The 10 most delicious things I made from cookbooks during the pandemic: Part I

At Cooks Without Borders, The Great Confinement has been a time for (among other things) deep dives into cookbooks — focusing mostly on volumes published within the last year, but also on cookbooks from a few years back that we hadn’t yet had a chance to explore.

The riches we’ve found in the pages of the best of them has been absolutely exhilarating, opening up entire new worlds to us.

Here are the first 5 of my 10 favorite dishes from the dozens of cookbook recipes I’ve tested and tasted over the last six months. What they have in common — besides their cravability factor — is that they are all really fun to cook.

Chicken Musakhan from Sami Tamimi’s ‘Falastin’

Traditionally during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil and served with pebble-textured taboon bread, the Palestinian dish known as Chicken Musakhan is now a year-round favorite in the Levant. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends,” writes Sami Tamimi in Falastin,” served from one pot or plate, for everyone to then tear at some of the bread and spoon on the chicken and topping for themselves.” To make it, toss a whole quartered bird with plenty of cumin and sumac and other spices, then roast it and layer it on crisped pieces of torn pita with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts and parsley. Spoon over with the roasting juices from the chicken, drizzle on more olive oil, dust with more sumac, and invite everyone to tear in. The dish is stunningly good.

Why we love cooking it: It’s liberating to use all those spices with such abandon.

We reviewed Falastin, which Tamimi wrote with Tara Wigley, in July.

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

These melty-soft baby eggplants with a coconutty, spicy filling come from Anjali Pathak’s 2015 book, The Indian Family Kitchen: Classic Dishes for a New Generation. Sizzled fresh curry leaves make it really special. We spotlighted this dish — finished with dabs of yogurt — in an an August story about eggplants.

Why we love cooking it: The topping is really fun to make, beginning with cooking the mustard seeds in oil till they jump out of the pan, and using the curry leaves (which freeze really well, so if you get your hands on some, buy extra).

Yangzhou Fried Rice from Fuchsia Dunlop’s ‘Every Grain of Rice’

Enticing, satisfying and fun to make, this Yangzhou Fried Rice from Dunlop’s superb 2012 book Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking is a dish is a highly craveable classic — one that I’d be happy to eat every week.

Why we love cooking it: Mastery! It’s an ideal recipe to use if you want to learn fried rice technique, as it’s the best (and least fussy) method we’ve found so far. After you try it once, there’s lots of room for ingredient improvisation. A seasoned wok is required.

Our review of the book is coming soon.

‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s award-winning book

The pickled shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking has been a point of joy for us several times during the pandemic, including last weekend, when a friend requested its presence at a socially distanced Labor Day picnic. It’s shown above before being pickled overnight. We reviewed the book in June 2020.

Why we love cooking it: The technique for pickling seafood in vinegar has its roots in Spanish escabeche. A recipe Tipton-Martin found in Savannah, Georgia inspired this one. Once you’ve made it once, you can play with the herbs and spices: This I upped the pickling spice a bit and added a bit more tarragon. Or even run with the basic escabeche idea and use what it’s taught us to pickled fin fish (snapper would be great) or scallops.

Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés from Camille Fourmont’s ‘La Buvette’

Crushed rosebuds and cumin bring a beautifully fragrant and savory aspect to Camille Fourmont’s spin on the classic French sablé cookie; dried apricots add a delightful chewy high note. Though Fourmont credits pastry superstar Pierre Hermé with having dreamt up the flavor combo, it is she who put them together in a sablé. Super buttery and tender, they are exquisite. We reviewed the book they’re from, La Buvette: Recipes and Wine Notes from Paris, in August.

Why we love cooking it: Playing with dried flower buds is a treat, and it’s always fun to slice and bake dough that’s been chilling in a log in the fridge.

RECIPE: Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

RECIPE: ‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp

RECIPE: Yangzhou Fried Rice

RECIPE: Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

Cookbooks We Love: Shanghai and its Jiangnan region shine in 'Land of Fish and Rice'

Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China, by Fuchsia Dunlop, photographs by Yuki Sugiura, 2016, W.W. Norton & Company, $35

Backgrounder: The British, Cambridge-educated cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Central China; she has four James Beard Awards. Land of Fish and Rice — which won the Andre Simon Food Book of the Year Award — is her fifth book; in 2019 she published a sixth, The Food of Sichuan. Land of Fish and Rice explores China’s Lower Yangtze (Jiangnan) region, of which Shanghai is the gateway. It’s a region “known for delicacy and balance,” Dunlop writes in the introduction. This is the book we look in first when we happen upon beautiful bunches of tong hao – chrysanthemum leaves – or giant bunches of flowering chives in a Chinese supermarket and wonder how to show them to their best advantage.

