Beef bourguignon? Deviled duck legs? Dazzling halibut? There's still time to pull together a festive NYE dinner

We couldn’t be happier to say goodbye to 2020. Why not ring in the new year with something delicious?

Don’t worry — even you’re not thinking about it till this afternoon, there’s still time to pull together a great dinner. Small gathering? If you’re two or three or four, a delicious braised dish like beef bourguignon will fill your living space with wonderful, warm aromas, and even probably leave you with fabulous leftovers.

Though it’s luxurious, the ingredients are not terribly expensive (chuck roast, mushrooms, pearl onions, bacon). If you’re a meat-lover, it’s one of the most glorious dishes you can make.

RECIPE: Beef Bourguignon

Prefer something super-easy? Deviled Duck Legs Provençal is another French dish that will delight.

Of course it depends whether you can get duck legs; they did have them at my local Whole Foods yesterday). Once you have them in your hot little kitchen, the rest is easy. All that’s required to prep them is a dusting of herbs, a smear of Dijon mustard and a coat of panko bread crumbs — shove them in the oven, and 90 minutes to an hour 45 minutes later, you’ve got these beauties.

Deviled Duck Legs Provençal with braised lentils

RECIPE: Deviled Duck Legs Provençal

In our photo, the duck leg is served with saucy braised French green lentils. To make the lentils, chop half an onion (or a shallot or two), a carrot and two stalks of celery, cook them in olive oil or duck fat until tender (about 7 minutes), add a pound of French green lentils and enough water or red wine to cover by an inch or so, plus maybe a bay leaf and/or a branch of thyme and simmer until the lentils are tender, about 20 or 25 minutes. Add more liquid if necessary to keep them very saucy.

Like the Beef Bourguignon, the duck and the lentils are also excellent the next day.

Seared halibut on ginger vinaigrette: a 10-minute dazzler!

Finally, here’s a light, quick and easy ginger vinaigrette that turns any piece of fish — or shrimp, or a grilled or sautéed chicken breast — into a 10-minute dazzler.

Here’s the vinaigrette recipe, sized for two portions (you can double or triple it for more servings):

RECIPE: Ginger Vinaigrette

And here’s the recipe including instructions for halibut:

RECIPE: Seared Halibut in Ginger Vinaigrette

Wishing you and yours a wonderful New Year’s Eve, and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021! May we all enjoy better times ahead!

Our 25 favorite recipes of 2020, from Veracruz to Morocco to Vietnam (Part 2)

Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with scallop sashimi and crab

Yep, cooking really saved us in 2020, the worst year ever. We lost ourselves — and found our sanity and our joy — in the kitchen.

So many delicious dishes came out of it that we know we’ll be cooking for years to come. Here’s the story we we ran down the first 12. And now, onto the festivities!

13. Mely Martínez’s Pollo a la Veracruzana

Because cookbook author and blogger Mely Martínez spent good chunks of her childhood learning to cook with her grandmother in Veracruz, Mexico, her Pollo a la Veracruzana was the first dish we cooked from her new cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen. We reviewed the book in September.

Why we love to cook it: With olives, capers, raisins and marjoram, this dish may sound a bit odd — but its flavors dance together beautifully. It’s quick and easy enough for a weeknight dinner, yet impressive enough for a special dinner for friends (if we can ever do that again!)

Fun factor: 3

14. Moroccan Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons

This delicious tagine came from Anissa Helou’s marvelous and monumental book Feast: Food of the Islamic World. Partly because Cornish hens were nowhere to be found when I reviewed the book in early pandemic, I adapted it for chicken.

Why we love cooking it: It teaches us so much about tagine technique, in which you only brown the meat at the end, after the meat has cooked and most of the braising liquid has evaporated. Thanks to a lot of finely grated onion and spices that melt over the course of the cooking time, it becomes a savory, silky blanket of a sauce. The dish’s high fun factor is because of the delightfulness of the technique and the beautiful aromas that result from the spices.

Fun factor: 7

15. Moussaka for the Ages

Our recipe for Greece’s most famous dish was my family’s unanimous favorite out of maybe nine jillion dishes that came out of our kitchen this year. (For my husband Thierry, it was tied with a dish that appears near the end of this list.) It was also a reader favorite: Though we only published it a week ago, it’s already among the most clicked-on of the year.

Why we love cooking it: It’s fun the first time, making the layers (potatoes, then eggplant, then lamb sauce). And the lamb sauce, spiced with cinnamon, allspice and more, fills the kitchen with a beautiful aroma. And then the “wow” moment when you see that incredible thick layer of yogurt-béchamel baked to puffy, toasty golden-brown: It’s breathtaking. Another plus: Once you make it a two or three times, it becomes second nature, because each step is quite easy. Did we mention that unlike convention versions, this one doesn’t require frying?

Fun factor: 7

16. Olivia Lopez’s Aguachile, Colima-Style

In a story in May, we featured a glorious aguachile — raw shrimp bathed briefly in chile-spiked citrus and then sauced — from Dallas chef Olivia Lopez. We made it many times in the summer, and will make it again next time we’re overcome with longing for a Mexican beach getaway.

Why we love cooking it: It’s quick, easy and transporting.

Fun factor: 3.

17. Ottolenghi’s Puy Lentils and Eggplant

I had a hard time deciding whether to include this recipe or Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe for Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa. Both are included in Ottolenghi Simple, for which we are long-overdue on a review. I’ve cooked the zucchini many times — and no doubt will many more. But I can’t stop thinking about the lentils, a glorious, delicious mess of a dish. Think I’ll make it this coming Meatless Monday.

Why we love cooking it: The method is easy and soothing, and the result wholesome and delicious.

Fun factor: 4

18. Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits

The shrimp and grits recipe in chef Marcus Samuelsson’s new cookbook The Rise makes the best version of the dish I’ve ever had. Yes, literally. The recipe honors Ed Brumfield, executive chef of Red Rooster, Samuelsson’s restaurant in Harlem. It’s so good I won’t wait for okra season to make it again; I’ll buy frozen okra.

Why we love to cook it: In less than an hour you can have it on the table. There’s a zen-like quiet loveliness in small-dicing all the veg, and the okra are beautiful cut that way.

Fun factor: 2. The fun is in eating this one, which would be a fun factor 10!

19. Rice Noodle Salad Bowls with XYZ Skewers

A Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with grilled pork skewers adapted from Andrea Nguyen’s ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’

Mostly over the summer, we riffed on this fabulous recipe, adapted from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day, maybe seven or eight times. Our adapted recipe mentions “XYZ” skewers because the skewers could be just about anything — grilled chicken, grilled shrimp, grilled pork (as shown here), or even not-skewers, like the sashimi shown in our story’s lede photo.

Why we love cooking it: Because it’s infinitely riffable, super-fun to assemble and thanks to the nuoc cham, insanely delicious.

Fun factor: 9

20. Sonoko Sakai’s Okonomiyaki

After years of searching for a great okonomiyaki recipe, I finally hit the jackpot in Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, which we reviewed in June. Okonomiyaki, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a savory pancake (this one is filled with cabbage and shrimp) brushed with tonkatsu sauce and topped with bonito flakes.

