Every Wednesday night, Bon Appétit food director Carla Lalli Music takes over our newsletter with a sleeper-hit recipe from the Test Kitchen vault. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
Here’s what I should do when I get home, hungry, after a long day at work: Make this socca recipe.
Here’s what usually happens: I open the front door and my cat, Peggy, runs past me into the freedom of the great Brooklyn outdoors. I shut the door behind me, then yell for my children. I literally yell: “Children!” I rarely get a response, and neither of them appear. I kick off my shoes. That’s a signal for my other cat, King Jeffrey, to jump onto the counter, gaze purposefully at me with his spooky lizard-snake eyes, and telepathically message that he would like his dinner now.
Before I can even pour myself a tumbler of vino, I’m fork-deep in wet food. That’s Peggy’s cue to jump back into the kitchen through the front window. My own children have no incentive to join us. They’ve already been fed—thanks to a meal plan I work out with our sitter. But what about my dinner?
I’ll be real. Sometimes my husband and I eat what is known as a “snack-around plate.” This is cheese, nuts, dried fruit, some salumi (if we have it), and a cut-up apple. Great stuff, if you’re a toddler. There are nights when I eat the kid’s leftovers, and nights when my husband and I talk about ordering in for so long that by the time we decide where to order from, I don’t want dinner anymore. There are nights, Dear Reader, when I eat cereal for dinner.
Somehow, being the food director of Bon Appétit has equipped me with the knowledge of how to put together a great weeknight dinner but without the wherewithal to actually execute. I mean, once in a while I come up with a life-altering invention like Broccoli Delight, but the bulk of the time it’s Refrigerator Blues. If I had my druthers, my dinner would be a quick-cooking something that goes from raw to perfection while I stand at the cutting board prepping a vegetable to go with it.
That’s where the chickpea flour pancake called socca comes in. It is protein-rich and filling, but unlike a pork chop or a salmon fillet, you don’t have to remember to stop off at the store to buy it on the way home (except, of course, for the first time you purchase the flour). It turns into a batter with the addition of salt, olive oil, and water—no eggs, even! And while that sits for 10 minutes hydrating, you can prepare any raw or cooked vegetable component your heart desires (or that your crisper drawer hasn’t wilted yet).
And there it is. A hot dinner, a quick dinner, a pantry-friendly dinner, the actual dinner I deserve. When my meal is ready, that’s when the children appear, sniffing around to figure out the source of the enticing food smells they’re smelling. “Oh,” they say, “can we have our second dinner now?”
