The dreamiest moussaka, perfect for thrilling a crowd

By Leslie Brenner

If you’re in a certain Mediterranean mood, there’s nothing more marvelous than a great moussaka. With its layers of potato, eggplant, tomatoey lamb sauce and silky béchamel, Greece’s most famous dish has irresistible appeal.

In fact, when it’s carefully made, moussaka is one of the best dishes in the world. It’s perfect for this time of year, when eggplants are still in peak season and it’s cool enough to finally turn on the oven.

Yet somehow, moussaka has gotten left behind in the universe’s decades-long love affair with Mediterranean food. You don’t find it on restaurant menus much, nor is the internet bursting with outstanding moussaka recipes.

In an attempt to right that wrong, three years ago I set about to explore the origins of the dish and create the best version I could conjure — and came up with what a friend who tasted it called “Moussaka for the Ages.” Fragrant with allspice and cinnamon, it’s at once saucy, bright and rich; the way its creamy crown of béchamel plays with the lamby, saucy layers makes it eminently craveable.

READ: “Moussaka, a spectacular dish with a curious history, gets a magnificent makeover”

It’s great for feeding a crowd. Begin the fun with a big green salad (to keep it simple), or a cold mezze (appetizer spread) if you want to live large (weekend party!). You can build the moussaka ahead of time, stopping at the point where you add the béchamel topping. After that, the final half-hour or so of baking is pretty much hands-off, and it needs to rest 15 minutes after that, so the dish settles and the flavors bloom.

My version is less messy and easier than traditional version, which started with frying potatoes then eggplant. For the eggplant, I go a sheet-pan route, seasoning and drizzling olive oil on thick slices, and roasting them to melty tenderness. This results in a lighter moussaka with a more lovely caramelized eggplant flavor. Slices of potato, which form the base, get parboiled.

The béchamel-and-cheese topping on my moussaka is a little different than traditional versions as well. Lightened with yogurt, it’s brighter and fluffier; grated cheese gives it depth.

Try it this weekend — if you’re not feeding a crew, you can enjoy it reheated for a weeknight dinner or two.

RECIPE: Moussaka for the Ages

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Coq au Vin — the soul-satisfying, heartwarming French classic — is a magnificent dish to make at home

By Leslie Brenner

A chill winter day is the perfect opportunity to make coq au vin — chicken marinated overnight and then braised in red wine and aromatics. Not only is the classic French dish fabulously delicious, it feeds a crowd (or lasts a few days into the workweek), and it will fill your living space with gorgeous aromas.

Seems like I’m not the only one craving this type of old-fashioned French comfort food; it’s having something that feels much bigger than a moment. A few days ago, The New York Times published a story about 25 essential dishes to eat in Paris. (The only one I’ve had is the first on the list — cassoulet from L'Assiette — and I couldn’t agree more. Go eat it, if you can!) Classic-style French bistros and brasseries are drawing crowds in Los Angeles, New York (always!), Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Dallas — and every other American city with a heartbeat. Buvette — which chef Jody Adams opened in New York a dozen years ago — now also has locations in Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City (as well as Paris and London).

Oddly, for many crave-able bistro and French-home-cooking dishes, it’s not easy to find outstanding, workable recipes. For coq au vin, I’ve used (or consulted) probably no fewer than 20 recipes from various usually-excellent sources. (The great Julia Child fell down on this one; the coq au vin recipe in her Volume I of Mastering the Art does not have you marinate the chicken in the wine first; you merely braise it.)

The marinade: Start with a bottle of red wine.

For well over a decade, I’ve been working on my own recipe, informed by everything I’ve learned along the way. At long last I feel it’s worth sharing.

Developing it has required some accommodations. For one thing, traditionally the dish is made with a big old rooster — that’s the coq. These days, both stateside and in France, coq au vin is usually made with chicken. Either way, the bird is cut up, marinated in red wine and aromatics overnight (or up to two or even three days), browned then braised in the marinade and and garnished with mushrooms, pearl onions and lardons.

No problem with the mushrooms; you can use either white mushrooms or crimini. And you know what? I find the mushrooms so delicious in coq au vin that I’ve doubled the amount most recipes use — that way each person gets a generous amount.

Lardons, however, may be problematic for many American cooks, as it has become difficult to find the required slab (unsliced) bacon in supermakets, even the best ones — at least where I live, in Dallas, Texas. (Readers in better-provisioned cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco may have an easier time.) Happily, we do have an old-school butcher shop that carries it; perhaps you do, too.

Pearl onions are another problem. No so long ago, I used to find them, or cippolini, fresh at our better supermarkets; alas, no longer. You can buy a bag of frozen pearl onions from Birds Eye or at Trader Joe’s — already peeled, which is nice, but they’re pretty flavorless. I’ve taken to hunting down the smallest shallots I can find and treating them like baby onions; sometimes it means pulling two or more cloves apart from a larger one. To tell the truth, the shallots add such nice flavor I actually prefer them to baby onions. If one day I can’t find small enough shallots, I don’t know; I’ll probably punt and use the frozen pearl onions. Or relocate.

In place of an old rooster, I had been using a whole cut-up chicken, but because it’s smaller than a coq, I added a couple of extra thighs or drumsticks. Who wants to go to all this trouble for just four servings? Lately, I started using only thighs and drumsticks — and why not? Everyone in my orbit prefers dark meat, and dark-meat only simplifies the preparation. (Though our recipe allows for either approach.)

The versions of coq au vin that most informed mine are Anne Willan’s, from her wonderful 2007 book The Country Cooking of France, and one from Le Grand Livre de La Cuisine Française. Published (in French only) in late 2020, the latter book — which clocks in at 1,148 pages and weighs more than 8 pounds — comes from Jean-François Piège, one of France’s most renowned chefs. His book is an instant classic. I’ve cooked from it quite a bit (and referred to constantly) since the French cooking spree I’ve been on since I first lugged it back in my carry-on two years ago, having picked it up in a bookstore in Bordeaux. Imagine me literally running — with that anvil of a volume in tow — in order to make my connection (barely!) in Paris at Charles de Gaulle to come back home.

Piège’s and Willan’s recipes have much in common, but like many of the recipes in Piège’s tome, his is very restaurant-y. For instance, the chef assumes we will have on hand a liter of brown veal stock, 10 cl of sang de volaille ou de porc (poultry or pork blood), and some marc de Bourgogne (an eau de vie made from Burgundy grape must, like a French grappa) with which he wants us to flambé the bird first, and the garniture later. Oh, and that bird is either a coq or a Bresse chicken. He has us turn the mushrooms, sauté them in lardon fat and set them unsauced atop the finished dish, rather than cooking them in the sauce. Call me a peasant (or even a pheasant), but I like to simmer the mushrooms briefly in the sauce for a bit of flavor-exchange. (Willan’s recipe does that, but only for three to five minutes.)

One of the key issues with coq au vin is how to give the sauce enough body. Ideally, you’d use homemade chicken stock — that would have enough gelatin to give it a great texture. Most of us don’t have that lying around our freezer, though, so my recipe calls for store-bought chicken broth. Many recipes rely on whisking in beurre manié — softened butter mixed with flour — at the end. That works, but I don’t love its raw floury vibe; I’d rather leave the sauce a bit thinner and sop it up with lots of great crusty country sourdough. Recently, I came around to the idea of including a small amount of optional purchased veal demi-glace, which you can find in the freezer section of better supermarkets (or online at D’Artagnan). It’s expensive, but you can freeze and keep what you don’t use, and it does add silkiness and a bit more depth.

The wine question

I know what you’re wondering: What kind of wine should I use? First, don’t spend too much — pick up a bottle to cook with for $10 or less, if you can. Pinot noir, Beaujolais, Dolcetto d’Alba, Barbera, Sangiovese and Tempranillo are all good choices. Spend more, if you’re so inclined, on a great bottle to drink with it.

