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!)

Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

Several months before The Great Confinement, I became obsessed with butter chicken.  

It began with a problem I needed to solve for a client, for which an Instant Pot seemed like a possible solution. Never having used one, I Googled — and found a nearly two-year-old New Yorker profile of one Urvashi Pitre, “The ‘Butter Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot.”

Butter chicken? I’d never given the dish much thought — always assumed it was an Indian dish concocted for American tastes, as chicken tikka masala is for the Brits.

How wrong I was. And how silly I felt, and still feel — mostly because of the missed opportunities to indulge in murgh makhani (butter chicken’s proper name) during a lifetime enjoying Indian food. 

Meanwhile, if exemplary butter chicken could be easily achieved at home in less than a half hour using an Instant Pot, well, then, I had to get an Instant Pot.

My young-adult son Wylie was living with us at the time. Though suspicious of the plug-in-pot contraption, he’d always been partial to the charms of butter chicken, so he was keen to give the recipe a whirl for dinner one weeknight. It was remarkably easy: You put nearly all the ingredients — chicken pieces, a can of diced tomatoes, spices and salt — in the Instant Pot and turn it on. Then you pull out the chicken, use a stick blender to blitz the sauce, swirl in butter, cream, more spice and cilantro, put the chicken back in, and that’s it. Wylie started prepping everything just as I was leaving my office to head home; when I walked in 20 minutes later, he was swirling in the cream.

Wylie’s first (Instant Pot!) butter chicken. Delicious — and so easy!

The Instant Pot butter chicken was astonishingly good: rich, nicely spiced, altogether satisfying. And in so little time, with so little effort. Bravo Urvashi Pitre! 

Urvashi Pitre, a.k.a. the Butter Chicken Lady, with her instant pot murgh makhani in Southlake, Texas

Now I wanted to meet the famous Butter Chicken Lady — who happens to live not 25 minutes from me. I had the perfect opportunity. Another one of my clients, in process of opening a new store and cafe in Southlake, Texas, asked me to recommend a local cooking personality for the store’s inaugural Supper Club series. The Butter Chicken Lady! The event was an instant sell-out, and the guests (some of whom flew in from other states) loved it. What a kick to dine on delicious murgh makhani seated literally next to the extremely delightful Butter Chicken Lady. (Check out her excellent blog, Two Sleevers, where you’ll find hundreds of quick-and-easy recipes.) 

Meanwhile, I was getting curiouser and curiouser about murgh makhani. What were the origins of the dish? Were they knowable, or, like most dishes, something with hazy beginnings, a dish that evolved over eons? Would other versions include onions, which were conspicuously absent from Urvashi’s version?

The simplicity of the answer to the origin question threw me for a loop: Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created, according to a 2018 Washington Post story, in the late 1920’s or early ‘30s in Peshawar (then India, now Pakistan) by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral. It’s exceedingly rare that a dish has origins so precisely knowable, but butter chicken’s origin story is uncontested, the smart story by Andreas Viestad asserted.

I found the piece just as I was headed to Massachussetts to visit Juliet, a brilliant web designer (and gifted cook) who is now my partner in Cooks Without Borders. As we drove from the airport to her house, I told her about the Post piece, which profiles Monish Gujral, the grandson of Kundan Lal — who also created (incredibly!) tandoori chicken. His grandfather had wanted to create a dish for his mentor that was lighter than the usual dishes of the region, so he had the wacky idea of roasting a chicken in a tandoor oven, which at the time had normally only been used for baking bread. Tandoori chicken was a hit that put the restaurant — Moti Mahal — on the map, and later Kundan Lal created butter chicken as a way to use leftover tandoori chickens. Bathed in a rich, tomatoey, buttery, beautifully spiced sauce, murgh makhani made Moti Mahal famous throughout India. After partition in 1947 (when Pakistan and India were separated), Kundan Lal moved to Delhi, where he opened his own Moti Mahal. His grandson Monish apprenticed with him, becoming a chef at Moti Mahal after graduating university, and eventually taking over the family business — now an empire of some 250 restaurants.

