Cookbooks We Love: Leela Punyaratabandhu's life-changing 'Simple Thai Food' is one of our favorite primers ever

Simple Thai Food: Classic Recipes from the Thai Home Kitchen, by Leela Punyaratabandu; photographs by Erin Kunkel; 2014, Ten Speed Press, $24.99.

Backgrounder: Bangkok-born Leela Punyaratabandhu, who now divides her time between Bangkok and Chicago, has written for Serious Eats, Dill Magazine, Food52 and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She launched her Thai cooking blog, She Simmers, in 2008; four years later, it was honored as “Best Regional Cuisine” blog by Saveur. It has been inactive for a few years, though still very much worth reading — especially if you wind up buying Simple Thai Food, her 2014 cookbook, and loving it as much as we do. She has since written two other books, Bangkok and Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill. We look forward to exploring those. But first things first: Simple Thai Food is life-changingly excellent.

Why we love it: Having spent much of my adult life in places with easy access to outstanding Thai restaurants, I’d never been moved to learn to cook Thai food. Then came the pandemic, and being shut in made me crave its bright, optimistic herbal tang, its lovely perfume of makrut lime leaves and lemongrass. Punyaratabandhu’s slim, 228-page volume makes Thai cooking approachable and accessible. Further, her recipes, though simple to execute (once you get your hands on the right ingredients), look and taste anything but simple; they’re extraordinarily sophisticated, downright impressive, with beautiful layered, balanced flavors.

Punyaratabandhu writes instructions that are not only clear and easy to follow, she also thoughtfully describes exactly the way a dish should look and taste as you cook, helping us appreciate the cuisine as it’s meant to be enjoyed.

Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans (or in this case, green beans). It is garnished with a chiffonnade of makrut lime leaves.

That is particularly valuable when many of us may be using mediocre Thai restaurant renditions of dishes as yardsticks. “This dish is not supposed to be saucy,” she writes in the instructions for Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans. “When it looks like a dry curry that glistens with deep orange oil, you know it is done.” In those Americanized Thai places that offer “choice of protein” with this dish, that deep orange oil rarely shows up on the plate.

If you’re like me, you’ll be astounded at how simple it is (again, once you have the key ingredients) to make Tom Yam Kung (hot-and-sour prawn soup) or Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup.

Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup

Som Tam — the green papaya salad that launched my pandemic Thai cravings — is easy to manage as well. Shredding the green papaya so that it does not bruise is best achieved using a mandoline (great excuse to buy one if you don’t already own one). The author also suggests a hand grater, calling out an inexpensive one called Kiwi Pro Slice.

Som Tam Malako — Green Papaya Salad

Read this first: Buried at the end of the book is Punyaratabandhu’s extremely essential Ingredients Glossary. It’s where I would suggest you start if you want to dive into Thai cooking. In it, the author explains everything you need to know about palm sugar (it’s complicated; if you’re not already familiar with it you might want to stick with her suggested sub of brown sugar. We also used coconut sugar as a sub, with excellent results). She also explains that Thai eggplants may be eaten raw; the differences between Thai basil, holy basi and lemon basil; what to look for when you buy galangal (plus how to freeze it) and how to use makrut lime leaves and rind (and how to freeze them). While we are on the subject, Angkor Cambodian Food is a great source for many of these ingredients. If you think about gathering all your ingredients first, and prep and freeze those that can be frozen, you will be much better off when you finally dive in.

In the glossary, Punyaratabandhu insists on the use of some of these hard-to-source ingredients for particular dishes, and no doubt she’s right in doing so. Happily, she does condone shortcuts when the resulting flavor is acceptable, allowing that commercial Thai curry pastes are far better than homemade ones made with inappropriately subbed ingredients.

You’ve gotta try this: Among the many amazing Thai dishes I made from this book, the one my family was most bowled over by was a sort of dip called Lon Kung Mu Sap, which Punyaratabandhu translates as Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Vegetable Crudités. Basically, it’s chopped shrimp and pork simmered together in coconut milk, brightened with tamarind paste and seasoned with shallot and chiles and garnished with makrut lime leaves.

Leela Punyaratabandu’s Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Crudités (Lon Kung Mu Sap)

“Most people who did not grow up in a Thai household or live with Thai people are unfamiliar with the various coconut milk-based relishes called lon,” she explains in the headnote. She also explains that it is served not before dinner (as a westerner might guess), but along with the rest of the meal. Punyaratabandhu went to to share how she likes to eat it: “I take a piece of the vegetable crudités, put it on a bite’s worth of rice on my plate, top it with a dollop of the lon, transport the whole assembly on a spoon, and eat it in one big bite.”

Thank you for that delicious morsel, dear author.

Dear reader, if you’ve ever been tempted to try your hand at Thai cooking — or if you’ve done quite a bit of it and want a great reference with great recipes — you need this book.

RECIPE: Phat Phrik Khing (Sweet Dry Curry of Pork and Long Beans)

RECIPE: Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)

RECIPE: Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Green Papaya Salad

RECIPE: Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Shrimp-Coconut Relish

BUY ‘Simple Thai Food’ at Bookshop

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Cookbooks We Love: With ‘Amá,’ Josef Centeno takes us home to San Antonio, liberating Tex-Mex along the way

Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen by Josef Centeno and Betty Hallock, Photographs by Ben Fuller, 2019, Chronicle Books, $29.95

Backgrounder: Just after his Japanese-and-Italian-inspired Los Angeles restaurant Orsa & Winston was named Restaurant of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in the summer of 2020, chef Josef Centeno had to close two other acclaimed restaurants, Bäco Mercat and Amacita, due to COVID-19. The San Antonio, Texas native — one of the most highly acclaimed chefs in the U.S. — continues to serve his modern Tex-Mex cooking at Bar Amá, from which this exuberant book gets its name. As forward-looking Tex-Mex is a rare thing indeed (most of what is served in Tex-Mex restaurants around the U.S., including in Texas, is hopelessly stuck in time), we were excited to discover and cook Centeno’s modern takes.

This is Centeno’s second book; his first, Bäco: Vivid Recipes from the Heart of Los Angeles, was published in 2017. Both were co-written with his partner Betty Hallock, a former deputy Food editor at the Los Angeles Times. (Full disclosure: Betty and I worked closely together when I was Food editor at the Times.)

Amá’s Broccolini Torrada with Aged Cheddar and Lime

Why we love it: The modern dishes, like Broccolini Torrada with Aged Cheddar and Lime, which has been on the menu at Bar Amá from the start (“and will always be on the menu”), are smartly delicious, bold and fabulous in flavor. And the soulful traditional dishes — such as Carne Guisada, eaten as breakfast tacos with Centeno’s Tía Carmen’s Flour Tortillas — are simply smashing. They are dishes we’ll come back to again and again.

Carne Guisada from ‘Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen’

You’ve gotta try this: At Bar Amá, Centeno lightens his guacamole with an unusual ingredient — grated celery. Odd as it sounds, it’s wonderful (don’t tell the guacamole police!). Chopped red onion makes a snappy garnish.

Amá’s guacamole, garnished with chopped red onion, gets a lift from grated celery.

Tiny complaints: Closer editing would have been appreciated. The caraway seeds you toast for those albondigas never get incorporated; we had to guess what to do with the tepin or arbol chiles destined for the torrada and the serrano for the guac (we stemmed, seeded and chopped them).

Still wanna cook: Hoja Santa Vinaigrette (if we can get our hands on fresh hoja santa); Anchovy Butter-Roasted Red Onions; Charred Green Onion Crema; Migas; Mama Grande’s Chicken Soup (with brown rice, scallions and cilantro); Chile Shrimp Ceviche (with grapefruit and watercress); Lamb Birria; Puffed Tacos (if we can get our hands on fresh masa from nixtamal); Nachos Compuestas; Borracho Beans; La Piña (a cocktail made with mezcal, pineapple, cilantro and serrano chile).

RECIPE: Bar Amá’s Broccolini Torreada

RECIPE: Carne Guisada

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

RECIPE: Amá’s Guacamole

With 'The Mexican Home Kitchen,' Mely Martínez is now everyone's abuelita

The more it goes, the more I cook, the more I’m interested in cookbooks that let you learn the basics of a cuisine by cooking dishes that real people cook at home. As inspiring as it is to pore over a tome by Enrique Olvera or René Redzepi or Pierre Gaignaire, there’s something about the very basic joy that comes from doing things the same way mamas and grandmas have done them for ages — whether those mamas are in China or Lebanon, Senegal or France, Italy or India or Uzbekistan.

And for me, since I have felt since I was about 10 years old that somewhere deep inside of me lives an old Mexican woman (seriously, I’ve always felt it as kind of a past-life thing), a book that speaks to how old Mexican women and young Mexican women cook every day at home is quite an exciting prospect.

I’ve learned to cook Mexican dishes mostly from books — starting with those from Diana Kennedy, the British expat who moved with her journalist husband to Puebla nearly 70 years ago and has been chronicling Mexican regional foodways ever since. But I’ve never had a Mexican mama or abuela to hold my hand. (Kennedy, as wonderful as her books are, is more the stern taskmaster than the hand-holder.)

Until now.

The Mexican Home Kitchen — the debut cookbook from the hugely popular food blogger Mely Martínez that has been 11 years in the making — is one of the titles I’ve been most looking forward to this very unusual fall publishing season.

