[Scallop Mango Tartlet]

What do you mean, you’re still trying to recover from the Christmas celebrations? Come on, New Year’s Eve is just around the corner, time to hit the ground running and plan for it!

If you intend to host a little dinner party but are still scratching your head about the menu, stop it: it’s bad for your scalp, and my latest piece on NPR’s website has a first course suggestion for you, offering a recipe for these delicate and delectable scallop tartlets.

Reason number two hundred and forty-seven to be friends with your next-door neighbors: they cook, and they share.

When Stéphan (one door to the right) prepares scampi in coconut milk, he will prepare a plate for you and hand it over through your respective kitchen windows, a.k.a. the service hatch. In return you will send two flutes of rosé champagne their way, because you just happened to be celebrating something.

And when Peter (one door to the left) takes a trip back to his native Italy to celebrate Christmas with his family, he will ring your doorbell just before leaving, to return the ice-pack his girlfriend Ligiana had borrowed for her sprained ankle, and to give you a freshly baked loaf of pandolce, still a little warm, golden and crusty.

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If it sort of seems from my recent postings that all I eat these days is soup, well, it’s not very far from the truth. But see, all those winter vegetables are really begging for it, and I don’t have the heart to turn them down. Besides, since I am now equipped with a cast-iron cocotte and an immersion blender, it’s only courteous of me to use them, right?

Today’s featured soup was made with a large chunk of butternut squash bought at the farmers’ market on Saturday morning. My favorite produce stall (when you come out of the Rome metro station and walk through the market, it is the penultimate stand on your right, with a pretty salesgirl and an older bearded man who gives clementines to children) had impressive specimens, chubby at the base with two-feet-long necks curled like a swan’s. I recoiled at first, never having bought such a huge vegetable before, but the salesgirl explained that they sold them in smaller sections if desired, which felt more manageable: I bought about a third of one, which still weighed in at two kilos.

Back home, I started cutting and peeling the squash, which is always a bit of a pain one has to admit, but not so bad if you’re listening to Jack Johnson on the stereo. I softened some onions, added in the squash, poured in water to cover (I seldom have stock on hand, sue me), and brought the soup to a simmer. I then surveyed my unabashedly disorganized spice rack — a simple ledge running the length of the counter — in search of something to spike up the soup. Cumin, pimentón, ginger maybe?

But no. All these possibilities were brushed aside when I spotted the smoked glass jar of vanilla paste (which my friend Alisa kindly brought back to me from Trader-Joe-land) and I decided to use that instead, to very pleasing results: vanilla complemented the sweetness of the squash beautifully, adding nuance and a supple kick to it. It would be a good idea to make the soup a day ahead (or make sure you have leftovers) because the vanilla aromas had blossomed more fully the next day.

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I’ve noticed that my cooking is most often vegetable-driven: I will buy fresh veggies at the market or at the produce stall, and then decide what fish or meat will complement them — not the other way around.

On Saturday morning I returned from the farmers’ market with a basket of mostly root vegetables, not such a surprise in December: tiny spuds with a skin so thin you feel they should wear chapstick, young carrots with a wild tuft of bright green hair, and parsley roots, which were a novelty to me. They are called persil tubéreux in French, they look and taste somewhat like parsnips, and their small and flat leaves are a very tasty parsley that resists frost. Just like parsnips, they belong to the family of “forgotten vegetables” that were once very common but have fallen out of fashion — because they’re too vividly associated with war food, difficult to cultivate and prepare, or simply not very palatable to the modern eater.

Once this trio of root vegetables was neatly put to bed in their fridge drawer, it occurred to me that they would be lovely in a simple beef stew, slowly cooked so the different flavors would have time to meld. The next morning I paid a visit to my butcher Mario, asked for advice regarding the cut — I am not a very experienced stew maker — and got the jumeau he recommended, a tender cut taken from the upper part of the front leg. Mario’s wife then weighed it on an ancient mechanical scale because their electronic one had just broken down and it was Sunday so the repairman was unavailable.

This was the perfect dish to make on an ice-cold Sunday afternoon: around five I started peeling the vegetables, set the stew to simmer over low heat, and went about the house doing other things, intermittently coming back to check on it, breathe in the warm smells and get my glasses all steamed up. It was also the perfect dish to eat on a similarly ice-cold Sunday night, warm and comforting, with soft textures and sweet aromatic notes.

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