Having eyeballed the WaPo adaptation of Gujral’s recipe, I thought it looked remarkably quick and easy — maybe even as quick to put together as Urvashi’s Instant Pot version. “Let’s make it!” said Juliet. Leave it to my friend to have all the ingredients already on hand.

The WaPo adaptation had us quick-roast pseudo-tandoori chicken pieces in the oven, having slathered on a yogurt-and-spice coating, but not leaving it to marinate before roasting. The sauce came together quickly on the stovetop.

The butter chicken Juliet and I made from the Washington Post story.

Again, this was delicious — perfect for a flavor-happy weeknight dinner.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how close this was to the original; the tandoori-approximation seemed a bit quick and clipped, and did the dish maybe want a little more depth?

Monish Gujral’s book, On the Butter Chicken Trail, offers a recipe slightly different than the adaptation in the WaPo piece. It calls for making an actual tandoori chicken first, marinating a skinless chicken first in lime juice, chile powder and salt, and then in a yogurt-spice blend — for at least four hours altogether, so all those flavors soaked in — then skewering the soaked bird and roasting it in a tandoor oven or grill.

Most cooks I know do not have a tandoor, and grilling isn’t always an option, but those two marinades seemed very worthwhile, and I wanted to do something a bit closer to the original than the WaPo recipe. Chicken thighs strike me as more practical for most American cooks, always flavorful, of course, and easier to cook evenly in high oven heat than a skinless whole chicken. Our recipe calls for roasting the thighs on a rack over a baking sheet so the pieces don’t braise in all the juices that collect otherwise.

[EDITOR’S NOTE Oct. 19, 2020: In honor of the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, October 20, 2020, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Moti Mahal, we have published a new story and created a new, streamlined version of our recipe. The new version is called World Butter Chicken.]

I also adapted the wonderful garam masala Gujral uses, which gives the dish a gorgeous aromatic underpinning. (The recipe for garam masala in Gurjal’s book yields nearly a pound of spice mix — more than most cooks I know would use in a lifetime; I scaled it down to a twelfth of that.)

Kundan Lal Gujral, the creator of murgh makhani — a.k.a. butter chicken. Gujral also is credited with with creating tandoori chicken. Photo courtesy of Monish Gujral.

Finally, while Gurjal’s recipe calls for 14 medium-sized ripe red tomatoes, that is an awful lot of tomato for one chicken; one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes seemed and tasted like the right amount, and canned tomatoes are more practical outside of tomato season.

That left me with one question: While the WaPo recipe called for Kashmiri chili powder, with 2/3 paprika and 1/3 cayenne offered as a sub, the recipe in the book called for “red chilli powder” without specifying a type. I tested it with the paprika and cayenne combo, and that seemed perfect. But what was ideal — and how much does it matter?

I went straight to the source, and asked Gurjal, whom I had no trouble finding through Facebook.

Now I was just beside myself — first I got to meet the Butter Chicken Lady, and now I was corresponding with the Butter Chicken King himself! Juliet pointed out that he was really more like the Butter Chicken Prince, as he was descended from the dish’s creator, but to me the fact of his world-wide murgh makhani empire makes him the Butter Chicken King.

Gurjal clarified the red chile powder question: Kashmiri chile powder, or a commercial blend called Deggi Mirch (a powder of Kashmiri chiles and red bell peppers), or the paprika-cayenne alternative work well. I sent him my adaptation of his recipe pre-publication, we discussed the switch to canned diced tomatoes and my adaptation of his garam masala, and he approved of the whole package. He was careful to add that you don’t want to blend the sauce too fine; you want it to have a bit of nice texture.

When we chatted later on the phone, he told me about his two grown children (his daughter is a lawyer at the High Court in Delhi; his son is in law school in London). “When they’ve been away and they come home,” he said, “right away, they always want butter chicken.”

Of course they do. It may well be the world’s most beguiling comfort food.

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken