how to scrape the last bits of egg out of the shell with my finger. This is no longer considered a good idea, btw.

Then my cooking education took a long break. I’m sure I helped my mom here and there, but she was working hard just to get meals ready. In college I shared a house with two friends, and we ate a lot of ramen and frozen waffles. I remember being incredibly impressed when one roommate and his girlfriend made lasagna.

From there I learned the basics, and continue to learn. Cooking Light magazine was a key instruction manual for me. But I often think back to those pancakes and my first experience in the kitchen.

W.C. Fields famously quipped “don’t work with kids or animals,” referring to the unpredictability of both in live theater. And I’ve been plenty challenged in my Kakao career trying to conduct chocolate tastings for kids. I’ve had 9-year-olds who were wonderfully attentive, and 13-year-olds who were horrid. I keep trying kids’ chocolate parties, although after each of them — successful or otherwise — I swear I’ll never do a kids’ party again.

Then I got some brilliant advice from fellow Slow Foodie Farmer Kim: kids don’t like
sittin’ and gettin’. (Kim is from Texas, in case you couldn’t tell.) Littles, as she calls them, are much better at hands-on doing than sitting quietly and being talked to. (This applies to some adults, too.)

In her post Raising Kids in a Fast Food World she lists kitchen tasks for different age groups, beginning at THREE YEARS OLD:

Ages 3–5

Start with:

• washing produce

• tearing lettuce

• snapping beans

• stirring ingredients

• spreading soft foods

Ages 5–7

Introduce:

• nylon kid-safe knives

• measuring ingredients

• slicing strawberries

• soft vegetable prep

• simple recipes

Ages 8–10

Practice:

• recipe reading

• herb chopping

• salad making

• supervised knife skills

• stovetop basics

Ages 11+

Build confidence with:

• meal prep

• roasting vegetables

• seasoning food

• cooking for groups

• family meals

• food systems discussions

It all seems so reasonable, right?

If you’ve got kids, now you’ve got somewhere to start. We’re integrating these ideas, and more, into The Cooking Solution, too, and introducing classes for kids. We’re starting with 8-10 years old this summer, and expanding older and younger in the fall. We also have a Cooking for College class designed to help older teens move beyond ramen and frozen waffles. You’ll find our classes and events here.

I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot at these classes. After all, W.C. Fields also said, “The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.”

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Terra Madre translates directly to Earth Mother, a metaphor for the gathering of people dedicated to taking a more responsible role as we live on this planet. Petrini organized the first Terra Madre in 2004 as an international gathering of supporters of Slow Food, which Petrini founded in 1986 as a protest against a McDonald’s opening near the base of the famous Spanish Steps in Rome.

Ironically, in 1986 I was working at a McDonald’s in Duluth, Minnesota.

Incensed as he was about the fast food chain so near an important landmark, Petrini didn’t just assemble a simple protest. Already a proponent of cooking good food, and pushing back against rampant capitalism, he organized an entire movement. Within a few years, in 1989, he launched Slow Food with a manifesto signed in Paris by representatives of 15 countries.

While Petrini was forming a national organization promoting Good, Clean, Fair food for everyone, I was working for his nemesis. In my late high school and early college years, I was more concerned about earning money and having fun with friends, and even learning about cooking and cleaning (“if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”) and following Standard Operating Procedures.

Luckily, I also had an early start with conservation, from parents and our garden and small farm to my grandparents’ home cooking, and Ranger Rick magazine. That, along with my fast food experience, all helped direct my path through 20 years of corporate America into the food world, as a chocolate shop owner. I incorporated into Kakao Chocolate the principles of all-natural and made-by-hand, which we’ve stuck with for 18 years now.

A few years after starting Kakao, I connected with Slow Food, where I saw the overlap with Good-Clean-Fair, and became more involved with the local chapter, eventually joining the board and serving as co-president, and the traveling to Terra Madre.

My first Terra Madre in 2014 overwhelmed me with new foods and new ideas and new friends. I learned about the Ark of Taste and the Slow Food Presidia, and the importance of biodiversity. I not only learned about good cheese and wine and chocolate and so many other foods, but also about this global network of people determined to preserve them.

