One-pot wizardry

Patented 'infusion cooking' turns out layers of flavor

Marty Meitus, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 30, 2005 at midnight

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When Elizabeth Yarnell received one of those small cast iron-and-enamel Dutch ovens as a wedding present, she and her husband weren't sure what to do with it.

Who knew that it would become the MVP of their home kitchen?

Yarnell has patented a way of cooking in a Dutch oven, giving new meaning to the phrase one-pot meals. By layering the various components of a dish, she has figured out a way to do an all-in-one meal that doesn't turn into a melange of meat and vegetables, aka a soup, stew or casserole.

Rather, each layer can be lifted out with tongs so that you end up with perfectly cooked ingredients, such as broccoli, chicken and rice, without using three pots to make them.

"I call it 'infusion cooking,' " Yarnell says. "When everything goes into the pot and into the high heat (in the oven) and the ingredients heat up, they release their moisture, and that's what cooks everything."

Sounds simple, doesn't it? But Yarnell, 36, worked on her newly released cookbook, Glorious One-Pot Meals ($14.95 at the Tattered Cover and on the Web site www.gloriouspotmeal.com), for six years as she perfected her recipes and taught the process to students at the Seasoned Chef Cooking School in Denver.

"I think she's developed a pretty remarkable cooking method for making quick, easy, healthy meals," says Susan Stevens of the Seasoned Chef. "Her classes have been very well-received by her students. The classes always fill up and sell out because people appreciate the ease of putting healthy ingredients together for a quick meal."

The dishes take about 45 minutes in the oven. Getting the timing right so that all the ingredients would cook - and not overcook - was challenging, to say the least.

"I spent a lot of time figuring out how much liquid you need to add so your pasta doesn't get mushy and so your rice comes out perfectly and your couscous is fluffy."

On this particular day, her husband, Ed Cope, who teaches English at a charter school, has the day off, so he's watching the kids, Lilia, 1, and Jeremy, 3. Jeremy keeps peeking in as his mother prepares lunch in that kidlike "notice me but not enough to make me leave the room" fashion.

Although she has kid-friendly meals in the cookbook, this is a one-pot scallop dish for grown-ups. "Some flavors he likes," she says. "He's a mac-and-cheese kid, certainly, but he's a pretty adventurous eater."

Yarnell cuts vegetables and layers them in the pot, undistracted by Jeremy and not missing a beat. There's no mess, other than a cutting board, to clean up. She sits down to talk during the 45 minutes that the food cooks.

Miraculously, not only is the meal done on time, but it's delicious. So delicious that within a matter of moments everyone has cleaned his plate.

Yarnell, who designs corporate training manuals and programs and is a technical writer, has taken a few cooking classes but has no professional cooking experience. She began to take an interest in healthier eating after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just before her 30th birthday.

She and Cope were engaged and buying their first house at the time, a fixer-upper. "All this was going on at once and I woke up and I couldn't read my computer. I went (temporarily) blind in one eye, and there's confusion that goes along with a massive attack. I thought it was an eye problem," Yarnell says.

With treatment, she hasn't had any problems since 2000, "but I think eating well plays into it," she says. Still, it took her husband, a speed athlete who used to run and ski competitively, to push her in that direction.

"When I was single, my staple was gummy bears," she says. "I didn't like to cook for myself, so if I went grocery shopping, I'd end up with a refrigerator full of rotten food."

Cope helped her to develop the concept and hone the recipes. "He had worked in a restaurant, so he understood food," she says.

For a while, her new concept was just one of several techniques she used, but when a friend asked her for lessons, she knew she'd stumbled onto something. The friend said, "Can you teach me to cook, because you eat so well?"

As she wrote down recipes for her friend, "I found that most one-pot meals said, 'Serve with rice,' which means you have to make something else" - and dirty another pot.

The cookbook has recipes for all kinds of ethnic flavors and foods - Moroccan, Thai, Indian, American, American Indian, vegetarian. "It teaches you how to be an intuitive cook," she says. "It helps you with the flavor combinations to give you full flavor."

But she realized that it was her process that was critical to the all-in-one result, hence the patent. "I was (willing to spend the money for the patent) because how many times do you invent something?" she says.

She'd like to teach the process to anyone and everyone. "I'm so evangelical about it," she says.

Marty Meitus is the food editor. Meitusm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5229

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