Food, Home and Style
Cookin’ for Love: Satisfaction Stew
You’ve been stripped of your big office, fat title, hot assistant and, most important, your paycheck. But being emasculated on the job doesn’t mean you can’t satisfy your significant other at home—with food.
On the Home Depot scale, cooking something impressive and tasty falls somewhere in between changing a light bulb and installing a new shower head—that is, pretty simple. Some quick rules for the new house husband:
- It’s only food. Yes, you can burn it or ruin it some other way, but only if you are an idiot.
- Taste stuff while you’re doing it. If tastes good to you, don’t do anything. If it’s too salty, add some water or more of the thing you’re cooking. If it’s not salty enough, well….
- Enough with the measurements already.
- Chicks dig: avocado, ginger, goat cheese, and mangoes (but not necessarily together).
Butternut Squash Stew
At some point, your partner will throw out the idea of a) becoming a vegetarian or b) you making dinner. This recipe helps you seem sensitive to both of those unappealing demands without caving to either. It’s from a cookbook I can no longer find (apologies to the authors—if you see this, get in touch). Ingredients should cost less than $10 if you hit Trader Joe’s.
Prep Time: 20 minutes (pretty much everything takes 20 minutes)
Cook Time: See prep time
Ingredients:
2 bags of cut butternut squash
1 can of chick peas
1 can of PLAIN diced tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic
½ onion
Curry powder
Nutmeg
Coriander
Cinnamon
Olive oil
Open: The cans. Dump the chick peas into a strainer and rinse them in cold water. Don’t dump the liquid out of the tomatoes.
Chop: The garlic and onion into little pieces (I’m sure the world’s great chefs know what to call this but you should just make them small enough so you don’t bite into chunks later).
Coat the bottom of a deep soup pot with olive oil; sauté the garlic and onion until right before it burns (obviously, it’s going to burn as soon as you turn away from it, so strategize a little).
Toss in the butternut squash, tomatoes (with some of the liquid) and chick peas.
Sprinkle with salt, curry powder, coriander and nutmeg. Go heavier with the curry and coriander, lighter with the nutmeg and cinnamon.
When the liquid comes to boil, lower the flame and cover it.
After five minutes, stir it a bit and taste. Add more curry powder (just make sure it’s not too hot, okay?).
Let it cook on a medium flame (the one that doesn’t make the flame lick up the sides of the pot) for another 10 to 12 minutes. You can serve it on a flat plate over some instant couscous. That involves boiling water and tearing open a little box, so I’m not going to insult anyone by including directions.
Dan Colarusso, who was managing editor of Condé Nast’s Portfolio.com until the end of 2008, is now managing editor of The Business Insider.
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I made this tonight and it was awesome–even though I had to cut up a whole squash because I couldn’t find bagged. I feel just like someone’s unemployed boyfriend.