When the trees are bare, the skies are gray and the threat of a cold seems to be eternally looming, there is no better time to rekindle your creative spirit in the kitchen. Winter may be the season of warming soups, stews and porridges, but they needn’t be one-note or soporifically heavy. Below, a roundup of simple and energizing recipes, from the dancer Misty Copeland’s beautifully light flounder dish to the Italian chef Nina Clemente’s bright ginger-laden dal, that will reinvigorate your rotation of cold-weather staples — and help you recover from the holidays.
Rice and Oat Porridge With Cranberry Molasses
The New York-based chef Camille Becerra works with fresh, seasonal, vibrantly hued ingredients — golden kabocha squash, brilliant red barberries, purple ninja radishes — but not in a manner that, as she puts it, feels “excessively healthy.” Becerra, who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New Jersey, developed her visually distinct, flavorful culinary style in the ’90s, working in mostly female-run, often vegetarian restaurants in and around New York. To stay energized, she starts the day with a bowl of hearty (but not heavy) breakfast porridge. The rice-and-oat-based dish is an updated version of the breakfast she ate while cooking at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center, a Buddhist retreat in New Mexico, where she worked in 1995, soon after graduating from culinary school. She adds cranberry molasses for a tart tang, black sesame gomashio for a salty note and a drizzle of cold-pressed cranberry-seed oil. See the recipe here.
Flounder With Sautéed Kale
To put it mildly, the life of a ballerina does not leave much time for a grand sit-down meal. “Most of the time, I’m in the studio from 10:15 a.m. to 7 p.m.,” says Misty Copeland, who in 2015 became the American Ballet Theater’s first black female principal dancer. “And the longest break I get is five minutes on the hour. So it’s really difficult to manage eating.” When Copeland gets home from work (or when she has a rare night off), she likes to make virtuous variations on the homey dishes she grew up with in the stick-to-your-ribs barbecue capital that is Kansas City, Mo. In her kitchen, kale replaces collard greens. Flounder and vegetable broth substitute for ham hocks and chicken stock. Cooking, she says, “is a way for me to be creative with a lot less physical exhaustion than dancing all day.” See the recipe here.
Warm Evergreen Soup
The nutritionist and triathlete Eve Persak has overseen the nutrition and wellness-related programs for the Como hotel group’s 15 destinations. But when cooking for herself, Persak keeps it simple. She often rides her motorbike to the local markets, where she stocks up on fresh produce, which she likes to purée to create vibrant, vitamin-rich soups. One of her favorites is a warm evergreen soup, made from healing bone broth and fiber-packed cruciferous vegetables — such as broccoli, cauliflower and kale — garnished with grated, anti-inflammatory turmeric. Sometimes she will stir in miso paste for a dose of probiotics (“When I’m feeling I need some digestive settling”), or if her body demands more energy, she will add sliced avocado and a handful of pumpkin seeds (for “a bit of a crunch and extra zinc for immunity”). See the recipe here.
Persimmons for Breakfast, Two (Healthy) Ways
“As a young line cook, I’d eat when I could and I liked to feel full,” says the chef Angela Dimayuga. “Now, I think a lot more about what I put into my body and notice how I feel afterward.” Perennially on her menu at home during the winter months: fuyu persimmons, plucked straight from a tree in her childhood backyard in San Jose, Calif., and sent to Dimayuga by her mom each November. The fruit ultimately becomes breakfast fare, either as a smoothie or atop porridge. The former calls for persimmons that are soft to the touch and “feel like a basic unripe grocery-store tomato,” which Dimayuga quarters and blends into a persimmon-sesame milk smoothie. Then, when the persimmons soften and become jammy, Dimayuga plops them on top of quinoa-oat porridge. See the recipes here.
Three Easy-to-Make Purifying Tonics
Daniela Soto-Innes’s Brooklyn apartment might as well be an apothecary, with her trays of powders and roots and bowls overflowing with herbs. First thing in the morning, she will often drink a tangy mixture of dried hibiscus flowers steeped in hot water with a splash of apple cider vinegar. When she’s feeling particularly lethargic, or before going on a run, she’ll also drink green coffee (the color comes from the unroasted beans) mixed with coconut oil, which provides “pure energy without anxiety,” she says, and keeps her full. (Also, the green coffee beans don’t cause teeth stains.) And for the inevitable late nights out — Soto-Innes loves dancing — a light, floral drink of lemon verbena and coconut water is her all-purpose hangover cure. See the recipes here.
Hearty Red Lentil Dal
The chef Nina Clemente spent much of her childhood in New York City and southern Italy, but some of her earliest memories are of Chennai, India, a bustling city on the Bay of Bengal. She and her family lived there for half a year while her father, the artist Francesco Clemente, worked in the area. Her mother — the artist, actress and costume designer Alba Clemente — would often experiment with local ingredients as she cooked a red lentil dal. “To this day,” Clemente says, the traditional Indian dish “is one of my comfort foods.” It’s one that Clemente, who runs her own catering business, turns to when she’s battling a cold or just feeling run down. While her mother “made a mellow version,” Clemente goes “super heavy on the fresh grated ginger and cumin” for an extra kick. See the recipe here.
Pea Shoot Salad
Like a lot of couples, Gabriel Hendifar and Jeremy Anderson — the co-founders of the New York lighting and design studio Apparatus — have distinct roles in the kitchen. “He’s the baker,” Hendifar says of his partner, “the one who roasts and cooks things that require a lot more planning. I’m more of an assembler.” Being an assembler comes in handy, though, when making a salad. Over the years, Hendifar has developed a flexible recipe that works any time of day, at any scale, with any number of variations. If it’s beet season, they go in. In the summer, corn does. “Salads are my thing,” Hendifar says. “I’ve had a love affair with butter lettuce, but I’ve found it doesn’t always support heavier ingredients.” So he sometimes replaces the lettuce with hardier pea shoots that form a kind of green nest. See the recipe here.
Balancing Okra Stew
To stay energized and keep her digestive system healthy when she’s on the road, Alek Wek — the model, author, designer and Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — relies on a diet that’s mostly plant-based and rich in gut-balancing ingredients. One of the staples in her kitchen is okra: The fibrous plant is plentiful in Wek’s native city of Wau, South Sudan, and found in many of the region’s traditional dishes, including an okra and tomato stew that her mother would often serve when Wek was a child. She now makes her own version of the stew, adding ginger and cinnamon to boost immunity, and spoons it over spiced couscous. When gearing up for a busy stretch, like fashion month, she adds a glass of detoxifying lemon juice — fresh lemons squeezed into ice water with a bit of honey — to the menu. See the recipe here.