Why we love cooking it: “Okonomiyaki” means “as you like it,” and it’s infinitely riffable once you know the technique. Forming the pancakes and cooking them is satisfying, and it’s meant to be shared right away. We enjoyed taking turns making the pancakes (the recipe makes 4 fat ones).

Fun factor: 10

21. Salaryman Potato Salad

In the summer, potato salad became our drug of choice, and Japanese versions felt especially captivating. In a July story (remember picnic season?!), we featured one we love from Dallas Japanese ramen house Salaryman, where chef Justin Holt topped it with ajitama eggs, ramen-style. Holt has since closed the restaurant because he has been battling an aggressive form of leukemia (here is a GoFundMe to help with his mounting expenses).

Why we love cooking it: The ajitama egg, such a brilliant flourish, feels magical to make.

22. Shrimp, Sausage and Okra Gumbo

In the scanty-offerings-on-grocery-shelves days of early pandemic, I found okra, shrimp and andouille sausage at the supermarket all at the same time, and happened to have a package of dried shrimp in my larder, so I improvised a gumbo. It was deliciously soothing — both to make and to eat. I made it again, and again, tweaking until it was just where I wanted it. It’s also great to riff on according to what you have on hand. Okra season is finished, but you can skip it or use frozen.

Why we love cooking it: The power of transformation is intoxicating — shrimp shells into fabulous broth, flour and oil into a mocha-colored roux, and then the two combining into a saucy broth.

23. Tom Kha Kai

I can’t think of a better way to enjoy the sunny flavors of Thailand on a cold winter day than diving into a bowl of Tom Kha Kai, coconut-galangal chicken soup. This one is from Leela Punyaratabandu’s excellent primer, Simple Thai Food (a must-have for anyone new to Thai cooking who wants to explore).

Why we love cooking it: The aromas are absolutely transporting, it’s super easy to make (once you collect the ingredients) and the result is thrilling in its Thai-ness. Cutting fresh makrut lime leaves into strips is maximum kitchen fun — what a perfume!

Fun factor: 8

24. World Butter Chicken

To commemorate the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, marking the 100th anniversary in October of the restaurant in India where butter chicken (murgh makhani) was invented, we developed a new, streamlined version of earth’s most popular Indian dish. Our first version was adapted from one by Monish Gujral — grandson of the chef who invented the dish. This version takes a couple hours of marination time out of the equation, with equally delicious results. Until Moussaka for the Ages came along, it was my husband Thierry’s favorite thing we’ve cooked during The Great Confinement, and he requests it again and again. (Now it is tied with Moussaka for his favorite.)

Why we love cooking it: I love the tandoori hack for the chicken, and the sauce is soothing to make, with fabulous aromatics.

Fun factor: 6

25. Yangzhou Fried Rice

If I weren’t on a serious mission to eat whole grains rather than white ones, I’d make the Yangzhou Fried Rice from Fuchsia Dunlop’s splendid book Every Grain of Rice every week or two — it’s that good.

Why we love cooking it: Making it the first time is a delicious lesson in Chinese fried rice technique, and Dunlop provides guidance on how to improve according to the ingredients in your fridge.

Fun factor: 7

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READ: ‘Ottolenghi Simple’ is one of the most inspired — and inspiring — cookbooks in a decade (with recipes!)

Our 25 favorite recipes from the year we cooked our asses off (Part 1)

Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits from Marcus Samuelsson’s ‘The Rise’

Let’s skip the pleasantries and cut to the chase: Here are the dishes that have thrilled us the most over the last year. They’re the recipes we were excited to share with you first time around, and jazzed to round up for you now. They’re the recipes we’ll be returning to again and again we’ve fallen permanently in love with them. They’ve changed our lives for the better.

Most are new, whether developed this year in our test kitchen or adapted from cookbooks published this year.

Because it feels so important to find joy in the kitchen these days, we’re assigning each of them a “Fun Factor” — how much fun they are to cook. Our scale is 1 to 10, 10 being the most fun.

They’re listed in alphabetical order.

1. 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 them: 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). Definitely fun to plate.

Fun factor: 10

2. Baba Ganoush

We took a deep dive into our favorite eggplant dip beginning just as the year started — chasing optimal smokiness, perfect balance and the creamiest texture we could conjure. We wrote about it in late February. Please help yourself to our Baba Ganoush recipe.

Why we love cooking it: Because you get to burn the hell out of the eggplant in the bottom of a charcoal grill (or in the oven), and then pull it apart with your hands; it’s very primal. Whisking tahini and lemon juice to fluffiness has its charms as well. And then, of course, it is meltingly, classically delicious.

Fun factor: 8

3. Camille Fourmont’s Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

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 making them: 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.

Fun factor: 6

4. ‘Falastin’ Chicken Musakhan

The national dish of Palestine dish is our favorite (so far!) in Sami Tamimi’s Falastin, which we reviewed in July. 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.

Why we love cooking it: All those spices! Three tablespoons sumac! A tablespoon of cumin! You eat it with your hands! And it’s super-easy to make.

Fun factor: 7

5. Fried Chicken LudoBird Style

During early pandemic, we had a blast watching Ludo Lefebvre make his famous Fried Chicken LudoBird Style on his IGTV live channel. We pieced together a recipe, conquered our fear of deep-frying and triumphed.

Why we love cooking it: Because with our trusty Thermaworks instant-read thermometer to keep us in the right zone, we found we could fry with the best of ‘em.

Fun factor: 5

6. The Greenest Gazpacho

Vegan and gluten-free, this is the green gazpacho of our dreams. Here’s to hoping that either our ancient Waring blender holds out through the spring, or Santa brings us a Vitamix.

Why we love making it: It’s so easy — throw everything in the blender and give it a whirl — and so very green.

Fun factor: 2

7. Half-Whole Wheat Pita Bread

We love whole grain breads, but the whole wheat pitas we were finding — even at our favorite Lebanese bakery — were kind of like eating cardboard. So we took matters into our own hands and developed a recipe using half whole-wheat flour and half white flour: perfect!

Why we baking them: They may take a little practice, but when you nail it, they’re super-fun to roll out, squish and bake. Watch them puff up in the oven!

Fun factor: 8

8. José Andrés’ Dancing Eggplant

Whip up this Japanese-inspired sauce, slather it on microwaved eggplant, top with katsuobushi — bonito flakes — that “dance” on top, and you’ve got a quick and entertaining appetizer that’s great with beer or sake. We found the recipe in José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed , but skipped Andrés’s instruction to wrap the eggplant in plastic film before zapping. (We don’t believe in cooking plastic into food.) It works fine when the eggplant is naked. We keep meaning to grill the eggplant instead of zapping, but it’s just so damn great to have a fabulous app you can pull together so quickly — and just another reason to keep bonito flakes on hand at all times.

Why we love cooking it: Instant gratification, with a beat.

Fun Factor: 8

9. Josef Centeno’s Carne Guisada with his Tía Carmen’s Flour Tortillas

Making this dish, a favorite of L.A. chef Josef Centeno from his childhood in San Antonio, Texas, made us feel like we were part of his family. (We reviewed his latest cookbook, Amá, in September.) The Carne Guisada — long-braised beef — is wrapped in the warm tortillas and eaten tacos. My French husband Thierry proclaimed it “better than beef bourguignon.” Hard to say — but it’s up there, and you don’t get to eat home-made tortillas with the French dish.

