It’s a dilemma you’re probably already familiar with: you love to cook and eat, but you don’t know how to look good doing it and help support one of your favorite food blogs.

Friends, we’ve heard you and we’re here to help. Starting today, you can become the proud owner of a limited edition Salt & Fat t-shirt, designed by our own Neven Mrgan and printed in beautiful Portland, Oregon by our friends at Buy Olympia.

If you’re worried about staying cool when your kitchen gets hot, don’t be. These are American Apparel’s 50/25/25 blend we’re talking here so you know they’re going to feel great whether you’re stirring a batch of tomato-butter sauce or roasting a chicken. And it’s a great way to help support what has been a labor of love for us.

Like we said, this is a limited run so get yours while you can. And ladies, we’d love to hear from you — should we print a run of ladies’ cut shirts? Do let us know.

When you’re cooking to make an impression, as I suspect some of you may be this Valentine’s Day, it’s especially important that your dish look as good as it tastes. The expression “you eat first with your eyes” wouldn’t be cliche if there weren’t some truth to it.

This roasted beet and blood orange salad is certainly colorful but it also brings together a mix of winter flavors — sweet and earthy beets with just a little sharpness from blood oranges. Complete with a mix of spicy greens with a few herbs and some crunchy almond slivers.

I like to use golden beets here so that I have an excuse to use my favorite citrus, the blood orange, but you can certainly invert those colors with red or chioggia beets and a more traditional orange.

A little heads up: roasting then cooling the beets will take you about an hour to an hour and a half, mostly unattended, but it’s not like you can just whip this one up right before serving the main course. The beets and the dressing can be prepared well ahead of time, though.

Your ingredients:

• 3 medium golden beets (red or chioggia will work, or a mix)
• 2 blood oranges, sectioned, juices reserved
• A few handfuls of spicy greens, like a mix of arugula, spinach, frisée and baby lettuces
• A few fresh herbs like dill, cilantro or mint
• 1 tablespoon of good extra virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons of canola oil
• Juice of 1 meyer lemon
• 1 teaspoon of champagne vinegar
• 1/2 a clove of garlic or shallot, diced
• Slivered almonds

First things first, preheat the oven to 400. Place the beets in the middle of a sheet of foil big enough to wrap them and drizzle them with canola oil. If you’re using a mix of colors of beets, wrap each one separately to keep the colors distinct. Seal the beets in the foil packages and roast them in the oven for 50-60 minutes.

While the beets are roasting, section the oranges, saving as much of the juice as you can by scraping it from the cutting board into a glass and squeezing out the core of the orange. Chill the orange suprêmes in the fridge.

A word here about vinaigrette dressing. What you’re aiming for is an emulsion of an acid, in this case the juice of the meyer lemon and blood orange with a little champagne vinegar, in a fat, canola oil. Oil and vinegar don’t naturally like to combine but with careful attention and a slow hand, you can make it work beautifully.

Dice the garlic or shallot. Mix the garlic (or shallot) with a pinch of kosher salt, one teaspoon of meyer lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of blood orange juice and 1 teaspoon of champagne vinegar. You are more than welcome to adjust to your liking (if you don’t have champagne vinegar, for instance, feel free to go with 2 teaspoons blood orange juice, 1 teaspoon meyer lemon juice), just make sure you end up with 3 teaspoons at the end.

Measure out 3 tablespoons of canola oil, preferably into a container with a spout that will let you pour it slowly (I find that a glass Pyrex liquid measuring cup works brilliantly for this).

Slowly, starting with just a few drops at a time working to a thin drizzle, pour the canola oil into the juice/acid mixture, constantly whisking with a fork. You really can’t go too slowly here or whisk too much.

Back to the beets. Before you pull them out of the oven, prepare an ice bath that’s equal parts ice and water in a medium sized bowl. Check the beets for doneness — if a paring knife easily slides through them, they’re done. Let them cool until you can handle them (about 5-10 minutes) then peel them while they’re still warm. The easiest way is to slice the top then scrape the sides with the sharp edge of a knife, the peel should come right off, and then slice off the bottom. Cut the beets in half lengthwise, then each half in half again lengthwise, then each quarter across the middle for 8 cube-ish pieces. Cool them in the ice bath for at least 15 minutes, again, keeping them separate if using a mix of colors.

Coarsely shred the greens and herbs into bite-sized pieces then rinse and dry them. Put them in a dry bowl then drizzle the olive oil along the side of the bowl, not directly on the greens, then add a pinch of salt and use a pair of tongs or your hands to mix the greens with the oil. The oil will add a little complexity and mouth-feel to the greens without weighing them down too much.

Drain the beets and drizzle them in the vinaigrette and mix to combine. Start the plates with a bed of the greens (let any excess oil drip off before plating) then add the beets, then the blood orange sections, arranged to your liking. Roughly crumble the almonds over top and season with a pinch of kosher salt and a few grinds of black pepper.

