Although ostensibly a day devoted to giving thanks, Thanksgiving for many descends into gluttony – or at the very least eating a bit too much food that is a bit too rich. Whatever effect this might have on one’s soul, it definitely takes a toll on the body, as the pending post-thanksgiving naps will attest. The days after Thanksgiving give no respite, either: these are days devoted to the consumption of leftovers, constructing, eating and immediately regretting ever-more ridiculous “Thanksgiving sandwiches”. I’m not saying I don’t like Thanksgiving – quite the opposite, I assure you – just that it has a way of making one’s body feel pushed to the limit.

Anticipating this food binge in the days before the big day, I’m filled with a puritanical need to purge. For about three days before Thanksgiving I adopt an almost-vegan diet, avoiding meat, heavy fats and anything that feels like it will linger past its welcome in my gut. Simple meals of grains and vegetables – in small portions – is what I crave before a meal that is complicated, rich and excessively-portioned.

If you too are both excited for and slightly dreading Thanksgiving indulgence, or if in the aftermath of the holiday you’re ready to give up on the damned leftovers, make a meal of this dal and flatbread, inspired by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Flatbreads & Flavors.

Dal

• ½ medium onion, sliced thin
• 2 tsp vegetable oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1 cup red lentils
• 4 cups water
• 1 tsp salt
• ¼ tsp black pepper, ground
• ¼ tsp ground cumin
• Dash ground turmeric
• Cinnamon stick, a couple of inches long
• ½ cup cilantro

Fry onion in vegetable oil in 4 qt saucepan over medium-high heat until edges start to brown. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add lentils and water and stir to combine. Add salt, spices and cinnamon stick. Bring to a boil, then simmer over low heat, covered, for 20 to 25 minutes, until porridge-like. Off heat, stir in cilantro and adjust seasoning. Serve warm.

Puri

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• ¼ tsp black pepper, ground
• ¼ tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 cup yogurt
• ½ cup water

Pulse flours, spices and salt together in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade to evenly distribute. Add yogurt and water and process until dough has formed a cohesive, smooth ball – about two minutes in my processor. Place dough in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rest about 1 hour.

Divide the dough into 3 oz balls – you should have 14. Allow the balls to rest 20-30 minutes. After the dough balls have rested, begin rolling them out: they should be rolled as thin as possible, as if for tortillas.

Heat a dry large skillet over medium high heat. Cook one flatbread at a time, flipping after bubbles appear all over the surface of the bread. The bread should be dark brown, almost charred in spots. Store cooked breads in a towel to keep warm while you prepare the rest of the breads.

Note: Purists will note this is not actually puri, which should be fried in oil. You might recall the whole point of this meal was to avoid fats like that – if it makes you happier think of these as puri-inspired flatbreads. Also, if you can get it, substitute 3 cups Indian atta flour for the flour in the recipe.

Serve the dal and puri together, using torn off bits of bread to scoop up the lentils.

As much as I love a good risotto, what I’m really hoping for when I serve one is that people won’t want to finish the whole dish. I wasn’t after a risotto lunch; I wanted to try an idea I’d had in mind for a while. Probably the best thing to do with day (or two) old risotto is to make arancini – breaded, deep-fried rice fritters.

Similar to croquetas, arancini require none of the work or planning of making a thick béchamel: just take cold leftover risotto, form it into small balls, coat the balls with flour, beaten egg, and bread crumbs, then fry in oil at 350ºF for a few minutes until deep golden brown. As with anything fried, remember to salt the arancini after taking them out of the oil.

These are good on their own, hot and crisp from the fryer, or you could serve them with anything you like to dip fried food in: marinara, ranch dressing – we ate them with a mixture of mayonnaise and sriracha, which may not sound wonderful but worked at the time. We may have even enjoyed these more than the risotto itself.

Local food mega-site the Heavy Table recently stirred up controversy by deeming, after conducting a metro-wide tasting, the Bruegger’s bagel to be the best bagel in the Twin Cities. To have a giant national chain beat out all the local options was understandably upsetting to the many people whose culinary ethos is built around eating as locally as possible. I fall into this camp, when it comes to bagels at least, since I almost always choose Common Roots, for reasons entirely related to the cafe’s proximity to my home (this is a lazy decision, not an ethical one). Still, people are passionate about their bagel purveyors, and if you’d like to avoid the debate altogether your best bet is to make your own.

As with so many things bread-related, the first place to turn is Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. His bagel recipe takes two days: one day to mix and shape the dough, an overnight refrigerated fermentation, and the second day to boil and bake the bagels.