Why we love cooking it: The slow braise makes the house smell great, and there’s primal joy in forming and griddling the flour tortillas.

Fun factor: 6

10. ‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp

This was the first dish that caught our eye in Toni Tipton-Martin’s fabulous cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. We made it in and previewed it in early May, then reviewed the book in June, just as it won a James Beard Award. It went on to win two International Association of Culinary Professionals awards, including Book of the Year. We’ve made the dish — which makes a great gift, by the way, as you can deliver a jar — four or five times since.

Why we love cooking it: It feels like a cool science project and art project in one, as you pack the shrimp in a jar with all the gorgeous herbs and aromatics.

Fun factor: 5

11. Leela Punyaratabandhu's Green Papaya Salad

We were delighted to learn that mere mortals can make excellent som tam — Thailand’s famous green papaya salad. Leela Punyaratabandhu’s splendid recipe makes it seem like a miracle every time. We love that

Why we love cooking it: It’s rare to get permission to pound vegetables and fruit together, and in this case the resulting flavors are insanely vivid and transporting.

Fun factor: 7

12. Miso-Butter Sweet Potatoes

A friend told me a few years ago about a sweet potato filled with miso-butter he had swooned over at our mutually favorite Japanese restaurant in Dallas. I don’t know who invented the idea, but I knew I had to try it at home; it blew me away. (Then again, I can be blown away by a simple, plain sweet potato roasted to caramelly sweetness.) This year, I had the idea to add scallions, furikake and togarashi, and wow — it’s spectacular. Insanely good. I’ll be making some this weekend.

Why we love cooking it: It’s more like dressing something up than cooking it. You just roast that sucker whole, split it open and go to town. Mushing the miso together with softened butter is pure pleasure, and makes for better utensil-licking than even cookie dough.

Fun factor: 8

Here is Part 2, Recipes No. 13 to 25.

Dana Cowin teams up with talented food entrepreneurs to bring a world of flavor to her table and yours

Dana Cowin, founder of Giving Broadly and Speaking Broadly | photo courtesy of Dana Cowin

Strange as it may seem, Dana Cowin — who led Food & Wine magazine for 21 years as editor in chief, and who has been one of the most influential people in food in America this century — does not count her skills in the kitchen among her strengths.

“I’ll be honest,” she famously wrote in the introduction to her 2014 cookbook Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen, “I am not a great cook.”

So how does someone who has long been devoted to eating well manage to put excellent food on the table every night for her family during a pandemic? She collaborates with interesting chefs and food makers to put the flavors she craves in bottles and boxes — cooking shortcuts, if you will. 

That’s part of the idea behind the project Cowin has just launched: Giving Broadly. It’s a guide that curates and spotlights amazing products from women-owned artisan brands. The Giving Broadly website functions as a shop for those ingredients and other edibles as well as a place where the remarkable women behind them share their stories. Some of those entrepreneurs have been helped by Hot Bread Kitchen, an organization that helps immigrant women incubate food businesses; Cowin sits on Hot Bread Kitchen’s board.

We caught up with Cowin on the phone for a Q & A to hear more about the project. She, her husband and their two children (one home from boarding school, the other home from college) had spent most of the pandemic at their home in Upstate, New York. When we spoke, Cowin was back in New York City. 

Cooks Without Borders: Tell me about Giving Broadly — where did it come from? How did you get the idea?

Dana Cowin: For the first time in my entire life, I found myself at the stove mostly every night. I found that in order to make it great and interesting to me and to everyone around me, I really needed some help. 

There are cookbooks, yes, and actually I love cookbooks. But I also like shortcuts because as someone who’s not an amazing cook, I really need the shortcuts to flavor. So this first great discovery during Covid was Omsom. Omsom was started by two sisters — Kim and Vanessa Pham — who have put the flavors of Southeast Asia essentially into packets. I would be craving larb, and there would be the packets, and I would follow the instructions, use the little flavor packets, and put it on the table and be like oh, my goodness — I actually feel like I’m at a restaurant! I, Dana Cowin, made a restaurant-tasting meal, which has often been somewhat beyond my reach. 

Omsom founders Vanessa Pham (left) and Kim Pham | Photo courtesy Giving Broadly

So my not being a cook definitely led me to finding shortcuts, and then my desire to spotlight women entrepreneurs and learn their stories led me in a very particular direction, as I was trying to find great condiments or great products to make cooking in the last nine months more interesting and more exciting. 

CWB: Very cool.

DC: The larb was so well received that I actually went online and bought a second starter kit, just so I wouldn’t run out. What I found — and I think this is what most real cooks do —  is that the first time I followed the directions. But the second time I just took the notion of the flavors that were inside those packets and used it on something else. Like instead of doing it with ground pork, I added the flavor to potatoes, or something that was not something they had recommended, which gave me a lot of freedom. 

Fauzia Abdur-Rahman, founder of Fauzia’s Heavenly Delights | Photo courtesy of Giving Broadly

I sort of rationed my Omsom, and I wanted to try different things, so I ordered Fauzia’s Jerk Seasoning. Fauzia Abdur-Rahman is a street vendor in NYC who has Fauzia’s Heavenly Delights; she has been on the street making her food for 25 years, which is quite extraordinary. She partnered with Hot Bread Kitchens and bottled her jerk seasoning. 

To me part of the idea behind Giving Broadly and my own quest for change in the kitchen was to bring back memories of travel, or bring back memories of restaurants. That was what I was in search of. Having this really great jerk seasoning brought me right back to the beaches of Jamaica, which I love —  the idea of smoke and the outdoors and the music and the heat and just that whole vibe. I love a condiment that can do that to you.

CWB: That’s amazing that you can get all that in a condiment.

DC: The thing about jerk is that it’s not hard to do, but it involves all these things that I don’t know if I have in pantry, and if I do, they are aging. I like the fact that all things in Fauzia’s are fresh. She has a great story about how when she first got in the business, she was buying her spices from a big wholesaler, and her mother tasted the spices and was like, “this is awful. We are never buying from them again. This does not taste like home.” And so her spices are definitely fresher than mine.

Diaspora Co. founder Sana Javeri Kadri | Photo courtesy Giving Broadly

CWB: You also have someone doing single-origin spices — Sana Javeri Kadri. Tell me about her.

DC: Amazing. What’s so remarkable about Diaspora Co. and Sana is how devoted she is to finding exactly the right farmer. She says it can take her anywhere from two months to two years to find the right person for the right spice. I’m in love with her pepper — it has so much flavor. Again, it makes you realize how long the pepper you generally have in your spice grinder has been sitting on the shelf before it got to your house, and how flavor does degrade over time. 

Sana often does a pre-order, so I’ll pre-order the pepper because she pays attention and respects the season — because pepper has a season, it has a picking time and I imagine it has a curing time; it has a time during which she can import it. She’s not getting old pepper, and that’s part of the respect for the ingredient.  

