One of my favorite meals to order in a restaurant is French fries and a salad (but only if the fries are really good and come with a delicious dipping sauce, like the duck-fat fries with brown butter béarnaise sauce at Orson, or the fries with harissa aioli at Nopa). But that is not really a meal in the spirit of the season of resolve. As we learn from the Buddha, the middle way is best.

And so I present, French fries and a salad, Buddha-style:

Take some sweet potatoes; cut them into wedges; toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper; and maybe some cayenne or chili powder. Spread them out on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake at 425 for 30 minutes or so, turning occasionally.

The kale salad is another recipe from my friend K., via her father-in-law who had this salad at a restaurant in Aspen. From Aspen to Portland to San Francisco to you. Nothing could be easier. Take some kale (curly or dino, whichevs); separate it from its ribs; and chop it up very, very fine until you basically have a pile of kale confetti. Finely mince a shallot. Put it all in a salad bowl. Add a generous handful of parmigiano cut into a fine dice. Toss in a handful of currants and pine nuts. Squeeze a lemon over the whole thing and drizzle on some olive oil. Add some Maldon sea salt if you’re feeling fancy, or just plain kosher salt. Toss to coat.

Kale salad also goes well with a baguette and pate, but that might be a meal for another season, too.

Does arugula count as a dark leafy green? It is green and it is a leaf, so let’s say yes. This is a perfect main-dish salad invented by my friend K. It makes an ideal supper for a lady dining alone but it also likes company. Pomegranate seeds are like the high heels of salads. Throw them into the mix and you feel all dressed up.

You need about 2 cups of roasted pumpkin (or whatever winter squash you have on hand. I’ve used red kuri, buttercup, kabocha, pumpkin, and plain old butternut). 6 cups of arugula. Seeds from one pomegranate. Shavings of parmigiano. A handful of toasted pumpkin seeds (extra credit for toasting the seeds from the pumpkin you roasted).

Make a vinaigrette with 1 minced shallot; 1/4 cup olive oil; 3 tablespoons of the vinegar of your choice; 1 tablespoon each pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard; and salt and pepper to taste.

Toss it all together. Serve it to your guests or sit down with a glass of wine, kick off your high heels, and have a nice solitary supper.

Put on your finest scarves and bring your crystal ball—it’s gypsy soup for dinner. The original recipe comes from Mollie Katzen and her classic Moosewood Cookbook (the first cookbook, alongside Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso’s New Basics, that I ever owned). I don’t really cook from Moosewood anymore. A few years ago I was telling my friend M. about the sweet potato and kale soup I’d made, and she said “Oh, like gypsy soup.” Gypsy what? I didn’t remember the recipe at all. But when I went home and pulled out my copy, there it was, on a page with stains splattered across it, calling to mind the gypsy that I was at age 22.

In Katzen’s headnotes for the recipe, she urges you to experiment. All you need, she says, is a combination of orange and green vegetables. Except her recipe doesn’t involve actual greens. I had to read it three times before I decided that her green must be the bell pepper listed in the ingredients. To me, “bell pepper” always means red. Or any color but green. Moosewood was written in a different era, a gentler time when green bell peppers were not held in widespread contempt.

In fact, the more I read the Gypsy Soup recipe, the more I realized that my version has deviated widely from the original. Mine isn’t even vegetarian. But gypsies are free spirits. They can’t be pinned down. They have to roam where their hearts lead them. Just ask Stevie Nicks. So let’s say that the core elements of gypsy soup are sweet potatoes, chickpeas, and some kind of green vegetable, and leave it at that.

Gypsy Soup
adapted from Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen

1 large onion, chopped
1 or 2 medium carrots, chopped
1 chile de arbol, crumbled
4 or 5 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch chard, ribs removed and diced, leaves torn or chopped into bite-size pieces
1 large sweet potato, cut in 1/2″ dice
4 cups chicken stock
2 medium tomatoes, chopped, or 1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes
2 cups chickpeas, cooked or canned
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
1 bay leaf

In your favorite soup pot, saute the onion, carrots, diced chard ribs, sweet potatoes, garlic, and chile in olive oil for about 5 to 7 minutes.

Add the spices and chicken stock, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the chickpeas, tomatoes, and chard leaves, and simmer for 10 minutes or until the vegetables are as tender as you’d like. Taste and adjust seasonings.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream, crème fraiche, goat cheese, yogurt, or something similar. Maybe some crusty bread. Cornbread might be nice. Or not. It’s your soup. Be your own gypsy.

