Lettuce Chicken. Yeah, that’s right. Lettuce Chicken.

With food, as with fashion, some things are timeless...and some are fads that instantly evoke the era that spawned them. Like, while steak frites is the culinary equivalent of a little black dress and pearls, pesto with sun-dried tomatoes is the equivalent of a pink Izod shirt with a turned-up collar.

Recently, I found myself with a strange nostalgic compulsion to make a circa-late-1970s dish that could be considered the equivalent of a Mrs. Roper print muumuu. And let me tell you, gentle reader, it was damn good.

My aunt—ironically, I'm her namesake—was not much of a cook. She was one of those people that had one “company-friendly” recipe down pat and would make it at every occasion she hosted through the years. In this case, her signature dish was Lettuce Chicken, composed of sautéed chicken, bacon, and—how weird is this?!—iceberg lettuce, with some lemon juice bringing it all together. And it was actually AWESOME—a perfect balance of rich and clean/tart flavors. For some reason, a craving for this popped into my head recently…but when I googled “lettuce chicken” I got a bunch of crap about “wraps” and “cups” calling for lettuce leaves in lieu of the tortillas God intended.

So I texted my mom to ask if she recalled the gist of the original recipe for Lettuce Chicken, and, happily, she did. (Apparently it originated in Gourmet back in the day. If anyone can track down this O.G. recipe I’d be most grateful, and would sleep better at night linking to it as the source of this post. I did do due Google diligence in an effort to cite my source properly…but it’s not my fault that ’Merickan women are obese but aspire not to be, and hence searching for lettuce chicken yields 87 pages of variations on the same freaking “wraps” and “cups”!)

Anyhoo. I originally thought of substituting escarole for the iceberg lettuce as a modern update of the dish, since I just didn’t trust my memory that iceberg could go in a cooked dish. But the Met Foods, much to my lack of shock, did not have escarole in stock, and when I texted my mom to confirm that it was indeed iceberg in the original recipe, she responded, “Yep. That’s all we had back then. AND WE LIKED IT!” Clearly, I had to keep it real and go with the iceberg. (I mean, I didn’t have an option. You caught the part about how the market had no escarole, right?) So, to make a long story short (too late), here’s how I made the awesome lost-in-history dish that is Lettuce Chicken.

Grilled Escarole With Pecorino

Escarole is a great green but one that I have never cooked myself before—in part, gentle reader, because I often have trouble distinguishing it from lettuce at the market. On this occasion, however, the escarole was clearly marked, and I thought it would be perfect grilled as a complement to the lamb chops and butter beans I was making for dinner. So I decided to take a chance on an escarole-grilling escapade, and it turned out delicious.

This side dish was actually inspired by a delicious small plate from The Vanderbilt—one of The Rob’s and my favorite neighborhood spots—consisting of grilled escarole, hazelnuts, and as I learned when I looked it up after dinner, “Pecorino Ginepro”—which I’d never heard of before but turns out to involve flavors of balsamic vinegar and juniper berries. I happened to have pecorino romano on hand, but no hazelnuts—they’re great in this, though, or you could maybe try some toasted walnuts.

Rigatoni With Sausage & Broccoli Rabe

This is one of your super-simple, quick weeknight one-dish meals. The balance of sweet, rich, spicy sausage with the bitter greens, the salty Parmesan, and the neutralizing pasta is a perfect harmony.

The secret to good broccoli rabe (or as we call it in our household, broccoli The Rob) is that you have to take the edge off the bitterness, either by “shocking” it in boiling water or siphoning it out into chicken stock or another liquid while sautéing. I find the former method to be more effective—as long as you don’t boil the greens for too long so they lose their crunch and flavor. It works great for pasta since you can just toss it into the same water.

Start by boiling a big covered pot of salted water. I like using one that comes with a lift-out colander basket, since it makes it super easy to lift out the broccoli rabe and then add the pasta into the same boiling water. But if you don’t have one you can use tongs to extricate it.

While you are waiting for the water to boil, heat a little olive oil in a large skillet or wide-bottomed stockpot over medium-high. Add a pound of loose sweet or hot Italian sausage—you can either buy it that way, or use a paring knife to slit the casings of a package of 6 tube-style sausages and “peel” them to extricate the filling.

Sauté the sausage, stabbing it with a wooden spoon to crumble it up into smaller chunks. (BTW, Stabbing to Crumble would be a great name for your new thrash-metal band. You’re welcome!)

When the sausage is cooked through (gray with brown spots; it’s okay if there are hints of pink still), lift it out of the pan with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels or a brown paper bag.

Duck Confit Salad With Plumped Dried Cherries

Why is it that people love the novelty of breakfast for dinner, but when presented with what is essentially lunch for dinner—a sandwich and chips, say, or soup and salad—it just feels like a downgrade?

This question occurred to me, and I was inspired to do a soup-and-salad combo that would be worthy of the label “dinner.” This one fit the bill, to the tune of $12 total for a light dinner for two.

The meal consists of a French onion–style mushroom soup, a salad with duck leg confit and dried cherries, and a loaf of crusty bread with pesto butter. All of which sounds fancier and more complicated than it in fact is. I will herewith break down this salad, including the homemade vinaigrette—and, what the heck, the pesto butter too.

This salad would also be a fantastic first course for any date-night or special-occasion meal, even those occasions that are special for no particular reason.

Corn-Tomato-Arugula Sauté

To all of you who have lots of corn and tomatoes from the garden to use up as summer turns to fall…well, screw you! I can’t even have a window box of basil with the amount of exhaust-fume buildup that collects on my windows from the busy Brooklyn avenue they face! But because I am incredibly generous and selfless (pfff), I will provide for you a very easy and yummy recipe that uses up both of those. You could also use up your basil or other herbs with this warm veggie side dish, which could also be served cold or at room temp as a salad.

Roasted Bok Choi

This recipe, like so many great dishes throughout history, had its genesis in one crystal-clear beacon of inspiration: Some food was about to go bad.

In this case, that food was a head of bok choi, which I bought last week and failed to use. I wanted to try roasting it, because the oven tends to be more forgiving to vegetables that have passed their prime, much like dim lighting with humans.

I figured it would go great with the pork dumplings I made a big batch of and froze a few weeks ago. You can plop these right from the freezer into a steamer over boiling water, and they cook in about 10 minutes, so they are awesome to have handy.

Bok choi has stems that are much thicker, and thus take longer to cook, than its green ends. So I debated whether to add everything to the pan at once, or start with the stems and add the greens later. I Googled “roasted bok choi,” but every recipe that came up was for baby bok choi, which have far slenderer stems (hence the name, duh), so I wasn’t sure whether the directions would apply.

Being hungry and impatient, I opted to wing it. I decided I would cook everything together but keep the greens under the stems so they would retain their moisture.

Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans

I once attended this awesome lecture class at the Natural Gourmet cooking school, taught by Annemarie Colbin, whom I admire very much for proving that it’s possible to believe in holistic health and nutrition without being pretentious or preachy. To wit: At one point she said something like, “I just know there’s something medicinal about bacon. I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s just so delicious, there has to be!”

That quip came to my mind while making Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans (above left), since if you operate with the assumption that bacon is indeed somehow medicinal, this would be, like, the healthiest dish ever. You could, of course, omit the bacon and just use olive oil to sauté your veggies, but bacon is a great complement to bitter greens and really just brings all these flavors together.

(Also, you could use kale instead of chard, though I might discard the stems and use solely the leaves, and also cook it about 10 minutes longer. But I love red chard [above right], because it cooks into such a pretty pink color.)