She’s also investing in the community, and if there are farmers she feels need more time, she can work with them in order to get them ready to produce and to ship to her. So she’s very, very, very thoughtful about who she’s pairing up with. 

CWB: I love that you’re helping small businesses bring what they’re doing to a much wider audience than they’d otherwise have just in their own geographic communities. 

Krissy Scommegna, founder of Boonville Barn Collective | Photo by Gilbert Bages

DC: Every single person whom I spoke with, I asked “what is the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in your entire time as an entrepreneur?” And almost to the last person, they said COVID has presented enormous challenges, because of disruption. And in every case it isn’t because they don’t have an audience.Their supply chains are disrupted, their ability to produce sometimes is disrupted, and they’ve had to pivot, and so there are women in this guide who were mostly selling to restaurants, and of course those accounts dried up and so they had to pivot. 

I’m thinking of Boonville Barn Collective’s Krissy Scommegna, with her Piment d’Ville — which is sort of a pun on piment d’Espelette. Her dried ground peppers were mostly going to restaurants. And she had to pivot; she had to find a new audience.

I think in each case these women feel they’re stronger for it, but it’s been a tremendous challenge. So going into this project, I really wanted to find people who would benefit from the exposure. To be fair, there are some who have had tremendous exposure, but the bulk of the people on the site don’t have as much PR or visibility and helping them through COVID and sharing their stories during this time I feel is very important. 

Fly By Jing founder Jing Gao | photo by Sarah Ellefson

There are many parts of the story. Many of them are really fighting for recognition for their culture. Jing Gao, who has Fly By Jing, which is an extraordinary company, is creating a Sichuan Chili Crisp that is I actually eat standing up at the fridge, I can’t even get to put it on top of something, it’s so addictive. But the journey for her was really about how people perceive Chinese ingredients and their value. And how that in turn made her value herself. Through this project, Fly By Jing, she changed her name back to her birth name from Jenny, which she had adopted living in Europe. Now this condiment is sort of everything to her because it’s made with beautiful ingredients from Sichuan, and it’s brought so much pride to her culture. 

So there are many ways in which I was looking at people I wanted to highlight. 

Of course the food has to be great, but I also wanted it to stand for something that was important — both to the individual but also in the conversation around food today. 

CWB: Dana, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and tell us about these incredible artisans and their fabulous products! 

A number of them are available at the Cooks Without Borders Holiday Pop-Up Gift Shop. You can find them all (along with many others) at Giving Broadly, and you can listen to Dana Cowin’s extraordinary interviews with brilliant, remarkable women in the food world at her podcast, Speaking Broadly. 

Top 10 cookbook dishes that blew me away during The Great Confinement (Part II)

Cooking — and losing myself in the pages of cookbooks that dive into cuisines from around the world — has been the closest I’ve come to traveling this year. Not only has that been a delicious consolation, but the incredible recipes I’ve found will be mine forever: to execute faithfully or to riff on endlessly, making them my own. It’s nearly as much fun reliving them in the retelling as it was to discover them the first time.

Part I of this story ran through five of my new-found faves — dishes that come from China, India, Palestine, France and Savannah, Georgia. The next five dishes criss-cross the globe, with stops in Japan, Vietnam, Mexico, the Levant and the globally expansive mind of chef José Andres.

Okonomiyaki from Sonoko Sakai’s ‘Japanese Home Cooking’

Sonoko Sakai’s wonderful Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors showed us the way to turn out reliably fabulous okonomiyaki — the bespoke, bonito-flake-festooned savory pancake that’s got umami written all over it. We reviewed the book in June.

The crazy pancake begins life as a thin batter of flour, egg, milk, baking soda and salt, to which you add shredded cabbage, bell pepper and scallion. Into a hot, oiled skillet it goes. Let it brown a moment, add shrimp, flip it and finish cooking. Paint with tonkatsu sauce (the recipe supplies that too), shower with katsuobushi (bonito flakes), scatter with scallions and crumbled nori and serve.

Why we love cooking it: It’s eminently riffable; “okonomiyaki” means “as you like it.” Add bacon, swap the shrimp for crab or other seafood, add a squirt of Kewpie mayo. Watching the thick, luscious pancake cook to golden brown then flipping it is terrifically satisfying. The bonito flakes are so thin they seem to come alive on top, waving around from the heat of the pancake, so it’s a show-stopper at the table.

Carne Guisada and Homemade Flour Tortillas from Josef Centeno’s ‘Amá’

When the French person at the table declares, “This is even better than beef bourguignon” and the only other sounds in the room are groans of gustatory pleasure, you know you’ve got a keeper. We’ve got a review of chef Josef Centeno’s Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen in the works (it’ll be published soon); this dish is a preview. If his Carne Guisada doesn’t exactly look modern, that’s because it’s not: It’s straight-ahead San Antonio soul food. Following Centeno’s lead, we wrap it in a home-made flour tortilla (recipe included), and proceed directly to heaven.

Why we love cooking it: It’s a classic braise, super easy to achieve, that slow-cooks for hours and fills the house with a gorgeous aroma. While it’s finishing, making flour tortillas by hand (including mixing the batter without a mixer) is primally satisfying, and easier than expected.

Rice Noodle Salad from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Every Day

Andrea Nguyen’s Rice Noodle Salad Bowl topped with grilled pork skewers

It was love at first nuoc-cham-drenched bite, and we’ve since made the Rice Noodle Salad Bowl from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Every Day four or five times. Partly that’s because it’s more than anything a “blueprint” dish (Nguyen’s description), a base designed to accept skewered grilled meat, chicken or shrimp, marinated grilled tofu, simple sautéed fish — whatever you like, whenever you’re craving that nuoc-cham tang and a pile of fresh herbs. A couple days ago, when we found ourselves with odds and ends of leftover sashimi and crabmeat from a roll-your-own sushi evening the previous night and a gorgeous bouquet of herbs our friends had grown, that all went on top of rice noodles, salad greens, shaved cucumber.

Why we love to cook it: Skewers or grilling aside, it’s really about assembling and arranging, so it’s a lovely chance to show off your food styling skills (which inevitably leads to an Instagram post or Snapchat peek). Dressing it with tangy, salty, chile-hot nuoc cham brings a giant flavor payoff.

Dancing Eggplant from José André’s ‘Vegetables Unleashed’

Eggplant topped with bonito flakes (katsuobushi) that seem to dance, from José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed

Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) strikes again — this time dancing on top of ingenious microwaved eggplant brushed with ginger-soy sauce. The effect is so delightful with a Japanese beer or glass of cold sake, it inspired us to turn a prearranged video chat with friends into Zoom Izakaya Hour. We included the recipe in an August review of Vegetables Unleashed by José Andrés.

Why we love cooking it: That sauce, which comes together in 5 minutes. We just want to paint it on everything.

Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa from ‘Ottolenghi Simple’

Seasonal zucchini disorder — that time of year when summer squash invades your immune system and produce bin — sent us looking for the most inspired zucchini recipes. Predictably, we fell into Yotam Ottolenghi’s clutches. Unpredictably, the captive eaters — who had already OD’d on zucchini — went mad for this. Anyone have a bumper crop? Try this.