Ten years prior, Petrini had also founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences, a school dedicated to the art and science of good eating. When I first learned about UNISG, I assumed it was a culinary school, and since I didn’t want to become a chef I didn’t pay it any attention. Years later I learned it was so much more, and in 2024 found myself in the Master of New Food Thinking program there.

By then I had met and heard Petrini speak several times, and had read much of his writing. Still, I felt mesmerized when I first arrived on campus — too early for the scheduled tour — and was invited to wait in his (unoccupied) office. There were so many snails…

Petrini spent two afternoons talking to our MNFT class, and sharing his experience and wisdom with us. (He was particularly enthralled with the fact I was the only guy among 13 women in my program, and vigorously shook my hand as if to congratulate me.) He likened the geographic diversity in our class — we represented 10 countries — with the biodiversity that should be present in our food system.

This food system is severely broken, he explained. Only 30 crops provide 95% of global food demand. We use too many resources to get too few positive results — agriculture consumes more than two-thirds of total human water usage, and contributes one third of the pollution we create. And yet one-third of the food we produce globally — 1.5 billion pounds per year — is wasted. And while 1.7 billion (with a b) people are overfed or obese, 900 million people suffer from malnutrition.

Much of this comes from the global impact of fast food.

But even as things appear to be getting worse, Petrini also shared his plentiful optimism with us. We are at the beginning of a new phase of history, he explained, as we start to understand — truly, to re-understand — that our food system doesn’t need to be only about making a profit. We also are starting to look more closely at biodiversity, community, public and environmental health, and education, and better understand how they are all connected.

“If we forget about the common good, people will not be happy,” he said. “We don’t need to suffer, we need to increase pleasure and joy. We need to ensure for future generations the right to live in a healthy world, and you gastronomes need to lead.” He shared many examples of how various communities around the world were solving the problems in the food system, and bringing more joy to people’s lives, and encouraged us to be the agents of change for better food systems.

I actually learned a lot about cooking during my time working in a fast food restaurant (yes, we actually cooked food there in the 1980s), and that influenced my eventual move from the corporate world to owning a chocolate shop. My involvement with Slow Food motivated me to open two specialty food shops selling Slow Food-aligned products, and to teach cooking classes using good food. And my MNFT degree inspired me to teach more and different cooking classes with The Cooking Solution, where we teach people that life gets better when you cook.

Carlo Petrini, through his amazing life’s work, inspired and shaped much of my life, as he has for thousands of people around the world. He founded Slow Food and UNISG and more, and built them all to outlast his time with us. He was a true visionary, seeing both the enormous problems we’ve created in our food systems, and the ways we can solve them.

I encourage you to check out Slow Food, starting with Slow Food International or Slow Food USA. Check out the resources there, sign up for the newsletters, get involved in a local chapter. Get to know your food, and the people who make it, and learn how to make it better yourself, too. Be a part of Petrini’s vision.

You never know how it might change your life.

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Now’s your chance with my new invention — Open That Jar Night.

We’ve already talked about meal planning, and this is another tool you can add to your arsenal to plan meals for the week, while simultaneously making more room in your cupboard.

I have a bunch of jars like these. Some I got at a farmers market or specialty store, something I got on super-sale, or as a gift from someone’s garden or kitchen. I’m saving them for something, some occasion, some reason, some special — or not — dinner.

Do you have any of those in your cupboard?

The idea is based on Open That Bottle Night, introduced by the Wall Street Journal wine columnists in 1998. OTBN is the last Saturday in February, the night that you open the bottle of wine you’ve been saving. It’s something special, and you need a reason to enjoy it, and OTBN is that reason.

The process for OTJN is simple: as you’re planning your meals for the week, go to your cupboard and pick a jar. Grab any one. Don’t think about it, or pull out several and try to choose, just grab one.

Check it out — how can you prepare it? Read the label - what do you need to make it into a meal? Some meat or other protein? Some rice or noodles?

Then put that meal on your meal plan for a day this week, and put the ingredients you need on your shopping list. Now you’ve got dinner planned for at least one night, and you’re starting to make some more room in your pantry (maybe for more jars like this!).

Simple, right? Here are some other thoughts:

• If you grabbed a condiment, that’s super — this is your opportunity to make something to use with it. Caramelized onions = burgers. Mustard = grilled brats. Hot sauce = tacos.

