Late last year, I made farinata (in this case, based on this Mark Bittman recipe) when home for the holidays. It went well, but something seemed a little off — though some of that may come from the fact that my fondness for black pepper exceeds that of almost everyone I know. Either way, I have an abundance of chickpea flour on hand in my apartment, and decided to give the recipe another shot, this time using my skillet. Things I have learned: don’t underestimate the skillet. The result this time out was much more crispy around the edges; the pepper seemed more dispersed throughout as well. I added some ricotta to the top of it, which worked out well enough and — to my taste — balanced the pepper pretty well. Next time out: olives.

Less successful may have been my attempts at a side dish: here, a hastily conceived/improvised red lentil soup. Other things I now realize: that’s a lot of legumes. But I somehow didn’t glean, until I sat down to eat, the extreme similarities between the central ingredients of the two dishes I was making. (I would now make some sort of clever comment, possibly using wordplay to reference the word “legume”, but I don’t thing it’s actually possible.)