{"id":6078,"date":"2015-10-20T15:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T19:38:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-12-16T02:41:15","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T07:41:15","slug":"on-short-notice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2015\/10\/on-short-notice\/","title":{"rendered":"On short notice"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s hard to start a post when I’m bored with the photograph(s) I have for it. The alternate title for this post is “A Life Fraught with Difficulty, by Molly Wizenberg.”<\/p>\n

But I am never bored with beans.<\/p>\n

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I don’t remember how I first learned of Molly Stevens<\/a> and her classic\u00a0All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking<\/a><\/i>, but if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you will know that it is a longtime favorite. I bought it shortly after it came out, sometime in 2004. I was in graduate school then, planning to become\u00a0Michel Foucault<\/a>, albeit with more hair, fewer turtlenecks<\/a>,\u00a0and a vastly inferior command of the French language. Like anyone who has tried to read the borderline unreadable,\u00a0I had a ton of\u00a0Post-It flag things<\/a>\u00a0in my desk drawer, and I intended to use every last one when I read\u00a0Discipline and Punish<\/a>. <\/i>But then\u00a0All About Braising<\/i>\u00a0came along, and it was so good that I put down my schoolbooks and plastered my Post-It flags all over Molly Stevens’s recipes instead. By the time I was done with it, the book looked like a hastily plucked chicken, sprouting feathery flag things from every third page. And though I cannot say the sequence of events was purely causal, I quit grad school the following year. In the decade since, I’ve cooked more from All About Braising<\/i>\u00a0than from any other book.<\/p>\n

When I wrote about dried beans<\/a>\u00a0a week or so ago, I mentioned a particular Molly Stevens recipe, promising to write about it soon. Here I am. For the past few years, during the colder months, I’ve made this recipe every other week, and occasionally more often than that. Molly, if I may use her first name, calls the recipe Escarole Braised with Cannellini Beans, though I’ve made it with every kind of white, or white-ish, bean I can think of: cannellini,\u00a0corona<\/a>, marrow, garbanzo, great northern, navy, and\u00a0flageolet<\/a>, cooked from dried, or out of a can. I call it Braised Escarole with Beans. It’s one of my best back-pocket meals, one I can make on short notice, assuming that I can get my hands on a head of escarole, which is a pretty fair assumption to make in the fall and winter. In the crackling heat of the pan, the escarole goes slack and silky, olive green, curling around the plump, creamy beans. This is honest food, old-lady-with-crepey-elbows-in-a-house-dress food, soft and stewy and fragrant with garlic. Everyone in my house likes it, including June, though she thinks the escarole is bok choy and I am not about to correct her, because the child is crazy for bok choy. I know when to leave a good thing alone.<\/p>\n\n

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Recipe<\/div>\n

Braised Escarole with Beans<\/h2>\n

Adapted from All About Braising<\/a><\/i>, by Molly Stevens<\/h3> \n \n <\/header>\n\n
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