• With some sauces, and especially condiments, you might not use the entire bottle. Condiments go back into the fridge, and most unused sauces can be refrigerated for a week, and frozen for weeks or months. (As long as there’s space in the jar for the sauce to expand when it freezes, the original jar won’t break. Or you can put it into a freezer bag — label it (before filling it!) and lay it flat to freeze, which will make it easier to stack.)

• Speaking of, this system can also be used with things in your freezer. It could be a leftover sauce, or a package of frozen meat you got on sale, whatever. Pick it, and plan to use it.

• Did you grab something sweet, like a jar of chocolate sauce? You might consider some type of sinister dessert-for-dinner scenario, or you might plan a special dessert for one night and reach back into the cupboard for another jar for a savory dinner.

• Maybe you have a lot of spice rubs (like I do). You can apply this same system, working with whatever protein or vegetable works best with the random spice mix you picked.

• Keep doing this, weekly, until you run out. Which you won’t, because you’ll always run into more, and replenish the stock. Which is great!

Whatever your situation, don’t make it complicated. The idea here is to use those jars in your pantry by working them into your meal plan for the week. And to look forward to a special meal with that special jar. And maybe even a special wine.

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The scenario is familiar: we worked late, we’re driving home hungry, the people we have to feed are probably hungry, and we’re wondering what we have to eat that’s easy and quick and satisfying. A few mental calculations later we’re dining out or ordering in, and most likely eating something unhealthy, not because we chose to, but because it was convenient. (I wrote about the “efficiency calculation” that leads to fast food here.)

One of the biggest enemies to cooking is Not Planning. The solution, of course, is Planning, which takes some effort, but I can assure you won’t take much time. You just need to plan for it. (Sorry…)

So sometime on Saturday or Sunday, or whenever you usually do your grocery shopping, take a half hour and make a plan. Certainly there are apps and special forms you can print, but you really just need a piece of paper and a pen. This needn’t be complicated.

Write down the days of the week (weeks conveniently come with seven days, but you might have a unique approach). If you write the day/menu list on the bottom of the page, you can keep the grocery list on top.

Then take a look at your schedule for the week. What nights are you home? What does everyone else in the house have on their schedule? Who else in the house will take an evening to make a meal? (This can complicate things a bit, because you’re counting on someone else to make a plan, too.)

Now you know which nights you have plenty of time to make something, and when you’ll need to be quick about it. Then put some menus items next to your days, and your meal plan will start taking shape. And don’t forget about the side dishes!

Here’s where I turn to my cookbook collection (which is too big, and has too many books with too many sticky notes marking recipes I plan to make) and find something new, that maybe will take more time. I might also plug in some standards, one of those dishes I can make anytime. For the quick-turnaround nights, I might plan for something easy and awesome (future post!), maybe even using one of those jars in the pantry (another future post!). You might also prepare a large quantity of something, as I did with the pork on Thursday, so I could use it as an ingredient on Friday (this is meal prepping, and yet another future post!). Planning, again.

When you’ve got a meal for each day, then create your shopping list, and write that on the top part of the page. You should also include the staples that need restocking. This is where I get up and check the fridge and pantry to make sure I have enough mayo or cream cheese or ketchup. Don’t assume you have enough oregano in the spice cabinet — check it.

If you’re super clever, you can build your shopping list like the store itself, and group the fresh vegetables separate from the dairy, meat, and dry goods.

Now you’re ready for the grocery store, which is full of opportunity, which is what we call it when you see chicken on sale, or the fennel doesn’t look very fresh. And of course you’re also shopping at the farmers market, which is ripe with these types of opportunity meals (future post!).

It’s okay to change your menu plan. As someone once said, no plan is good that cannot be changed. But if you start with a plan, you can more easily adjust it when you need, without getting into that hangry situation.

By taking some time to plan ahead, you’ll know what you’re going to eat that night because you’ve already planned to make it (I think this is a future post, too, yes?). You won’t make bad eating choices because you’ve already made the better choice to plan ahead. Planning to cook is the solution.

What tips do you have for meal planning? Or what obstacles get in the way?

Leave a comment

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We’re not as healthy as we’d like. Everything, especially food, especially at restaurants, is expensive. Maybe we’d like to lose a few pounds. We’re connected to the entire world through our phones, but we still feel disconnected from everything. Plus reading the news nowadays is exhausting.

We’ve got a lot of problems. And I think cooking can be part of the solution.

