It's been a bit on the nippy side recently, and the depths of winter are upon us, so what better time to make split pea soup. I like mine with ham, but with a few alterations we'll discuss it's very easy to make this a vegetarian dish. Dried split peas, like lentils, are cheap and easy to find, plus they cook without any additional preparation and they're filling. You Will Need: Split Peas Ham? Onions Other Vegetables? Spices Oil Salt/Stock/Bouillon Cubes Water Split Peas If you happen to have them, you can make this soup with toor dal instead (toor dal is just split pigeon rather than green peas) but the traditional way is with split green peas. Buy them dry in the supermarket, and there's no reason to pay more for a brand here; the generic will do just fine. One pound makes four healthy servings, particularly if you have a nice crusty bread to go with your soup, but this soup freezes well and making more is just as easy. Ham? The best way to make this soup is with...

This isn't so much a recipe as a family of recipes, a technique for better chicken, or maybe just a string of ideas. That said, I'm going to give you the spice blend I started making this with, then in variations we'll talk all about the myriad different ways you can prepare this dish once you have the basic idea. You might have heard of buttermilk fried chicken and thought that the buttermilk must be part of the batter. But in fact the buttermilk is what you brine the chicken in, and while it does sometimes become a part of the coating, that's not its primary function. Chicken soaked in buttermilk becomes more tender and more resistant to overcooking. You might have read the preceding paragraph and thought, "Why is he talking about buttermilk? I thought this was yogurt chicken." And you'd be right, except that while American cooks have figured out that buttermilk marination is a good way to preserve moisture in chicken, many of them don't know that th...

  From top left clockwise: ground green, green seeds, whole green pods, whole black pods I promise, I'm not just doing all the spices that start with C. If coriander and cumin are the bases of a lot of savory spice mixes, cardamom is from the land of sweets, though you'll frequently find it playing in the savory pool in Indian cuisine. You're most likely to have experienced cardamom in Indian food, where it plays a prominent role in many desserts, and also in tea (chai frequently has cardamom in it, if you've wondered why simply adding mulling spice to your tea didn't make it taste quite right), but while it's wonderful when paired with sweet flavors, you're missing out if you don't try it with something assertive and meaty. Taste When most people think of cardamom they think of the green variety, but confusingly there's a black cardmom as well. Black cardamom is a slightly different variety of the plant, and the seed pods are larger and have been dr...

 To some people, chili without meat is sacrilege. This recipe is proof that they're just snobs. No one likes a chili snob, even though there seem to be an awful lot of them around these days. All snobbery aside, this recipe is a quick chili with lots of flavor that can be thrown together fairly quickly from non-perishable ingredients. And as we'll discuss, if you feel the need to add meat, you certainly can. I find that you don't need it, but if it'll trick that difficult eater into eating beans and vegetables, by all means use whatever weapons are in your arsenal. On the other hand, this chili is vegan if you don't add any dairy, and it's easy enough to make to avoid most allergens if necessary. You Will Need: Black beans Onions Tomatoes Peppers Oil Spices Salt and sugar Black beans Okay, so here's the time to talk about it: beans do have different flavors and aren't all interchangeable. Black beans add an earthy, almost meaty texture to chili, but some...

 If there's one lesson to take from cooking, it's that you can usually add more but it's hard to take too much out. Obviously if your dish needs salt, you can add a little, but if you've got too much salt? There are a bunch of folk techniques involving potatoes and probably praying to Odin, and I'm here to tell you that sometimes, you added too much salt and there's no coming back from it. I am a person who likes his seasonings (as is probably clear). Once, when I was a poor college student working for pennies a day in an internship, I had scraped together one last meal out of my week's grocery budget, a nice sauce of tomatoes and crumbled up meatloaf (ok, so it was a nice meal for my budget) and I was just putting the finishing touches on it, adding some salt, just a pinch, and then a little pepper. And the top of my pepper bottle came off (I wish I could have afforded a grinder, but I was using pre-ground) and poured an entire dollar's worth of pepper ...

Eggs are a cheap and easy form of protein but unfortunately a lot of people associate them strictly with breakfast. And perhaps more people think that they're hard to cook. Nothing could be further from the truth. This recipe is as easy to make for one person as it is for a crowd. You can even make them in batches and hold them in a low oven until it's time to serve. And don't worry if you overcook the eggs; this isn't Eggs Benedict. It's vaguely Turkish-inspired and I'll talk some condiments you can use to tip it into that part of the world, but with different seasonings it's just as easy to make it from other parts of the Mediterranean or even across the oceans to the New World or the Spice Islands. You Will Need: Onions Spinach Oil Eggs Salt Spices Onions For a small dish, you'll want a small onion. For a larger one, you guessed it, a larger one. Or several smaller ones. Or my personal suggestion, more or less of a bag of frozen diced onions. If you d...

A lot of recipes (yours truly included sometimes) tell you when to add your spices and only mention them once. And sometimes that's for a good reason. Tempering , for instance, relies on late addition and quick heating. If you add your tempering too soon in the process, you might as well not have tempered; you could just as easily have added the spices to oil at the beginning and started from that base, and indeed many recipes tell you to do that instead. The thing is, as you become more comfortable with spices (and this is why it's important to become more comfortable with spices) you'll learn what adding them at different points does for the flavor. Some spices shouldn't be added right at the end because they're too intense, but you can temper them first. Some spices should only be added at the end because otherwise you'll lose all their flavor by heating them. But a lot of spices live in a middle ground, where they taste different depending on how long you co...

  Cumin is one of my most-used and favorite spices, right alongside coriander, so we're getting the heavy hitters out of the way first. It can really be thought of as two different spices: the whole seed and the ground seed. We'll discuss taste a little later, but the whole seed might be mistaken for dill seed or caraway, but is quite distinct in flavor. Slightly smaller and pointier than caraway, slightly larger than dill Cumin is used in cuisines across the world, from east to west and everything in between. You've most likely run into it in Mexican food, but it pops up in soul food, Cajun and Creole, curry, and is likely in any bean dish you've ever had that had an earthy tone. It's usually not the star of the dish, but you can taste it in the background. It's like the bass player of the spice world. Taste Cumin is really three different spices: fresh whole cumin seeds (and to a certain extent very fresh ground cumin, like if you ground it yourself a minute a...