A week ago, I was over at my friend Sharmaine's house, sitting on her comfortable brown couch in her cozy kitchen while our sons played with trains and trucks and cars on the floor, sort of ignoring each other while they played, but sort of stealing sweet little glances at each other every so often, too. We talked about work and life and parenting, the usual stuff, while her husband Thomas pulled a simple chocolate cake from the oven and we all had some, still warm and lovely. Then Hugo had to go crumb-hunting on the big brown couch, of course, and after that the boys ran around without pants on for a while and Sharmaine told me that there was going to be chili at her birthday party a few days later and I said I'd bring cornbread. After that it was time to go home, so we packed up and left after Jackson and Hugo kissed goodbye at the front door and we all went "awww", and then I couldn't stop thinking about making chili for the rest of the week.

So this is a post about chili.

I was well into my third decade of life before I understood that chili wasn't just something served up at potlucks and Mexican restaurants in Germany. I didn't know that there were rules and strictures about what goes into chili and what doesn't go into chili. And I certainly didn't know about the Chili Appreciation Society International. (!)

Now I do. And while the Italian side of me has a profound respect for food rules, I must confess and beg forgiveness for having found a chili that I love that certainly does not abide by the no-bean rule, which - as I understand it - is likely to be Rule Number One about chili. It's just that this chili is simply so good, as its name already suggests, that it pains me to let it pass by. It's so complex and wonderful, sweet and spicy, and you can just about make it with your eyes closed.

The chili boasts beer and cocoa and coffee, ground meat and beans, and a warm sprinkling of spices. It cooks for an hour or longer, turning the sauce a wonderfully rich, deep brown, almost mahogany. We ate our bowls of chili topped with diced avocado, sliced scallions and a few long shreds of grated cheddar, to bring a bit of color and texture and creaminess into play, and felt almost comically satisfied with our dinner, no cornbread required.

Rules are rules for a reason, I'll admit. But I'm so glad this chili exists.

***

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm going to be teaching a food writing class in Berlin later this month. The class starts May 20 and runs for 7 weeks. There will be reading and writing assignments, snacks by yours truly and it should, I hope, be a whole lot of fun. The stack below is just a sampling of the kinds of texts I think the world needs more of and that we're going to get into. If you're interested in attending, please visit The Reader for more info and to register. And feel free to spread the word!

Jennifer Steinhauer's Just Good Chili
Original recipe here
Serves 4

2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 pound ground beef
1/2 pound ground pork
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 12-ounce bottle of beer
1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup strong brewed coffee
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon ancho chile powder
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
Half a serrano or other hot pepper, seeded and finely chopped, or to taste
1 1/2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
2 15-ounce cans kidney beans

1. Place a Dutch oven or other large pot over medium heat. Add the oil and heat until shimmering. Add the meat and sauté until browned, then transfer to a plate.

2. Add the onion to the pot and stir for 1 minute. Take two large sips from the beer, and pour the rest into the pot. Stir in the tomatoes, coffee and tomato paste.

3. Add the brown sugar, chile sauce, cocoa powder, hot pepper, cumin, coriander, cayenne, salt and kidney beans. Return the meat to the pot. Reduce heat to low and simmer, partly covered, for at least 1 hour (Longer cooking improves the flavor.) Adjust salt and cayenne pepper as needed and serve.

I'll bet you've been wondering where I've been, haven't you. Felled by the flu, perhaps, you think. Off visiting her husband in his faraway city, maybe. No, dear reader, I was right here the whole time, only instead of cooking and writing or cleaning up my desk space (urgh) during my spare time this past week, I was deep - deep - into Downton Abbey. Yes, it's true. I abandoned you for an English television show. Forgive me. I can't help it. It is just so good.

I'm almost at the end of Season 3 now (how, you fellow Downton freaks gasp? Right here. You're welcome, unless you want to get anything done again, ever, in which case, I'm sorry.) and am finally coming up for air and it occurred to me that it might be nice to, you know, get back to work again or at least vacuum the apartment so that my child doesn't start teething on dust bunnies, seeing as he's starting to learn how to scoot forwards and sideways all of a sudden. (And has two teeth! Two bottom teeth!)

I have cooked now and then in the past week, most notably last Sunday when I made my mother a birthday lunch consisting of salt cod (chewy!), a plethora of delicately steamed vegetables (pain in the necky!) and a big old bowl of mayonnaise (this one) that broke not once but twice before I found the best trick ever for saving broken mayonnaise. (There was a lemon tart, too, that was a disaster from start to finish, but I'm not going to dwell on that now, am I. Confectioner's sugar hid a multitude of sins and it was gobbled up in no time, thank goodness.)

