I made these soups some time last week, but it’s been difficult to figure out how to write about them. They’re both very, very pretty, but also very, very simple. And simple is boring, right? What is there to write about simplicity that hasn’t already been written?

Then I got into a conversation with my friend Allie, who was making plans to cook dinner for her boyfriend, for the first time ever. She had picked a Barefoot Contessa recipe for a pork rib roast, and she asked me to walk her through it. I suggested mashed potatoes to accompany the roast, and she wrote down detailed notes as I explained what to do. I had never realized how nuanced the recipe really is. We repeated the process when she picked carrots as her vegetable.

It’s weird to me that there are people who have never cooked a meal before, but I am sure that there are people who think it would be weird to never have sewn their own clothing or built their own houses. Allie told me that I should host my own cooking show, something for which I have neither the skill nor the patience, but her comment reminded me that the simple things actually can be worth the most attention.

Take this spinach zucchini soup, for example. Yes, it’s basically all the green stuff in my fridge soupified, but that’s part of its charm. This is a Horatio Alger story of soups. A couple zucchini loitering in the crisper drawer, the remains of a package of frozen — yes, frozen! — spinach, a knee-jerk twitch towards a jar of curry powder: it all adds up to something both rich and light.

Why does blending a soup makes it fancier? This is something I’ve always kind of taken for granted, but like the process of mashing potatoes, perhaps there are aspects I haven’t noticed. Why is it that a broth with chunks of zucchini and clumps of spinach just seems so pedestrian when compared to a silky, forest green purée that tastes neither of spinach nor zucchini, but something fresh and green and in between? I may have answered my own question.

But as far as soup goes, there isn’t much simpler than tomato. This soup is basically fresh and canned tomatoes that have, again, been blended. I layered them over a base of toasted fennel seeds to give it some punch, but it ended up being a more subtle note that melded with the tomatoes into one flavor. Next time I’d take the seeds out after flavoring the oil with them, and also seed the tomatoes, but the chunkiness of the soup didn’t end up bothering me in the end. The green onions that I originally sprinkled on top to pretty it up, but they became a sharp punchline to the fennel seed setup.

Come lunchtime at work, I poured some hot soup into into a bowl, garnished it with some scallions, and dipped my toasted baguette slice into it. The plain Jane tomato soup was definitely more refined than something from a can, but it was still a refreshingly simple pleasure.

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I bought Claudia Roden’s Arabesque well before Christmas, but it took me until last week to make a recipe from it. It’s not that I wasn’t excited about it. On the contrary, I was very eager to capture the elusive tastes of the Middle East, which I once sampled on a weekend in Tangier. (I love saying that; it makes me feel so international.) I was most intrigued by the use of sweet seasonings in otherwise savory dishes, as brought to my attention in a braised chicken dish dusted with powdered sugar. What initially seemed odd and incongruous actually worked to elevate the dish to a new level.

So why did it take me so long to crack open the book? I can’t say I rightly know. I’d have an ingredient I wanted to use but couldn’t find a dish in the book that I wanted to make. Or I’d be flipping through and something would catch my eye, but it would turn out I didn’t have the right ingredients. When the planets aligned and I found the perfect recipe, I was surprised to see that it was actually Lebanese.

According to Claudia, Lebanon is known as a country of both immigrants and emigrants, and their food is very cosmopolitan. Vegetables are especially important, not just because of their role as the cheaper peasant alternative to meat, but because they could be eaten during the many fasts of the various religions.

Stewing eggplants with tomatoes and chickpeas doesn’t sound like a big deal, and on the surface of things, it isn’t. The whole thing is completely changed by the molasses. Who knew a little musky sweetness could go so far? The tomatoes cook down into savory jam, the eggplants take on new dimensions of flavor, and the chickpeas acquire a nutty richness that certainly wasn’t there before. The simple combination had been fractured by the prism of molasses and reassembled into a beautiful new pattern.

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Last Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, but despite the lovely flowers (thank you, Matt) and chocolates (thank you, mom and dad) that I received, the bigger holiday was the snow day. As anyone in lower New England knows, it’s been a particularly dismal winter, and I can’t remember one with less snow. The snow that started Tuesday night was only the second of the year, and it was the first that gave us more than an inch or two. So flustered was everybody by this late, icy snow that just about everything shut down.

I had awoken for work at the crack of one in the afternoon, only to be notified shortly thereafter that the store would be closing at two. It was the first day off for inclement weather I’ve had since middle school, so I completed the regression by watching Nick at Nite’s Growing Pains marathon for most of the day. Of course, my parents were also stranded at home, so we also celebrated a rare chance to eat a meal together.

My mom defrosted some top round and I marinated it in a bunch of condiments that I found in the pantry, including Worchestershire sauce, sesame oil, Dijon mustard, and horseradish. I seared it on the stove and finished it in the oven. It was okay, but a little bland and not very tender. I would have liked to have had some sort of green vegetable, but we were snowed in with nothing but canned and frozen, so I went with the carrots. What I really want to talk, though, about is the potatoes.

I’ve only roasted one goose in my lifetime, but apparently it resulted in enough goose fat to last the rest of it. This recipe, from Nigella Lawson’s Feast, used up a good half cup of it after I quartered the ingredient amounts. It basically involves deep frying the semolina-covered potatoes to create an irresistibly crisp crust recalling fast food french fries. The trick is that the deep frying takes place in the oven, safely containing the hot, sputtering grease and giving me some peace of mind. It’s not an everyday recipe since the process takes little time and effort, but it’s definitely worth it to spruce up a celebratory dinner.

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