Mely Martínez with epazote she grew in her backyard garden in Frisco, Texas | Photo by David Castañeda

I’ve been excited because I’m a fan of her blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, and of her Instagram posts, where she fluidly moves back and forth between English and Spanish to give background about a dish, showing us what she made for breakfast (black bean gorditas! red chilaquiles!); it’s all completely engaging and charming. No wonder she has 63K followers there.

Though I’m one of them, I had no idea until a couple weeks ago that she lives in Dallas (in Frisco, a northern suburb). We chatted at length on the phone, and she told me about her life, her cooking, how she came to write this book.

Born and raised in Tampico, a coastal city in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas, Martínez spent summers on her grandmother’s farm in Veracruz. There, she told me, “They cook what they have on hand. My uncles in the evening went out to hunt rabbits, and you knew the next day you’d have rabbit for lunch. If they went to fish in the river, we knew we’d have fish — and whatever my grandmother had planted in her garden.” Her grandmother’s big kitchen with its wood stove was where she loved being, and that’s where she learned to cook.

Eager to experience some of those flavors, I made her Pollo a la Veracruzana — Veracruz-style chicken.

Pollo a la Veracruzana from ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ by Mely Martínez.

It’s a simple dish — achieved by browning pieces of chicken (Martínez calls for thighs or breasts; I used both), then sautéing onions, garlic, carrots and potatoes. Add fresh tomato purée, herbs, sliced green pimento-stuffed olives, capers and raisins. Simmer the browned chicken in the sauce, and serve it with Arroz Blanco.

One bite, and I knew this would be a dish I’d make again and again. Never mind that we’re the same age; Martínez is now my very own abuela. This dish is easy, bright, deep, homey and soulful.

The idea of including raisins with the olives and capers together in a tomatoey sauce might sound odd, but the flavors meld beautifully, and the raisins add depth. I’d been unaware that raisins are used in Veracruzana dishes; that’s because on the coast, they’re not included; it’s more of an inland mountain style, as Edmund Tijerina explained in a 2011 Houston Chronicle story about Veracruz-style fish.

It’s not the kind of micro-background detail you find much of in The Mexican Home Kitchen, which keeps things more general (black beans are more common in Mexico’s Gulf states; flour tortillas are eaten more in the north) and on the way things are served and eaten.

Her main purpose in writing it was to share recipes from around Mexico with emigrants who missed the cooking — and their U.S.-born children, or non-Mexican spouses. “I realized there were no books written by Mexicans, or by Mexican-Americans,” she told me. She started writing “so people who are Mexican and have children who don’t speak Spanish can have the recipes in English.” She could be their surrogate kitchen-loving mama or abuela. Her own 25-year-old son, David Castañeda, did all the lovely photography. (And no, Martínez is not an actual abuela.)

As a young elementary school teacher, Martínez moved to the south, which gave her the opportunity to travel extensively in the Yucatán Peninsula, where she loved exploring the foods. Later, her husband’s work in human resources led them to live in states all over Mexico: Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Veracruz, Puebla, Estado de México and Tabasco. Their regional cuisines are most strongly represented in the 550-ish recipes on her blog, and in the pages of her debut book.

And in the 85 recipes in the book. Dive in just about anywhere randomly, and delicious-looking-and-sounding things jump out that you’ll want to try posthaste.

Pozole Rojo could be a great place to start — especially if you’re reading this in time for Mexican Independence Day, September 16. Throughout Mexico, says Martínez, pozole is “one of the stars” of the holiday, for which people make a much bigger deal than they do for el Cinco de Mayo. (Flautas, tamales, tostadas, empanadas and buñuelos are also popular, she says.) The celebration starts around 11 p.m. on the 15th, as friends gather, eat and drink, and at midnight there are shouts of “¡Viva México!” and “¡Viva la Revolución!” and bells are rung.

Martínez’s recipe includes the traditional garnishes: shredded lettuce, sliced radishes, dried Mexican oregano, dried chiles, chopped onions, diced avocado and limes. Where I grew up, in Southern California, shredded cabbage was a familiar garnish. I always loved that, and asked Martínez about it. “That’s what they use in the northwest part of Mexico,” she said; in the rest of Mexico, lettuce is more prevalent.

If you’re after something sweet, try one of Martínez’s personal favorites: Pastel de Tres Leches (Tres Leches Cake).

It’s a denser version than most, not a sponge cake, and requires an overnight rest for the tres leches — condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream or media crema — to soak in properly. The result, topped with vanilla whipped cream, is super luscious. Not realizing that in a footnote to her recipe, Martínez suggests a variation adding rum or brandy, I had a crazy idea and pour a tablespoon or two of pineapple rum on my slice. It was insanely good. (And it taught me the lesson that Martínez’s “notas” following many of the recipes can be extremely valuable and interesting.)

There’s still so much more I want to cook from this wonderful book. I enjoyed the Crema de Elote — a soup of fresh creamed corn that was even better served chilled the next day. And I still have my eye on Chiles Rellenos, Albondigas en Chipotle, Mole Poblano, Tamales de Salsa en Salsa Verde, Picadillo, fabulous-looking Tostadas de Pollo, and many others.

It’s an impressive debut cookbook — one that deserves a celebration. To that end, Cooks Without Borders and The Dallas Morning News will be co-hosting a virtual book party for Martínez on Thursday, Sept. 24, from 5 to 6 p.m. Central time. The party is free and you’re all invited to join. RSVP here for a link, and read more about the party here.

And here is a profile of Martínez I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

Till then, help yourself to one or more of these delicious dishes, and treat yourself (or a friend) to a copy of the book.

RECIPE: Mely Martinez’s Pollo a la Veracruzano

RECIPE: Arroz Blanco

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Pozole Rojo

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Tres Leches Cake

The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes that Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico, by Mely Martínez. Photographs by David Castañeda. Rock Point, $28.

Cookbooks We Love: Camille Fourmont’s ‘La Buvette’ lets you live (and eat!) the vibe of Paris' 11th

La Buvette: Recipes & Wine Notes from Paris, by Camille Fourmont and Kate Leahy, 2020, Ten Speed Press, $24.99

Backgrounder: Camille Fourmont opened her cave à manger (wine bar with snacks), La Buvette, in 2013 in a dull stretch of what was rapidly becoming a hot Paris neighborhood, the 11th arrondissement. It was an instant hit: called “hyper-fashionable” by the New York Times and named Wine Bar of the Year in 2014 by Le Fooding. A buvette is a refreshment stand, and La Buvette is tiny; Le Fooding calls it “about the size of a sardine tin.” It’s a good metaphor, as there’s no kitchen — just a fridge, a wooden cutting board and a portable burner. What Fourmont serves (she’s cook, sommelier, bartender, etc.) is smart little bites put together from great ingredients, including some that come from cans, like her famous gros haricots blancs au zeste de citron — gigante beans with lemon zest.

Why we love it: La Buvette is a modest book of small ambition, great charm and a sweet foreword by co-author Kate Leahy. Fourmont, who describes herself as an “untrained cook,” shares stories that make you feel part of the intimate little scene and recipes that come from what’s obviously her great palate. Most of them are perfect for “apéro” — France’s version of happy hour, which involves an apéritif or glass of wine and a little bite to go with it. Many are super easy to put together, really more ideas than recipes — like those beans, which “people come from all over the planet to eat,” as her headnote explains.

La Buvette’s ‘Famous’ Gros Haricots Blancs au Zeste de Citron made using dried gigante beans in the Cooks Without Borders kitchen.

The dish was born early on when Fourmont opened a can of giant white judión beans imported from Spain and seasoned them with olive oil, Maldon salt and bergamot zest. “The key to this very simple dish,” she writes, “is the fresh citrus grated on top, which brightens the flavor of the beans.” She changes citrus according to the season, “from bergamot to mandarin to lemon or citron,” and sometimes decorates the beans with a few edible flowers, such as chive or garlic blossoms.

It’s not so easy to find plain canned giant white beans stateside (most I find are swimming in tomato sauce), but if you can put your hands on dried gigantes, you can cook them up. Then, following Fourmont’s instructions, put them on a plate, drizzle them with your best olive oil “until the beans look shiny, add a good pinch of salt and grate zest directly over the top to finsh.” That is literally it for the recipe. I have made gigante beans a bunch of different ways, and as simple as this one is, it is my hands-down favorite.

Besides the dishes she serves at La Buvette — which include pickles, flavored butters, things to do with cheese and some simple charcuterie — there are also “Anytime Recipes” Fourmont puts together at home. They’re the kind of “imprecise recipes that allow freedom to add more of a favorite ingredient or to be flexible with what you do have on hand.” In other words, perfect for cooking from a pandemic pantry. There are things to do with sardines (serve them with flavored butter and halved seared-till-caramelized lemons), unusual salads (like green bean, white peach and fresh almond), a “really buttery” simplified croque monsieur and an anchovy, egg yolk and hazelnut pasta that’s a riff on carbonara. We haven’t made these yet, but have our eye on that croque monsieur.

You’ve gotta try this: Another chapter, “Le Goûter,” offers treats for afternoon snack, which in France usually means something sweet. It’s here we found Fourmont’s recipe for Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés. Tender, buttery and savory from the cumin — with a lovely sandy texture and a beautiful whisper of dried rose petal (sounds like a wine description!) — they’re one of the best cookies ever to come out of our kitchen.

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

From the “At La Buvette” chapter, we got a kick out of making cured magret — duck breasts — which is so much easier and quicker than you’d think. Besides the duck breasts, only salt and pepper are involved, and they’re ready in two or three weeks. Just bury the breasts in salt, leave in fridge 12 hours, wipe them off, add pepper, loosely wrap them in a kitchen towel and let them cure tucked away in the fridge till firm and dry to the touch. Slice and serve: The result is pretty stunning.

