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.

These days, we don’t have much need to confit, originally developed as a way to preserve meat before the advent of refrigeration. The basic technique is to salt cure a piece of meat for a day or so, slowly cook it in fat (preferably fat of the type of animal that’s being cooked) and then store it submerged in that very fat. But life would be fairly boring if we only stuck to what modern convenience required and the combination of curing and slow cooking in fat provides just too perfect a launching point for a blog called Salt and Fat.

Unlike my partner, I decided to launch with an experiment that I’d never tried before. I wanted to introduce the idea of a confit but thought the traditional duck or goose might be a bit off-putting to folks more accustomed to neighborhood grocery stores instead of butchers or specialty markets. So I thought a chicken, the mainstay of the modern American diet, might be fun to try. And since chicken fat is fairly difficult to come by, and undesirable to boot, I figured a bottle of olive oil, another fixture in every cabinet, would work as a suitable stand in. I also threw in a few herbs and spices that should be easy to come by.

For my experiment, I picked up a cellophane-wrapped “best of fryers” from my neighborhood market (locally raised to boot), an already butchered set of two wings, two breasts, two legs and two thighs, skin on, for a grand total of just under six bucks. I grabbed a bottle of nothing-fancy olive oil — no need to splurge on extra virgin, in fact you might want the richer, heavier flavor of a second or third pressing. If you don’t have any kosher salt, grab a box while you’re in the store (I like Morton’s) and throw out your table salt while you’re at it. I included some peppercorns and a clove of garlic.

Back home, I coated the chicken in about 2-3 tablespoons of salt — it should have a noticeable patina on every surface. Once coated, everything got shoved into a non-reactive pan — a 9x13 pyrex baking dish fit things snuggly. A healthy sprinkle of coarsely ground pepper on top, pressed the thinly sliced slivers of garlic directly into the meat, covered in food safe plastic and into the fridge it went overnight. To keep the final chicken from being too salty, rinse the salt and seasonings the next morning.

Next, the fat. Preheat your oven to 200 (or lower if yours will do it). You’ll need a pot or pan that can safely go in the oven (so nothing with plastic handles) — a cast iron oven works great for this. Pat the rinsed chicken dry, dump it in your pot in a single layer or two, cover completely in the olive oil (I used a full bottle) and bring to simmer on the stove over medium high heat. Once you start to see some bubbles in the oil, turn off the stove and put the pot, uncovered, in the oven. For, oh, about four to six hours — this is best done on windy, rainy or snowy Saturday when sticking around the house and heating up the kitchen is a fairly appealing notion.

At this point, the chicken should be quite tender, probably falling apart. Let the whole thing cool at room temperature and then you can either transfer the meat and oil to tupperware or just stick the whole pot in the fridge. It’s imperative that the meat stay submerged in the oil — it will stay good for weeks this way. You can reheat by heating some of the olive oil over medium heat and frying the meat, skin side down, for 4-5 minutes — this goes pretty well on with some braised greens or on top of a salad with, say, a light vinaigrette.

As for whether the experiment worked, I’d say it was a noble effort if not something I’m going to add to my repertoire. For one, I prefer to avoid cooking with olive oil, as its low smoke point means its flavor changes when heated. But mostly I just didn’t feel like the chicken was transformed in the same way that a duck, goose or (best yet) pork are when put through the same alchemy; duck fat or lard may have been a better substitute for the olive oil, but I’m worried the chicken wouldn’t hold up to such strong stuff. It was good, and certainly different than the boring seared chicken breast at the heart of the American diet, but it didn’t blow me away.