During my sabbatical attending graduate school in Italy, and working for several months in Barcelona, I learned a lot about cooking, about communities, about collaborating.

The food in Europe, especially countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, is not only superb, but really simple. As in, four or five ingredients simple.

There are two reasons why. First, the cooks in these countries use a lot of easy but super ways to coax the best flavors out of those few ingredients. Second, they use really good ingredients, fresh from the farm, or only minimally processed.

Back in the U.S., I saw how so much of that was missing here. The grocery stores in Italy and Spain had plenty of processed foods, with lots of ingredients, and even artificial flavors and preservatives. But grocery stores in the United States are stuffed with ultra-processed foods. We even have an acronym, UPFs.

And good food in the USA is expensive, or at least that’s what most people think. We’ve learned to shop for the lowest prices and not the best foods, which leads us to honey mixed with corn syrup, and peanut butter with added vegetable oil and sugar, and all the other UPFs in the middle of the grocery store.

Then we eat this cheap, bad food, and wonder why we’re not feeling great, and why we can’t lose weight. Well, it’s mostly because there’s a $13 billion industry aimed solely at making you eat more of their junk.

Americans miss a lot of the community of food, too. The small Italian town I lived in mostly closed down weekday early afternoons so people could go home and have lunch with their families. They did the same most of the day Sundays. These were times when people got together and cooked and socialized and enjoyed each other in person.

In the USA we eat lunch at our desks so we can keep working. We mindlessly eat dinner while watching television. Often, even when we eat together, we eat alone.

I believe learning to cook can help solve these problems.

Using a few ingredients, from the outer edges of the grocery store, and acquiring a few simple techniques, you can learn to cook great food.

The Cooking Solution is here to help.

This isn’t about subscribing to some breakthrough meal plan. We’re not selling a meal replacement drink or dietary supplements.

It’s about showing you some simple things you can do, easily and quickly, that will connect you to your food, show you how to make simple and delicious meals, and in general, make your life better.

You’ll learn how to plan for the week, and how to pivot when plans go awry. We’ll show you how to keep some basic things on hand to make a quick meal at the last minute, instead of ordering delivery or heading to the drive-thru. And we’ll share inspiring stories to help you keep on track.

If you already know how to cook, we've got you covered, too! You’ll find new cooking techniques to add to your arsenal, and we’ll explore different cuisines and dishes to add variety to your kitchens.

We’ll have in-person classes, held in the kitchen at Kakao Chocolate in Maplewood. If you live outside the St. Louis area (or even if you do) we’ll also have online classes where you can cook in the comfort of your own home. You can find our latest TCS classes here. And we’re building an “underground shop,” where you’ll be able to get some great ingredients you can’t find in other stores.

And, bit by bit, we’ll show you how cooking makes life better.

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Alone, that is, until 54 children surrounded me — probably only 12, but seemed like 54 since they and their chaperones were all using outside voices. My Italian language skills peaked shortly after I learned buongiorno and grazie, but I think she was yelling at the children to be more quiet.

The journey from St. Louis to Bra took 29 hours, three planes, four airports, a car, a train, and plenty of walking. It was really only 22 hours because I gained seven time zones back, but the trans-Atlantic flight was only six hours from Boston to Madrid, leaving little time to actually sleep.

From St. Louis to Boston, seated in the very back of the plane, I enjoyed The Mostly Serious History of Wine, which caught the attention of Shannon, the woman across the aisle from me. Shannon asked about the show, and we chatted, and since we were both transferring in Boston to Madrid, she invited me to join her in the Sapphire Lounge. I shared with her some of my adventures, and she told me about her family moving from Naples to Cadiz, her visit back home to St. Louis for a wedding, and her son’s obsession with snails. (I still cannot imagine how a single kid can bring home 70 snails.)

But eventually I stepped off the train in Bra, returning to the small Italian town where I lived nine months as I studied at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in my Masters of New Food Thinking program. I spent a couple of days here in October at graduation, but had already fully moved away last July for my internship in Barcelona.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said a person cannot cross the same stream twice, because the second time both the stream and the person have changed, and I felt that to my core on this visit. Bra, Pollenzo, the Uni, were all the same, but also completely different. There were familiar and new shops and restaurants, the same construction scaffolding but now additional work happening down the block, the Uni looks the same, but there’s a new fancy copy machine. And foosball tables?!?!?

