Learning to make good soup has been a lot of trial and error for me. When I started out I would make the rookie mistake of just throwing everything into a pot and covering it with water. Now I know you need to build a soup gradually, nurturing it along, adding each item at just the right moment to let the flavors layer onto each other for just the right amount of time.

My lentil soup recipe is very representative of this philosophy. When I started making lentil soup, it was – well – depressing. Brown and gloppy, and overwhelmingly lentil-y. Even when I added chopped ham it was far from inspiring. Then I discovered French green lentils, which helped tremendously. Then I discovered adding enough stock to let the lentils dance around in the bowl instead of binding into mush. Then the addition of noodles and chunks of spicy pork sausage crowned the rendition. I still vary the soup considerably, but I seldom veer from the basic formula. It works.

First, the broth. Every time I roast a chicken I make a simple stock from the carcass, and freeze it in variously sized containers. I will often just thaw a quart or so of stock, then add water to fill out the pot. Every bit of extra flavor helps, but don’t feel the need to use nothing but stock, especially if the other ingredients are assertive. Get the stock and any additional water warm and ready to go before you start cooking.

I start building the soup with some aromatic vegetables. Often this is nothing but some diced carrot and sliced garlic, sauteed in olive oil until it begins to brown, but if I happen to have celery and onion on hand I’ll throw those in as well. Sometimes a bay leaf goes in, or a sprig of thyme.

After the vegetables have softened and browned, I wash the lentils and stir them in. Once they are coated with the olive oil and mingled with the vegetables, I pour in the stock. Once the liquid is at a boil, I cover the pot and turn it down to simmer. About half an hour usually does it – I want the lentils tender enough to eat but not getting mushy.

More liquid – water or stock – can be added now, and some salt. Sometimes I add a can of tomatoes, sometimes a handful of frozen spinach. I bring it all back to a boil and add some pasta – usually bowties, but gemelli or macaroni or shells would all do. The soup then simmers just until the pasta is cooked.

While the soup burbles, I cook the sausages. For one pot of soup I like to use about a pound of hot Italian cased sausage. Our local grocery makes these in-house, and they’re spicy enough to perk up a large pot of lentils all by themselves. I cook them in a covered skillet with just a bit of water for ten minutes, then uncover the pan, boil off the water and sear them in their own fat until they brown.

Once the sausages are cool enough to handle I slice them thickly, then toss them into the soup pot as soon as the pasta is finished cooking. Then I turn off the heat, because I don’t want the sausage pieces to overcook. The soup is now ready to eat, or to put away in the fridge for later – always a good idea, since it lets the sausage flavor permeate the lentils. The soup reheats well, and can be frozen in individual containers for lunches – the pasta’s texture suffers slightly but not enough to bother us. We never have enough leftovers to satisfy us – so I just make more.

Boy, this dinner was a smashing success if I do say so myself. We had been pondering what to do for food one night, and I was idly considering something involving fish, since we were about to go to the grocery store. I opened up a few cookbooks and flipped through their fish sections…many of them too complicated, too weird-sounding, wrong kind of fish…then, in Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen, a book I hadn’t yet made a thing out of (but I sure do love the Palace Kitchen and Serious Pie, two of his restaurants), I saw a heading for pan-roasted halibut with herbed lentils and toasted breadcrumb salad.

For some reason, the thought of that just really did it for me, so I headed to the fish case with my eyes peeled for halibut. They had had halibut cheeks a few days previously, but of course they were out – so I ended up getting a few fillets of very fresh, beautiful looking Dover sole.

Because I had such a delicate fish, I ignored the recipe’s instructions for cooking halibut and instead just tossed the fillets in a pan with some butter and pan fried them very lightly. Other than that I followed the recipe pretty closely, with just a few small adjustments on the fly.

The Lentils:

The only things I changed here were the cooking time on the lentils, substituting shallot for onion, and leaving out the celery and some additional herbs (he calls for thyme and oregano as well as the sage and rosemary, but I had just cut down my thyme bush the day I made this).

• 1 cup French lentils, rinsed
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 1 carrot, finely diced
• 1 shallot, finely diced
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 tsp chopped fresh sage
• 1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
• 3 Tbsp unsalted butter
• salt and pepper

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil, then add the lentils. Tom says they cook in 12 minutes, but I’ve never known lentils to cook that fast – I think mine took at least 20 minutes. They should be cooked through but still with a bit of bite to them. Drain the lentils and set aside.

In a large skillet, heat the oil and saute the garlic, carrot and shallot until soft. Add the lentils, chicken stock and fresh herbs and bring it all to a boil. Add the butter and stir. Salt and pepper to taste.

Toasted Breadcrumb Salad

This stuff was great. I mean, really great. I could eat it like cereal.

• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 cup coarse breadcrumbs
• salt and pepper
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
• zest of one small lemon

Heat the olive oil in a small pan and stir in the breadcrumbs. Keep stirring over med-high heat until they are golden and crisp. Let them cool, then toss in a bowl with salt, pepper, parsley and lemon zest. Right before using, drizzle with half a recipe’s worth of lemon vinaigrette.

Lemon Vinaigrette

• juice of the lemon you zested
• a couple tablespoons of olive oil
• coarse salt

Combine the juice, oil and salt (Tom says to add shallot to this as well, but it frankly didn’t seem necessary). Whisk it together and pour part of it over the breadcrumb salad and part over your cooked fish.

Part of the fun was building the plates: a pool of herby, buttery lentils, the fish sitting on top with a drizzle of vinaigrette, steamed asparagus on the side, then an airy mound of the breadcrumb salad sitting on top. As we ate, the lemony breadcrumbs mixed with everything. The textures were a lovely mix of crisp, soft, soupy and firm.

We fussed for a while over our wine selection. Tom Douglas recommends a New Zealand sauvignon blanc with this dish, which we happened to be fresh out of. We almost went with a Washington viognier, but then we remembered a coastal California sangiovese rosé that we were given recently. The copy on the label was very peculiar, but the wine was delicious – just crisp and acidic enough to cut through the buttery lentils, and holding up well to the lemon in the dish.