Why we love cooking it: You get to crush the cherry tomatoes with your hands.

RECIPE: Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowls with XYZ Skewers

RECIPE: Carne Guisada

RECIPE: Josef Centeno’s Tía Carmen’s Flour Tortillas

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

Summer vacation in your backyard: 7 dishes that can make this weekend feel like a delicious Mediterranean getaway

We have heard that there are people who get to go on actual vacations (wow, what a thought!). We see some of them frolicking on sunny beaches; others revel in leisurely strolls up high-altitude meadows dotted with flowers with stunning views in the background. Yes! We know this is true because we see it on Instagram. Unless maybe some of it is fake.

In any case, the rest of us are stuck at home, and so we cook as a form of escape. The thing is, it works pretty well!

Whether or not you have a backyard and the ability to grill, or you’re just relying on your trusty stove, you’ll find something delicious among these 7 treats that can bring a bit of summer vacation to your little piece of permanent paradise this weekend.

1. Grilled Artichokes with Aïoli

Don’t have a grill? They’re great boiled, as well.

2. Classic Gazpacho Sevillano

The most refreshing way to celebrate tomato season. Prefer green gazpacho? We’ve got the Greenest.

3. Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb

It’s simple, and it’s fabulous. Throw some vertically halved zucchinis on the grill next to them for a summery accompaniment.

4. French Lentil Salad

Super-easy to put together, this is wonderful warm, room-temp or even a bit chilled.

5. Deviled Duck Legs

These may roast for nearly two hours, but prep time is 10 minutes, max. Payoff is huge.

6. Kafta — Lebanese Lamb Skewers

Serve them on pita with hummus (O.G. or cheater) and a lovely parsley and onion salad.

7. A Showstopper Stone-Fruit Tart with Thyme

To spotlight all that great summer fruit! Want something easier and more casual? You’ll love this peach (or nectarine) and berry crisp.

RECIPE: Grilled Artichokes with Aïoli

RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

RECIPE: Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb

RECIPE: French Lentil Salad

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

RECIPE: Deviled Duck Legs

RECIPE: Stone-Fruit Tart with Thyme

Cool as a cuke: Four cucumber-happy salads to refresh you through a hot and heavy summer

Blimey, we all need a chill pill! In the absence of an effective one, we’ve been turning to the coolest of vegetables, the cucumber.

The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that the cucumber is “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables,” that it has been grown for some 4,000 years, that it may have originated in South India and that Christopher Columbus introduced it to Haiti in 1494. Jessica B. Harris points out, however, in The Africa Cookbook, that the some scholars feel that the cucumber may have come from Central Africa.

But wait — isn’t “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables” technically a fruit?

“It is a fruit,” says my friend Tim Simmonds, a Dallas botanist — and so are squashes, both summer and winter, including pumpkins. “Same big happy family.”

The curcurbit family, that is: the vine-y plant group that also includes watermelons, chayotes, gourds, cassabananas (a.k.a. melocotón) and the kiwano (a.k.a. African horned cucumber or jelly melon).

Given the cucumber’s origin story, it’s not surprising that it is popular in India — especially in the form of raita.

The cooling cucumber salad accompanies just about any kind of Indian meal, of course. But I’ve been known to enjoy a bowl of it on its own for a soothing lunch (particularly in a pandemic!).

Ours features grated cucumber, toasted cumin and a touch of lemon juice.

A Cucumber Sunomono was literally the first recipe we test-drove for our recent review of Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since the cucumber salad is a frequent starter of Japanese meals. This one, which weaves wakame seaweed in with the cukes, sports a jaunty grated-ginger garnish. We fell in love, not surprisingly. Maybe you will, too (let us know in a comment!).

Cucumbers also make appearances in Sakai’s recipe for Potato Salada and Dallas chef Justin Holt’s Salaryman Potato Salad.

But we’re not counting those in our four, so wait, there’s more!

This pretty Cucumber, Radish and Feta Salad came together as we riffed on a Levantine dish called khiar bel na’na, starring thin-sliced cukes, dried mint and orange-blossom water. We added radishes, scallions, feta and fresh mint (which layers beautifully with the dried). Lately it has become a house favorite.

And finally, this Scandanavian Cucumber-Dill Salad — which is wonderful with poached salmon, Cold Poached Arctic Char or even Swedish meatballs.

A happy development, at least in my neck of the woods, is that organic Persian cucumbers have become more readily available, even during the pandemic. They have lovely texture (as long as they’re nice and fresh), they’re less watery than English cukes but more flavorful than most hothouse cukes, and they don’t require peeling — a win win win. Though sizes for all kinds vary, generally speaking you can figure two Persian cucumbers for one medium English cucumber, or three for a large English cuke.

As you’ll see from the above recipes, many cultures salt cucumbers and let them sit to draw out the water and ensure great texture; sometimes gentle squeezing is called for as well. Hope you enjoy these refreshing treats.

Stay cool. Think cuke. Wear a mask. Stay healthy.

[RECIPE: Cucumber Raita]

[RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono]

[RECIPE: Cucumber, Radish & Feta Salad]

[RECIPE: Cucumber-Dill Salad]

Quarantine special: Marcella Hazan's ragù bolognese meets luscious handmade pappardelle

Last year, when L.A.’s handmade pasta genius Evan Funke published his cookbook American Sfloglino: A Master Class in Handmade Pasta, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. His then two-year-old Venice pappardelle palace, Felix, had pasta-loving Angelinos swooning. Chef Funke was getting big-time buzz with the book, whose forthright hashtag, #fuckyourpastamachine, said everything you needed to know about its handmade approach.

The book has since been nominated for a James Beard Award for its gorgeous photography, by Eric Wolfinger — whose beautiful how-to shots are at once sensuous and highly instructive; the pics of Funke’s finished plates are almost painfully attractive.

Wylie had just moved in with us post-college to start a job search, and when the book arrived in the mail, we devoured it together. If ever there was a book to appeal to the current Gen-Z zeal for extreme DIY immersion, this was it.

We knew immediately what we had to do. We had to attempt the book’s two holy grails: sfloglia all’uovo (egg dough, for pasta) and ragù della Vecchia Scuola, the old-school meat sauce bolognese that, once you have procured all the ingredients and equipment, is a seven- or eight-hour project.

We blocked off not just a Saturday, but the whole weekend. For the ragù — which Funke learned at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese in Italy (which is also where he learned to make pasta) — we had to purchase a meat grinder. (We bought an inexpensive cast-iron manual, hand-crank number.) I already had a food mill, suggested to make the passata di pomodoro (tomato sauce) that is another ingredient in the ragù. So a half-hour plus for that before you can even start the ragù. 

The ragù recipe calls for grinding together beef chuck, pork shoulder, pancetta, prosciutto and mortadella — nearly four pounds in total. Plus five ounces of strutto, which is pork fat. It yields two and a half more quarts of sauce than you need for the recipe, which is a good thing, as the recipe is so time consuming. 

Gathering the ingredients was its own adventure, and then the grinding, etc., followed by five to seven hours of cooking time. We had a grand time in the kitchen, Wylie and I.

