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

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

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

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

Chicken Musakhan from Sami Tamimi’s ‘Falastin’

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

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

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

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

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

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

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

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

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

Our review of the book is coming soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

RECIPE: ‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp

RECIPE: Yangzhou Fried Rice

RECIPE: Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

Food-lit revival: Cookbooks are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe

A few of our favorite cookbooks, old and new, with the Cooks Without Borders kitchen wall of cookbooks in the background

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A slightly different version of this story was originally published at The Brenner Report.]

Six months ago, if you had asked me to assess how important cookbooks are in our culture, I would have slotted them somewhere between skee-ball and beetle fighting. I had been lamenting the fact that millennials and gen-Zers are more likely to click on a Food Wishes video in order to learn chicken-roasting skills or hummus technique than they are to reach for Judy Rodgers or Sami Tamimi. Cookbooks just seemed hopelessly old fart, boringly low-tech, increasingly irrelevant — never mind that many of the best recipes and techniques have always lived in them, and continue to be expressed in their pages.

Complicating things was the fact that what with all those free recipes on the internet and all, publishers were under pressure more than ever before to publish titles they felt sure would take off — and that wasn’t always great for quality. About five years ago I was told by my agent (of twenty years) that all the cookbook deals were going to cute young bloggers with powerful Instagram followings, so the odds of my publishing anything new were slim (even though I had six published books under my belt). I bought a few of the popular bloggy books and tried to cook from them. Generally speaking, the recipes didn’t work and the food sucked. Also young people tend to gravitate toward chefs, and chef recipes are often ridiculous in terms of what they demand of the cook. No wonder young people didn’t take cookbooks seriously.

A noodle salad from Andrea Nguyen’s excellent Vietnamese Food Any Day. Its publisher, Ten Speed Press, consistently publishes worthwhile books from the best authors.

Still, there continued to be a few excellent editors publishing great titles filled with cookable, inspired recipes — by authors like Toni Tipton-Martin and Samin Nosrat and Andrea Nguyen and Yotam Ottolenghi (and many more). In the best cases, the authors take recipe testing seriously and their recipes work. Or at least the dishes are exciting and recipe errors are fixable.

Shining a light on those exceptional cookbooks (and fixing those booboos for our cooking readers) is something we spend a lot of time doing at Cooks Without Borders. But because it is so hard to get young people interested in cookbooks (again, for reasons that are easy to understand), it has felt like a somewhat weird and probably futile pursuit, and one worried about the future of cookbooks.

COVID-19 has changed all that. Now, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, it feels like cookbooks are everything, and everywhere. After a drawn-out, near-death experience, they are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe.

Of course it is because we all now have to cook; restaurant culture has been sucked out of our lives with the force that an airline meal gets pulled off the tray table and disappears into the wild blue when a there’s a puncture in the plane. Now, after decades of gleefully forgetting how to scramble an egg, cooking is the thing that saves us from hunger. But as those of us who have been practicing the craft for any length of time know, it can do so much more. And it is that so much more that cookbooks invite us to enjoy. Which is why the cookbook — or more properly cookbook appreciation — is enjoying a renaissance.

Two weeks ago Vittles — a cool and forward-looking cooperative food newsletter out of England via Substack — published a beautiful essay, “The live-changing magic of cookbooks,” by Gemma Croffie. In her debut as a food writer, the “writer, mum and foodie based in Kent” ties together the terror of living as a Black person during the time of Covid with losing herself — and finding herself — through cooking and cookbooks.

One of the books Croffie admires immensely is Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin (which we reviewed in June 2020):

I am in awe of Ms Tipton-Martin’s scholarship; I learn something new on almost every page. Recipes shouting my name range from gingerbread waffles and cream to salmon croquettes to curried meat pies. There is such promise in cookbooks yet to be used, a palpable excitement to see if they live up to expectation. 

Wrapping things up, Croffie answering the question of why she loves cookbooks so much.

Anti-blackness is all too real in this time and fighting racism is life-draining. Very little sparks joy in my life, but some cookbooks ignite such a big spark that they practically light a bonfire. Black joy is fleeting; I’ll take mine where I can.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, discussed in Gemma Croffie’s essay, was reviewed on Cooks Without Borders in June 2020.

At the opposite end of the nuance spectrum, cookbook worship is splashed across the pages of “People” magazine. “I am a cookbook fanatic and collector!” proclaimed Drew Barrymore yesterday. “Chefs are my heroes. I must read 3 cookbooks a week...cover to cover!"

There’s a Substack newsletter, Stained Page News, devoted to cookbooks. Its author, Paula Forbes — a cookbook critic who has reviewed for Eater, Food 52 and Epicurious and Lucky Peach — is turning out missives on warp speed at the moment, as we are heading into the fall cookbook publishing season. To paying subscribers she has been sending every weekday (it’ll last two weeks) covering every upcoming books genre by genre. (Forbes offers a free weekly version as well.)

What enticing titles do publishers have in store for us this autumn — besides four witch-related cookbooks, five books with “flavor” in the title (Flavorbomb, The Flavor Equation, Chasing Flavor, Flavor for All, and — of course — Ottolenghi Flavor) and eight pie books?

Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen is one of the fall season’s highly anticipated new titles.

It’s actually an exciting crop. I’m keen to cook from, eat from and read (among others):

• Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

• Alex Guarnaschelli’s Cook With Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook

• Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy’s Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets and Railways of India

• Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen (I love Martinez’ blog, Mexico in My Kitchen. Her recipes reflect the way people cook at home in Mexico.)

• Nuit Regular’s Kiin: Recipes and Stories from Northern Thailand

• Jason Wang’s Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

• Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking

• Donna Lennard’s Il Bucco: Stories and Recipes

• Wilson Tang’s The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes from 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant (because dumplings!)

• Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

• Jonathan Waxman’s The Barbuto Cookbook: California-Italian Cooking from the Beloved West Village Restaurant

We’ll be reviewing as many of them as we can manage here at Cooks Without Borders — where by the way, and not unrelated, we just launched a new column of mini-reviews: “Cookbooks We Love.” (Here are the first three installments.)

Find our collected cookbook reviews here.

🐞

Forget the queso: Time to move beyond Tex-Mex and explore the joys of Texas Mexican comida casera

Nostalgia, as a story last week in The New York Times explained, can serve as “a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.” And so it’s not surprising that, during these incredibly disturbing times, we reach for the kinds of nostalgic foods that soothe us — mac and cheese, pasta with ragù bolognese, spaghetti and meatballs, cheese enchiladas.

But children outgrow their transitional objects, the blankies and bunnies that soothed them as babies. And so I would submit that maybe, just maybe, it’s time for people to give up queso — the gooey comfort dip that, let’s face it, folks, is made from Velveeta.

An attempt to chase down the history of a dish I grew up eating, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, led me last week to a very interesting writer, chef and filmmaker, Adán Medrano. Medrano has written and spoken extensively about the roots of Mexican cooking in Texas, which, to be sure, did not involve process cheese (the actual industry term).

Adán Medrano at a cooking demo in Moscow in 2019 | photo courtesy of Adán Medrano

In 2014, Medrano, a San Antonio native who was the founder of the San Antonio CineFestival (the first and longest-running Latinx film festival in the U.S.) and now lives in Houston, dove into those roots in a book called Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes (Texas Tech University Press).

“‘Texas Mexican’ is the cuisine that has evolved over centuries in the region immediately north and south of the lower Rio Grande,” he wrote in the introduction. “It is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultures of what are now northeastern Mexico and central and south Texas, the region where my extended family and all my Mexican American friends live.”

What it is not is Tex-Mex.

Although I’ve long been aware that much of what passes as Mexican cooking in the United States bears little relation to what you eat if you travel in Mexico, I suppose I’d always assumed that Tex-Mex was also the result of some kind of evolution — that early on it must have looked and tasted more like what Mexican-Americans might cook at home, what Medrano refers to as “comida casera.”

In fact, as Medrano wrote, the first Tex-Mex restaurant — named, in a remarkable display of hubris, The Original Mexican Restaurant — was created by an Anglo for Anglos. Specifically, the owner was Otis M. Farnsworth, an entrepreneur visiting San Antonio from Chicago. Furthermore, to make way for the rise of Anglo-driven Tex-Mex, the businesses of a “celebrated group of Mexican, Texas Indian businesswomen” were systematically destroyed, as Medrano tells it, and the women were harassed. Though today we know the name of the man who opened that first Tex-Mex dining room, the names of the women who fed the community before him, cooking out of open-air diners in the downtown market square, have been forgotten. We only know them as “The Chili Queens.” How easy to dismiss and even ridicule.

As Rachel Wharton pointed out in an excellent New York Times profile of Medrano last year: “Today Farnsworth’s restaurant might be called out for cultural appropriation, or what Mr. Medrano calls ‘cultural poaching.’ And Mr. Medrano does get angry at the lack of respect for his culture, the many ways in which Mexican-Americans have been wronged throughout history.”