This will be a beautiful, simple but elegant start to dinner.

It’s a cruel trick of the brain that the things we can’t easily reach become so much dearer to us by that quality alone. Consider one of the recent additions to the list of my favorite foods ever: pissaladière, Provençal pizza. It has all the makings of a Neven Pleaser: rich, salty, satisfying. Yet I can’t think of a single restaurant in Portland that serves in (on a regular basis, anyway).

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make pissaladière at home. Before we look at the ingredients, a brief disclaimer: like pizza, this is a dish of many styles and variations. This recipe is a combination of several kinds I’ve read about, ordered, and attempted myself. Feel free to improvise. I’m including a bonus sauce at the end; it’s optional but delicious, and good to know as a secret weapon for other dishes.

The below recipe, combined with a nice salad, will feed two. If you plan on using both puff pastry sheets from the package, double everything and bake in sequence.

• 1 sheet puff pastry, frozen
• 8-12 anchovy fillets; half chopped, half whole
• 10-15 niçoise (“nee-swaz”) olives or Kalamatas, pitted and quartered
• 1 large onion, sliced chunky
• fresh thyme
• fresh parsley, chopped
• good olive oil
• salt, sugar, black pepper

Ingredient notes: the best possible anchovies are Ortiz brand; Scalia will also work. Check your local Italian deli - the grocery store is unlikely to carry anything you’d want to eat.

Preheat the oven to 500º F. Next, grab the puff pastry sheet; they usually come in pairs, so remove one from the package and place it on a tray on the counter for 30 to 60 minutes, until it unfolds easily.

Meanwhile, let’s caramelize the onions - heat a bit of oil in a shallow nonstick skillet on medium-high. When it’s shimmering, add the onion and half a teaspoon each of salt and sugar. Stir lightly immediately to distribute the sugar. Cook 15-25 minutes until the onion is soft, with some brown spots, but not fully browned. If any slices were so small that they’re now burnt black, remove them. When done, remove from heat and add half a tablespoon of water to the skillet to keep the onions shiny and moving. Set aside.

Time to assemble: place a large sheet of parchment paper (NOT wax paper) on a pizza peel or a cookie sheet. Unfold the puff pastry sheet onto it and roll it out with a rolling pin lightly; we want to prevent the whole thing from puffing up madly, but don’t “crush” it.

Brush the whole thing with olive oil; if your anchovies came in a nice oil themselves, add some of that. Next, top with the olives, then the chopped anchovies, leaving a 1/2” border around the toppings. Add a sprinkle of fresh thyme and grind on some black pepper. Grab onions from the skillet using tongs and top the pissaladière. Finish it off with the whole anchovy fillets arranged in a pretty criss-cross pattern.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the edges of the puff pastry and the underside are golden brown. The edges may puff up quite a bit, but they’ll deflate once out of the oven. Let it cool for 5 minutes, then cut into a 2 × 3 grid. Top with the parsley and the sauce. What sauce? This sauce:

Bonus recipe: herbed mayonnaise

I learned this as sauce ravigote, which is probably not quite right, though the definition of the sauce appears to be controversial. Let’s just call it a sort of herbed mayo.

• 1 tbsp mayo; if possible, Kewpie brand
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp canola, grapeseed, or other mild oil
  
• 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tbsp combined fresh herbs: parsley, chervil, tarragon, thyme; minced as finely as possible

Combine the egg, mayo, and mustard in a small bowl. Slowly drizzle in the oil while whisking vigorously, making sure it gets integrated and the sauce stays together without separating. Stir in the juice and the herbs. Add salt if needed.

Grab dollops of the sauce with a fork and drizzle it over the pissaladière; if you have any left over, it’ll keep in the fridge for a week. Use it on literally anything savory.

Serve everything with a crisp white wine or lemonade for the youngsters.

There are two reasons to section¹ a citrus. The first is for presentation, an elegant way to use lemons, oranges and grapefruit pieces in all kinds of recipes, from salads to cakes. The second is to remove the tough, often bitter, pith and inner membrane so that the flavor of the fruit can shine.

As we’re at the height of citrus season, with exotic blood oranges and meyer lemons in the stores, it’s a good time to take advantage of these wonderful fruits.

The basic idea is to first peel the fruit, taking the white pith along with it, and then separate as much of the flesh fruit from the inner membranes. A sharp knife, as always, is important here, I like to use a small paring knife for most fruits because it’s thinner blade lets me extract more flesh. A good chef’s knife is fine, though, especially for bigger citrus like grapefruit.

First, cut off each end of the fruit so that it’s flat enough to stand up on its own. You want to cut just to the flesh of the fruit, but not too much. It’s ok to take a few shallow slices, you can always cut more.