The sauce was outrageously good, profoundly delicious. The transformation — after hours and hours and hours of simmering — was so striking, its depth extraordinary. At some point, it seemed like it all just melted together. It wasn’t ready, and then it was. Patience was an important ingredient.

It was also so rich that when we looked at what was left over in the fridge the next day, we were shocked by the white of all that strutto. Incredible that we had ingested that much fat. No wonder it was so good. Round two, the leftover ragù with dried pasta, was also profoundly delicious, but frankly, I wonder how long it’ll be before I’m moved to devote another weekend to making that sauce again.

As the ragù simmered that Sunday we made the pasta. I’ve owned a pasta machine — the old-fashioned, hand-cranked Atlas-type — since I was 19, and used it regularly for years, so the prospect of making dough and rolling and cutting pasta was not daunting. I’ve long understood that the dough requires a half-hour or 45-minute rest before rolling so the glutens relax, in order to get tender noodles. 

With Funke, the only equipment requirements are a rolling pin, a knife and a scale; a bench scraper and a spray bottle of water are handy. You also need a very large board for rolling out the dough into an immense, round sfoglia. 

Once you dive in, there is a lot of kneading and shaping and several hours of resting, and quite a lot of super-precise rotating and rolling of dough — whose desired thickness Funke measures in the thickness of a stack of Post-It notes (9 Post-It notes for pappardelle, 4 for tagliatelle). And then curing, which is more resting, and then cutting. We probably should have attempted pappardelle first, but we wanted to make Tagliatelle al Ragù della Vecchia Scuola, the book’s flagship recipe. 

Pappardelle made from a simplified method inspired by American Sfloglino

The resulting pasta, I have to say, was outstanding. Was it blows-it-away better than what I’d always made with my machine? Um, no. Better, but not that much better. If we are going to be painfully honest.

However, I really enjoyed the process. It’s just wonderful to knead the dough by hand, and roll it out into a beautiful, thin, giant round (even though it takes forever). Few cooking projects I’ve attempted have been that satisfying. So you know what? It has now become my preferred way to make pasta. I’m sure I’ll use my machine again, but only if I’m short of time. 

Too late to say long story short, but here comes the payoff. When the Covid-19 crisis first struck, and there was a run on dried pasta, I wrote a story for my local paper, The Dallas Morning News about how to make fresh pasta without a pasta machine — using a much simplified version of Funke’s method. We couldn’t tell the difference on the plate; it was wonderful. 

I wanted to offer a recipe for a ragù bolognese as well, but now was not the time for Funke’s Vecchia Scuola sauce, for many reasons — prime among them the long list of special ingredients, which were just not possible to procure. Instead I turned to the late great Marcella Hazan’s seminal 1973 The Classic Italian Cookbook, to page 127, to be precise: Meat Sauce Bolognese Style. 

Hazan’s ragù differs from Funke’s in a few ways. First, Hazan’s calls for nothing more exotic than ground lean beef; its other ingredients are staples, easily gotten. Second, one of the ingredients is milk, so it’s a different type of ragù bolognese. Third, Funke has you put the celery, carrot and onion through the meat grinder. And finally, Hazan’s requires only 3 ½ to 5 hours of simmering, compared to Funke’s 5 to 7. 

I tweaked Hazan’s just a little, for convenience and yield’s sake; notably Hazan’s called for ¾ pound of ground beef, which I upped to 1 pound, and she called for 2 cups of canned tomatoes, which is slightly more than a regular can and a lot less than a large can; I evened it out to one 14.5-ounce can for my adaptation.  

The recipe, striking in its simplicity, doesn’t look like much. But putting it together is just the kind of lazy, laid-back slow cooking that seems so soothing right now, and enveloping the tender, floppy handmade pappardelle in Hazan’s ragù — deep and soulful and tender as well — was a pure and profound pleasure. I highly recommend it.

RECIPE: Fresh Handmade Pappardelle

RECIPE: Pappardelle with Marcella Hazan’s Ragù Bolognese

Delicious last-minute gift for Mother's Day this year: a fabulous dish, with a cookbook to follow

An outsized jar of fabulous pickled shrimp — and the cookbook it came from — would be the Mother’s Day gift that keeps on giving this year.

The recipe comes from Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, which was just nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Cookbook in the American category.

In this weird-ass season otherwise known as The Great Confinement, buying gifts and commemorating special occasions can be incredibly challenging. But I have an idea for you — based on what I’d like, if I were a mom. (Which I am.) Make your mom (or your partner whose mom-ness you’re celebrating) a big jar of of this pickled shrimp (here’s the recipe):

You can enjoy it together for Mother’s Day brunch or dinner, and tell her you bought her the wonderful cookbook, which she’ll soon receive. Do this part today; here’s a link to Jubilee on Bookshop. If you buy it there, you’ll be helping to support independent booksellers.

The book really is special; in fact, I’m working on a review of it, which we’ll publish soon, but I thought I’d offer a sneak preview with this recipe. And back to the recipe: Your mom will probably have quite a bit of pickled shrimp left over — which is actually great news, as it’ll keep her supplied in nibbles that’ll result in Zoom happy hour happiness for days.

The shrimp needs to pickle overnight in the fridge, so you’ll have to make it today (Saturday) or tonight in time for tomorrow. And a jarful of this happens to be gorgeous. You could tie a big bow around it.

Your Mother’s Day dish-plus-cookbook doesn’t have to be shrimp-plus-Jubilee. It could be any dish (maybe as part of a meal) that would be nice on Mother’s Day, plus a cookbook-on-the-way.

Maybe it could be Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh, and Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking (the cookbook it comes from). One of my favorite dishes, from one of my favorite cookbooks, it’s absolutely perfect for this time of year (I made a double-batch last weekend, and fell in love with it all over again.)

You get the idea. We are in process of expanding and updating our cookbook coverage, and I wish our Cookbooks We Love department were a little more filled in. At least you can get some ideas there, and I promise to have it expanded and developed soon.

To add to that, here are a few of my all-time favorite cookbooks that will soon be added to that collection:

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers

Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey R. Shere

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook

The New Spanish Table by Anya von Bremzen

That’s just a few — need to run, so you have time to cook up Mom’s gift! Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

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.

Use what you know, what's sitting in your crisper (and your imagination!) to make an Iced Green Disco Soup

This coming Saturday (as we mentioned in a recent story), April 25 is World Disco Soup Day, organized by Slow Food Youth Network. To help with the goal of ending food waste (and having fun doing it!), we’d like to offer a way to think about those green vegetable odds and ends in your crisper in a new way. It’s easy to round up wilted greens and tired carrots, throw in some lentils or beans and turn them into a delicious hot soup.

But what about making them into something fresh and cool? Something that speaks of spring or summer and spotlights everything green? A delightful cold green soup!

To help you achieve that with whatever you happen to have that needs to be used in your fridge, let’s think about the world’s classic cold soups and what makes them work.

There’s vichyssoise, France’s purée of leeks and potato. The potato and leek combo can be a vehicle to which you can add leafy greens or lots of herbs. Add watercress (another classic) and you get a gorgeous, emerald-green cold watercress soup. You could also add a arugula or parsley or mint or basil — or any combo that sounds good to you.