At the time Wharton interviewed Medrano, in advance of the in advance of the publication of his second book, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, Medrano expressed the view that Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated. “It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years,” she paraphrased him as saying.

So much has happened in the last year that I couldn’t help but wonder whether Medrano still holds that same hospitable view of Tex-Mex.

Though he’s busy in post-production of a 90-minute documentary, “Truly Texas Mexican,” that follows up on his first book, he was happy to illuminate his views on the phone with a Q + A. (scroll halfway down the story linked to find it). The documentary’s log line: “Texas chefs, artists and activists dig up the 15,000-year-old indigenous roots of today’s Texas Mexican food. A delicious combination plate of archaeology, politics and feminism, it definitely ain’t tex-mex!” He’s hoping to have it finished by the end of this month.

In any case it should, I think, be of concern to the proponents of Tex-Mex that the genre was born of a cultural sin.

How to atone? We can start by paying attention to comida casera. Often it’s what indigenous Mexican people are, as the name describes, cooking at home. But sometimes it’s also on the menu at your local mom and pop’s, if you skip down past the queso and combo plates and explore the guisados and the caldos.

And find a way to see Medrano’s documentary when it’s released. (It’ll definitely be announced in the Brenner Report.)

Last night I cooked a delicious dish, Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita — Shrimp and Squash Noodles, from Medrano’s newest book.

The basic ingredients, as the chef writes in the headnote, "are all native to the Texas Mexican region: tomato, tatuma squash, onion, chie, salt and Texas Gulf Shrimp.” He suggests substituting zucchini for the tatuma; the two are very similar.

Oh, one more thing — about that chicken dish that led me to chef Medrano. I spent my whole life calling it The Chicken that Killed Grandpa. Going forward, I’ll be referring to it as it was called when my mom found the recipe for it in the New York Times Magazine circa 1970: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken. My family’s re-naming of it dishonors not only Grandpa, but also he dish’s author, Ms. de la Garza — whoever she was.

One day, I hope to find out. Until then, here is her chicken — which seems, according to everything I’ve read, to be a pretty clear example of Texas Mexican comida casera.

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita

RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

Favorite dish of summer 2020 so far: Andrea Nguyen’s tangy, fresh, umami-ful Vietnamese rice noodle salad bowl

Cutting to the chase here: This Vietnamese rice noodle salad — from Andrea Nguyen’s new(ish) book Vietnamese Every Day — is probably the most craveable single new (to me) recipe I’ve discovered in four months of daily cooking through the pandemic. That would be my favorite dish in something like 120 days of cooking. Or at least the one dish I know I’ll come back to again and again. It’s the kind of dish you’re excited to add to your life, the kind of dish you think about and crave. The kind of dish you wake up certain days and you simply have to have.

At its base, it’s pretty basic. Put salad greens in a bowl with cilantro and mint, and maybe a handful of bean sprouts and/or some shaved cucumber. Add a layer of cold rice noodles. Then the star of the dish — grilled skewers of meat, chicken or shrimp. Tuck in some pickled daikon and carrot, scatter on toasted peanuts or cashews plus more cilantro and mint, and serve with nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, to toss with as dressing.

It’s cool and salad-y, with a tangy, spicy umami zap of the nuoc cham. It’s fragrant with herbs, and fresh, and cool — perfect for summer. The hot skewer lands atop cold salad and rice noodles, all those herbs and pickle, and it all gets tossed with that delicious, tangy nuoc cham sauce, plus a pickly, nutty crunch — what could be better?

We came upon the rice noodle salad recipe because Wylie was in process of preparing a Crispy Lemongrass Salmon, from the same book. Nguyen writes that while salmon is not native to Vietnam, once her family tasted it in America, they adopted it as if it were. She makes a paste with lemongrass, brown sugar, shallot, Madras-style curry powder, and fish sauce, coats salmon fillets in it, then broils them. In the headnote, she suggests serving the salmon either with rice or on top of the rice noodle salad. Wylie jumped into action, pulled together the rice noodle salad — and we were all gobsmacked.

A week later, I was craving it again, so I tried it with the pork skewers offered in Nguyen’s recipe (and which are shown on the cover of the book!).