Besides the crusty bread, coq au vin is traditionally served with boiled potatoes tossed in butter and parsley, or maybe less frequently, pommes purées — mashed potatoes. I have also seen references to buttered noodles, which I have served chez nous. That raised an eyebrow on the face of the Frenchman to whom I am married, but all was forgiven once he dove into the saucy, fragrant, flavorful dish.

Don’t forget that you do need to start this dish the day before you want to serve it. The marinade needs to cool down completely before you add the chicken, so best to achieve that in the morning (it’s just 10 minutes or so of active time). Cool it down during the day, and plop in the chicken that evening. The next day, you’ll be ready to roll, whenever. Want to make the whole thing in advance? It’s even better, reheated, the next day.

I hope you enjoy this dish half as much as I do.

RECiPE: Coq au Vin

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Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with a sumptuous, authoritative version

By Leslie Brenner

October 20 is one of our favorite food holidays of the year: World Butter Chicken Day.

Murgh Makhani, also known as “Butter Chicken,” is arguably the world’s most beloved Indian dish. It’s certainly one of our favorite dishes at Cooks Without Borders, and our recipe — developed and tweaked over a number of years — has a special story. It also has a stamp of approval from Monish Gujral, the Delhi-based chef and restaurateur whose grandfather created the dish 102 years ago.

What — an actual person created Butter Chicken?

That’s right. “Butter chicken was invented by Kundan Lal Gujral at Moti Mahal, which was established in 1920,” explains Monish Gujral, who today presides over what has become the Moti Mahal empire of some 250 restaurants around the world.

The first World Butter Chicken Day, in 2020, celebrated the centenary of the restaurant that birthed the dish.

Curious as it may sound, the idea for the food holiday came from Cooks Without Borders; we wrote about it that inaugural year in an article for The Dallas Morning News. Pranjali Bhonde wrote about it last year for Whetstone.

Read: “Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with the real thing — made quicker, easier and lip-smackingly delicious”

Our Monish Gujral-approved version of the dish is a glorious way to celebrate — tonight, this weekend or anytime the craving strikes.

RECIPE: World Butter Chicken

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Inspired by old Hollywood, this may be the world’s most craveable Caesar

By Leslie Brenner

An eon ago, when I was in my twenties, I worked in Hollywood as an assistant on “Cheers,” a popular sit-com produced at Paramount Studios. One of the perks was that we could order lunch to eat at our desk (or dinner when we worked late) from any nearby restaurant, and the production company would pick up the tab. There were some really good restaurants to choose from, including a swanky French place called Le St. Germain, and an elegant Italian place, Emilio’s. (There was also a Mexican spot called Lucy’s El Adobe, whose chicken tostada captivated me.)

But there was one lunch I craved constantly, and ordered frequently: the Caesar salad from Nickodell, an old-school Hollywood restaurant that was right next door to the studio. Of course that Caesar was more of an event when you ordered it in the dining room, where it was tossed table-side, but to my desk, it always arrived crisp and chilled and perfect.

Super garlicky, forthright with anchovies, wonderfully tangy and generously endowed with grated Parm, it was absolutely smashing — an extreme Caesar. I’m not sure whether memory is playing a game, but I think they served it to-go on one of those cardboard-like deep-dish paper plates, with another bowl-like paper plate stapled onto the top of it. (This was pre-Uber Eats and GrubHub, of course; we sent our production assistants out to pick up our food.)

I wound up leaving Hollywood for grad school in New York. The sit-com’s decade-plus run ended, Nickodell closed and life went on. But I never stopped craving that salad.

At some point, I started recreating that Caesar at home. I don’t think I was fully conscious that it was the Nickodell umami-garlic-tang I was after, but my personal Caesar aesthetic had been set, on full-throttle.

Now, when I crave that flavor, I make my extreme Caesar. Its dressing includes both red wine vinegar and lemon, and a healthy dose of Worcestershire. Olive oil, of course. Lots of garlic, put through a press, and a meaningful amount of chopped anchovies. Lots of freshly ground black pepper. When I’m in a rush, I’ve been known to use anchovy paste instead of mincing fillets; both always live in my fridge.

Did Nickodell’s Caesar have croutons? Certainly, but they weren’t memorable or important, and croutons slow one’s salad game way down, so I leave them out. Also, I’d rather not have those carbs and extra calories from the oil they soak up. Having erased my carbo footprint, I figure I’ve earned the right to extra Parm — and a couple of eggs coddled to nearly gelatinous.

There is a feeling, among Caesar enthusiasts, that whole-leaf is the way to go. I certainly see the value, but to bend that way would be contrary to the spirit of the Nickodell archetype, so I chop.

Because this Caesar fires on so many cylinders, it loves to be a main course. Is it thanks to those solitary lunches at my desk that I like to eat it alone?

Of course it also loves company. Add a cool glass of rosé (or skin-contact!) wine, and you’ve got an excellent treat for a hot summer evening.

Beware, though: There is the possibility of permanent craving.

Capture Bing cherries' spectacular flavor in a glorious ice cream (sugar cone and bare feet, optional!)

By Leslie Brenner

Bing cherries bursting with flavor. Santa Rosa plums, with their tart-taut skins and juicy-sweet interiors. Blushing ripe peaches whose juice runs down your arm when you bite into them.

These are the things I love most about summer.

Santa Rosa plums don’t show up where I live in Dallas, Texas, but fabulous cherries are easy to find, and I devour them like they’re going out of style. They’re not — in fact, scientists are more excited than ever about their likely health benefits.

Curiously, great cherry desserts are not easy to come by. I love the idea of clafoutis — France’s famous cherry-packed eggy baked thingy — but I’ve never found one I’ve loved. (Got one? Please send it our way in a comment!)

Cherry ice cream always sounds so wonderful, but most of the recipes I find either require candying the fruit or contain much more cream, milk and sugar than fruit. I want cherry ice cream that’s seriously cherry-packed.

This season, I came upon a Serious Eats recipe that sounded seriously wonderful, so I dove in. The recipe does without eggs, to focus the cherry flavor, which sounded wise. Unfortunately, the cherries exploded in the oven after about 35 minutes of roasting with sugar (40 minutes did sound long!), leaving my oven walls caked with the aftermath. I free-styled my way through the rest, loving the idea of steeping the cherry pits in the cream, but not getting why we’d strain the juice and not use the pulp (especially as the recipe noted that it’s delicious to eat as a jam or dessert topping). So I threw it back in. The ice cream was fabulous, with super-intense cherry flavor, but the recipe needed lots of tweaking. Roasting was smart, but I’d roast mine half the time — just long enough to intensify the flavor and make pitting easy.

As I was putting it together, it occurred to me that a little fresh bay leaf flavor could be lovely with the cherries, so I steeped a couple of fresh leaves with the cream. Then, as I was whirring up the cherries, black pepper suggested itself as a complement, so I added that as well. If you want to go more purist, you can certainly skip these; alternatively, you can amp up the pepper a bit, as the amount called for is very subtle.

It’s delicious on its own, but also goes well with thin, crisp almond wafers. What I really want, though, is to scoop some into a sugar cone and lap it up like a kid. Maybe I’ll even take it outside, so I have to eat it before it melts.

Hope you enjoy it.

RECIPE: Bing Cherry Ice Cream

Recipe for Today: Asparagus, all dressed up!

By Leslie Brenner

We have a new feature at Cooks Without Borders: our Recipe for Today. Every morning, the green announcement bar at the top of all our pages offers a link to something that sounds delicious to us that day: Recipe for Today!

It’ll be right for the season, holiday-appropriate if something’s going on, and keyed to whether it’s a weekday or weekend.