Slices of Cured Magret

I couldn’t resist trying a “classic chocolate mousse,” which Fourmont and Leahy adapted from Trish Desein’s Je Veux du Chocolat! It was very good and easy to achieve, but much denser than what I think of as a classic mousse. In fact it was so dense and rich none of the three of us could eat more than half a serving — which felt like a miracle, considering we enjoyed it so.

I was torn about whether to offer the recipe, as it’s so dense and intense (definitely for serious chocolate lovers), and in the end decided to skip it. We’d happily reconsider, though, if there is interest — do let us know.

Still wanna cook: Rillettes! Our favorite sandwiches in France, filled with the potted pork spread known as rillettes, and accented with cornichons, have become harder and harder to find there in the last 10 years. (According to Fourmont’s headnote butchers at Rungis, the wholesale market outside of Paris, pack into a cafe called Le Saint Hubert to eat sandwichs rillettes at 4 or 5 a.m.) Fourmont’s recipe, adapted from Terrines by Le Repaire de Cartouche’s Rodolphe Paquin, looks approachable and easy. If it’s as good as it looks, we’ll be slathering baguettes with it sooner rather than later.

RECIPE: Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

RECIPE: Cured Magret

Classic cookbook review reprised: ‘Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine’

EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed this book shortly after it was published, on February 28, 2016. We have come back to it again and again since then; it has very much shaped up to be a classic. Here’s our 2016 review.

"Everything you need to know to be a great Italian cook." That's the subtitle of Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine. Hard to resist, right? 

Here's the short review: Bastianich's book is a new classic – something you'll want on your shelf as a reference, a manual and (perhaps to a lesser degree) a source of inspiration. Want to hear more? Read on.

The book is particularly strong on technique, and on offering thoughtful variations on basic recipes, like ragù alla Bolognese. And it's comprehensive: I found every classic recipe I sought, including saltimbocca. The recipes work, and they're generally delicious – as wonderful as they look in the photos.

You may know Lidia Bastianich from her PBS show, Lidia's Italy, or from one of her New York restaurants, Felidia, or Esca, Becco or Del Posto (which she co-owns with her son Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali).  She's also one of the forces behind the Eataly empire.

If you're an American home cook who has been in the game a long while, Lidia's Mastering may remind you of another classic: Marcella Hazan's The Classic Italian Cookbook, or her the Essentials of Italian Cooking (The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cookbook together in one volume). 

Both are encyclopedic works that take a no-nonsense approach. Both do without photography, relying instead on black-and-white drawings as illustration. I have to admit I'm a wee bit disappointed in the antipasti offerings in Lidia's Mastering, just as I've always been with Hazan's book. I do want to make Bastianich's chicken liver crostini sometime soon, though, and once summer rolls around, I'll definitely turn to her zucchini blossoms filled with fresh ricotta perfumed with lemon zest (doesn't that sound good?).

I've tested six recipes from the book, and loved five of them.

One of my favorites is rabbit in gremolata. A few weeks before I made it, I'd noticed some nice-looking frozen rabbits at Whole Foods, so I picked one up. I had no idea what I'd do with it, so I was happy to find, when this cookbook landed in my mailbox at work, not one but three recipes for rabbit. Besides the gremolata, there's also rabbit with sage and rabbit stew with mushrooms and pine nuts (both sound delicious, too). 

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It's easy to put together: Brown the rabbit, braise the legs in white wine and lemon juice, then add the rest of the rabbit plus some potatoes, cook some more, add parsley and serve. I had one small issue with the recipe: not quite enough liquid; I added half a cup of chicken broth about halfway through the cooking.

Friends came to dinner that night, and we all loved it. My friend Habib loved it so much he bought the book the very next day. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Dinner started with a salad, then we had Bastianich's spaghetti alla carbonara as a middle course. No foolin' around when I'm testing recipes: You must come hungry!

Spaghetti carbonara, the pasta coated in a silky sauce of eggs, bacon and cheese, is a great dish to make at home, because when made right, it's so wonderful, and it's so often botched in restaurants. (Dudes – there is no cream in carbonara!) You want the egg yolks to cook just slightly, and very evenly; you don't want to end up with spaghetti and scrambled eggs. Bastianich has a good way to achieve a wonderful, silky sauce: she has you whisk a little hot water into the egg yolks, which ensures even, slight cooking. Her technique is easy, and the recipe – which includes sliced scallions (unconventional!) – turned out perfect. It's killer comfort food.

I haven't yet tried any of Bastianich's appetizers, but there are quite a few wonderful-sounding salads, like one with dandelion greens, almond vinaigrette and ricotta salata (I'll definitely be making that soon – maybe even tonight!). Roasted beets with beet greens, apples and goat cheese sounds nice; I love the idea of using the beet greens. A shrimp and mixed bean salad sounds wonderful, and so does lobster salad with fresh tomatoes – something to make us wish for summer.

I didn't, alas, love the one I wound up making: radicchio salad with orange, radishes and oil-cured black olives. It struck me as so perfect for a wintry day. 

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It was OK, but the radicchio was unrelenting; there was just too much of it.

But that was the only dish I didn't flip for. I loved that Bastianich offers three versions of Bolognese sauce – including one with milk (I'll try that next!) – plus an Italian-American meat sauce. I went for one she called, simply, meat sauce Bolognese (sugo alla Bolognese). It calls for half pork and half beef and two to three hours of simmering time – "the longer you cook it," she writes, "the better it will become."

I cooked mine about two hours and twenty minutes, and it was superb. This, too, I served with spaghetti. Not the same night! This one I made for Wylie and his friend Michael, who's half-Italian. Michael gave it the stamp of approval.

Feeling like I had hit the basics pretty well, I thought I'd stop there and write the review.

But then I thought I should try cooking something that really required technique. I've made fresh pasta a jillion times; while it's labor-intensive, there's nothing tricky about it. But what about gnocchi? I attempted potato gnocchi once or twice a hundred years ago, but definitely didn't master it. If Bastianich could teach me to make great gnocchi, that would be something. 

My friend Shaun was coming over for dinner. She loves to cook, so I thought she'd enjoy helping me make them. We had a great time: The dough – basically boiled potatoes you put through a ricer then combine with eggs and flour – came together quickly and beautifully. We rolled it into half-inch ropes, cut them into half-inch pieces, rolled them over the tines of a fork (though we also tried using a little wooden gnocchi paddle I had in my drawer – we liked the fork better). They were beautiful, as you can see. They seemed to be perfect! How exciting! And then how disappointing when they nearly dissolved in the boiling water. I dropped them into butter-sage sauce. Great flavor, but they were soft as mush. 

 Hm. What was the problem?

Aha. It was sort of my fault, and sort of the book's fault. The recipe called for six large Idaho or russet potatoes, "about 2 1/4 pounds." I had six, but I hadn't weighed them – my bad. The proportion was way off: I had far too much potato for the amount of flour called for, three cups.

A few nights later, I rolled up my sleeves and attempted the gnocchi again: This time going by the potatoes' weight rather than the number of potatoes. Six large russets weighed a whopping five pounds! That was the problem. I used 2 1/4 pounds, as Bastianich called for – which was a little less than three large russets. (And these were the smallest ones I could find, not whoppers by any stretch!). Once again, the dough came together beautifully, but this time, they held together. 

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In fact, they were wonderful, light yet firm. Tossed in the butter and sage sauce with plenty of grated parm, oh, man — that's comfort food. It involved some work, for sure, but rolling out those puppies was soothing, even therapeutic. Definitely fun to make with a friend. Or a child learning to cook.

RECIPE: Rabbit in Gremolata

RECIPE: Spaghetti alla Carbonara

RECIPE: Meat Sauce Bolognese

RECIPE: Potato Gnocchi with Butter and Sage Sauce

Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali, Knopf, $40.

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

Cookbooks We Love: José Andrés' 'Vegetables Unleashed' is a summer cooking bonanza, with great ideas for all seasons

NOTE: This is the first in a new and ongoing series of mini-reviews of cookbooks both new and old.

Vegetables Unleashed: A Cookbook, by José Andrés and Matt Goulding; photography by Peter Frank Edwards, Ecco, 2019, $39.99

Backgrounder: This is the third cookbook from superhero chef José Andrés, founder and chairman of World Central Kitchen and co-founder of ThinkFoodGroup, which owns and operates some of the best and most forward-looking restaurants in the United States. The book is not strictly vegan or vegetarian (recipes might include a garnish of bonito flakes or optional anchovies, for instance), but it is certainly vegetable-driven and completely vegetable-centric.

Sangria made with watermelon, peaches, cherries, blackberries, basil, thyme, rosé and brandy.

Why we love it: It’s filled with delicious, expansive ideas that are so inspired you can’t wait to try them, elucidated with fun, colorful photo-driven graphics. Often the concepts extend the reach of a familiar technique.

For instance, Andrés provides a framework for building a sangria from a variety of fruits, wines and spirits. Put one pound of chopped fruit in a pitcher with 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, any herbs, spices or citrus you’d like and macerate that in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours. Pour in a bottle of wine plus a few ounces of an optional accent spirit. Pour in to large glasses filled with “massive amounts of ice” and garnish with citrus peel and/or herbs.

I riffed on it using the seasonal fruits at hand — watermelon, peaches, blackberries, cherries, rosé, basil, thyme and brandy — it was delicious. (And gorgeous.) As Andrés suggested, I served the fruit leftover on the bottom on ice as a boozy-fruity dessert.

You’ve gotta try this: A bunch of our favorite recipes and ideas in the book happen to feature summer produce that’s now in its peak.

Zap whole ears of corn, husks and all, in the microwave and the kernels come out perfectly sweet and tender, ready to be slathered with one of four topping/sprinkle combos. We went crazy for one inspired by elotes and another with miso-butter and a combo of Japanese seasonings.

Elote Loco (aka Crazy Corn): This is one of the most delicious things we made from José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed

Another microwave trick (and more slathering!) is used for a dish Andrés calls Dancing Eggplant. Japanese eggplants get zapped till tender, sliced open, slathered with a sweet, salty, umami-happy glaze inspired by the Japanese eggplant dish nasu dengaku, then topped with bonito flakes (katsuobushi). The bonito flakes, light as air and activited by the eggplants’ heat, dance around on top. Although we had to tweak the technique a bit, the dish is insanely rich, savory and delicious — something I’ll be excited to make often.

Dancing Eggplant from Vegetables Unleashed

It’s not all microwave tricks; another favorite is Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs — which you don’t even really need a recipe for. Cut zucchini into 1/2-inch-thick planks, brush or toss with olive oil and salt, grilled on both sides till lightly charred, sprinkle liberally with za’atar (the Mediterranean herb mixture) and top with a big handful of herbs — dill, thyme, basil, mint, parsley, tarragon, and/or fennel fronds in any combination.

A few little complaints: Not everything works so beautifully. A recipe for zucchini fritters gave us a batter that was too runny for the fritters to hold together; smashed cucumbers were inedibly salty and oily. A recipe that promised perfect cacio e pepe in the microwave was a giant flop that left us with a pile of crunchy pasta and a blob of melted cheese.

Normally with so many busts (along with a few recipes that were just duds), I wouldn’t recommend buying a book. But honestly, there is so much of value in these pages — and the ideas and approaches are so inspiring — that I’m very happy to own it, and would probably buy it as a gift for certain vegetable-loving friends. There are still a bunch of recipes I want to try, such as a riff on steak tartare made from tomatoes (the dish was born at El Bullí) and a luscious-looking cauliflower with béchamel that will be delicious when the weather cools down.

RECIPE: Corn on the Cob with Elote Slather

RECIPE: Miso Butter Corn

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

Exuberantly delicious and beautifully told, 'Falastin' is one of those life-changing cookbooks

My cookbook shelves are lined with hundreds of earnest volumes filled with culturally faithful recipes for legions of traditional dishes. Usually the recipes work and the dishes are correct, often they’re pretty good, occasionally they’re very good. But rarely, when cooked as written, are they so delicious that they make me want to cry.

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin: a Cookbook, which Ten Speed Press published last month, is bursting with recipes from Palastine that do just that.

Because it’s described in the headnote as “the hugely popular national dish of Palestine,” I stuck a Post-It on the page with Chicken Musakhan on my first pass through the book, as a reminder to cook it soon. But it looked so simple, like there was nothing to it — just some cut-up chicken rubbed with spices and roasted, served on flat bread with cooked onions (how great could that be?) — so I kept passing it by.

Until one evening I didn’t.

It was gobsmackingly, soul-stirringly fabulous. The chicken, a whole quartered bird, gets tossed with a lot of cumin and sumac, plus cinnamon, allspice, olive oil, salt and pepper, then roasted. Once out of the oven, it gets layered on crisped pieces of torn flatbread with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts, plenty of parsley and spooned over with the roasting juices from the chicken. More olive oil gets drizzled on, and more sumac. It’s a stunning, fragrant centerpiece. Before serving it, you pull apart the chicken pieces with your fingers into two or three piece each. Put it in the middle of the table, and have everyone dive in, pulling the chicken apart with fingers, grabbing some soaky, juicy, crispy bread and sumac-ky onions, and groaning with pleasure, and diving back in.

When can we have this again??!!

I went back and reread the headnote. The dish was traditionally made during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil, but now it’s enjoyed year-round. “Growing up, Sami ate it once a week,” goes the headnote. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends, 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.”

Traditionally, taboon bread is used in the dish. Baked on pebbles in a conical oven, the bread has a pock-marked surface that are great for catching the juices. But the recipe calls for any Arabic flatbread (we used pita from a local Lebanese bakery that I’d stashed in the freezer), or naan.

I can see why Tamimi’s mom, Na’ama, made it once a week: It’s fun and easy to make, probably no more than an hour from start to finish, and a great crowd-pleaser. I’ll be buying sumac futures this week: A full three tablespoons of the spice (a powerful anti-oxidant) go into the dish.

If you’re not familiar with Tamimi, some context may be helpful. Chances are you do know of Yotam Ottolenghi and his cookbooks. Tamimi is head chef for and a founding partner in Ottolenghi’s namesake London restaurant empire. He co-authored Ottolenghi’s first cookbook (Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, 2008). Together the two — led by Ottolenghi — created a style of produce-forward, Levant-accented, slouchy-chic improvisational cooking. In other words, what they did powerfully influenced the way so many of us cook now, and the way food looks on blogs and on Instagram — seductively dissheveled, vegetable happy and casually strewn with tons of herbs.

The two chefs went on to co-author Jerusalem: a Cookbook (2012). Both had grown up in Jerusalem in the 70s and 80s — Ottolenghi, who is Israeli and Italian, in the Jewish west part of the city and Tamimi, who is Palestinian, in the Muslim east. They didn’t know each other back home; they met in London, where they were both living in the 1990s. To the Jerusalem project, each brought his delicious perspective, and they wove together a gorgeous, deep, inspired, cookable portrait of their hometown. The book didn’t shy away from politics, but its explorations managed to unify rather than divide.

With Falastin, Tamimi explores the cooking of his beloved Palestine. “There is no letter ‘P’ in the Arabic language,” begins the introduction, so ‘Falastin’ is, on the one hand, simply the way ‘Falastinians’ refer to themselves.’”

Of course there is an “on the other hand” — and that’s the substance of the book, which Tamimi co-authored with Tara Wigley, a cook and writer who also co-authored Ottolenghi’s most recent book, Ottolengi Simple, and who is an integral part of the Ottolenghi family.

Cilantro-crusted roasted cod with tahini sauce

Beautifully photographed by Jenny Zarins, it’s a wonderful read that conveys so much about the culture that you might feel you’ve been there, and fallen in love with its people. A visit to the apartment-house kitchen of the “yogurt-making ladies of Bethlehem” gives richness to a recipe for balls of labneh (thickened yogurt) marinated in olive oil then rolled in dried herbs or spices. A trip to the Jerusalem shop where Kamel Hashlamon produces tahini that’s “somewhere between a paste and a liquid and truly good enough to drink” makes us understand what separates great tahini from all the bitter crap we get stateside (Humera sesame seeds from Ethiopia, bespoke millstone made by a master Syrian stonemason, cold-pressing at 140 degrees).

The authors, refusing to tip-toe around the politics, address head-on the difficult questions that arise as they tour us around. For instance, it becomes clear that because Kamel sells to a largely Israeli (but also Palestinian) market, some feel he has “sold out.” When Kamel justifies his position by saying “We are all living in the result of the game,” Tamimi doesn’t let him off easy. In the end, though, the last image of his “small stunning shop,” with its irresistible product, is of Israelis and Palestinians standing “side by side at the counter, looking through the glass, debating little more than which halva to buy.” Complicated, uneasy, but what what a privilege it is to be let in on it in a cookbook.

From a culinary point of view, Falastin is also a rare gift: a cookbook filled with exuberantly delicious recipes, each with the special flair of a super-gifted chef, but without the ridiculous, long lists of obscure ingredients and sub-recipes that you needed to start preparing three days ago. These are approachable, thoughtfully crafted and apparently carefully tested recipes that are easy to follow, simple enough to execute and clearly designed to work for a moderately capable home cook.

If the aesthetic driver of the Ottolenghi books is herbs, with Falastin it is spices — lots of spices, aromatic, dreamy and unapologetic. Flavors in all the dishes are dialed way up. (One touch I really appreciate: Tamimi and Wigley never leave us guessing about how much salt to use — they always specify, and it’s always right on or close.)

Back to my bookshelves and all those earnest volumes. Among all the serious Middle Eastern, Levantine, Mediterranean and North African cookbooks, I hadn’t been able to find an appealing recipe for ful medames — the traditional fava bean dish that’s mostly closely associated with Egypt. There were recipes, sure, but none found any joy in the dish — which is, after all, really just doctored canned fava beans.

Tamimi has a wonderful way of elevating the ordinary. His version of ful starts by ridding the beans of their canned taste — by draining, rinsing, then simmering them in water, a five minute process that makes all the difference. Once they’re drained again, cumin is invited to the party, along with the lemon, garlic and chile. A delightful salad of red onion, sumac and parsley goes on top, along with tomato; avocado adds cool and creamy depth. Soft boiled egg, which is optional, adds another dimension.

Finally, the ful medames I dreamed of — so good I will make sure to keep canned favas stocked, so I can whip it up on a regular basis. (This is what I mean by life-changing.)

