Author: Walter Thames

As a general rule in restaurants, I don’t want a chef cooking my food who looks like a marathon runner. Like Shakespeare’s Caesar, “Let me have [chefs] about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.” I want people who love to eat, who have a hard time saying no to something good, and whose bodies bare the imprint of a rich, varied and luscious diet.

With that said, I must confess that I’ve spent a lifetime on diets of one form or another. This is because everyone in my family succumbs, eventually, to circulatory and heart problems. So, at one time or another I have given up or restricted virtually every type of food – meats, cheeses, eggs, chocolate, sweets, dairy products, salt, sugar, bread, pasta. I have fasted for, I think, up to three days (trivial to serious fasters, but tough for me). And, please understand, none of this has been easy. I am not someone for whom food is fuel. Food is keen pleasure. 

At this time of my life, I eat nothing white (a concession to an overworked pancreas). That is as restrictive as it sounds if you think about it, and  particularly if you add sweets to the list – these, even if not white, act like it, according to my medical advisors. If you add to that a personal and intense aversion to fast food of any kind, to processed food, to factory food, you can see some real limitations here.

For the most part, though, I live with it just fine. The reason is that I know how to cook and if you know how to cook, you have a world of interesting things to choose from, even if none of them can be white or sweet. There are meats, crustaceans and fish, poultry, eggs, butter, vegetables, beans, nuts, herbs, olive oil, cheeses, fruit and all the lovely things one can do to prepare them. And, there’s foix gras (not a nice food but absolutely wonderful) and sausage and barbeque, also not nice but definitely on my list.

The diet works for me, but I would be hesitant to recommend it, nor do I think, like reformed smokers, that everyone absolutely must eat like I do. I love what I don’t eat and I cook it very well. So sweet desserts and all good things made with sugar, flour, eggs and butter – pies, mousse, fudge, egg custard, creme brulee. Roasted potatoes, French fries, potato chips. Crepes and waffles with maple syrup.  Lasagna and all forms of pasta dishes. Pizza. Foccacia bread. Sandwiches. Burgers. Bread pudding with bourbon sauce. And on, and on.

As a dieter, I can also cook for other dieters. It comes easy. And another consolation is that when I get the chance to cook verboten things, I do have to taste them. Sometimes more than once. After all, your food has to be perfect.

Few delights of summer are more satisfying than a fresh tomato, plucked from your own backyard vine, warm from the sun, sliced and eaten raw or with a touch of fresh mayonnaise. The aroma – even before you slice it – the rich red juice, the firm red flesh – ah. Few are the delights indeed that are better than a fresh tomato.

But in winter, if you try the same slicing and eating mostly raw with the tomato-like objects you find for sale in the grocery, it is not the same. In place of juice, there is watery pinkish fluid that’s vaguely tomato-ish. The texture is mealy or tough. In salads, as garnish, on a sandwich, these tomatoes are mostly worthless.

Or so I thought for years until I started roasting and searing and grilling these otherwise useless tomatoes. I was, you may say, very pleasantly surprised.

Quickly, here are a few things you can do that yield lovely results:

Slice a whole winter tomato in half and sprinkle the cut side with chopped garlic, dried thyme, kosher salt and fresh pepper. Top with fresh bread crumbs – just pop some bread in a food processor – and drizzle with olive oil. Roast hot until they wilt and crust over.

Or slice a winter tomato and sear it in a hot smoking skillet with a little canola oil. Let it cook till it blackens and flip it. Use it on top of eggplant or your morning eggs.

Or take some (also tasteless) winter cherry tomatoes. Cook them whole in a hot skillet with olive oil and toss until they burn a bit on the sides. Season and add to other cooked vegetables, or use them to garnish a pork chop or grilled chicken breast.

I’ll also cut winter plum tomatoes in half, squeeze out the juice and toss with a lemon-olive oil herb vinaigrette and roast them at 500 degrees or so.

In all these cases, what you’re doing is cooking off the watery fluid and concentrating what flavors are still there. Because despite what the tomato engineers have perverted in the cause of durability, shipability and shelf live, they are still, deep down in their round little souls, tomatoes. You just have to cook off the dross and flavor them a bit.

Let me acknowledge at the outset that there is no question of contradiction in the notion of “family meals” made outside the family by someone not remotely connected to the family.

But I did name our new service (four days of meals ready on Monday afternoon) deliberately. Our “family meals” are intended to be the same kind of food someone with time, inclination, basic skill and experience would provide at the evening table if the conditions of his or her life would permit it.

For many families, that’s not possible now. If both adults work, there’s no time. If you grew up with fast food everywhere, instant food available out of the freezer at the market, you just may not be familiar with how things as simple as roast chicken are put together. And, it is very possible that, never having watched it happen or be around to taste the results, you may not know how to cook.

Family meals when I was growing up were the work of my mother. They were made from basic ingredients. A cake, for example, she made using flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, eggs, milk and vanilla extract instead of a cake mix. Fried chicken from a whole chicken, cut up, floured, seasoned and fried in bacon grease. Not that she had any problem with using prepared food – it just wasn’t quite so prevalent as it is now.

With that base, I began my life as a cook by trying to make things instead of buy them. Making a tomato sauce with tomatoes, instead of just opening a jar. Throwing away the bag of powder from the little mac & cheese blue box and making a sauce with butter, flour and real cheese. When I did cook something out of a can or from the frozen meal section of the supermarket, I would adjust (increase) the seasoning so that it tasted a bit better. You get the idea.

Now, we’re providing this kind of simple food, made by chopping, blending, roasting and other simple-if-time-consuming techniques for people who, we hope, will sit down together around a table and enjoy a family meal.

I love getting new cookbooks, and recently my son, who understands my enthusiasms, sent me a copy of Donald Link’s Real Cajun. This is his first cookbook and is focused on a rich family history of cooking good food out of the Louisiana pig pens, rivers and swamps. It’s also the inspired work of a great chef.

Link runs Herbsaint and Cochon in New Orleans, two remarkably good places to eat in a city full of fine restaurants. I particularly like Cochon, having dined on pigs with great gusto most of my life, including an evening at Au Pied de Cochon (pigs foot) in Paris. Link, like the French, takes his swine seriously and makes all his own bacon, sausage, tasso, boudin, pork belly cracklins and andouille. I highly recommend tasting a sampler, his boucherie plate, as a heavy appetizer to acquaint yourself and the table with his skill.

Link has the heart of a butcher and as a devout meat eater he reluctantly includes dishes for vegetarians. But, he’s also a good husband and his wife doesn’t share his devotion to meat. Hence his recipe for Maque Choux, a dish I’ll be serving from his recipe July 31 at the third Hot Rock Hollow dinner concert at the Flying Monkey. I’ve had various versions of this simple corn, pepper and tomato dish, but Link’s is lovely. It’s spiced with fresh thyme, basil and bay leaves. It has a bit of heat in the peppers, but not too much, and it is especially good this time of year in Alabama when the tomatoes, corn and peppers are fresh out of the field. Vegetarians will love it, as will the meat eaters. Browse our , with a variety of options to suit every taste and budget, available to buy online.

Jambalaya is also on the menu, though the version I’ll be preparing is more of a Creole version, according to Link, since it is cooked in stock with tomatoes and includes shrimp, chicken and tasso served under a rich tomato sauce. Cajun jambalayas lose the tomatoes and are heavy on chicken and sausage to flavor the rice. Not a bad combination, either.

I highly recommend the book to lovers of Louisiana cooking, and if you don’t want to bother with the book, or with cooking, do come taste some good food while you listen to good music at the next dinner concert.