A great week for Dining In

Usually, the New York Times Wednesday food section has one recipe I'd really try, maybe two. Last week, it was Bittman's Puttanesca sauce.

In today's Times, there are three winners that I can't wait to make: Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry from Nigella, Chicken with Green Olives from Bittman and Basic Pot Roast from Eric Stirling, some cute guy who owns a camp in northern Maine. Not too plain, not too fancy, just right. As a bonus, the chickpea curry and the chicken with green olives use many of the same spices. I love it when you can spice shop once, cook twice and make dishes with an entirely different taste. Finding two different recipes that use the same spice is the best way to really learn about how a spice works and helps to make sure you have some hope of getting to the bottom of a new spice jar before the spice looses its taste.

The Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry will be a great way to use up the sweet potatoes (or are they really yams? what's the difference?) that came in my Urban Organic shipment last week, especially since I can't take those treacly marshmallow sweet potato concoctions that are so famous for Thanksgiving.

I'll be away this weekend visiting Boston, but will make the Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry and the rest of the recipes from this week's times and I'll report back here. This week's Dining In/ Dining Out is a winner!

Also this week, Nigella taught me a new word: bosky. In her description of her mushroom ragout, which I would also like to make if buying and finding mushrooms didn't feel like such an expensive pain, Nigella explains that, after the mushrooms have been on the heat for a while, "clamp on a lid and let them give off their bosky juices." I haven't found a great definition of bosky yet, but I did some Googling around and it seems to mean a deep, earthly, woodsy flavor that is still somehow light. Does anyone else have a definition for bosky?