Not surprisingly, there’s a little overlap with the dishes in Jerusalem: It would be odd for this book not to include hummus, for instance, or tahini sauce. But the books complement each other really well: While Jerusalem gave us Maqluba, a one-pot layered dish of eggplant, chicken thighs and rice inverted onto a plate to serve, Falastin gives us Maqlubet el Foul el Akdhar — Upside-Down Spiced Rice with Lamb and Fava Beans. (Will be making that soon as I can source some Iranian dried limes!)

And while Jerusalem proposes Kofta B’siniya (seared lamb-and-beef patties in tahini sauce), Falastin offers Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. Another major crowd-pleaser!

Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

For the three of us, this was a fabulous dinner two nights running — the leftovers were every bit as delectable.

There are so many recipes I still have marked to try. Preserved Stuffed Eggplants; Cauliflower and Cumin Fritters with Mint Yogurt; Shatta (an exciting looking red or green chile sauce); Na’ama’s Buttermilk Fattoush; Roasted Eggplant with Tamarind and Cilantro; a zucchini, garlic and yogurt dip called M’tawaneh; Buttery Rice with Toasted Vermicelli; Eggplant, Chickpea and Tomato Bake (Musaq’a); Pomegranate-Cooked Lentils and Eggplants; Lemon Chicken with Za’atar.

There are baked treats that look incredible, too: Sweet Tahini Rolls, and the triangular spinach pies called Fatayer Sabanekh; Warbat — filo triangles filled with cream cheese and pistachio and doused in rose syrup, and definitely a Chocolate and Qahwa Flour-Free Torte, flavored with lots of cardamom and espresso (Qahwa is coffee in Arabic).

I love this book. I’m happy to think of its treasure-filled pages, and it gives me hope for the future — in more ways than one.

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

RECIPE: Cilantro-Crusted Roasted Cod

RECIPE: Ful Medames

RECIPE: Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

Falastin: a Cookbook, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, Ten Speed Press, $35.

Sonoko Sakai's 'Japanese Home Cooking' is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years

A few years back, when Cooks Without Borders was just a wee thing, I developed an obsession with okonomiyaki.

A thick, luscious savory Japanese pancake, okonomiyaki is filled with vegetables and seafood or meat, painted with an umami-rich okonomiyaki sauce or tonkatsu sauce, perhaps squiggled with mayonnaise and definitely topped with bonito flakes. The bonito flakes — katsuobushi in Japanese — are so thin and light that they catch air currents and wave around, looking like they’re alive.

There’s a bit of a cult in the U.S. around okonomiyaki. After I wrote a story about the crazy pancake for The Dallas Morning News (in 2016), I decided to find or develop a recipe for Cooks Without Borders.

Easier said than done! Too thick, too pasty, too gloppy, too weird — I couldn’t manage to get it right. Recipes were scarce, sketchy, flawed, and I was flailing developing my own. Unable to nail the batter, I resorted to buying something called “okonomiyaki flour” in a Japanese supermarket. The store-bought okonomiyaki sauce I was painting them with was cloyingly sweet. None of it was working.

After something like Okonomiyaki Number Twelve, Thierry begged for mercy. “Stop!” he cried. “Yamero, kudasai ! やめろください!”

Kidding. Thierry does not speak Japanese (nor do I).

The point is, there is now a book that has an okonomiyaki recipe that works: Sonoko Sakai’s delightful Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

Thanks to Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, we can now make okonomiyaki at home.

Whether or not a wild-looking savory pancake speaks to you at all, if you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume. Published last November, it is now a finalist for a prestigious 2020 IACP Cookbook Award in the International category.

To so many of us, Japanese cuisine means high-flying restaurant food — the kind of precise and specialized dishes chefs spend years (or even decades) learning to execute. I’ve never wanted to make nigiri sushi at home, for instance, as it depends on sourcing the best and most interesting fish, treating them properly, having the knife mastery to slice them to their best advantage— oh, and getting the rice right, which is an elaborate subject in itself. Yakitori — skewered chicken — involves grilling the poultry over blazing-hot binchotan (Japanese charcoal), something I wouldn’t be able to manage at home, even if I could find the binchotan. Because the places I’ve lived — Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas — all have such great Japanese food, I’ve always preferred to leave it to the pros.

However, going back to my childhood in L.A., I always loved another kind of Japanese cooking, something much closer to home cooking. It’s the kind of humble, approachable fare that Sakai features in Japanese Home Cooking.

You might start with something quick and easy, like a cucumber sunomono. One taste of the Sanbaizu dressing — mirin, rice vinegar and soy sauce simmered very briefly then cooled — and I was back at Tempura Hiyama, the beloved neighborhood mom-and-pop of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Sakai’s cucumber sunomono with wakame seaweed is garnished with grated ginger and toasted sesame seeds.

Sakai adds wakame (the same seaweed that’s common in miso soup), along with glass noodles and grated ginger, but you could go even simpler with just the cukes, dressing and sesame.

If you want to go into Japanese cooking in any kind of depth, you’ll want to put dashi in your bag of tricks; not surprisingly, Sakai leads off her book with a chapter about it. A quick stock made from nothing more than katsuobushi (those same shaved bonito flakes that wave around on top of the okonomiyaki), kombu (a dried seaweed) and water, it is the basis for much of Japanese cooking — just as veal stock is the foundation, or fond in French, of French cooking, but it’s even more ubiquitous in Japanese dishes. Dashi is easily achieved — just heat a piece of kombu in water, remove it, and drop in a bunch of bonito flakes, let them steep for two minutes then strain them out.

Kombu (upper left), katsuobushi (lower left) and water combine to make dashi (right).

Miso soup with shimeji mushrooms, tofu, lemon zest and scallions

I like Sakai’s approach to it. She’s quick to let readers know that rather than discarding the spent kombu and bonito flakes, you can (and should) use them to make a secondary dashi. While the first one is good enough to sip on its own (and has lots of culinary uses), the secondary dashi is good for miso soup and for seasoning a wide variety of dishes. Miso soup, by the way, is super easy to make once you have dashi: Just stir in some miso and add whatever else you like — tofu, mushrooms, wakame seaweed, etc.

Sakai provides recipes for several other dashis as well, including two vegan versions (one using only kombu, and the other kombu and shiitakes). That’s a splendid solution for vegans who are limited to what they can eat in a Japanese restaurant: It’s super easy to make vegan miso soup at home.

Also useful is a section about shio koji — which is the easiest way for home cooks to get in on the koji craze that has captivated chefs. To prepare it, get your hands on rice koji — rice that has been innoculated with koji (you’ll find a link to purchase it in the recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon below). Massage that together with salt and hot water, let it ferment 5 days and you’ve got a useful ingredient that you can use to rub into napa cabbage leaves to make a quick pickle, or onto meat, chicken, salmon or other fish as an overnight (or up to three-day) marinade. As Jonathan Kauffman explains in the Epicurious story linked above, it concentrates the flavors in those proteins, adding umami depth.

Sakai’s recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon, which she calls her “‘no-recipe’ salmon dish,” proves the point; the extremely simple prep is a great one to add to your repertoire. See some nice fillets in the supermarket? Slap that shio koji all over them and figure out when you’ll eat them later. After overnight koji marination, give the fillets a quick wipe, run them under the broiler and dinner’s ready in less than minutes. While the salmon’s broiling, you can grate some daikon and ginger, which make a really nice garnish.

Koji-Marinated Salmon with grated daikon and ginger

Looking for dishes to round out the Koji-Marinated Salmon? Sakai’s “Potato Salada” (as it is called in Japanese) is wonderful, with lots of cucumber along with carrot and green beans. (And we have other dishes in our new Japanese section — check out the Spinach with Sesame Dressing.)

To make the Potato Salada, Sakai has you whip up some Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese tahini). Our adaptation includes those instructions, but also provides a hack using store-bought mayo and tahini. (We hope Ms. Sakai doesn’t object — it was pretty good!)

I have not yet had a chance to make any of the noodles in the book, but the chapter is enticing, with beautifully photographed recipes showing how to make handmade soba, udon and ramen. Sakai, who was born in New York and grew up in Japan, Mexico and California, lives in Southern California, where she gives cooking classes — including very popular classes on soba-making. So this is definitely something I’ll want to explore. There are also recipes for tofu and miso (which takes from six months to a year and a half to ferment!), and for mochi. A pandemic’s worth of projects!

Meanwhile, what she writes about rice is illuminating. I’d been pulling my hair out during the pandemic because I couldn’t find sushi rice, and Thierry, Wylie and I were all craving sushi.

Sakai explains that any short-grain rice can be used for sushi — including Arborio, which I had in my pantry. I’d had no idea! I cooked that Arborio according to her instructions for Basic White Rice, and turned it into sushi rice, using her seasoning formula — 2 batches of basic white rice (about 8 cups) seasoned with 1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and a tablespoon of sea salt. Perfect sushi rice! With it I made some simple maki rolls. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

With hardly an exception, the recipes in Japanese Home Cooking work perfectly — which is incredibly rare for any cookbook these days. I test-drove a lot of them (fifteen, at last count), and still have many on my can’t-wait-to-try list (Kombu-Cured Thai Snapper Sashimi, as soon as I can get my hands on some great fish, and Soba Salad with Kabocha Squash and Toasted Petpitas in the fall!).

Honestly, this is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years. The writing throughout is clear, charming, thoughtful and frequently illuminating, and Poon’s photos are gorgeous. Already it has given me the tools to feel like a pretty confident Japanese cook, which is quite a gift indeed.

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors by Sonoko Sakai. Photographs by Rick Poon. Roost Books, 300 pages, $40.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Koji-Marinated Salmon

RECIPE: Potato Salada

Celebrating two centuries of African American cooking, Tipton-Martin’s ‘Jubilee’ earns a coveted Beard Award

A piece of culinary news that in less turbulent times would have made a much bigger noise got a bit drowned out last week: Toni Tipton-Martin’s deliciously inspiring Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking won the 2020 James Beard Award for the best American cookbook. It’s a shame the moment was missed because a robust, thoughtful and groundbreaking celebration of African-American cooking and culture could not be more timely.

A formidable scholar, culinary historian and cultural historian as well as a cook, Tipton-Martin won her first Beard Award four years ago. That was for The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks — an annotated bibliography of the author’s collection of rare, historical African-American cookbooks, published in 2015. 

To create Jubilee, Tipton-Martin culled more than 100 recipes from those books; collectively they represent her curation of seminal African-American cooking. Being honored with the Beard Award honor puts them squarely in the center of the American table. 

At Cooks Without Borders, we had just started cooking from Jubilee when Covid shut us in mid-March. I was eager to explore the enticing recipes, sticking Post-its on scores of recipes for which I couldn’t yet procure the necessary ingredients: Deviled Crab, Okra Gumbo, Peach-Buttermilk Ice Cream. 

But there were plenty of dishes I was able to make, and with delicious results: a Biscuit-Topped Chicken Pot Pie, the Savannah Pickled Shrimp I wrote about last month, wonderful Sautéed Greens that felt like the best thing imaginable for our immune systems during a pandemic.

As I flipped through, enjoying the beautiful photos by Jerrelle Guy, I was taken with Tipton-Martin’s stories, and her background. Like me, she grew up in Southern California (we were both born in L.A., six months apart). Just out of college, she joined The Los Angeles Times as a food and nutrition writer (I served there as Food Editor 23 years later).  

She grew up in the tony Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, a neighborhood she describes as  “home to the black elite — doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and white-collar professionals.” There, at the home her mother treated like an “urban farm,” she thrilled to tender lettuces, avocados and California stone fruits plucked from the garden. 

Some of my favorite recipes in the book are very vegetable-forward: those greens; a delightful Layered Salad with Garlic and Herb Dressing; an old-fashioned Country-Style Potato Salad that took me back to my own Southern California childhood (it is nearly identical to the one my mom used to make). 

Until she wrote The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin felt isolated as a food writer. “My culinary heritage — and the larger story of African American food that encompasses the middle class and the well-to-do — was lost in a world that confined the black experience to poverty, survival, and soul food,” she explains in her intro. Jubilee “broadens the African American food story. It celebrates the enslaved and the free, the working class, the middle class, and the elite.” 

For me, In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, exploring a powerful African American cookbook has taken on a different quality; it feels more urgent. A month ago, I was skimming through, enjoying, cooking, hanging out with the book. Now I’m more focused — on Tipton-Martin’s intentions, on the stories of the cooks, on the ingredients and what they mean, on the origins of dishes. 

I’ve learned, for instance, that gumbo, from the beginning, was all about okra; in several West African languages the word for okra is gombo. The vegetable, Tipton-Martin writes, is  “mucilaginous when sliced and cooked. Devotees love that slime; it thickens gumbo and gives the stew body.” Native American Filé, also known as sassafras flour, came into the gumbo picture as a thickener later, as did roux, which came from French and Creole cooks. “After that, soups thickened with any combination of these ingredients started to bear the name ‘gumbo.’”

Now I really need to cook that gumbo I’d been eyeing for months. Yesterday I ventured out to the supermarket, where I’d only just spotted okra a few days before. It was gone, and so was the crabmeat. So the gumbo will have to wait. 

But I don’t have to wait to recommend Jubilee — not just to cooks and people with a passion for food, but to everyone who wants to better understand African-American culture.

In an interview in March with Saveur magazine, Tipton-Martin was asked what she hopes people will gain from the book besides the beautiful recipes and scrumptious food. “One answer,” she said, “would be to determine what we can all do in our own spheres of influence to bring down the barriers constructed through the stereotypes that divide us.” 

Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, by Toni Tipton-Martin, Clarkson Potter, $35

RECIPE: Layered Garden Salad

RECIPE: Country Style Potato Salad

RECIPE: Sautéed Greens

Anissa Helou's 'Feast' delivers delicious inspiration from around the Islamic world

Life can get in the way, during normal times, of plumbing the depths of the cookbooks on our shelves or coffee tables.

The Great Confinement of 2020 has changed all that: So many of us are seeking deeply immersive cooking projects to delight us, distract us and give us strength. The most far-reaching of them can also transport us somewhere far away from the confines of our kitchens.

Coming up on its two-year publication anniversary, Annisa Helou’s Feast: Food of the Islamic World has been my nearly constant companion since about a month before quarantine locked us in. Within its 530 pages there are so many beguiling flavors to discover, so much culture to soak in and so much to learn that honestly, I don’t feel cooped up at all.

The book, which won the James Beard Foundation Award last year for best International Cookbook, takes us on a journey around the Muslim world in more than 300 recipes — from Helou’s native Lebanon to Senegal to the west, Turkey to the north, Tanzania to the south and Indonesia to the east, with stops in Morocco, Egypt, India, Iran, Xinjiang and much more along the way. The sweep and scope and depth of the project is just incredible; it’s an awesome achievement.

Author of many other acclaimed cookbooks, including Modern Mezze, Mediterranean Street Food, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean and Lebanese Cuisine, Helou is a gifted cultural guide who tells a great story. (I’ve been following her on Instagram for years; it’s always lovely to see what she’s cooking and eating as she travels around the world.)

Lebanese fatayer, spinach-filled pastries

The most unexpected story in Feast tells of her quest to taste a roasted camel hump, which begins when she’s invited to take part in a feast in the United Arab Emirates in which a roasted hump would be the centerpiece. It doesn’t work out for her as hoped: Separated from the main part of the feast with the other women, Helou is disappointed to be served some “positively nasty” camel meat rather than the hump, which is reserved for the men. The story ends a couple years later, with Helou purchasing her own baby camel in Dubai, having it slaughtered, massaging it with saffron, rose water and the Arabian spice mixture b’zar (cumin, coriander, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, etc.) and roasting it herself.

“The hump looked gorgeous as it came out of the oven,” she writes, “crisp and golden. Both the fat and meat were scrumptious — the baby camel must have been milk-fed. The meat was pale and tender and the fat very soft . . . . Apparently, people also eat the fat from the hump raw. I will have to try that next time around.” She then proceeds to offer advice for buying your own hump to roast, along with instructions to follow her recipe for Baby Goat Roast, subbing the camel hump for the baby goat.

Most of the stories and recipes are, fortunately for those of us who actually want to cook from the book, much more accessible than camel hump.

Among the dishes I’ve made (so far) and loved were a Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons; a classic Tabbouleh, Kafta (lamb skewers) that I served as Helou suggested with a beautiful Onion and Parsley Salad; savory, spinach-filled pastries called Fatayer; the Turkish salted yogurt drink Ayran, an Indian Mango Lassi and Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding. A year ago I bought a rakweh (Turkish coffee pot) and started making Turkish coffee according to the slapdash instructions on the coffee package. Helou’s primer on brewing qahwa (bringing water to a boil, stirring in coffee and sugar, reducing heat, simmering till it foams up, removing from heat and repeating once or twice till no more foam happens), takes it to another level. What a gift!

The Chicken Tagine recipe, which called for four poussin or Cornish hens rather than a generic chicken, required a bit of adjustment. I found Cornish hens, but they weighed nearly two pounds each, and eight pounds would have been far too much for the six to eight people the recipe was meant to serve. I punted and used a chicken instead, cutting it into four (two whole legs and two airline breasts, with wings attached).

Ayran (right), a Turkish salty yogurt drink, and Indian Mango Lassi

The dish was wonderful, and from it I learned so much about Moroccan tagines — the interesting thing about which, writes Helou, “is that instead of browning the meat at the beginning as with most other stews, the browning is done at the end after the meat has cooked and the cooking liquid has evaporated to leave only a silky sauce.”

That silky sauce happens thanks to a lot of finely grated onion and spices that melt over the course of the cooking time into a savory blanket.

I’d had no idea that there were four different types of Moroccan tagines depending on the seasonings used. Nor that many Moroccan home cooks cook the tagine in a regular pot, then transfer it to the beautiful ceramic tagine dish that gives the stew its name to serve at the table. “It is mostly street food vendors and rural folk who cook their tagines in earthenwear tagines,” she writes.

I found myself craving the dish again a few nights ago, when I stared into my (emptying) pantry and spotted a jar each of green Castelvetrano and black Kalamata olives — perfect for the dish. This time I cut the chicken into smaller pieces (leg, thigh, breasts cut in two with wing still attached to one half): even nicer.

Kudos for Helou’s pita bread recipe, which leads off the book. Not that I was able to test it word-for-word: in the time of corona scarcity, I didn’t have and couldn’t get the right kind of yeast. (The book calls for instant yeast everywhere yeast is called for, it seems; I only had active dry yeast.) But Helou’s method — more useful than others I found as I searched far and wide — did serve as seriously useful inspiration when I was developing my own recipe for half-whole-wheat, half-white pita bread.

It’s that kind of authoritativeness that has had me reaching for Helou’s book again and again as I develop any kind of recipe with roots or inspiration in the Muslim world.

Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad needed no tweaks.