As often as we can manage, we’ll also feature it in a quickie story, like this one.

Asparagus with a new-wave gribiche is one of our favorite ways to celebrate spring. It’s great for a weekend brunch, a picnic in the park, a dinner with friends, a potluck or even a festive celebration. The New Wave Gribiche in our recipe is inspired by L.A. chef (Gjelina, Gjusta) Travis Lett’s modern take on classic French sauce gribiche, made with eggs, capers, cornichons, herbs, shallots and other good things.

Enjoy your Recipe for Today!

If you enjoy Recipe for Today, please share it on your social channels or email it to a friend who will like it. Thank you!

The blueberry muffins in Roxana Jullapat's new 'Mother Grains' are seriously the best I've ever tasted

By Leslie Brenner

“It’s time to give the classic blueberry muffin a makeover, swapping out all the refined white flour for whole-grain spelt” writes Los Angeles baker Roxana Jullapat in her new cookbook, Mother Grains. Music to my ears!

I’ve always loved blueberry muffins — or maybe loved the idea of them, as I’m inevitably disappointed, finding them too white-floury, too cottony, too sweet. They stick unpleasantly to the roof of your mouth.

Because I love sneaking whole grains into baked goods whenever I get away with it, I was excited to learn of Jullapat’s book, subtitled “Recipes for the Grain Revolution.” It is scheduled for publication on April 20, and I’ve been cooking through it with plans to review, but you need this recipe now. It is far and away the best blueberry muffin I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.

Having a Easter brunch? It’ll be smashing on your table. Or on any weekend morning table.

The recipe, which has you top the muffins with a light and crunchy spelt streusel, is quick and easy — just 15 or 20 minutes to get the batter into the tin. The muffins bake for about 25, then need to cool for 20.

Their crumb is gorgeous and light, and the whole-grain spelt — which I had never baked with until I made the muffins this morning — gives them a mildly earthy flavor without clobbering you with an overly rustic texture or punitive health-food taste. Spelt, writes Jullapat, is “perhaps the best-known ‘ancient’ wheat.” She considers it “a gateway for bakers starting to explore ancient grains.” If I had money, I’d invest in a spelt farm.

Anyway, back to the recipe. Jullapat calls for a half-cup of frozen blueberries, adding that you can use fresh ones as long as you’re careful folding them in. I used fresh ones, and couldn’t help but wonder if the muffins might benefit from more berries than that. I made half using her exact recipe, and added more berries to the other four.

The muffin halves on the right were made according to Jullapat’s exact recipe; the halves on the left have extra blueberries.

I loved the extra berry version, while my husband, Thierry, preferred the less berryful original. In any case, the extra fruit did not compromise the recipe, so feel free to play with that.

Both ways were outstanding, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever eaten more than one muffin in a sitting in my life, and I had one and a half. I could easily have eaten three. Can’t wait to hear what you think — if you’d be so kind as to leave a comment.

[Did you notice we have a much more friendly new commenting system? We’d love to have you dive in!]

RECIPE: Roxana Jullapat’s Spelt Blueberry Muffins

Made in a flash, intensely chocolatey and ludicrously easy, molten chocolate cake deserves a comeback

By Leslie Brenner

There was a time when chocolate molten cakes were so ubiquitous that they became a runny joke — especially because the more it went, the less they were cooked. In went your spoon, and liquid eggy chocolate spilled out all over the plate. Ick.

Over the years, we’ve been subjected to so many mediocre versions of the dessert that we forgot how appealing they were way back when, as they poofed — pillow-like and fabulous — onto the scene. They were like small chocolate dreams — something between a soufflé and a mini-flourless chocolate cake, but preternaturally light, and intensely chocolatey. The middles were molten, but not liquid, just a bit oozy and soft. They were a way to show off great chocolate.

That was back in 1991, in New York City. I was a fledgling food writer there, molten chocolate cakes were everywhere, and they were wonderful.

I remember eating one at JoJo, Jean-George Vongerichten’s restaurant (his first), where he called it Chocolate Valrhona Cake. They’d been invented sometime before that, either by Vongerichten himself or by star pastry Jacques Torres, or maybe by someone in France, depending on whom you talked to. Vongerichten had served them a few years earlier, when he was chef at a restaurant called Lafayette, in the Drake Hotel, but apparently they were too early for their time. (I was still a starving grad student when Vongerichten was at the Drake, so I never made it there.)

In any case, as a society, in the intervening decades, we OD’d on them.

Now, at a time when we need small, easily achieved pleasures, it feels like a great time to rediscover them. A molten chocolate cake may be the biggest dessert bang you can in under a half hour, start to finish, and it’s ludicrously easy. All you need to have on hand is two good chocolate bars, four eggs, a stick of butter, a quarter cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and a couple spoonfuls of flour. If you want to impress a date, a spouse, a friend, a child — or anyone else in your orbit — you can whip this together in a flash and make quite a splash.

I thought about them the other night when my pod clamored after dinner for dessert, something rare and special in our small world. What could Wylie (our 24 year-old son) and his girlfriend Nathalie conjure quickly? I thought about this recipe, verified that we owned two bars of chocolate, and we found a perfect recipe penned by Vongricheten, published in Food & Wine magazine, 22 years ago.

Five seconds later, there Nathalie and Wylie were in the kitchen, melting the chocolate with butter, whipping eggs with egg yolks, folding in the melted chocolate and butter with a spoonful of flour and a pinch of salt, turning the batter into soufflé molds and baking. The cakes spend just 12 minutes in the oven. Maybe leave them in one extra minute, so they’re glossy and molten in the center, but no longer liquid. Pull ‘em out, let ‘em sit for one minute, and unmold.

Anyone can do this. And any of us — event the most well traveled and sophisticated — might well be dazzled all over again.

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤️

RECIPE: Molten Chocolate Cake

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A chocolate mousse for every mood: This classic, easy-to-make French dessert is yours to customize

The first time I had chocolate mousse was when I was five or six years old and my dad took me out to lunch — just the two of us — at a fancy French restaurant. I don’t know what the restaurant was called, but it was on the same plot of land in Los Angeles where Eataly now stands, in Century City. The restaurant was cozy, dark, and — to my five-year-old mind — terribly elegant. I wore white gloves.

I don’t remember most of what we ate, only that I couldn’t wait for dessert. We were going to have a chocolate moose, my dad told me. How fantastic — a chocolate moose! An edible Bullwinkle!

And then it landed, and it was something much better than a moose: It was a Champagne coupe filled with something chocolate, crowned with a dollop of whipped cream and topped with a candied violet.

A sugar-coated tiny purple flower you could eat! This was the best thing ever. And that mousse! In that Champagne glass! I still remember the sensation, the flavor, the mouthfeel: It was like eating a rich, chocolate cloud. Heaven.

Recently, my extreme bouts of culinary adventurism have been punctuated with longings for nostalgic French foods. Onion soup. Quiche. Chocolate mousse.

Anyone can make chocolate mousse, but you do need the right recipe. I like a classic one, which is basically melted chocolate with egg yolks mixed in, folded gently into egg whites. Chill it for three hours, and dessert is yours.

The nice thing is you can dress it up or dress it down for any mood. Spoon it into Champagne coupes if you’re feeling fancy, or jelly jars if the vibe you want is chill. Some people like to leave it in a big bowl and serve it from that, or just give everyone a spoon. You could use pretty tea cups, or ramekins or custard cups — whatever you have.

Make the mousse as sweet or dark chocolatey as you like. We’ve based our recipe on two 3.5 ounce bars of chocolate; choose the one you most love to eat. If you’re a 70 or 72% cacao person, use that. If you like sweeter (60%) or darker, adjust accordingly. My chocolate of choice is 85%. That might be a little un-desserty for dessert, so I use one 72% bar and one 85% bar: That’s perfect for me.

