There’s a moment that happens at the market in late July. You go in for tomatoes and you come out with a bag of long, wrinkly red peppers you’ve never cooked before, because they were there and they were beautiful and you couldn’t not.
That impulse—cook the thing in front of you, figure it out after—is the whole spirit of Pierce Abernathy’s new cookbook, Every Leaf, Every Stem. His recipes aren’t a list of instructions to follow exactly. They’re a framework you drop your actual groceries into.
A recipe that bends to your produce
Look at the soup below and you’ll see what we mean. It calls for “long skinny sweet peppers, such as Jimmy Nardello“—the such as is doing real work there. Padrón, Macedonian, Corno di Toro, whatever mild pepper showed up in your box this week: they all work. Same with the herbs in the yogurt sauce. Basil, dill, cilantro, parsley, or the half-bunch of each that’s wilting in your crisper drawer. Pierce says “or a mix,” and a mix is usually the honest answer.
The onion and shallot ends you’ve been saving? That’s the base. The chile is whatever heat level you can handle. The lentils are the ballast that turns a pot of vegetables into dinner.
None of this is improvising for its own sake. It’s the way people have always cooked when the produce is good and the season is short—you build the dish around what’s ripe, not the other way around.
The okra thing
If okra has burned you before, read Pierce’s note carefully. He’s cooking it in tomato broth on purpose, and adding it in the last five minutes on purpose. The acid neutralizes the ooze; the short cook keeps the bite. This is the kind of detail that makes a recipe portable—once you understand why it works, you can carry that trick into any other okra dish you make for the rest of your life.
That’s really what Every Leaf, Every Stem is teaching. Not fifty recipes. Fifty reasons things work.
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Pierce Abernathy’s Summer Soup with Okra, Tomatoes, and Peppers
Description
This soup is a great way to use up any onion and shallot scraps and ends you may have hanging around.Plus it’s an ideal way to highlight the “alternative peppers” that hit the markets in the summertime, like Jimmy Nardellos, Padrón peppers, Macedonian peppers, and any other varieties of mild peppers.Cooking the okra in tomato broth keeps it from getting slimy since the acidity of the tomatoes neutralizes the okra’s ooze. What you get is okra that stays nice and crunchy. Get back to me if you still don’t like okra after trying it cooked in this delicious, bright soup. I love adding a simple yogurt sauce to most of my soups—it adds a creamy, tangy, and fatty roundness.
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling
- 4 long skinny sweet peppers, such as Jimmy Nardello, thinly sliced
- 1 spicy chile, such as serrano, jalapeño, or Fresno, thinly sliced
- 1 medium white onion, coarsely choppedKosher salt
- 6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- 2 inches fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
- 8 ounces cherry tomatoes, halved
- 2 cups brown lentils, rinsed and drained
- 1 pound okra, cut crosswise into ½-inch-thick pieces
- 1 cup full-fat Greek yogurt
- 1 cup lightly packed herbs, such as basil, dill, cilantro, or flat-leaf parsley or a mix
- 1 small garlic clove
- 1 lemon
Instructions
- Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the peppers, chile, and onions, season with salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until the aromatics are lightly caramelized, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook, stirring, until jammy and broken down, about 7 minutes.
- Add the lentils and stir to combine with the aromatics. Pour in8 cups water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to maintain a steady simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are tender and the liquid is reduced, about 30 minutes. Stir in the okra during the last 5 minutes of cooking to keep it crisp-tender.
- While the lentils cook, make the yogurt sauce: In a food processor, combine the yogurt, herbs, garlic, and ½ teaspoon salt. Using a Microplane, finely grate the zest from the lemon into the food processor. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze the juice from one half into the processor. Blend the ingredients into a smooth, pale green sauce. Keep cold until ready to use.
- Ladle the soup into serving bowls and spoon over plenty of the yogurt sauce. Drizzle with more olive oil before serving.
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