And I was the same, but also different, having spent the summer in Barcelona, then moving back to St. Louis and returning to my chocolate business of 18 years, and the lack of the specialty food business I co-owned for the previous five and closed last year. Now armed with my new Master’s degree, and having transformed over a dozen life-changing experiences, I have loads of ideas for Kakao, new cuisines and preparations to explore, and even new business prospects. I look at everything differently, and ask more and better questions.

But right now I have returned to UNISG not as a student, or even as a graduate, but as an instructor — specifically a UNISG didactic instructor, definitely not a professor. With a love for sharing my knowledge and experience, and many years of operating Kakao, it seemed a great opportunity to teach a chocolate class to the current MNFT class. The Uni accepted my proposal, and here I am.

I won’t go on about how much fun it was to share what I’ve learned about the ancient and contemporary history of chocolate, and about its polymorphic crystallization qualities, and the importance of the tempering curve to create the strongest chocolate structure. I’ll spare you the details of answering their questions about chocolate, and also about my experiences in the MNFT program and telling stories about adventures with my 12 sisters.

I will simply say it was awesome to be on the other side of the desk, sharing and teaching and listening to the thoughtful silence as they sampled chocolates and confections.

I hope to return again, to teach about chocolate, or maybe storytelling.

It was also wonderful to visit and catch up with friends. Momo and her new book about hidden treasures in Torino, Teresa leading this year’s MNFT class as the tutor, Marlies continuing to push forward with her doctoral thesis while photographing hands and bees. Maria working toward an Italian driver’s license and cooking exquisite dishes. Maddalena also thesising, in addition to teaching, asking great questions, and walking her mom’s dogs. Kiva working in the Food Lab and helping students find their way around. Alice creating an Ark of Taste book and preparing for several months in South America. Giovanni helping students and others find places to live. Vin creating new opportunities with culinary study trips to India. Noemi making so many people happy with her pizzas.

All the same, and completely different. I am a bit older, hopefully wiser, and seeing everything through increasingly curious eyes.

And so my return to UNISG, just as my earlier — and upcoming — return to Kakao, becomes an extension, an evolution, a new growth. Each time we cross that river, we can notice the differences in the river, and in ourselves, and learn more about both as we travel across.

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I am spinning a lot of plates while simultaneously keeping a bunch of irons in the fire. Specifically, I’m working on a big What’s Next project, that you’ll hear more about in the coming weeks. Stay close!

This recipe takes a bit of time, but it’s really simple and SOOOO worth it. You’ll end up with a vegetarian dish exploding with umami flavors.

And, quickly, a few words about “hot dish.” It’s a Minnesotan term for a casserole, made in a casserole dish, usually with pasta or rice, some sort of creamy sauce (often “cream of something” soup), perhaps a protein, and something on top like melted cheese or crispy onions or tater tots. There are lots of ways to do this, resulting in many different recipes, but there are no hard and fast rules. If you feel better calling it a Casserole, please do so.

Whatever you call it, this dish does take several hours, because you’re going to cook down about 4 pounds/2 kilo of onions to 12 ounces/340 grams, which will get you to some serious caramelization. Give yourself 4–5 hours for the entire meal, which is perfect to hang around the warm stove on a cold, wintry day.

Ingredients

4 pounds/2 kilo yellow onions
1/4 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
5 teaspoons flour
4 cups beef stock (or vegetable if you prefer)
8 oz/225 grams cremini or other dark mushroom, chopped
1 package (1 pound or half-kilo) uncooked hefty pasta
8 oz/225 grams Gruyère or other shreddable cheese

First, peel and then slice those onions as thin as you possibly can. Use a mandolin if you have one. Super thin. No, thinner. Thinnest.

Then get a Dutch oven or other big heavy pot and put the onions, olive oil, and salt on low heat. Stir them occasionally, and let them cook down to their essence, which takes hours. This removes much of the water and gets to the sugar, which is going to caramelize as it continues to cook.

You will need patience here. In the picture above, I started with the onion slices on top. The middle of the pic shows two hours later, as much of the water has cooked off and things are starting to brown. The bottom picture reveals the caramelization we seek, after three hours.

This takes a long time because it’s a lot of onions. If you want to caramelize a single onion, you can do the same in about a half hour. You can also do this in a slow cooker, as described here or here, which requires 10+ hours, but hardly any stirring.

When the onions are deeply caramelized, you’ll need to get some other things ready. First, put the onions in a separate bowl, throw the mushrooms and some olive oil in the pan, turn up the heat, and stir. We’re not going to cook the mushrooms down too much, but we want to at least get them nice and soft.

Also, pre-heat the oven to 350F/175C, and also get the stock in a separate pot and heat it up.

Now, add the onions to the mushrooms, add the balsamic vinegar and flour, and stir. When that all glops together (it will glop), add the hot stock to the onions, a cup or two at a time, stirring constantly. The broth will thicken, and look like this. Turn the heat down to a simmer.

Take the pot you used for the stock and get some heavily salted water boiling for the pasta. You want a solid, sauce-clinging shape like rigatoni, fusilli, or radiatori. Cook the pasta as the package directs, minus one minute of cooking time.

Drain the pasta, reserving one cup of water, and put the pasta and pasta water in the onion-mushroom stew. Stir that up good. Give it a taste, and add some salt and pepper if you want.

Spread some olive oil all over the bottom and sides of a big baking dish — a casserole — and dump in the contents of the pot. Grate the cheese on top, spreading it evenly. Put it in the oven and bake for 30 minutes. If you like, you can carefully broil it to brown the cheese.

The result is an umami feast. The sweetness of the onions makes it rich and jammy, the stock, mushrooms, and cheese give it supreme meatiness without actual meat. As I said, this takes all afternoon to make, but on a cold day, you’ll understand why it’s worth the effort.

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Basque Country in Spain offers many delectable dishes, and many come in the form of pintxos, the small, beautiful, and delicious bites found in nearly every restaurant and bar I saw in Old Town San Sebastián.

One might equate pintxos with tapas and be completely right, and completely wrong, at the same time. Both are not just something to eat, but also a culture and way of life, not just what you consume but how you enjoy it. Pintxos might be served on bread with a wooden skewer holding it together, but it also might be served on a plate, like many tapas servings. Pintxos are more northern Spain and tapas are more south, but I had many skewered bites in Barcelona, although they were mostly called tapas. Do you stand or sit? Yes. Finger food or knife and fork? Yes.

For now, I’ll leave my definitions with a bit of overlap. (Also, I remain unsure about pintxo vs. pintxos, in case anyone has any advice for us all.)

Here in San Sebastián, they take their Pintxos seriously — so seriously they even have the Pintxo Institute of San Sebastián, dedicated to protecting and promoting the hometown hero. The institute has an annual guidebook, hosts a big gala, and promotes a contest.

So, very seriously.

And it’s easy to see why, as each pintxo is its own work of art.

These are my day’s worth of pintxos — the full extent of my meals Monday — with my best descriptions as I tried to sketch and analyze and also savor each bite.

Above is breakfast, with black pudding, a.k.a. blood sausage, but here it is morcilla, a local Basque delicacy made from very specific ingredients: rice (Designation of Origin from Valencia), onion, pork fat, paprika (Designation of Origin from La Vera in Extremadura), black pepper, and, yes, pork blood. While the Spanish version dates back to the 18th century in Valencia, the prized version is made here in Basque.

The morcilla covers thin slices of jamón, and is topped with caramelized onion jam.

Top left was served warm, a kind of Croque Monsieur Gratin, with potatoes and ham in béchamel sauce, topped with melted cheese.

Middle/bottom is pickled sardines over grilled green and red peppers, over a dark, rich, fig jam. Little spurts of aioli and crispy jamón top it all off.

On the right might have been my favorite. Thin-sliced jamón over a soft and funky goat cheese, over a layer of sweet pepper jam. And more crispy jamón, of course.

The top pintxos above is a fresh cod cutlet, breaded and fried, topped with a pepper salad and drops of pesto.

Below that, the piquillo pepper has a thin skin but still strong enough to hold a stuffing of seafood salad, topped with a pepper relish.

Starting on the left, it may look like a typical Spanish tortilla, which in America we would call a potato omelet or frittata. But this one is stuffed with ham and cheese, nice and melty.

The skewer in the middle might look like a simple fish-kabob, but between the grilled fish pieces are tiny slices of grilled red and green peppers (assembly must be like threading needles), all decorated with spots of pesto and sweet pepper jam.

And this artistic fellow — half a hard-boiled egg over a slice of smoked salmon, topped with aioli, shredded cheese, and grated preserved egg yolks. And at the top of the skewer flies an unmistakable shrimp flag.

Finally, one cannot visit Basque Country without indulging in Basque Cheesecake. The texture surprised me — far from its heavy appearance and the creamy cheesecake I’ve had before, it was light with a firm cake-like consistency. Certainly not crumbly, but solid, maybe like a sweet omelet. And of course the “burnt” surface, …

In each restaurant, they line the bar with all the selections, and you order by naming or pointing or sometimes filling out a form with the corresponding number and quantity. Below is a video from one of the bars I visited.

I’ve been thinking about the work that goes behind all this, but while each selection is different, many share the same ingredients (grilled peppers), and much of that would be prepared ahead in batches lasting days or weeks (fig jam). Nearly everything is made ahead, sometimes quickly reheated in a microwave, although some items need to be cooked to order.

For a meal at home, you’d need to focus on just two or three items, more if you’re hosting a group. But with some planning and prep, it would be a meal deserving of its own gala.

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I already felt slightly anxious about my itinerary for the day: take an afternoon flight from Barcelona to Bilbao, then a city bus to the main bus station, then another bus to San Sebastián and my flat. It’s Sunday, so there are fewer buses, and not conveniently timed to my scheduled arrival, so any deviation would present a challenge.

The flight was situation-normal until a thunderstorm over the city made the approach to the Bilbao airport pretty rough. When, instead of landing, the plane accelerated and climbed, and I assumed we were going to loop around to take another shot.

The captain’s announcement was in Spanish, but when I heard him say “Barcelona” and saw the other passengers gasp, I knew we would not be arriving in Bilbao anytime soon.

And when, back at BCN, they didn’t just fill up the gas tank and make another go at it, but instead ushered us off the plane and directed to a customer service desk outside baggage claim, where we would take a bus (?!?), then I realized all my plans were up in the air. Or not, as the case may be.

Now I have some options — I could stick with the airline’s plan, arrive in Bilbao in the wee hours and try to find my way to the flat in San Sebastián. Or I could try to cancel the flat, or change and stay a night in Bilbao and find San Sebastián in the daylight. I could stay another night in Barcelona and start over with another flight tomorrow. Or I could bag the whole Basque thing and take a train to Zaragoza, which was an earlier idea for the trip. All options, not all good options, but I’m still hoping for my travel karma to reveal itself.

I followed the crowd, keeping my sights on the woman who was seated across the aisle from me, hoping she might know where this service desk was. We exchanged smiles as we walked, and we and her seatmate formed a team to eventually find the long line of other passengers and the customer service desk that was clearly not marked with the name of the airline.

My new friend did some reconnaissance and learned the plan: we would be, eventually, loaded on buses to enjoy a 7-8 hour ride to Bilbao. Quite a difference from the 75-minute flight that had just carried me directly over my destination.

My teammate spoke English with a French accent, and presented herself as a serious problem solver. She had planned to rent a car in Bilbao to get to her destination, so now she would go home, get her own car, and make the 5.5-hour drive herself. She invited me and her seatmate to come along and share the driving and petrol costs.

The travel karma was starting to reveal itself…

Her destination was in the French part of Basque Country, and I’m headed for San Sebastián, which was along her route, but her seatmate was going home to Bilbao, a bit out of the way, and she decided she would stick with the bus.

It was at this point I felt it a good time to introduce myself, and formally met my new friend, Véronique. (And to explain that my name was French but I wasn’t.)

We took the airport bus back to the city, through the pouring rain, decided to take a taxi rather than walk 10 minutes in the downpour, which stopped just before we got off the bus so we could easily walk.

Now my travel karma is working…

Traffic was heavy getting out of the city, and we encountered a long-backup for a lane closure along the way, so the trip was a bit more than 5.5 hours. But Véronique and I had a lovely time, exchanging stories and asking each other deep questions as we drove in and out of more thunderstorms and wondered what the landscape beyond the motorway looked like.