Salt cod, cooked vegetables and boiled eggs served with a big bowl of garlicky mayonnaise is called le grand aïoli in southern France and during this very cold, very gray January, it was a welcome change from the usual meaty stew I would have thought to serve for a lunch party. All complaining aside, it was actually quite fun to cook, too. The salt cod soaked on the balcony for several days before the lunch and then only had to be briefly boiled and skinned and shredded the day of the party. I prepared the vegetables the morning of the lunch, roasting the beets in the oven to concentrate their sweetness, while doing the rest - Romanesco, small, sweet carrots, tiny potatoes, golden-yolked eggs and fennel wedges - one after another on the stove. And Max was home to entertain Hugo, so all was right with the world.

Well, until that mayonnaise broke. The first time, I tried to save it with an additional egg yolk (put it in a clean bowl, carefully whisking the broken mayonnaise into it until it's nice and thick again). But then it broke again. This time, I had no more egg yolks to rely on. Our guests were arriving and things were getting very hot under my collar. (Did I mention the lemon tart from hell? It was staring at me balefully from the kitchen counter, under its blanket of powdered sugar.)

I ran to the computer for help and found this tip: instead of an additional egg yolk, put a spoonful of mustard in a clean bowl and whisk in the broken mayonnaise. (The genius tip comes from none other than Julia Child, goddess of frazzled daughters trying to cook their mother's birthday lunches everywhere.) Max handed the baby off to a pair of eager hands and came in to help. He whisked while I poured the broken mayonnaise (is there anything more hideous?) into the bowl and, lo and behold, a thick, glossy, delicious mayonnaise emerged (and it didn't taste like mustard, in case you were wondering). I practically cartwheeled with joy.

Gently steaming the vegetables until they're just done ensures that they taste fresh and sweet - so good that they hardly need a thing to dress them except for a big dollop of mayonnaise. That mayonnaise ties all the things on the table together, the chewy cod and the rich, soft eggs, too. It's the base note of a delicious little symphony. I'd even go so far as to say that that it was a ray of sun straight from southern France on that cold Berlin day.

One thing you should know about living in Berlin is that there is no good Indian food here. None. There are plenty of Indian restaurants, but for some reason they all serve a variation on the same strangely insipid, gloppy mixtures that hold barely any resemblance to the Indian food I ate in Boston and New York over the years. The menus present no hint that India is a huge country, with myriad regions and cuisines (wherefore art thou, masala dosas of my heart?). And forget about anything spicy. Just forget it right now.

Oh, it's sad, alright. Whenever I go to London to visit my friend Betsy, we order takeaway from the Indian joint down the street from her and it is so good, so hot and complex and delicious, that I very willingly forgo all other meals in the city just to have that Indian food again and again. And then I return to Berlin and I hear about some new Indian place that has opened up and I get my hopes up, against my better judgment, and I go and once again am presented with mango chicken or some such train wreck and I feel deeply dejected all over again.

Luckily, a lot of Indian food isn't so hard to make at home. (Though I leave dosas and iddlies to the experts in New York.) Thanks to my father's obsession with Indian cooking, I even have a nice little collection of Indian cookbooks, full of wonderful things to eat. And anyway, it's not like I'm getting out of the house much these days. Hugo's nap schedule takes precedence over all.

I found this recipe for black lentil soup the other day when I staring at a jar of beluga lentils in my pantry and wondering how I'd use them up without a nice piece of salmon lying around to pair them with. Here you parboil the lentils with ginger and cardamom. Then you make a soup base with onions, garlic, butter and a quartet of spices, plus some canned tomatoes and stock, before adding the lentils back to the pot to simmer into a soup. It's very easy and was easily left halfway through when Hugo starting melting down, before being picked up later after he'd gone to bed. (This is often how I cook these days, in fits and starts. Just today I started a fruitcake recipe and literally abandoned it with one bowl already full of ingredients like chopped apples and puréed figs to go outside and run errands with the cranky child. Now that he's asleep, I was able to finish the job and the fruitcake's perfuming the house from the oven. It sounds irritating, but has its own satisfactions, this stop-and-go cooking.)

I added more lentils than the original recipe called for and used less butter and next time I make it, I'd probably purée half the soup, because it looks a little messy otherwise, but these are very faint criticisms. The soup is wonderfully fragrant and spicy and tastes just the way it's "supposed" to, at least to my Indian-starved palate. When you stir in the final bit of butter at the end to melt, it separates and pools at the edges of the soup. It's very nice indeed.