There’s tarator, Bulgarian yogurt soup — a purée of cucumbers, walnuts, garlic, dill, olive oil and a lot of yogurt. (I make that all the time in the summer.) The cukes and yogurt (the same combo you find in cucumber raita) are a classic vehicle, and the walnuts add depth, richness and body.

Once it’s tomato season again, you can make gazpacho sevillano-style disco soups.

Of course there’s gazpach sevillano, the most famous, but it’s not tomato season — and we’re going for the green. There’s white gazpacho, too, which gets body and richness from almonds, brightness from green grapes and a lovely bite from garlic.

Once of my favorite soups is the Green Gazpacho in Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetarian cookbook, Plenty. Though it has much in common with tarator (Ottolenghi says it’s loosely based on it), the chef throws in a lot (6 cups!) of raw baby spinach, a cup of basil leaves, sherry vinegar (as in gazpacho) and peppers. So it’s hard to think of it as a disco soup — unless you have a garden that’s producing tons of spinach. But it does help give us a blueprint: You might have some spinach, and/or other greens you want to throw in raw. (You don’t need 6 cups to make it delicious.)

So think about what you have, and how it might behave like in ingredient in a classic soup.

Then dive into your fridge. We’re going to make a green soup today, so everything has to be green, or white, or something in between. (You’ll find another use for those beets and that leftover half a can of tomatoes. If you can’t think of something, drop us a note in a comment and we’ll help!)

• You want something for body: either nuts (raw or toasted), or potatoes (which you’ll boil before puréeing), a little rice (hopefully cooked and leftover), or even stale bread. I had raw walnuts in the freezer; I’d toast them in the oven (5 minutes at 350). If you’re using stale bread, soak it briefly in water.

• Grab anything green thing that you either enjoy eating raw (herbs or salad greens on their way out, scallions). I had a lot of parsley stems: They have great flavor and gorgeous color (and lots of super-healthy phytochemicals). I didn’t have carrot tops, but those are also delicious raw (or briefly cooked). Really! I also had a few sugar snap peas: I love them raw, but they leave Thierry and Wylie cold. I could sneak them in.

• What do you have that’s green that’s starting to look a little sad and that normally benefits from cooking? That might be broccoli, rapini, green beans, kale, etc. I had odds and ends from a farm box that were looking wilty — two baby bok choys, a little broccoli, a few green beans. And a bunch of radishes had lovely greens still attached. Those are good quickly cooked.

Rescued from the crisper drawer. If I hadn’t made Iced Green Disco Soup, who knows what fate they’d have suffered?

• If you have a few tablespoons of yogurt and a few cloves of garlic, your soup can resemble Ottolenghi’s Green Gazpacho. You’ll also want olive oil and vinegar, for gazpacho-like brightness and dimension.

With that, we’re ready to roll: Anything that needs cooking, you’ll simmer in water or vegetable broth (our master recipe tells you how to make vegetable broth from peelings and things you might throw away). Then you’ll throw in any greens that you’d rather not eat raw — like radish or turnip greens — for a quick blanch. That’ll get puréed.

Separately, you’ll purée all the other stuff — raw greens, cucumbers, green bell pepper, herbs, nuts, yogurt, olive oil, vinegar, salt and anything spicy you might want (serrano chile, white pepper).

Then stir the two together. Serve in small bowls, with a couple cubes of ice, another drizzle of olive oil, and any lovely fresh herbs you might like to feature whole (the last-minute add-ins are totally optional). Do a little dance: Your Iced Green Disco Soup will make a huge splash!

Here’s a master recipe that’ll offer more help, with all kinds of options built in:

If you stare into your fridge and need some advice or help, please don’t hesitate to ask in a comment — I’ll do my best to jump in quickly!

Happy dancing. Keep it green.

Celebrate Easter, Passover (or spring in general!) with butterflied leg of lamb on the grill

It’s kind of strange that I find myself with these ingredients during such trying circumstances, but a well priced on-line special on semi-boneless leg of lamb and another on organic asparagus presented itself when I was scrambling to find groceries yesterday. Somehow, a delivery spot opened up — not always easy. An Easter/Passover miracle!

Maybe it’s by design on the part of the grocer: holiday foods on holiday special. If that’s the case, maybe it has happened to you as well. Or maybe later this spring you’ll find yourself in possession of a leg of lamb. If so, here’s what I’m thinking: Dust off the Weber (or whatever your grilling set-up; our base-model Original Kettle is already set up on our tiny patch of townhouse patio).

Since we’re outside so much less these days, and it suddenly turned into a gorgeous day in Dallas, grilling our non-or-every-denominational holiday dinner feels like just the thing to do.

A simple marinade of red wine vinegar, garlic, cilantro, mint and olive oil goes on the lamb two hours (or more) before you grill it. If you don’t have those particular herbs, but you have some thyme or rosemary — even dried — that’ll work just as well.

Because you open up the butterflied leg rather than tying it, there’s more surface area for grilling and a shorter grilling time. Depending on how hot your coals are and the size of your lamb leg, it should take between 12 and 22 minutes.

If you’re doing asparagus as well, just toss that in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and put it on the grill when you flip the lamb.

Here’s the recipe:

Happy spring, happy holiday. Hopefully happier days are ahead!

Got romaine leaves? Turn them into tabbouleh- or tuna-cannellini salad-filled dream boats

It was a classic cooking-in-place moment: As I scrounged around in the fridge, even more mindful than usual of eating or cooking with every last veg before it wilted, I found a bag of romaine hearts that wasn’t nearly full enough to make a salad for the three of us.

The tender leaves still looked lovely, though — why not use them to scoop up something delicious?

More scrounging, and I found half a bunch of mint, two stray scallions and the better part of a bunch of Italian parsley: all things I didn’t have plans for in the next 48 hours and should be used. Got it — tabbouleh!

I knew I had bulgur (I do keep a well-stocked pantry) and a lemon, but there was just one hitch: no tomato. I did have some grape tomatoes, though — not the most flavorful things in the world, but the rest of the tabbouleh ingredients could lift them up.

Especially as I’d been playing with Annisa Helou’s tabbouleh recipe in her gorgeous, award-winning cookbook Feast: Food of the Islamic World. Her tabblouleh gets glorious depth from a Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture (sabe bharat) and cinnamon. (Don’t fret if you can’t manage the 7-Spice: Helou offers ground allspice as a sub.) If you do want to make the 7-Spice Mixture, here’s the recipe, which will fill your life with beguiling aromas, so it’s worth making just for that.

Into a salad bowl went chopped parsley, mint and those grape tomatoes (which I diced smaller than I would have an actual tomato), a little bulgur soaked briefly in boiling water and well drained, the spices, the juice of a lemon, a glug of good olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Tossed well, and onto a platter with those tender romaine leaves: voilà our excellent lunch on the fly!

After that I was thinking: This probably wouldn’t be the last time, during The Great Confinement, that we’d be faced with stray romaine leaves. Normally I’d tear them up and add them to other lettuces for a green salad, but salad greens these days aren’t necessarily a given. What else could romaine leaves be filled with?