Why We Love It: There’s an easy elegance to Dunlop’s writing and cooking, an aesthetic we find super-appealing; Yuki Sugiura’s lovely photos capture it all perfectly. We happen to love the quiet charms of the cooking of Shanghai and the Jiangnan region, and Dunlop is a trustworthy guide who tells engaging stories of her experiences in the region along the way. Her recipes are easy to follow, they work, they showcase great ingredients and Dunlop has a wonderful way of teaching a bit of useful technique in each recipe. Cook a few, and you can’t help but feel you’re just that much farther along in learning. And you’ll certainly have eaten very well.

Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Fish and Rice

You’ve Gotta Try This: Dunlop’s recipe for Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives is simple and homey, somehow almost poetic. It uses very little meat — just four ounces. After prepping, which is minimal, it comes together in about five minutes; with rice it’s perfect for a light, laid-back supper.

Stir-Fried Shrimp with Dragon Well Tea is the thing to make when you find yourself with fabulous fresh shrimp. You cloak them very lightly in a mixture of potato starch, water and Shaoxing wine, then pre-fry them at a not-sizzling-hot temperature so they come out tender and silky, and then they’re cooked briefly with the tea and its leaves. Though the particular tea, Dragon Well (Long Jing), is one of the most prized in China, you can actually purchase it easily from from my favorite tea outfit, Upton Tea Imports. But any Chinese green tea will do.

Looking for cocktail nibbles? If you love radishes as much as we do, you’ll enjoy these sweet-and-sour babies — which get smashed and salted as if they were cucumbers, then bathed in Chinkiang vinegar with a little superfine sugar and sesame oil. They are delightful with cocktails.

Still wanna cook: So many things! Clear-simmered lion’s head meatballs. Hangzhou spiced soy-sauce duck. Scalded tofu slivers — an essential dish of the Yangzhou tea breakfast — with dried shrimp, ginger and Sichuan preserved vegetable. Shanghai fried rice with salt pork and green bok choy. Yangzhou slivered radish buns, plump with pork belly and spring onions.

Social perk: Dunlop’s Instagram feed — @fuchsiadunlop — mixes Eastern and Western bites. It’s one of our faves.

RECIPE: Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives

RECIPE: Stir-Fried Shrimp with Dragon Well Tea

RECIPE: Sweet-and-Sour Radishes

Wow your friends with Chinese lacquered duck (or chicken!) to celebrate Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year celebrations will begin on Saturday, January 25 and continue for 15 days until the Spring Lantern Festival on February 8. If we know you as well as we think we know you, you’ll be looking for some spectacular Chinese dishes that’ll wow your friends and family.

This weekend, the gorgeous lacquered duck pictured here can be yours — and remarkably easily, believe it or not. Though a couple days of preparation are required, there’s very little work involved — basically you just slap a marinade/glaze on the bird, stick it in the fridge, forget about it till the next day, brush on more marinade, then pop it in the oven the next evening.

In other words, bird alert: If you want the amazing lacquered duck on Saturday night, you’ll need to start preparing it on Thursday. We’re telling you now, so you can run out and buy your bird in swift order. In our neck of the woods, ducks disappear out of supermarkets like Whole Foods and Central Market after Western new year, but you can always pick up beautiful ducks (and for a lot less money) at Asian supermarkets.

Here — take a look at the recipe so you can swing by the market later. There are only four ingredients (duck, salt, soy sauce and honey), and you probably already have three in your pantry!

This spectacular lacquered duck can be yours!

Or center your Lunar New Year kickoff dinner around a lacquered chicken. Same drill, but the chicken can be achieved in as little as 12 hours advance notice. And oh, baby — it is outstanding as well.

We are working on some new recipes that would be perfect to serve with either, and hope to get them posted in the next day or two. In the meantime, you’ll find some tasty accompaniments like baby bok choy with whole garlic and two versions of fried rice in our Chinese cooking section.