Rajat Parr's Black Lentil Soup
Makes 6 servings

1.5 cups black (Beluga) lentils
3 cardamom pods
One 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced, plus 2 tablespoons minced ginger
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large onion, finely diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon garam masala
2 quarts vegetable stock
1 cup canned crushed tomatoes
Salt to taste

1. In a pot, cover the lentils, cardamom and sliced ginger with 1 inch of water. Bring to a boil and cook over moderately high heat until the lentils start to soften, about 10 minutes. Drain the lentils and transfer to a bowl; discard the cardamom and ginger.

2. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in the pot. Add the onion, garlic and minced ginger and and cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, 8 minutes. Reduce the heat to low. Add the spices and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 4 minutes.

3. Add the stock, tomatoes and lentils to the pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Simmer over moderate heat until the lentils are softened and the soup has thickened, about 1 hour. Stir in the remaining tablespoon of butter and season with salt. Ladle into bowls and serve.

So here's a little story for you. On Saturday morning. I was strolling around my favorite green market, filling my bag with snappy asparagus, hyacinths and peonies, rosy little radishes and rondes de Nice, those round zucchini that you're meant to stuff with seasoned ground meat and bake in the oven. I didn't expect to find them at the market, and I couldn't help but buy four of them, round and glossy and firm. Inspired with memories of the petits farcis of Nice, I stopped at the organic butcher to look for ground meat. As I stood in line, though, I decided to use ground dark chicken meat instead, lightening the filling.

Suddenly it was my turn. I asked for chicken thighs, ground. The butcher stared at me, asked me to repeat my request. I pointed to the chicken thighs and asked if he could grind them. Realizing he'd understood me the first time, he shook his head, almost disappointed in me. Maybe even a little indignant? "We don't do that." Now it was my turn to stare. "If you order five kilos? In advance? Then we'll grind the thighs for you. Otherwise, sorry, it's just too exotic."

Exotic! Ground chicken meat! Folks, you can't make this stuff up.

Back at home, hungry for lunch, I decided to put the zucchini away and turn to something else I'd been craving for a while, armed with an old recipe of Molly O'Neill's for red lentil ragout. Yes, I was craving legumes. I suppose that's pretty exotic(!), too.

The original recipe starts with a roasted panful of carrots and onions and ends with ancho chile and other exotic spices. It sounded absolutely wonderful. The only problem was that I didn't have ancho or chipotle chile powder. (Note to self: add to shopping list for May.) So I decided to improvise a little, which turned out to be just fine, because, man, that recipe was wonky. I almost charred my sweet little carrots to a blackened crisp, before realizing that roasting them at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 35 minutes is definitely not the best path to delicious food. Untested recipes! They make you a better cook, I guess.

Instead of ancho and chipotle chile powder, I decided to use a mixture of cayenne, Aleppo pepper and smoked paprika. And let me tell you, folks, this turned out to be a serendipitous choice. Also, exotic! (I'm sorry.)

So here's what happens. You roast a bunch of carrots in the oven with lots of salt and olive oil (and pepper) until they're soft and browned. It is almost impossible not to eat these carrots with your fingers the minute they come out of the oven. Resist! You must! (Onions are tossed in at the very end in rings and they go all fragrant and shriveled.)

Then you chop the carrots into bite-sized pieces and scrape the onions and carrots into a pot with some olive oil and the spices. These cook for a minute and start to release all their wonderful oils and flavors. That's when you add the red lentils and stock. You let the whole thing simmer away for about half an hour, stirring occasionally, while the lentils break down into agreeable sludginess.

What you're left with, in the end, is an improbably sweet and spicy stew. The sugars concentrated in the carrots through the roasting infuse the soup with honeyed sweetness, and are a good balance to the heat of the spices that will warm your body as you spoon up lunch.

The amount of cayenne that I used resulted in a very spicy stew. Not mouth-numbing, but enough to make you stop and take a bite of bread every once in a while. This is what I was going for, maybe just a little bit out of flounciness towards that butcher. Exotic? I'll show you exotic. If you'd rather have a milder stew that's no less nuanced and delicious, just leave out the cayenne or use less of it.