You can really get creative in that melting bowl of chocolate. I like to add orange liqueur, such as Grand Marnier. David Lebovitz, whose chocolate mousse proportions informed our recipe, favors Chartreuse. Julia Child called for strong brewed coffee as well as orange liqueur (which she whipped into the egg whites). Cognac could be nice, or Turkish coffee kissed with cardamom. You can use vanilla or almond extract, or even peppermint (just a touch).

Serve it naked for the full-on, chocolate-forward mousse experience, or top it with whipped cream, lightly sweetened or not, depending on how sweet you went with the mousse.

And then the (totally optional) final flourish, geared to your audience or expressive of your mood. Multi-colored or chocolate sprinkles! Slivered candied orange peel or cacao nibs! Dried rose petals! A candied violet!

If you love this recipe as much as I do, you’ll want to keep a couple of extra chocolate bars on hand for whenever you might want to conjure something special with very little effort. As long as you have four eggs, you’ll be good to go.

RECIPE: Your Favorite Chocolate Mousse

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Moussaka, a spectacular dish with a curious history, gets a magnificent (and long overdue!) makeover

A great Greek moussaka — the layered gratin of eggplant, potato, lamb-tomato sauce and cheesy béchamel — is about as delicious as Mediterranean-inflected comfort food gets.

“Moussaka is the urban cosmopolitan showpiece of lamb-and-eggplant combinations, a pairing as fundamental to Middle and Near Eastern cuisines as pasta and tomatoes are to Italy and potatoes and cream to the French,” wrote Anya von Bremzen in her 2004 book The Greatest Dishes: Around the World in 80 Recipes.

Yet Greece’s most famous dish has gotten weirdly short shrift in our love affair with Eastern Mediterranean cooking. It’s not easy to find great versions (stateside, anyway), whether in restaurants or as recipes.

I’m extremely excited about the makeover we’ve given the dish (here’s the recipe, in case you can’t wait.) It’s my son Wylie’s favorite recipe among everything we’ve worked on this year in the Cooks Without Borders test kitchen. “I could eat it twice a week,” he says. “When can we make it again?”

The dish has a curious history. Like butter chicken, its origin can actually be traced with some certainty, which is unusual.

First, for context, let’s take a step back and look at moussakas in general — for they’re not only Greek. The great food historian Charles Perry (my former colleague at The Los Angles Times), neatly elucidated the category in The Oxford Companion to Food. He described moussaka (or musaka, or musakka) as “a meat and vegetable stew, originally made from sliced aubergine [eggplant], meat and tomatoes, and preferably cooked in an oven.” That, he adds, is the version currently favored by Turks and Arabs.

“In the Balkans, more elaborate versions are found. The Greeks cover the stew with a layer of beaten egg or béchamel sauce. Elsewhere in the Balkans musakka has become a much more various oven-baked casserole, admitting many more vegetables than aubergines or courgette [zucchini], often dropping tomatoes and even meat. Bulgarian and Yugoslav versions emphasize eggs, and a given recipe may consist of eggs, cheese, potatoes, and spinach, or eggs, cheese, sauerkraut, and rice. In Romania, which considers musaca a national dish, the vegetables may be potatoes, celery, cabbage or cauliflower — or may be replaced by noodles.”

So there are, in fact, a whole panoply of moussakas, covering numerous cultures in several regions. It seems worth adding that the word moussaka derives from the Arabic word musaqqâ, which means “moistened,” apparently referring to the tomato juices.

But we are concerned, at the moment, with Greek moussaka — which long baffled food historians because of its béchamel topping. How did such a quintessentially French sauce — made with flour, butter and milk — make its way onto the top of a Greek dish?

Von Bremzen, in researching Greek moussaka’s origins for her 2004 book, turned to her friend, the renowned Greek food writer Aglaia Kremezi, for intelligence. Kremezi had long believed — as did a number of Turkish food writers — that moussaka was probably created toward the end of the Ottoman empire by a Francophile chef working at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. But upon digging deeper, Kremezi concluded that the Greek dish we know as moussaka is in fact much younger: It was created in the 1920 by Nikolaos Tselementes, author of a legendary 500-page Greek cookbook.

Kremezi went on to write about the dish’s origin at some length in an excellent story for The Atlantic 10 years ago, “‘Classic’ Greek Cuisine: Not So Classic." The story is a must-read that not only elucidates moussaka’s origin-story, but also helps us understand why Greek cuisine tends to be less attention-grabbing this century than that of its Levantine neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Palestine.

Tselementes, who was hugely influential early last century — not just on home cooks, but on restaurant chefs and therefore on the Athens dining landscape — aimed to Westernize Greek cooking by returning it to what he believed were its roots. Curious as it would seem, he believed French cooking had its roots in ancient Greek cooking. Under Turkish rule, he believed, Greek cooking had become unacceptably eastern, and his goal was to re-Europeanize it, emphasize cream and butter. (Béchamel!) The rising Athenian middle and upper classes of the 1920s ate it up.

Kremezi didn’t. In the Atlantic story, she wrote, of Tselementes’ influence:

“He revised — and in my opinion, destroyed — many Greek recipes….The exclusion of spices and even herbs from the spicy and fragrant traditional foods resulted in the almost insipid dishes many Greek restaurants still serve. Tselementes went as far as to omit thyme and bay leaves from Escoffier's recipe for sauce Espagnole, in his Greek translation. He also despised garlic, which he very seldom uses in his recipes!”

So Tselementes created the modern iteration of the dish, which was based on layered lamb-and-eggplant, moistened with tomato, and topped with béchamel. Did he leave out spices and garlic? I have not yet been unable to turn up Tselementes’ original recipe, though I am still working on it, and have reached out to Kremezi for further clarification.

If we can get our hands on that original recipe — and I’m optimistic we will — perhaps that will shed light on why there are not better recipes for Greek moussaka out there in the world. Perhaps the recipe, as Kremezi seems to suggest, was just not as great as it might have been had he not extracted all the spices and garlic from it.

Meanwhile, I remain convinced that made thoughtfully, it is one of the world’s greatest dishes. (And Von Bremzen, an immensely well traveled food writer with a great palate, did include it among her 80 greatest in the world!)

Kremezi’s recipe for moussaka, which is loosely based on her mother’s recipe, includes green bell peppers and optional sausage or bacon. My platonic ideal for the dish is purely lamb, and I wanted to come up with a recipe that was as elemental and simple to execute as possible, while still delivering maximum impact and fabulous flavor.

I loved Kremezi’s idea of adding yogurt to the béchamel for lightness and tang when I first came upon her moussaka in von Bremzen’s book, and it was that recipe I used as a jumping off point.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but feel that frying the slices of eggplant and potato wasn’t necessarily the worth the trouble and heaviness. My “aha!” moment came as I remembered one of my favorite dishes in Sami Tamimi’s recently published cookbook, Falastin — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. The Palestinian chef-author peeled eggplants, zebra-like, leaving half the peel on (which adds nice texture), sliced them, tossed with salt, pepper and olive oil and roasted the slices to meltingly tender, before building them into delicious layered towers of tomato, and lamb-beef kofta patties and baking.

The aha! was roasting the eggplant that way.

Cinnamon, which also appears in Tamimi’s dish, sounded like a great idea as well; I love the way it plays with allspice, garlic and Aleppo pepper.

I liked the idea of parboiling potatoes rather than frying them, which I came across in a 2018 recipe by Sydney Oland on Serious Eats. However, parboiling whole, peeled russets and then slicing them resulted in potato slices that were still crunchy once baked, even when I tripled the boiling time from 5 to 15 minutes.