There’s a caveat, though. As often as not, the recipes need tweaks, at best, or a lot of guesswork at worst. For a Hyderabadi Dumpukht Biryani, Helou has you marinate a princely amount of boneless lamb shoulder in a lot of yogurt, along with tenderizing green papaya (smart!) and spices. Are we meant to discard the yogurt when the meat goes into the pot? Who knows? Lots more yogurt goes in, so maybe not? If that’s the case, what a waste. I split the difference, shaking the yogurt marinade off most of the lamb pieces, but wound up with an epic fail anyway: There was way too much liquid, resulting in a drab and sodden mush, rather than the elegant, discreet rice grains that distinguish a well made biryani. I wound up picking the expensive lamb bits out of the inedible dish and making them into a soup the next day.

I came to understand pretty early on that rather than a book to precisely follow recipes from, Feast is a book to be inspired by, to learn from and to be guided by. So that even after the biryani fiasco, when Wylie decided to take on a kafta research project — finding and developing the best possible iteration of the Lebanese ground lamb skewers — I handed him Helou’s book. In the headnote for her recipe, she recalls going to the butcher shop in Beirut with her mother, who would carefully watch the butcher chop the meat for her kafta in order to make certain he used the right cuts (shoulder or leg). That inspired Wylie, after a decent version he had made with packaged pre-ground lamb from someone else’s recipe, to use hers, grinding his own meat from a leg of lamb. It was spectacular.

And when we plated the kafta with fabulous hummus, handmade pita and Helou’s Onion and Parsley salad, it transported us a million miles away from home.

There are so many more recipes and techniques I plan to explore in the book: Turkish meat boreks; scallion pancakes from China; a Saudi eggplant fatteh that’s said to be the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite dish; the Lord of Stuffed Vegetables; Moroccan meatballs with rice, harira and couscous with seven vegetables; Persian tadigh; a crab curry from Indonesia. I’ll soon be making up batches of her harissa and garam masala for my pantry.

And I’m eager to try out many of her desserts, once I can get the right ingredients. For now, here’s her Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding:

Helou even has a couple of recipes involving fresh, green almonds, answering a question I asked in a story last fall when they were in season.

To be sure, Feast is probably more a book for seasoned, confident cooks and armchair culinary travelers than for beginners who need to faithfully follow instructions. As for me, I’d buy it again in a heartbeat. And for friends who are ambitious, intrepid culinary adventurers, I will offer it as a gift.

Feast: Food of the Islamic World, by Anissa Helou, Ecco, 530 pages, $60

RECIPE: Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemon

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

RECIPE: Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad

RECIPE: Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding

Robin Ha's new 'comic book with recipes' will turn you into an awesome Korean cook

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If you want to learn to cook Korean food and you're starting from scratch, the first thing to do is find a very large jar. The second is to procure a copy of Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes. 

The jar, which needs to be glass and very large – like 96 ounces large – is for making kimchi, which is not only delicious (and super-healthy) on its own, but also an ingredient in many Korean dishes. It's also a hugely important part of Korean culture, as this story about kimchi and South Korean "gastrodiplomacy" from NPR's the Kitchen Sisters explains.

The book, engagingly written and illustrated by Robin Ha, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration, makes learning this cuisine – which might otherwise be daunting if you're a first-timer – approachable and fun. That's because she uses her talents as a comic book artist to explain and illustrate techniques and walk you through the recipes. You can find some of her work on her blog, Banchan in 2 Pages, named for the assorted and multitudinous side dishes (banchan) served with a Korean meal.

But don't worry: Even if you don't want to make your own kimchi (which you can always buy), you can still jump in and turn out some terrific Korean dishes with Ha, who was born in South Korea, as your guide. If you're anything like me, you'll be hooked after making just a couple recipes. After you cook three or four, you'll even start to feel like an honest-to-goodness Korean cook. 

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Are you game? Besides the book (or this blog post, with its linked recipes), you'll also need access to a few key Korean ingredients and (if you want to make kimchi) food-prep gloves. If you're lucky enough to live near a well-stocked Asian supermarket, that's easy. Pantry items, such as gochujang (Korean chile paste) and gochugaru (Korean red chile flakes) and food-prep gloves can be bought online, but you'll probably have to find refrigerated items, like the saeujeot (tiny fermented salted shrimp) used to make kimchi, in an Asian market. Nearly every recipe I tested in the book called for either gochujang or gochugaru or both. Of course if you do have access to an Asian supermarket, you'll find everything you need there – I even found boxes of disposable vinyl gloves. 

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Gochugaru – Korean red chile flakes – will quickly become your best friend.

If you are up for making kimchi – which I found incredibly rewarding (I thought only God could make kimchi!) and not nearly as involved as I imagined, here's the way it starts: Gather the saeujeot, gochugaru, napa cabbage, daikon radish and fish sauce – along with a few other standard staples (and yes, that giant jar) – and you're ready to rock 'n' roll. 

Make it once, and you understand basic kimchi technique,  which is pretty cool, as there are a jillion types of kimchi.

This one, which Ha calls Easy Kimchi, is the most basic – starring napa cabbage. It starts with a quick saltwater brine of the cabbage. After a 45-minute soak, squeeze out the water, put the cabbage in a big bowl with carrots, daikon, ginger, garlic, scallions, gochugaru, saeujeot, sugar and fish sauce, then put on those gloves, use your hands to mix it all together really well, pack it in the jar and close the lid. Put the jar in a plastic bag ("in case the juice overflows during fermentation"; mine didn't) and leave it at room temperature for 24 hours. After that, it's ready to eat – but it gets better and better as it sits in the fridge, where you can leave it, says Ha, up to a month. 

Even that second day, though, it's pretty fabulous. And abundant: You'll need to make room in the fridge for that giant jarful. I gave one smaller jar of it to a kimchi-loving friend (she swooned!) and about a month after I made it, I've managed to polish it off, nearly single-handedly. Wylie and Thierry acted extremely impressed and ate it heartily for a couple of days, but left the rest to me. It's great on its own as a snack, or as a condiment with other Korean dishes. 

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Not everything in the book is spicy, and not everything requires ingredients not often found in Western kitchens (though most do). I loved a super-easy recipe for bean sprout salad, a classic banchan you can make using stuff you can find at a reasonably well-stocked regular supermarket. 

For this you just boil bean sprouts, drain and squeeze out the water, then toss them with chopped scallion, minced garlic, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds. I garnished it with a little more sesame seed and scallion. So good!

Now I was really starting to have fun. And the timing couldn't have been better: Many of the recipes are for dishes served cold – so deliciously refreshing for a hot summer!

You may have heard that it gets pretty toasty here in Texas, and on one oven-like day when it was 105 degrees in the shade, I thought hoedupbap.  A salad and rice bowl topped with raw fish: That's the ticket. Ha calls it "one of the healthiest, tastiest and easiest dishes in Korean cuisine." OK, then! "Its tangy, spicy dressing," she writes, "is the key to tying all of the ingredients together."

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Hoedupbag – raw fish piled on salad piled on rice – before you mix it all up with spicy sauce

Right she was, on all counts. The spicy dressing – made with Asian pear, garlic, lemon juice, gochujang (that Korean chile paste I told you about), soy sauce, rice vinegar and sugar – is similar to others in the book, all whirred together in a blender. Ha says the cooking time is 10 minutes, but that doesn't take into account that one of the ingredients is freshly cooked rice, which takes about 35, including rinsing time and letting it sit for 15 minutes. I incorporated her rice recipe into my adaptation of her hoedupbap recipe.

Once you have the dressing ready, the rice cooked, the sashimi-grade raw fish sliced and the salad ingredients prepped (Romaine lettuce, Kirby cucumber, carrot and scallions), you assemble the ingredients in each of two bowls (the recipe serves two). Rice goes on the bottom, then salad, then fish on top, garnished with tobiko (flying fish roe), crushed toasted nori (seaweed) and toasted sesame seeds. 

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Add spicy sauce to taste, mix it all up and eat!

Each lucky Korean food lover adds sauce to taste, mixes it all up and enjoys. At least we did! For raw fish, I used sashimi-grade tuna I bought at our fabulous local Super H-Mart.

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Next I attempted mulnaengmyun – cold buckwheat noodles. Why not? I was on a roll! 

This time, I hit some stumbling blocks. You start preparing the dish the day before you want to eat it, blanching thin-sliced brisket in salted water for about a minute.  Pull out and chill the beef, and also chill the broth. Next day, you make quick-pickled daikon and cucumber, and the pickle juice combines with the beef broth to make a pickly broth for the noodles. 

Now I had a problem: Ha said to combine 1 cup of the broth and 1 cup of the pickle juice in each of 4 bowls, but I only had 3 1/2 cups of pickle juice. So I had to tweak, using 2/3 cup of each. That was no problem; it was plenty of pickly broth. 

But once I made the spicy red chile bibim sauce, cooked the soba (buckwheat noodles), sliced the Asian pear, hard-boiled the eggs and assembled the whole thing, it just wasn't that great – especially for a two-day recipe. The biggest problem was the beef, which was tough. Oh, well.

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For a final test, I thought I'd try something served hot – just in case summer eventually decides to end.

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I love daikon, whether raw or cooked, and I love shiny fish, like saury (mackerel pike), so a an easy, home-style recipe that marries saury and braised daikon, plus garlic, onions, ginger and chile, sounded ideal. The dish, writes Ha, "is a good example of how Koreans use seafood in everyday meals: It's easy and inexpensive and the leftovers taste good."