With the fruit standing on one end, cut into the peel where it meets the flesh and use a sawing motion to work down the side of the fruit and remove the peel and the pith. Make sure to follow the shape of the fruit as you work down by adjusting the angle of your knife along the way. Try to avoid cutting into the flesh as much as possible but make sure to get the bitter pith.

Rotate and peel the fruit until all of the pith and peel are removed. You may have a few white pith pieces left, just trim those off on your own. What’s left is an orb of just the flesh of the fruit and the inner membranes that hold the sections together.

Now you want to cut each section of the fruit out and leave the membranes that separate each section behind. Cut as close to the membrane as possible, towards the center of the fruit, to get as much of the fruit out, but be careful to fully detach the flesh from the membrane. The first and last sections will probably be the hardest. Be sure to pick out any seeds that may be lingering.

You’ll be left with peel, the self contained core and your beautiful citrus sections. Be sure to squeeze the core over a bowl to save any juice you might want to save for salad dressing or to use in a recipe.

Editor’s note: We desperately wanted to get this up before New Year’s but an east coast blizzard, two airlines and four airports conspired against it. We think it’s still worth your time, even if you have to wait until January 2nd.

New Year’s is as good a time as any to add a little luck, whether you think you’ve got use for it or not. Where I’m from that usually comes, at least in part, in the form of a dinner of Hoppin’ John and often a side of collard greens for good fortune. I suspect that they make a great pair because of their similar and shared histories, both dishes brought to the United States by African slaves and now considered staples of Southern cooking.

The exact etymology of Hoppin’ John is lost to history and the variations appear to be endless, but the basics are these: black-eyed peas¹ cooked slowly with smoked pork and a few aromatics served over rice that’s been cooked in broth from the peas. A little heat from dried peppers, garlic or even hot sauce is nice, too. Nearly every culture has their take on rice and beans, this is America’s contribution.

Like collards, the traditional preparation calls for a ham hock, and if you’ve got one on hand, by all means, use it. But a few strips of thick, smokey bacon, sliced into batons will work just as well. The following should make enough for 4-6 servings, depending on whether you want them as the main course or an accompaniment to, say, country ham or a roast chicken.

Some recipes would have you add the rice directly to the cooked black-eyed peas but I prefer to cook them separately. It lets me make sure both the rice and the beans are cooked just right instead of ending up with a mushy, porridgy mix where neither is.

• 1 cup black-eyed peas
• ¼ pound of smokey bacon, cut into about ¼-inch thick lardon
• 2 cloves of garlic, cut lengthwise then smashed with the side of a knife
• ½ yellow onion, itself cut in half
• 1 carrot, peeled and quartered
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 dried chili, coarsely chopped or 2 tsp. red pepper flakes
• 1 sprig fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 3-finger pinch of kosher salt
• 1 ½ - 2 cups of long grain white rice, such as basmati

Add the black-eyed peas, bacon, garlic, onion, carrot, bay leaf, peppers and thyme to a medium saucepan (at least 2 quarts) or enameled dutch oven. Cover completely with cold water, about 6 cups, and bring to a boil, then lower to a slow simmer. Stir it a few times then leave it alone for at least 45 minutes, when the beans will still be fairly al dente. Test for salt and add a healthy pinch, stir, and let continue to cook for at least half an hour more.

While the beans are cooking, dump the rice in a large bowl and fill it with water then stir to rinse it. You’ll notice the water is a milky color, pour it off, being careful not to lose too much rice, then repeat until the water starts to clear. This is the secret to good rice.

After about an hour and a half, the beans will probably be about the right consistency, still distinct, but not too starchy or toothy. Add a little more salt if you think it needs it but go slowly. Place a colander over a pot big enough to hold all of the liquid from the beans, line the colander with cheese cloth if you have it, and then pour the beans into the colander.

Pick out anything that’s bigger than bite-sized — the quartered onions and carrots, the bay leaf, distinct cloves of garlic — and dump it into your food waste bin. If there are bits of bacon that are more fat than meat, get rid of those, too, but keep some of the bacon. Pour the beans back into the saucepan you cooked them in and add half a cup or so of the broth to help keep them moist. Cover the beans.

Measure out enough of the bean broth so that you have about 1 ½ times as much broth as you do rice — for 2 cups of rice, this means 3 cups of broth. You can keep the rest of the broth, it should freeze great. In another saucepan or pot, bring the broth and rice to a boil, then cut the heat to about medium low and cover. Stir every five minutes or so to make sure it’s not sticking, it should be done in about 20 minutes. Set the beans on medium-low to reheat them when the rice has about seven minutes left.

You can stir the beans in with the rice if you like, I prefer to keep them separate, though I can’t tell you any good reason why. Serve them with mess o’ collards and good beer or even champagne if you’re feeling fancy.

Friend-of-the-site Jelisa Castrodale has a little fun with holiday cookies.