Wylie (who at 23 years old has developed into a confident and terrifically talented cook during the Great Confinement) unwittingly solved the potato problem for me a couple nights ago. As he was improvising a dish of crusty sautéed potatoes, he sliced the potatoes, then blanched them for 5 minutes before putting them in the hot pan with duck fat.

Aha! Slice first, and then blanche. I had considered that, but worried the slices would fall apart, or wind up too mushy in the moussaka. It worked perfectly. Moussaka makeover achieved!

Here’s how you build the dish. Brush a square, deep baking dish with a little olive oil. Cover the bottom with a layer of blanched russet potato slices; season gently with salt and pepper. Next add a layer of roasted eggplant slices. Because they’re so nicely tender, you can squish them in a bit so there’s an even layer off eggplant covering the potatoes, without big gaps between them.

Next comes a layer of lamb and tomato sauce, with all those lovely spices. And finally, on top, a thick layer of béchamel with yogurt and grated cheddar cheese stirred in. Into the oven it goes, and when it comes out, it is gratinéed a gorgeous golden-brown.

The temptation is to dive into it right away, it’s so beautiful. Nathalie — my son’s girlfriend, a moussaka fanatic who’s Lebanese and knows about such things as layered lamb and eggplant — put up her hand and said, “Wait. Let it rest a few minutes.”

She was right: It wants to settle, come together. It’s still plenty hot when you slice into it 15 minutes later.

Yes, it’s as delicious as it looks. One piece of advice about ingredients: Put your hands on the best ground lamb you can manage. I once made it with lamb I ground at home from boneless shoulder — it was insanely, out-of-the-world wonderful, the best result I’ve had. Other times I have made it with pre-packaged supermarket ground lamb. Very good, but there’s definitely a difference. Tonight I’m making it using ground local lamb from the counter of a halal butcher in a Lebanese bakery and market. I will update the story with the results, so you might want to check back tomorrow.

Want to enjoy a delicious moussaka at your own table? Help yourself to the recipe. And please let us know how you like it.

RECIPE: Moussaka for the Ages

Hang onto your molcajete: This Thai-accented guacamole (lemongrass! fish sauce!) is weirdly fabulous

Bangkok Guac, flavored with lemongrass, shallots, Thai chiles, fish sauce and lime and garnished with makrut lime leaves and cilantro, is weirdly fabulous — especially scooped up with a shrimp chip.

A few years back, the New York Times enraged the internet by publishing recipe for guacamole that included fresh English peas.

I’ve done something much worse. I’ve compromised everyone’s favorite avocado dip by giving it a Thai aromatic treatment. And you know what? I’d do it again in a hot minute.

How would a sane person come up with such a crazy idea?

I was reading a Facebook post by Pati Jinich, in which the star of the PBS show Pati’s Mexican Table discussed the role of lime in guacamole.

Being from Mexico City, I was fully for having lime in my guacamole until I tried one with roasted Anaheim in Sonora...

Posted by Pati Jinich on Thursday, October 29, 2020

That led me, because I’ve been cooking a lot of Thai food (in which limes figure prominently), to start thinking about a few of the other flavors Thai food and Mexican food have in common. Chiles. Cilantro. And then I thought: What if you took Thai versions of those flavors, added them to other Thai flavors, and put them in a guacamole?

In Thai cooking, a large mortar and pestle is often used to grind together aromatics, just as the molcajete is used in Mexican cooking, so I’d start there.

Green Thai long chiles could stand in for serranos or jalapeños. Finely cut makrut lime leaves would add a gorgeous perfume, and makrut zest might add an enchanting underpinning. Shallots — which are important in Thai cooking, and often used raw — could replace white onion. Lime juice, cilantro and avocado would be the common thread, and hey — what about fish sauce instead of salt, to up the umami factor?

Instead of tortilla chips, we could scoop it up with shrimp chips — those light, airy, addictive, melt-on-the-tongue snacks that come in bags like potato chips.

Sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, chopped Thai green chiles, finely chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves about to be ground in a molcajete — maybe for the first time anywhere!

Into the molcajete went sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, Thai green chiles, chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves. I held my breath. Who had ever put such a combo in a molcajete before? Maybe no one ever?!

Grinding them to a paste, I was rewarding a gorgeous aroma — the high note of the lemongrass, the perfume of makrut lime. In went a trio of ripe avocados, a good dose of lime juice and a couple teaspoons of fish sauce.

Wowie kazowie! It was even better than I imagined — these ingredients indeed have an amazing affinity with the avocado, and the fish sauce underlined it all with a gentle soulful salty funk that added incredible dimension. The garnish: more minced shallot, cilantro leaves and — an essential flourish — julienned makrut lime leaves made it taste (and smell) even more deliciously Thai.

I love the Bangkok Guac with shrimp chips, and when you scoop up a bit of guac on one, you can hear the chip faintly sizzle and pop from the touch of the guac’s moisture. We tried them with cucumber chips, too — Persian cukes sliced diagonally into slices about 3/8 inch thick. The flavor combo with the cukes was beautiful, though the cuke chips are a bit slippery with the guac.

So, how good is this Bangkok Guac? Well, I’m not sure I’d turn myself upside down trying to find the ingredients just to make it. But if it’s not too much trouble to source them, I would absolutely highly recommend you give it a try. If you have a Thai grocery or an Asian supermarket with good supplies of Thai ingredients available, you should be able to find the makrut lime leaves and lemongrass, and sometimes you can even find lemongrass in well stocked Western supermarkets. Makrut limes for zesting is more of a challenge; they are available online (see the recipe for a great source). I think if you used regular Persian or key lime zest, you’d come close.

Meanwhile, we are working on a review of an awesome Thai cookbook, Simple Thai Food. If you wind up loving the book, and loving cooking Thai as much as we now do, you’ll want to stock up on these essential ingredients. Once you start stocking these ingredients, Bangkok Guac may sound like just the thing when you spot ripe avocados.

OK, enough talking. Here’s the recipe.

RECIPE: Bangkok Guac
Please let us know what you think — either of the recipe itself, or even of the idea.

One of our 5 (five!) fabulous potato salads is sure to make your Fourth phenomenal

Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

My family has put me on a potato salad time-out.

That’s because I’ve made so much potato salad during The Great Confinement that we’ve each gained about 9,000 pounds. OK, I’m kidding — but it’s surprising we haven’t, considering the carbo count these past few months.

In more normal times, I try to avoid potatoes in favor of lower-carb vegetables — and when I eat them, they’re a rare treat (like sweets for some people). But in confinement, I’ve given myself license to eat them at will. After all, they’re so delicious. And comforting. And affordable. And available. You get my drift. If ever we deserved to indulge in a potato fancy, it’s now!

Plus, it’s great to have potato in the fridge. We have to cook every night, and it goes with most everything. It’s great with a work-at-home lunch. And it can even be a dazzling little stand-in for boiled potatoes in a main-course niçoise salad.

It’s been so omnipresent in our kitchen these months that one day we’ll probably describe something that’s everywhere as “ubiquitous as potato salad in a pandemic.”

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Potato salad is an ideal vehicle for a garden’s-worth of herbs, as in the Herb-Happy Potato above. With its vinaigrette dressing, this is the sole vegan entry in our bunch; it’s also gluten-free.

An old-fashioned one, such as Toni Tipton-Martin’s from her Jubilee cookbook, can take you all the way back to childhood. (Both are super-quick and easy to make.)

I love the Jubilee one because it’s rich in hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks blend lusciously into the mayo-based dressing, there’s a hint of sweet pickle relish and a nice celery crunch. If you’re going all-American classic with your July 4 menu, this is the one for you.