Bingo: tuna and cannellini salad, which happens to be one of my pantry cooking favorites.

Here’s the recipe, which calls for either a can of cannellinis or dried cannellinis:

Stay safe, healthy and well fed, everyone.

RECIPE: Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture

RECIPE: Classic Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad

How a bag of frozen peas got me through the zombie apocalypse and made it feel like spring

One frigid January a few years back, when I was in process of reviewing a big-deal chef’s new restaurant, I asked my server about the “garden English peas” in a menu description of a fish dish. No way anyone’s garden was producing English peas that time of year, I thought. The dutiful server headed to the kitchen and came back with Chef’s answer — the name of some local farm that was supposedly growing the peas for him. Mm-hm.

Not long after the review ran, the restaurant’s sous chef sent me a note: Those peas? They were frozen. The sous-chef was sure of this, he wrote, because Chef had sent him out to the supermarket to buy bags of frozen peas that afternoon.

My new BFF (sorry, Teach!)

Not that I’d been fooled. In the best of times, frozen peas are a savvy cook’s secret ally, so I’d figured that fish dish’s poetic menu flourish had been an icy deception.

Even in the best of times I keep a bag or two of frozen peas on hand. And now this crazy season, when gorgeous springtime produce is only the stuff of dreams, a bag of frozen peas has become my new best friend.

Use it to make a ridiculously easy minted pea soup that tastes as lovely as if you had shelled a bushel’s worth. It’s achieved by sweating butter lettuce in melted butter, adding frozen peas and water, simmering a bit and blitzing with a blender.

Defrosted frozen peas play a starring role in one of my favorite dishes in recent cookbook-publishing years: Chef Michael Solomonov’s quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh from Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. Again, it’s a super-easy recipe that makes great use of ingredients that haven’t been hard to procure during the COVID-19 crisis.

And finally, my current favorite happy-hour bite: a creamy dip whipped up in a flash from frozen peas and ricotta, scented with mint and lemon zest. I like to swirl in a little extra ricotta at the end, but not all the way, so a swipe of a crouton gets a contrasty bite. It’s lovely with a glass of crisp white wine.

It’s just the kind of little luxury that could make you forget — if only for a moment — about the zombie apocalypse and imagine it’s a normal, delightful, optimistic spring.

RECIPE: Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

RECIPE: Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Pea-Ricotta Dip

Treat yourself: This Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken will add outsized joy to your life

If you can get a chicken, you can make this smashing dish.

We all need something delicious in our lives right now, and the ingredients to make many of our fall-back comfort foods have become, all of a sudden, unattainable. Depending on where you live and how you shop, it may be difficult or impossible to find pasta, eggs, dried beans and flour, for instance. Flour’s elusiveness is particularly annoying, as it stymies bread-baking, cookie making and cake creation.

Where I live, in Dallas, Texas, eggs are hard to come by, but we can get chickens — something my brother in L.A. failed to turn up in his extensive hunt yesterday.

If you live somewhere where you can put your hands on a bird — and you possess (or can get) a little soy sauce and honey — you can, with very little effort, make one of my favorite dishes ever: Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken. (Substitute tamari for the soy sauce, and it’s gluten-free!)

It comes from Peter Meehan’s 2015 cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes. Though it requires preparation 12 to 48 hours in advance, that preparation is super quick and easy, requiring only about 15 minutes of active prep: Combine soy sauce and honey, paint the bird with it, wait 15 minutes, paint again, sprinkle salt on, and tuck into the fridge. After 12 hours, or two days later, pop it in the oven to roast, hands-free — no basting or turning over the chicken (no need to flip the bird!).

Serve it with a stir-fried or steamed vegetable; fortunately things like broccoli, asparagus and baby bok choy have not been difficult to obtain. I love this recipe (also adapted from the Lucky Peach book) for stir-fried baby bok choy with whole garlic — and garlic, as we know, is great for boosting our immune systems. The book calls for a choice of baby or regular bok choy — or spinach (Meehan specifies regular, not baby spinach) or pea greens.

Ideally, you’d also want to serve the glorious chicken and beautiful veg with rice. I did manage to snag a bag of jasmine rice at the online supermarket this morning (I’d been seeking it for a week); otherwise it seems to be all manner of brown rice crowding the real and virtual shelves. With this chicken, and this bok choy, brown rice sounds positively dreamy.

We at Cooks Without Borders and your fellow cooks would love to hear from you in a comment — if you try one of these two dishes, how’d you like them? Any issues? Were you able to find appropriate ingredients?

When life gives you masa harina, make tortillas — and tacos, and tortilla chips

You’re craving pasta — but whoosh! All the boxes have flown off the shelves. Next you crave chocolate treats, so you bake — chocolate chip cookies, brownies, Brazilian chocolate cake. You run out of flour, and there’s no more to be had at the store (whoosh!). Eggs are nowhere to be found (whoosh!).

But there’s one fabulous comfort ingredient that doesn’t seem to be out of reach — yet, anyway: masa harina, the corn flour made from limewater-soaked dried corn kernels that is also known as maseca. Just mix it with warm water, give it a stir, and it instantly becomes a dough that you can turn into tortillas. Or sopes.

For me, it has come in handy half a dozen times in the last couple of weeks.

We craved huevos rancheros, but lacked corn tortillas. Out came the tortilla press; in ten minutes we had tortillas — which I fried, topped with fried egg, smothered in salsa ranchera. Craving satisfied.

Leftover roast chicken, chopped onion, cilantro and salsa verde suggested a taco lunch; masa harina to the rescue.

And at our sheltering-in-place happy hour a few evenings ago, three perfectly ripe avocados begged to become guacamole. We thought we had everything we needed: cilantro, white onion, half a tomato, two limes, salt and a single, solitary serrano chile. However — and this could have been a deal-breaker — no tortilla chips for dipping.

Maseca saved us once again! We mixed up some masa, flattened it in the press, laid the discs on the griddle, then into the tortilla basket those golden babies went. I cut them into sixths, heated a pan of oil and started deep-frying: something I hadn’t done in ages. Sea salt ground to super-fine in a mortar was the finishing touch, and wow — our happiest happy hour to date.

I’ve used every supermarket brand of masa harina, and all have worked fine. But recently I fell in love with the organic masa harina produced by Bob’s Red Mill. A wee bit coarser than the supermarket brands, it produces tortillas with a little more texture, and lovely deep corn flavor.

Whatever masa harina you use, you’re going to be happy. Make chips. Make tortillas. Make tacos.

When I’m feeling a little more ambitious, I’ll try making tortillas without using the press (to aid those of you who don’t have one). And soon we’ll do a sopes story. Meanwhile, tortilla presses, which during normal times you can pick up at your local Mexican supermarket, are easy to buy online.

There’s never been a time when handmade tortillas are more appealing or useful. Wrap any kind of stewy-saucy leftover in one, or serve them with a batch of chicken chile verde. Boil up a pot of pinto beans. (or open a can), add some grated jack and cilantro and you’ve got vegetarian taco event. Put out salsa, cilantro and diced onion, along with leftover chicken, beef, pork or lamb, and you’ve got a taco party.

Oh, and don’t forget the Taquería Carrots.