Well, this one tasted so good there were no leftovers. That was a tiny issue in the recipe, actually: While I usually found the portion sizes in the book to be pretty enormous, this one, whose headnote says it serves 4 to 6, was just enough for three, as far as the fish went. (There was enough daikon for four.) 

Before I made it, I was most curious about the canned saury the recipe calls for. I'd eaten fresh grilled or smoked saury many times in Japanese restaurants, but I'd never eat (or seen!) it canned. Again, Super H-Mart to the rescue: I found at least three different brands there. How to choose?  I went for the coolest looking can. What was inside looked like oversized sardines. 

The recipe – another super-easy one – worked great. You put chunks of daikon and onion in the bottom of a pot, pour the can of saury over it (including its liquid), along with a spicy sauce you've just thrown together (gochugaru, soy sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger). Cook it 25 minutes, add scallions and cook another 3 minutes.

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Ha doesn't say to serve it with rice, but that's what her comic shows, so I did. Pretty good! Wylie's friend Jack, who had rarely eaten fish in all his 19 years, tried a plate of it. I was worried that he'd be put of by the saury's assertive flavor, but he loved it. 

So, four out of five recipes tested worked great – that's a pretty impressive result. I'll certainly make the kimchi and the bean sprouts salad again, and there are a bunch more recipes I want to try. Kimchi fried rice, for instance. And rice cake soup (tteokguk), traditional for New Year's Day. I'll probably skip the Korean barbecue (I think that's probably best cooked over charcoal at a special table in a restaurant), but there's a spicy pork over rice (jeyuk dupbap) that looks good. And I'll definitely try the haemul pajean – seafood and green onion pancake, one of my favorite Korean dishes.

If I have one small caution, it would be this: While Cook Korean!'s comic-book style is a big draw, and the illustrations are terrific, the way the recipe winds around on each page can sometimes be a little disorienting.  Because of that I occasionally missed directions. For instance, the kimchi recipe calls for cutting the ginormous napa cabbage lengthwise into quarters, then cutting those quarters into bite-sized pieces. I somehow missed the part that said to make them bite-sized. The recipe worked fine anyway, though every time I eat some of the kimchi, I cut up some of it with kitchen scissors. My fault, for sure: I think I was thrown because when I went to the giant Super H-Mart in a Dallas suburb to shop for ingredients, I watched a lady making kimchi – and she was massaging the sauce into quartered heads of napa cabbage (you can see cooks doing that in the photo accompanying the NPR story, too). But it is easy to miss such details.

If you want to try one or two of my adapted versions of Ha's recipes before you spring for the book, you won't run into that problem. Sound good? I thought so! Now go cook . . . Korean!

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Cookbook review: 'Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes' gets three gold wontons

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Shrimp-and-chive wontons bursting with gingery flavor. Fried rice that's even more delicious than what you get in most Chinese restaurants. A foolproof choose-your-veg master recipe for stir-fried greens with whole garlic. The moment (many months ago) I got my hands on Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach, I felt it was a book meant for border-free cooks. As soon as I started putting its recipes to the test, I was certain of it. 

But it gets even better: When I took the first bite of Meehan's crisp-skinned, honey-colored, incredibly succulent and flavorful Chinese lacquered roast chicken, I was completely over the moon. This recipe, this book are life-changing. 

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Asian cooking can be daunting to Western cooks – including pretty experienced ones. But jump into 101 Easy Asian Recipes and start cooking, even pretty casually, and you'll quickly feel you're getting the hang of stir-frying, wonton making and more. Meehan keeps the instructions clear and simple, and the recipes are appealing and uncluttered. As promised, they are easy. 

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Chineasy Cucumber Salad from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes

His "Chineasy" cucumber salad – with a lovely touch of sesame and crushed peanuts – is a case in point. It came together in a flash, and it was so nice I gobbled it up all by myself, though it was certainly big enough for two. Sound good? Here's the recipe:

Meehan tends to do without explanations of whether a recipe is Indonesian or Chinese or Korean, or from a specific region of Thailand or Japan, going instead with a looser fusion-y feel. Somehow, the dishes I've been most attracted to feel pretty Chinese. 

Not that all are perfect as printed; among the seven recipes I tested, I had to make some tweaks here and there, which are reflected in the adapted versions you'll find here at Cooks Without Borders. After nearly ruining a pan when making the lacquered roast chicken, for instance, I added an instruction to line the baking sheet with foil. Small detail, though, when the technique – simply combining soy sauce and honey and painting it onto the bird a couple days in advance, then roasting without even flipping it over – is so miraculously good. 

A recipe for stir-fried asparagus worked beautifully, though it yielded twice as much sauce needed for one bunch of asparagus. Easy fix: I doubled the veg. (As you can see, it's still plenty saucy!)

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In any case, there's so much inside that's so great that I highly recommend the book to anyone who's even vaguely interested. From its pages, you'll learn to master fried rice. (Here's the recipe:)

And pick up the basic stir-fry technique for Chinese greens. 

Lucky Peach's master recipe for greens with whole garlic is meant for pea greens, spinach or bok choy. I used baby bok choy with excellent results (can't wait to get my hands on some pea greens!).

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You can even amaze your friends with shrimp-and-chive wontons. Wow – these turned out so great, I couldn't believe I made them. And I can't wait to riff on the filling, which was gingery and spot-on.

OK, if we want to split hairs, there was a editing error that might have derailed a less-than-confident cook: The recipe called for square wonton wrappers, but the step-by-step illustration showed how to work with round ones, a completely different routine. (Our adapted recipe shows you how to use the square ones the recipe calls for.) Also, the wontons seemed like they really needed to be served with sauce on them or in a soup, rather than just sent out naked on a serving platter with the dipping sauce, as the book suggests. 

I poured some dipping sauce on each serving, which struck me as a little nicer. Um, yeah – pretty great. Check it out:

In a future post, I'll tweak the dumplings, fine-tuning the dipping sauce as well, until they're, you know, off-the-charts crazy-good. 

There's still much more I want to explore in 101 Easy Asian Recipes. A recipe for okonomiyaki – the Japanese cabbage-and-seafood pancake that's on its way to cult status. Thai-style lettuce cups that look delicious. Lion's head meatballs, that Shanghainese favorite. Oyokodon, a homey, Japanese comfort dish of custardy eggs and chicken. And many more.

Of the 101 recipes, there are only two desserts. One is egg custard tarts. The other is oranges. Yes, oranges. "The deal with dessert in the scheme of easy Asian cooking," writes Meehan, "is that you are NOT MAKING IT, not in the 'easy' French way of throwing together a last-minute clafoutis. You are serving fruit. Cut-up fruit if you've got the time."

You see, he's serious about the easy thing. And he has an irresistible breezy writing style that makes the book fun to work with. 

What can I say? Check out the recipes here and the stories about them at Cooks Without Borders. Make one or two that sound appealing. If you love them as much as I did, you'll want to gift yourself with the book faster than you can say dashimaki tamago. 

Cookbook review: A delicious passage with Madhur Jaffrey to Vegetarian India

It has been quite a rich publishing season for cookbooks that appeal to border-busting food-lovers, and when a review copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking landed in my mailbox, I could hardly wait to get cooking.  Jaffrey has legions of fans and admirers – seven of her books have won James Beard Awards. As soon as I started cooking from this one, I remembered why I'm such a fan: Her recipes are simple, they're delicious and they work. There wasn't a single problem in the three recipes I tested. The only tweaks I've made is calling for a medium-sized roasting pan or baking dish for the cauliflower, which would have gotten lost in the larger pan the book called for, and adding a note to adjust the seasoning in the recipe for spinach with dill, which wanted a little more salt.

If you buy Vegetarian India, take the time to read Jaffrey's introduction, which takes you on a mini-tour of vegetarian India: She traveled all around the vast country collecting recipes – from Uttar Pradesh and Benghal to Bombay and Hyderabad and back – for vegetarian dishes "that are both delicious and easy to make." So many things to discover here: dishes, regions, styles, ingredients. I'm particularly curious about poha, flattened and dried rice that's pre-cooked. Jaffrey raves about it, providing a number of recipes for it, including one with ginger-flavored green beans that sounds wonderful.

I love the way she wraps things up: "In India's ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine," she writes, "it is believed that the simple acts of cutting and chopping and stirring are graces that can bring you peace and calm. That is what I wish for you."

For me, Jaffrey's wish came true: I spent a glorious afternoon toasting and grinding and grating spices, which filled my kitchen with wonderful exotic aromas – ginger and coriander and cumin. "Whatever you're doing," said my husband, led by his nose to the kitchen, "it's going to be delicious." Thanks to Jaffrey, he was right.

Flipping through the book, which includes more than 200 recipes and beautiful photos by Jonathan Gregson, it wasn't hard to find three dishes I wanted to jump into: Everything looked and sounded so delicious. I chose Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings (Oven Ki Gobi), Peas and Potatoes Cooked in a Bihari Style (Matar Ki Ghugni) and Spinach with Dill (Dakhini Saag). All were terrific, definitely going into my repertoire.

Next time I cook from it, I'll heed Jaffrey's advice about menu planning: "Indian meals are always put together so they are nutritionally balanced: a grain is always served with a vegetable and a dairy product, not only because they taste good together but also because together they are nutritionally complete." This time around I hadn't chosen anything involving dairy. The ingredients were easy to find in my regular supermarket, the instructions were clear and the amounts and times were spot-on.

Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $35.