On the other hand, if you want to play it a little more exotic, consider a Japanese potato salad — we have two to choose from. One is from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking (which we recently reviewed); the other is the one chef Justin Holt serves at his Dallas ramen hot-spot, Salaryman. (And that one sports a prize on top: halved ajitama marinated eggs — like the ones you find garnishing bowls of ramen.)

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.

Oh, man — I’m getting a starch high just revisiting them in my brain!

Finally, there is the one that predates the other four on Cooks Without Borders — the one we named Best Potato Salad Ever before we knew there’d be such heavy competition.

That’s Wylie holding a batch of it, before he and Thierry put me on potato salad time-out.

What makes it so good? It gets a luxurious richness from soft-boiled eggs, delightful tang from cornichons and shallots and lift from an array of herbs, all in the form of a New-Wave Gribiche.

I think any one of the fiHve would be a welcome guest at your picnic or party tomorrow. You can make them ahead, or not. Oh, and by the way, they’re all easy-going — in case you want to swap potato types, or swap shallots for scallions, and so forth. Whichever you choose, enjoy. I’ll be jealous.

Happy Fourth!

[RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Salaryman Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada]

[RECIPE: Best Potato Salad Ever]

Say hello to the green gazpacho of your dreams

There are a grillion versions of green gazpacho out there — many of them likeable, some (like Yotam Ottolenghi’s in Plenty) lovable. But I’ve never found one that made me stop and say, OK, you are the green gazpacho of my dreams.

I enjoy versions with yogurt, but the green gazpacho of my dreams is vegan. And even though a gazpacho without bread is technically not a gazpacho, the green gazpacho of my dreams is gluten-free. That’s because when I crave green gazpacho, I’m craving something very clean and pure. I’m wanting something intensely chlorophyllic, and herbal — but also tangy.

The green gazpacho of my dreams is something I can throw together in a flash, as a satisfying and energizing lunch, or a refreshing prelude to a lovely summer or late spring dinner. It should be basic enough to make for myself and family on a weekday, but gorgeous enough to start off a celebratory dinner party with friends (if we are ever able to do that again!).

It has to have body, and a little richness. I’ve seen recipes for versions involving avocado, but I’m nor looking for that kind of unctuousness. (Though I do adore diced ripe avocado as a garnish on classic Gazpacho Sevillano.)

Sometimes the way out of a culinary conundrum like this is to go back to the basics. I looked to traditional ajo blanco, the cold almond and garlic soup from Malaga, Spain that’s also known as gazpacho blanco, white gazpacho.

Yes! Raw almonds add just the right body to this soup, without the tannic bite that’s so nice with the walnuts in Ottolenghi’s Plenty version. If almonds work here, perhaps raw cashews would as well. I tried that on round two, and liked it even better — it imparted a little more roundness and depth. But either works great.

You’ll want to use your best sherry vinegar and olive oil in this soup; they are more than just supporting players.

Here is your ticket to summer-long green greatness:

As you can see in the recipe, the ingredients are basic, easy to keep on hand for when a craving comes knocking. No need for advance planning, as you don’t need to chill it; just plop two or three ice cubes in each bowl before you serve. Or make it ahead, and chill it in the fridge. For maximum delight, garnish it with a flurry of soft herbs — any combination of dill, chervil, parsley, cilantro, basil, mint, chives, tarragon, celery leaves and sliced scallion greens (OK, those last two are not technically herbs, but you get the idea). Or just add a swirl of your best olive oil on top.

RECIPE: The Greenest Gazpacho

How Ludovic Lefebvre's insanely delicious Fried Chicken LudoBird Style turned me into a fry queen

I have a confession to make: Until last week, I had never made fried chicken.

Yes, I know, it’s weird. I’ve always been an otherwise fearless cook. Partly it’s that deep-frying thing: I’ve never made frites, either, and by extension I’ve never made French fries. But there was also a lack of motivation: Why attempt something so challenging and messy when the pros do it so well?

I’d gotten it into my head a month or so ago that at long last I’d dip my proverbial toes in the hot oil. Fabulous looking recipes in two cookbooks-of-the-moment had caught my eye: one in Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking and another in Sean Brock’s South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations. The books are each nominated for both a James Beard Award and an IACP Cookbook Award this season. I’d read a heap of background material about frying chicken, and deep-frying in general, so I had sense of the landscape. A deep-frying thermometer was ordered and on the way. Time to stop being such a fry-baby.

Wylie was rarin’ to go. Every afternoon, he’d say, “Tonight — fried chicken?” I kept coming up with excuses. We were missing an ingredient. We didn’t have the right sides. Not enough oil. Deep-fry thermometer hadn’t arrived. Couldn’t decide which of the two recipes to try. Mercury in retrograde.

Then, the day the deep-fry thermometer showed up, I saw a post on Ludovic Lefebvre’s Instagram feed: The Los Angeles chef would be making fried chicken on his IGTV series, “Ludo à la Maison.” I’m a Ludo fan from way back, and had been wanting to check out the French chef’s live cooking show. In this episode, he’d be preparing the “buttermilk Provençal” fried chicken served at his two LudoBird restaurants.

No more excuses. We’d watch the live show on Saturday afternoon, and maybe even cook along. Friday night I brined the chicken according to Lefebvre’s advance instructions.

You might be saying, why on earth would you look to a French chef as a guide to an iconic dish of the American South?

I suppose because I suspected Lefebvre would make it comfortable and relatable.

Which he did: So entertaining and instructive watching him butcher the chicken, as Krissy videotaped, provided commentary and read real-time questions from viewers. At some point their young daughter Rêve wandered into the kitchen, wanting a piece of chicken; she then hid in the pantry.

Ludo set up three stations for consecutive pre-fry dipping and dredging: first flour, then buttermilk, and finally seasoned flour. For the third, Ludo poured in a few spoonfuls of buttermilk, rubbing it into the flour to make it lumpy. So each piece got a dip in the plain flour, then the buttermilk and finally the lumpy flour mixture — which Ludo smushed into each piece of chicken, pressing hard to create a super shaggy coating that would form that gorgeous craggy crust. (Surprisingly, he had removed the chicken’s skin.)

The seasoning itself was pretty interesting: Most notably and unconventionally, it included a generous scoop of herbes de Provence.

He poured the oil into a Dutch oven, explaining that it shouldn’t go higher than halfway up the sides of the pot. Good, important knowledge. He talked about the importance of having the oil at precisely the right temperature: between 325 and 350 degrees F. And not frying more than two pieces at a time, as introducing chicken into the oil immediately lowers the temperature, and three pieces would lower it too much.

Watching him tend the chicken once it was in, checking its progress every couple of minutes and pulling it out when it was gorgeously golden-brown: All this was completely confidence building.

An hour later, Wylie and I were excitedly setting up our own dredging stations, heating the oil, fitting a sheet pan with a rack to received each fried piece.

We set the table. Poured ourselves glasses of wine. Checked the temperature of the oil. Dredged the first two pieces, and started frying.

How liberating! And how utterly, crunchily, juicily delicious the result. Honesly, this was some of the greatest fried chicken any of us had ever eaten; we couldn’t believe how fabulousness of the result. I felt like constant monitoring of the oil temperature was key.

Thank you, Chef, for showing us the way in.

And thank you all for reading. If you happen to fear deep frying — even just a tiny bit — I hope you’ll dive in, too. Come on in; the oil’s fine! Here’s the LudoBird Style recipe:

If you’re not entirely comfortable, watch the video first, then fry. Please post a comment and let us know how it goes. Oh, and by the way, if you clean your oil carefully after frying, you can re-use the oil at least several times. The headnote in our recipe gives the details.

Next deep-frying deep-dive: pommes frites.

RECIPE: Fried Chicken Ludobird Style

This refreshingly minty Levantine-style salad is missing a key ingredient — that's why we call it 'fattoush-ish'

What — no toasted pita?! That’s why we call this minty, sumac-y salad ‘fattoush-ish.’