The dough consists of a sponge (1 tsp or .11 oz instant yeast, 4 cups or 18 oz bread flour, 20 oz water) that is mixed and left to rest two hours, until bubbly. To the sponge is added another ½ tsp or .055 oz instant yeast, 3 ¾ cups or 17 oz bread flour, 2 ¾ tsp or .7 oz salt and 1 Tbsp or .5 oz barley malt syrup.

With a total of 35 oz of bread flour hydrated by only 20 oz of water (57% hydration) this is a very thick, heavy dough. In the days before I owned a stand mixer I would labor for ten minutes kneading this dough into shape, and it was tough. A stand mixer with a dough hook makes the kneading easier, but be careful: the thickness of this dough will heavily tax the mixer’s motor and on weaker models could even cause failure. Pay attention to how your mixer is holding up throughout the process.

After the dough is kneaded together – whether by hand or by machine – it should be immediately divided into balls of 3.5 oz each. Rest the balls for 20 minutes under a damp towel, and then comes the fun part: shaping. There are two methods: the dough can be rolled into a thick rope and then doubled back on itself to form a ring, or – and this is my preferred method – you can punch a hole in the center of a dough ball and gradually enlarge the hole around your thumb, rotating the bagel. After each bagel has been formed it should be placed on a parchment-lined sheet pan.

Reinhart recommends letting the formed bagels rest at room temperature for ten to twenty minutes until a bagel dropped in a tub of water floats after ten seconds. When I was last making bagels I completely overlooked this step and the bagels came out fine, so you can do with it what you will. In any case, the bagels should end up covered in plastic wrap and in the refrigerator overnight.

If you’re very industrious and/or intent on having fresh bagels for breakfast, the next morning wake up early, set a large, wide pot of water to boil and heat the oven to 500ºF. When the water is boiling, place as many bagels as will fit comfortably – no crowding! – in the water; the bagels can come straight out of the refrigerator. Boil for one to two minutes on the first side, then flip and boil another one to two minutes on the second side (boil longer for chewier bagels). After both sides have been boiled, place the bagels back on the parchment-lined sheet pan – maybe sprinkled with a little cornmeal in the intervening time to prevent sticking – and top as desired. I sprinkled on sesame seeds or dehydrated onion in this case. Continue boiling and topping all the bagels.

After every bagel is boiled and topped, they are ready to be baked: bake 10 minutes total, rotating the pans halfway through. Allow to cool 15 minutes before eating. They are great fresh and also freeze very well; cutting the bagels in half before freezing facilitates easy future toasting.

Two days making bagels might seem like a lot of time, but it’s not actually that much active, working time. And when compared to the alternative – trying to navigate the minefield of the bagel shop preferences of your friends and loved ones – it’s a fairly easy choice to make. After all, after two days spent making them, nobody will have the nerve to tell you your bagels aren’t the best.

Why is it always the smallest dishes that require the most work? Take these two-bite-sized steamed buns: for all the time I spent making them, I probably could have barbecued a whole cow. Twice.

The work began two weeks ago when I started my kim chi, the Korean fermented cabbage pickle. Beyond ingredients I had from the farmers market – napa cabbage, scallions, carrots, garlic, ginger – this recipe called for a few specialty Korean ingredients that necessitated a trip to the always-interesting Shuang Hur Foods, an Asian grocery store on Nicollet in Minneapolis. Perusing the many jars and boxes labelled primarily in various Asian languages that I don’t read, I was a bit overwhelmed. It was easy enough to find Korean chili powder — red powder with Korean characters on it and a picture of a chili – but jarred shrimp was a challenge. I did eventually locate some jars with illustrations of happily frolicking shrimp, but with my ignorance of what was printed on the jars, I was at a loss for how to distinguish between them. What to do? I picked the one with the happiest looking shrimp and headed to the checkout.

Making kim chi is straightforward: salt the cabbage and let it ferment in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, mix with scallions, minced garlic, sliced ginger, shredded carrots, sugar, water and a whole lot of Korean chili powder and return to the refrigerator. My recipe, from David Chang and Peter Meehan’s Momofuku, recommended waiting one week before eating, with the kim chi in its prime in two. The waiting game.

After two weeks had just about passed, and I was getting excited about my kim chi, the time had come to make the buns. The recipe from Momofuku looked simple enough, but it made 50 buns. I had already waited two weeks for my kim chi, and now I was expected to have enough patience to carefully roll out 50 tiny buns? Unfortunately, the book warns against scaling the recipe down: any less dough and a stand mixer can’t be used to knead it.