I loved this soup. Loved it. Loved the nubby red lentils, the sweet, melting carrots, the blessed heat that made my nose run, the fragrant soupiness of each spoonful. I sat on my balcony in the sunshine and ate my spicy, stewy soup and thought about that butcher, so solid in his traditions and his convictions, so unbending in the face of a customer's request. Living in Germany is a pleasure and a trial, just like any place, I guess. Thank goodness I've got my kitchen to keep me anchored, no matter where I am.

It is 80 degrees in New York City today (that's 26 degrees Celsius - one degree warmer than would be required to close school in Berlin!) and I'm spooning up pork ragout like it's the first day of winter and I've just settled in for the long haul. Strange? Perhaps. But awfully tasty.

I'll blame the fact that I have this wintry stew in my house in the first place on the fact that spring has taken its sweet old time getting here this year. You know the global weather's out of whack when Berliners are in shorts in April and we're still pulling out our wool coats well into May.

Last week, when this recipe flitted across my radar (from an old Pairings column from, you guessed it, the ever-reliable Florence Fabricant), it was just the right time for pork-and-beans - cold, windy, rather gray. Though I'm realizing that apparently warm, sunny and rather bright is also a good time for pork-and-beans. In fact, shall we just put it this way? When is it ever not a good time for pork-and-beans? Okay, maybe a July weekend at the beach. Maybe then.

A secret: for nigh on 4 weeks now, I've had a plastic bag full of potatoes sitting on my butcher block counter. They've been sprouting strangely pretty purple and green nubbins, which I rub off each time I pass them. Their skins have grown wrinkly and I've felt worse and worse every time I enter the kitchen, seeing the potatoes in their dusty bag reproach me silently for not ending their misery and cooking them.

The thing is, I've not really been in the mood for wintery mashed potatoes or herbed roasted ones. Those are for the real winter, when all you want to do is wear wool socks and watch the snow fall and listen to old jazz from the 40's on the radio. Today I want sourness and spice and sharp, bright flavors, a little heat to wake up my taste buds, gustatory jolts to shake off the remaining winter doldrums.

Now think about this: a little pile of minced shallots, a tiny mountain of diced cornichons, a palmful of salted capers, soaked and squeezed, a spoonful of sharp mustard, a few glugs of vinegar, and smoked paprika, glowing red. All of these things, plus some nice olive oil, mixed together, then used to dress that whole bag of potatoes, roasted. Can you imagine that? Is the water running together in your mouth now? You're welcome.

Actually, thank Bread Baby and Clotilde, for drawing my attention to Rose Bakery's way of getting rid of excess potatoes (though they probably don't use that exact - er - phrasing). The dressing is sort of a deconstructed sauce gribiche, a classic mayonnaise-based sauce, though it's lighter, of course, and instead of being used to dress a calf's head, you use it to dress a pile of salt-and-pepper-flecked roasted potatoes.

The salad tastes really, really good and it's simply such a relief after the relentless march of cold weather potato dishes. I, for one, can't stand them any more. The capers and pickles and mustard provide nice little zings and pops of flavor, the shallots give the salad a faint bite, the chopped eggs add creaminess and ballast, and the smoked paprika is just its usual mysterious and alluring self. Seriously, smoked paprika is like the Penelope Cruz of the spice world.

Clotilde didn't much like this salad the next day, but I had so many leftovers that I didn't have a choice but to refrigerate them and turn them into lunch the next day. I think the salad stands up just fine - all it needs is to be brought to room temperature and tossed with a fresh glug of good olive oil, which helps to brighten the flavors that have actually melded quite nicely overnight.

But a cook's work is never done, is it. Though my CSA's winter share is over (praise be), I still have about three more pounds of potatoes to fight through. I figure I've got at least another week of ignoring this batch before they start to sprout...

Potatoes Gribiche
Serves 4

1 1/2 pounds small waxy potatoes
Olive oil
Salt, pepper
2 hard-boiled eggs, diced
5 to 6 cornichons, diced
2 tablespoons capers (if using salted capers, soak for a few minutes in water first)
1 shallot, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
A handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F. Put the potatoes in a medium saucepan, cover with cold water, cover with a lid, and bring to a boil. Drain immediately, let cool for a minute, cut in two-bite wedges, and transfer to a baking dish large enough to accommodate them in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, toss to coat, and roast until golden and crusty, about 30 minutes.

2. In the meantime, combine in a salad bowl the eggs, cornichons, capers, shallot, mustard, vinegar, paprika, a bit of salt and pepper, and 2 and 1/2 tablespoons olive oil.

3. When the potatoes are ready, add them to the salad bowl, toss gently to coat, and fold in the parsley. Taste for seasoning. Let cool to slightly warm or at room temperature.