Fans of fattoush — the bread and herb salad that’s popular through the Levant year-round — are divided about how toasted pita, a key ingredient, should play in the bowl. Traditionalists like the pita soaked in the salad’s lemon, olive oil and sumac dressing so it’s soft, like the soaky bread in a traditional Tuscan bread salad. Modernists add shards of well-toasted pita at the last second, for a crisp crunch.

Traditionally eaten at iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast during every night during Ramadan, fattoush is delightfully light and refreshing. It’s a salad to riff on. Some cooks insist it must include purslane, the tangy salad herb that grows like a weed in the Mediterranean. (Stateside, you can often find purslane in Middle-Eastern or Mexican groceries.) Some versions of fattoush include green bell pepper; others don’t. Occasionally you see radishes. You can use scallions or onions, cherry tomatoes or regular ones, romaine or arugula, or both. Some versions go light on sumac, a bright-flavored, lemony spice; others play it up big. (Our recipe takes the middle sumac path.)

If you’re not already familiar with fattoush, it’s a great time to get to know it. Once you’re in possession of a jar of dried sumac and some dried mint (we favor spearmint), you might even be able to pull it together with ingredients on hand.

Craving fattoush’s minty, sumac-y, scallion-y flavors, I had everything but pita. (One of the challenges of The Great Confinement is not having all the ingredients required for culturally correct renditions of dishes.) I went ahead with the fattoush program anyway — and way glad I did.

Leave out the pita bread, as our recipe does, and suddenly you’ve got a delightful salad that satisfies anyone avoiding carbs: It’s gluten-free and paleo-friendly. It’s also just the thing to counterbalance all that heavy comfort food many of us find ourselves indulging in more often than usual. (Start dinner with fattoush-ish, and that giant plate of lasagna doesn’t count!)

Or go ahead and add some pita: One piece, split in half and each saucer-shape crisply toasted, makes it legit. Break the two toasted sides into bite-sized pieces before adding to the salad. Traditionalists, please double the dressing and toss the pita shards in half of it a few minutes before you’ll serve the salad. Modernists, add the shards at the very last minute.

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Fattoush-ish

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

How to make the most of asparagus: Dress it up with a glamorous new-wave gribiche

If asparagus might be destined for your Easter or Passover table, I can’t think of a more spectacular way to serve it than dressing it with a new-wave gribiche. Based on the classic French gribiche, which is an herbal, shalloty mayonnaise, this fresher version was inspired by a 2015 cookbook from one of my favorite restaurants in L.A. In Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California, chef Travis Lett dressed some gorgeous fat asparagus with a sort of deconstructed gribiche and grated bottarga. Fantastic.

A few nights ago it struck me that this kind of new-wave gribiche is not only a glorious way to feature asparagus, but also to honor the egg — as eggs have become so precious these days. The recipe calls for just two of them, really spotlighting their gorgeousness when cooked just three minutes.

It’s also a great way to spotlight beautiful soft herbs — dill, chives, chervil, parsley, tarragon (whatever you’ve got).

Want to know more about gribiche? We took a deep dive into it a few seasons back.

This new-wave take on it is also wonderful served with simple fish preps, boiled shrimp or roasted vegetables, or stirred into a bowl of boiled-then-sliced red potatoes. Find more ideas here.

Here’s the asparagus recipe.

Wishing you all a wonderful Passover or Easter. Stay safe and healthy, everyone.

Stodgy boomer, plucky Gen-Z-er share in unlikely Instant Pot epiphany; miraculous chicken chile verde results

A few weeks ago, Wylie chicken-shamed me. 

Maybe you know the drill: following a long day at the office, you stop at the supermarket on your way home and pick up a roast chicken. I was about to do just that, and texted home to see if I should pick up anything else. 

“Just buy a raw chicken,” said Wylie, who is temporarily living with us post-college-graduation in a figuring-things-out moment. “I’ll roast it. It’ll be so much better, and it’s so easy.” Who could argue?

While the hunt for a job in his field has not been thus far fruitful, he has taken full advantage of the parental larder — and our delight at being cooked for  — in order to develop his kitchencraft. 

Wylie making pasta dough from Evan Funke’s ‘American Sfloglio’

Like many fledgling cooks of his generation, Wylie really gets into cooking projects — the more elaborate the better. The most gleeful I’ve seen him since graduation was when we spent two days making tagliatelle al ragù della vecchia scuola from Evan Funke’s American Sfoglino cookbook — a process which started with putting various meats through a manual meat grinder for the ragù, and passing simmered tomatoes through a food mill. (My favorite line in the recipe: “Begin tasting for tenderness and seasoning after 5 hours.”) We used a rolling pin to roll the pasta dough, and a knife to cut it; Funke’s philosophy is summed up in his hashtag #fuckyourpastamachine. 

And so, when through a curious set of circumstances I brought a shiny new Instant Pot — one of those countertop pressure cookers — into the house, he regarded the thing with contempt.

Not that I blame him; it’s the way he was raised. But for reasons having to do with my consulting business, I wanted to explore the possibilities. And if by some miracle I took to the thing, well, maybe it would lead to fewer supermarket roast chicken situations post work-days.

Because precise timing is involved, and the thing was utterly foreign to me, I couldn’t just dive in and start improvising; I had to learn the basics first. I went to a couple of admired and reliable sources: New York Times Cooking and Serious Eats. 

It was at the latter that I turned up a recipe that looked so implausible I couldn’t wait to try it: J. Kenji López-Alt’s Easy Pressure Cooker Green Chili with Chicken. In other words, chicken chile verde. 

I couldn’t wait to show Wylie, who naturally scoffed. The recipe would have us believe that you could throw raw chicken thighs, onion, garlic, tomatillos, spices and chiles into the vessel, push a button and (once the machine came to pressure) 15 minutes later you’d have something gorgeous and profoundly delicious. 

First time around Wylie insisted on browning the chicken thighs on top of the stove first. So we tried it like that. Then we tried it exactly as written. Then we tried it giving the poblano, Anaheim and serrano chiles, along with the onion, garlic and tomatillos, a quick char on a comal, as you would in a traditional chile verde recipe. 

I’m here to tell you it was very good each and every time. We served it once with home-made corn tortillas (fantastic!), with handmade tortillas picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant when we were out of masa harina and couldn’t find any nearby (also fantastic) and with corn tortillas we bought at Trader Joe’s and reheated in the microwave (even that was pretty good).

• We stirred a couple tablespoonfuls of masa harina (a traditional thickener for these types of braises) into the finished dish: perfect! 

• We also added an optional garnish of crumbled queso blanco, which rounds out the flavors beautifully; if you’re wrapping the chile verde into tacos, some crumbled queso blanco added in each one is lovely.

What of our various other attempts at improvements? 

• Because the Instant Pot is all about ease, our recipe uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of using skin-on, bone-in thighs and then removing skin and bones (if the dish lost any depth of flavor as a result of not cooking with the bones, I couldn’t detect it). 

• Browning the chicken, however, did not noticeably improve the dish, so we jettisoned that step. 

• Charring the chiles and garlic cloves (in their skins) adds slight value — a subtle charry, roasty flavor — do that only if you feel like it and have an extra few minutes (meanwhile, it’s easier to seed charred chiles than raw). 

• Don’t bother charring the onion or tomatillos because the charry payoff is less, and it’s a little messier.

Though our version of the recipe — which we call Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooking Version) — calls for boneless, skinless thighs, of course you can also use bone-in, skin-on thighs as the original recipe suggests, simply removing the bones and skin before shredding the chicken. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one time I forgot to buy Anaheim chiles, and so just made it with poblanos — and there wasn’t much of a difference in flavor.