Mara’s gypsy:

This is my new favorite orange-and-green combo, thanks to Melissa Clark of The New York Times. Yes, it’s a lot of carbohydrates. She originally wrote this recipe to fuel a marathoner, so if you don’t think you’re going to need a few hundred extra calories to get through your day, you could skip the pasta part. That’s what I thought I would do, but it’s so good with the pasta—even gluten-free spaghetti made from corn and quinoa—that I usually keep it in. This dish also works well with polenta.

The recipe is pretty perfect as written by Ms. Clark in the Times.

I first came up with the idea for an orange-and-green series back in November, when winter squash were everywhere and the season stretched long before us. But now it’s almost the end of January and the supply of local squash is dwindling down to butternut, acorn, and spaghetti. So, forthwith, the rest of the recipes!

Let’s go back in time to Thanksgiving. The baked kale and sweet potato gratin were my contribution to the table this year. The traditional Thanksgiving palette runs the narrow stretch of neutrals between beige and white, so it’s nice to see some pops of color on the plate. The challenge with The Holiday Edition is dealing with the quantity of kale it takes to fill a 9 x 13 pan after being sautéed with shallots and onion. Kale is not a ruly vegetable. It has not a single ounce of rule in it, and just the draft caused by turning around will make it fly all over the place. You’ll probably also run out of bowls for washing it in. Definitely use two pans to sauté it all. Even with two pans, it doesn’t all fit right away, so I add it in batches as it wilts down.

And beware, the gratin calls for the use of the most bloodthirsty tool in the kitchen: the mandoline. Keep your band-aids close by and be prepared to give up some fingernails/fingertips. The sacrifice is worth it. While I’m not entirely sure what this says about the gratin, it was pronounced the best side dish on the Thanksgiving table by a man who doesn’t really eat vegetables.

If you have any gratin and gruyere left over, put the gratin in a dish, top it with the cheese, and pop it in the oven at 400 degrees. After 15 minutes, crack two eggs on top, bump the heat up, and cook for another 5 minutes or so, until the whites are set but the yolks are runny.

The kale comes from a recipe found in Food and Wine a few years back and I adapted the gratin from this recipe in last year’s Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet. All I did was substitute sweet potatoes for the potatoes.

The first, the original, the Classic. This was my first combination of the orange and green, invented shortly after I discovered dino kale, the gateway green. Take a few tokes off this bumpy, dark green leaf and it is a short spiral into more hardcore greens like curly kale, mustard greens, collard greens, broccoli rabe, red Russian kale, and the like. Like marijuana, dino kale goes by many names: lacinato kale, dino kale, cavolo nero. It’s all the same thing.

The Classic was my go-to meal for much of the late 1990s, leading some to call it “The Lynne Special.” It was probably the first dish I ever made that wasn’t from a recipe. I still eat it fairly often. It’s not particularly fast, but it’s easy and uses mostly things you have on hand (or should have on hand). Most recently I ate this for dinner after a yoga workshop dedicated to detoxifying the body (in the spirit of the season). I felt full but not toxic. A few more meals like this one and I’ll feel well enough to start on a retox diet.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

1 or 2 large garnet or jewel sweet potatoes, cut into 1″ chunks or rounds
a generous pinch of chili powder
a sprinkling of brown sugar
olive oil to coat
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400ish. Combine all ingredients and put them in a roasting dish with a cover. Use foil if the dish doesn’t have its own lid. Roast until tender and the chili powder and sugar have caramelized together, 45 minutes to an hour.

Braised Dino Kale

1 bunch dino kale, ribs removed and leaves torn into manageable pieces, washed and drained but not dried
2 or 3 large cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 dried chile de arbol

While the sweet potatoes are roasting, get the kale ready. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large saucepan or deep skillet.

Crumble the dried chile de arbole into the heated oil and stir for about 30 seconds. Add the garlic and stir until fragrant. Put the washed greens in the pot and stir to coat the leaves with the oil and garlic. If the leaves don’t have water still clinging to them from the washing, add about a ¼ cup of water to the pot.

Lower the heat, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until leaves are dark and glossy but not too mushy, about 10 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste, then turn out on a plate alongside the roasted sweet potatoes.

And they just so happen to be in season during winter, the season of resolution. If you’re searching around for dietary alternatives to holiday excesses like salami-and-cheese cracker sandwiches washed down with a bottle of wine, look to the orange and the green. Even if you cook them in cream and butter, it’s hard not to feel virtuous and healthy when these two are on your plate, in the same way a Prius might ease your guilt about driving the two blocks to the store.

There are endless ways to combine these two, but in the following posts I present some of my favorites. First up: The Classic.