Too little dough for a stand mixer, but what about for a food processor? I had recently been turned on to the idea of food processor dough kneading by a Food Lab article on New York Style Pizza at Home, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. I dutifully assembled the ingredients – ½ Tbsp yeast, 6 oz water, 9 ½ oz white flour, 3 Tbsp sugar, 1 ½ Tbsp dry milk, ½ Tbsp salt, ¼ tsp baking soda and one-sixth of a cup of shortening – in the bowl of a food processor with the steel blade, locked the cover and hit the switch. I was amazed at how quickly the dough came together and and reached the perfect springy-smooth consistency – about two minutes. I suppose I should have known from the many pasta doughs I’ve pulled together in the processor that it was an ideal kneading machine, but I was surprised how well it worked with a traditional bread dough.

And it was a good thing I saved so much time kneading the dough with the food processor, since there was still lots of work to be done. The dough rose two hours then was punched down, divided into twenty-five rounds,  rested another hour, rolled out, folded, placed on 25 separate 3″ squares of parchment (what, you don’t have 3″ squares of parchment on hand? Better get the scissors), rested another 30 minutes, and finally steamed in four batches. Whew.

As much fun as these buns are to make, they’re not going to be much without something delicious – and preferably porcine – to fill them with. Chang and Meehan slow-roasted pork belly – which actually would have been pretty easy – but I was led down another path by unrelated reading in the Texas Barbecue Cookbook by Rob Walsh: I was going to smoke my pork. But since I live in a tiny apartment without a yard, it would have to be indoor smoking.

There are stovetop gadgets for smoking indoors, but I don’t have one. Instead, I planned to use a technique developed by Cook’s Illustrated that utilized Lapsang Souchong tea. I happened to have a healthy supply of this from the last time I tried the technique a few years ago – because really, who drinks this stuff?

I first salted and peppered thin cutlets of pork shoulder and placed them on a rack that would fit in a half sheet pan. Said half sheet pan was then filled with the ground powder of tea extracted from twenty Lapsang teabags. Placing the rack over the sheet pan, I covered the whole thing tightly in foil and placed this improvised smoker on the stone in my 500ºF oven. This is hot enough to get the tea smoking, and if the pork is frozen briefly before going in the oven it can sit in the smoke for a half hour without overcooking in the intense heat. After the half hour was up, I dropped the heat to 250ºF, poured some water over the tea, and let the chops cook two hours until very tender. By the way, if cutting open and emptying twenty teabags doesn’t strike you as tedious, I guarantee you that scrubbing caked-on tea dust out of every hole of a cooling rack will.

To finish the pork, I made a quick barbecue lacquer by whisking together ketchup, soy sauce, mirin, brown sugar and sriracha. I then painted the sauce on the smoked pork and broiled until the chops shone. I let the pieces cool slightly and chopped them into slivers for serving.

Having fermented my kim chi, steamed my buns, and smoked my pork, I wasn’t especially in the mood to devote many more hours to this meal. Luckily, the other elements – chopped scallions, cucumber pickles (from a long-in-the-fridge jar, thank God), sriracha, and mayo – only needed to be put on the table; diners could assemble the sandwiches themselves.

But while it’s true that small packages may require the most work to get together, the reward can also be very big: these buns were delicious – well worth the effort. While I found that sticking to Chang’s recommended toppings – mayo, sriracha, pickles, pork and scallions — was better than my version using kim chi in place of the pickles, both were very good. Maybe even good enough to make them again.

Maybe the economy has you down, the political climate depresses you, or you’re just sad because it’s Monday, there’s ample reason to feel a little blue these days. Now I would never prescribe liquor as a treatment for passing sadness (go do something fun instead!), a couple of drinks Martha and I have enjoyed lately seem like the perfect thing for the blues. Because they’re blue. Yeah.

Both drinks come from the invaluable Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum Cocktail to the Zombie by Ted Haigh, a.k.a. Dr. Cocktail.

Leatherneck Cocktail

• 2 oz blended whiskey (Crown Royal, for example)
• ¾ oz blue curaçao
• ½ oz fresh lime juice

Shake over ice; strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime wheel.

I have a confession to make: I do not own blended whiskey. So what did I do to make this drink? Well I was making two, so I “blended” the dregs of a bottle of 100 proof Wild Turkey (3 oz) with a last bit of Bulleit Bourbon (1 oz). I know that’s not blended whiskey – and probably a sign that I have a problem – but it made an okay version of the Leatherneck. Such is my shame.

This drink is the color of radioactive blue only achievable with blue curaçao.

Blue Moon

• 2 oz gin
• ½ oz Crème Yvette or crème de violette
• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

Shake over ice; strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

While the Leatherneck Cocktail’s garish acid blue gave off an exuberant vibe with a strong hint of desperation – a drink for a Friday night, perhaps – the Blue Moon is all refinement and class right down to its subdued blue color, a distillation of the intense purple of crème de violette.  You can almost hear the strains of the eponymous song wafting across the room as soon as you open the shaker.