The travel karma now worked perfectly, as Véronique was a thoughtful, inquisitive, and fascinating driving/riding companion. She retired as a career coach several years ago, and lives in Barcelona where she sings in a gospel choir and practices watercolor, and connects with her children and grandkids in Barcelona, France, and the US. She’s super well-traveled, and next week goes to South Africa with her newly reconnected love, who lives in Stockholm.

Véronique dropped me off at the door to my flat in San Sebastián just before 2am. I look forward to staying connected with her and hopefully seeing her again when I return to Barcelona sometime.

And, I continue to be thankful for my travel karma.

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I get a lot more done when there’s a lot that needs doing.

There’s something about a pressing backlog of projects with imminent deadlines and not quite enough time — that’s when I find myself super-productive.

So now the December rush at Kakao is over, the shop is only open four days a week, I have lots to do but an abundance of time to do it, and I feel very little is getting done.

But I’m not completely idle, and some things still happen.

First, I’ve scheduled two pop-up classes at Kakao (listed here) to share more of what I learned on my sabbatical, and since. On February 18 is Understanding Flavor - How to Make the Most of Good Taste, where we’ll explore how taste and aroma work together to create flavor, and learn how to create and blend and enhance different flavors to become better cooks, or at least better eaters.

On February 20 I’m repeating an overview of Lessons from Italy and Spain, sharing some things I learned at University, moving to Italy, attending classes and study trips with 13 ladies, creating an amazing internship, and living in Barcelona first with two cats, and then on a sailboat.

I’m also working on a hands-on workshop on fermentation — anyone interested in making sauerkraut with me?

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I’m also headed to San Diego for the Winter FancyFaire, a specialty food expo. I’ve attended these expos for years, mostly focusing on items to resell. This time will be a bit about all-natural treats to resell at Kakao, but also collecting ideas for What’s Next for Brian.

“I wonder what’s next for Brian?” you may wonder (I wonder the same).

First, after returning from San Diego I’m going back to Spain, but just for a week, kind of because I have to, because I have a ticket. I didn’t know my summer plans when I went back to Italy last January, so I bought a one-way ticket. And because a round-trip costs just a bit more than a one-way, from that point I started buying RT tickets originating in Europe. (So technically, at the moment, I guess you could say I’m just visiting the U.S.)

When I came back at the end of my sabbatical, I booked the return trip to Barcelona for 90 days later, to accommodate tourist visa requirements. And that return trip is in two weeks! I’m only staying a week, visiting friends in BCN (including the cats’ momma, to keep that channel open, right?) before traveling north to Bilbao and San Sebastián in Basque Country — lots of culinary exploration to do there — and then flying back from Madrid.

I do have a backlog of Substack posts that need finishing, but you’ll surely hear more about Basque cuisine first. I’m very excited to check out a region of Spain I haven’t visited, and try the marmitako stew and bacalao al pil pil. And the cheesecake!

The recipe for the stew pictured above can be found here, and I’m sure it’s fine, but just a quick look tells me there’s room to make it better and more accessible for U.S. cooks, so stay tuned for a different version after I do a bit of on-site research.

If you’re keeping score at home, you might have questions about the back leg of the RT ticket. Where? When?

Well, that ticket goes back to Torino in March, because I’m traveling back to UNISG to teach! Even before I started the Masters of New Food Thinking program, I hoped I would find an opportunity to someday teach there, and, well, here we are, or, rather, there we will be. I will instruct the current MNFT class for two half-days in the art and science of chocolate, which seems like a good fit, yes?

Important: I am not a Professor, not even a Visiting Professor — I am, as clearly defined in the agreement, a “UNISG didactic instructor.” Just call me Brian, please.

Meanwhile…

I actually do have a plan for What’s Next, and it definitely involves lots of writing here about food and cooking (and sometimes other things), and also pop-ups at Kakao with demonstrations — excuse me, Anna, showcooking — and hands-on classes and tasting presentations. And other components as well, all part of a purposefully designed business.

Part of that purposeful design will include regular postings here, which leads me to another heartfelt thank you for your support, and some simple asks.

First, if you like what you read here, and you want to read it regularly, and even support it financially, you can subscribe by clicking on the button below.

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Or, if you don’t want to commit to becoming a paid subscriber, you can buy me a cup of coffee. Literally, if you’re in St. Louis and have some time, let’s get together! Or, if you’re not nearby, you can still buy me a coffee by clicking this button:

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As always, thank you so very much for your support!

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