OK, then — a quick walk through. The only active time it takes to speak of is prepping the onion, chiles and tomatillos, which get husked and quartered; the chiles are seeded then roughly chopped, like the onion. (If you’re going to char the chiles, you’d do that before seeding and chopping, and you can toss the garlic cloves in their skins on the skillet, comal or griddle to char as well.) Toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a small pan till fragrant. Set the pressure cooker to SAUTE, and toss in all of those things, along with three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a pinch of salt. Once it sizzles a bit, seal the pressure cooker and cook on HIGH PRESSURE for 15 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken and shred it. Add López-Alt’s brilliant secret ingredient (Asian fish sauce!), along with salt to taste and a handful of cilantro, blitz the sauce — either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender or food processor — then stir in a couple tablespoons of masa harina. Shred the chicken and return it to the sauce. Garnish with more cilantro, and (if you like) some crumbled queso blanco. Serve it with warm corn tortillas and maybe some limes and more crumbled queso blanco.

Here’s the recipe. Please (please!) let us know how you like it.

Or, if you’d prefer an old-fashioned, long, lazy and aromatic braised-the-on-the-stove experience, let us know that as well, and we’ll hurry up with Chile Verde (Stovetop Version).

[RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde]

How to fool your friends into thinking you shelled 9,000 English peas

When spring rolls around – and even before – I start craving asparagus. And strawberries. And English peas. 

Unless you live near a farm, grow them in your garden or have access to a great farmers market – and depending on where in the world you live – finding sweet, tender English peas can be a real challenge. If you're lucky enough to find English peas at a supermarket, they're likely to be hard and woody, or if they're still small and tender, they'll likely have lost their sweetness. 

The solution? Frozen peas. That's right – they're actually really good, especially if you pick up the tiny ones sometimes called petits pois. I usually have a bag or two in my freezer – even in springtime, when we're all focused on what's fresh. 

And nowhere do they show better than in this wonderful soup, based on traditional French potage Saint Germain. 

It's the easiest thing in the world to whip up. Wilt a head of soft Boston or Bibb lettuce in butter. (Hey, this is like a salad within a soup!) Add a couple bags of frozen peas, stir and cook 10 minutes. Add water, and a few fresh mint leaves and simmer for 20 minutes. Whirr it up with a stick blender, et voilà. Garnish it with a dab of crème frâiche. Or not. That's it!!!

It's vegetarian. And it's a knockout. Serve it to your friends, swearing you shelled 9,000 English peas for their pleasure. 

Or tell the truth. And get ready to hand over the recipe.

Turkey tetrazzini is the mac and cheese of Thanksgiving leftover dishes

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You've had your fun with the turkey. Now you want the tetrazzini. 

What? Never made it or even tasted it? If you love mac and cheese, this is for you – it has that some kind of old-fashioned comfort-food creamy, luscious appeal.

In fact, I always make a bigger bird than I think I'll need for Thanksgiving so I'm sure to have four cups or so of leftover turkey meat after everyone has had their fill of next-day bone-gnawing.

It's pretty simple to achieve. Boil up half a box of spaghetti. Sauté some mushrooms. Make a white sauce by sprinkling flour on the mushrooms, cooking till the flour loses its raw taste, whisking in chicken broth and milk (or a combo of milk and half-and-half, if you want it richer, or even all half-and-half), then cooking till it's thick and creamy. Stir in chopped turkey, the spaghetti, grated Parmesan cheese and seasoning and turn it into a buttered baking dish. Top with Parmesan-enriched bread crumbs and bake till the top is golden-brown.

Then serve it up. Underneath that golden-brown, crunchy top it's rich, creamy and savory: old-fashioned comfort food at its best.

Preceded by a simple green salad and joined by a glass of full-bodied white wine, it's the perfect post-Thanksgiving dinner. 

Messy, gorgeous and dramatic: The berry Pavlova is a spring-into-summer stunner

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My friend Jenni has an incredible flair for entertaining. Talk about making things look effortless: You can arrive for a dinner invitation at Jenni's at 7, and she'll just be walking in after a day at the office, bags of groceries in tow. You think: Did I get the day wrong? 

You didn't. She just doesn't fret about doing everything (or anything!) in advance. It'll be 10 p.m. before we eat, you think. And then whooosh!!! – Jenni goes into action, chopping onions, tearing lettuce, tossing things in a pan. Here, you slice the zucchini; I'll do the garlic. Out on the counter goes a fat, oozy burrata, a slick of olive oil, some pesto and prosciutto, crusty bread. Wine corks pop. Flowers land in a vase. Everyone's nibbling, and sipping, and laughing. Somehow before you know it, you're at the table – and wowed by what's before you. A butterflied leg of lamb strewn with rosemary branches. A spectacular salad, grilled asparagus, roasted potatoes. How did she do this? (She shares her delicious secrets at her blog, Jenni's Table.) 

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Jenni and her husband Philip are from South Africa; we met through our kids when we all lived in L.A. (Wylie and their son, Max, were playing on opposing baseball teams, and we moms got to talking in the bleachers.) Now they live in London, which is where her family's originally from. Every couple of years we have a reunion in Southwest France, where Jenni's mom has a house, not far from Thierry's family. There we cook out of the garden, bake the orchard into pies. Sisters show up, and their husbands. Everyone's happy in the kitchen. Joy camps out in the garden. We always eat outside.

One of those crazy marvelous evenings at Jenni and Philip's house in the hills of L.A., Jenni whipped up a gorgeous, dramatic dessert: a magnificent Pavlova piled with whipped cream, smothered in berries from the farmer's market and strewn with pistachios. She must have made the Pavlova shell – a giant cushion of French meringue – that morning. Or maybe she'd snuck home at lunchtime, who knows. 

Anyway, impressive as it looks – the thing makes a pretty incredible statement! – it's actually very easy to put together, more time (unattended in a slow oven) than effort. And once you know how to make a Pavlova shell – the base of it – you have the perfect vehicle on which to show off all kinds of summer fruit: ripe peaches, plums and nectaries; macerated apricots with toasted sliced almonds; peaches tossed with blackberries – even something like mango and roasted pineapple showered with grated toasted coconut. Curiously, the Pavlova isn't South African or British; it's Australian, named for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, as the story goes, after one of her tours through Australia. (It may possibly have been invented in the U.S., however.) 

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Egg whites and sugar whipped to stiff peaks

But let's get to the important part: how to make one. To create the shell, whip room-temp egg whites till they hold soft peaks, then gradually add sugar, and continue whipping till they hold stiff peaks; whip in vanilla. 

The Pavlova, ready to go into the oven

Spoon the meringue into a thick circle on a parchment-lined baking sheet, and make a slight depression in the center with a spoon (just so the edges are slightly higher than the center). Put it in a 350-degree oven and immediately turn down the temp to 300. Let it bake for an hour and a half, then open the oven door and let it cool like that. Nothing to it! It'll look all craggy and rough. 

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The Pavlova shell: ready to dress up!

But those cracks and crags are just the thing for catching the whipped cream and berries and juices you'll pile on top. 

Jenni tossed berries in sugar and added a spoonful of Banyuls vinegar – very French (and hard to argue with). Lately I've tossed them in Grand Marnier. Whip up a pint of cream and mound it on top. Spoon on those juicy berries and scatter toasted chopped pistachios over them. Or leave out the nuts and fold some chopped fresh mint in the berries. Riffing is encouraged! The Pavlova itself is easy and forgiving, crisp on the outside, like a cloud inside. When you eat it, you swim through a whirl of textures and tastes, cool and creamy and pillowy-crunchy, all bright and sweet and juicy.

Ready for the recipe? Here you go . . .

It's a summer fruit game-changer, for sure.

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