I enjoyed putting together the marinade (garlic, shallot, five-spice powder, sugar, molasses, fish sauce, soy sauce and canola oil), and making grillable skewers out of pork shoulder — a cut I’d always thought had to be cooked long, low and slow. I couldn’t get boneless pork shoulder, but it was easy to cut bones out of a small picnic roast (a.k.a. pork butt), and slice the meat across the grain into quarter-inch-thick strips. Marinated and grilled on a cast-iron stove-top grill, the pork skewers were superb: tender, charry, flavorful, just delicious. No doubt they’d be even better grilled over charcoal.

It also seemed obvious that, as Nguyen suggests, the bowl would be fabulous topped with all kinds of alternative things. Shrimp — either marinated and grilled or poached and chilled. Chicken, with this same marinade. Beef (though I’m not usually craving beef with my salad). That’s why we’re calling our adapted version Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers.

To go vegan, you can marinate and then grill tofu and vegetables, and use that in place of the skewers.

If you’re starting from scratch, getting all the ingredients together takes some work, for sure. But you can make the key elements in advance and keep them on hand, so it comes together either in a jiff or with just a little effort, depending on the protein.

Nuoc cham base is worth keeping in the fridge (for up to two weeks); add lime and fresh chiles just before serving. Pickled daikon and carrot can be kept on hand in the fridge as well (we used a Japanese salady-pickle called Namasu, from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since it’s so similar to the one offered in Nguyen’s book), and rice noodles boil up quick and easy. That means if you keep greens, cilantro, mint and either cucumber or bean sprouts on hand (along with roasted peanuts or cashews), and a sudden craving strikes — which it will, if you’re anything like me — you just have to think about the protein.

A super-easy alternative to Nguyen’s lemongrass salmon is fillets of Koji-Marinated Salmon. (It’s easy as long as you have shio koji (the recipe for that is included in the salmon recipe). That piece of fish — which is five minutes broiler-to-table once it has marinated a day or three in the shio koji — is awesome on that bowl. So what if it’s Japanese and the noodles are Vietnamese? It works, and it’s delicious. But honestly, any simple grilled fish or seafood would do.

OK, maybe you’re ready to get to it. Just think of the dish as a way to riff. Try it once as suggested with pork, if you’re so inclined. And then embrace it as a fabulous vehicle for whatever you feel like.

[RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pappardelle made from a simplified method inspired by American Sfloglino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Fresh Handmade Pappardelle

RECIPE: Pappardelle with Marcella Hazan’s Ragù Bolognese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers

Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey R. Shere

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child

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

Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook

The New Spanish Table by Anya von Bremzen

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

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

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken

Cookbook gifts galore: The season's greatest titles for culinary adventurers

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If there has ever been a more exciting year for cookbooks, I can’t remember it. That’s splendid news for anyone looking for holiday gifts, and particularly, this year, for globally-minded cooks.

I’ve culled through hundreds of review copies that came across my desk, seeking the most exciting, approachable, workable cookbooks for culinary adventurers.

None of the seven I’ve chosen as the gotta-have gifts for this holiday season are glitzy chef books, though a few were written by chefs, and none are gorgeous coffee table books, though they’re all quite beautiful. What they have in common is that they’re all books that can transport us deliciously, and they're all geared to real home cooks.

 To be honest, not all were published in 2016: Two were published last year – Michael Solomonov’s Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking and Anissa Helou’s Sweet Middle East. With those, I’m playing catch up. And while I’ve cooked from Zahav extensively (I meant to do a full-on review, but kept telling myself I just needed to try one more recipe, then another, then another . . . ), and from Diana Henry’s Simple, I haven’t yet cooked from the other five.  I'm suggesting them because they've the books I want to cook from. I have reason to trust each of the authors, whether because I’ve cooked from their books in the past, or I’ve given their recipes a close, critical look.

What’s remarkable is the trip around the world they offer as a group, taking us from Iran and Turkey and Azerbaijan to Italy, France and Britain, from Shanghai to Okinawa to England and Israel and back.

 Does the peripatetic cook on your holiday gift list happen to share your own initials? Don’t worry – your secret is safe with us.

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Land of Fish and Rice

Ever wonder how best to cook baby bok choy, or wish you knew the secret to Shanghai-style soup dumplings? Maybe you've wandered through an Asian grocery, admired those beautiful bunches of tong hao – chrysanthemum leaves – or giant bunches of flowering chives and wished you knew what to do with them. If that sounds like someone on your gift list Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China is your go-to gift. Author Fuchsia Dunlop has all the answers. With the chrysanthemum leaves, for instance, you’ll want to blanch them, chop them finely, toss them with chopped tofu and sesame oil and top them with toasted pine nuts. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

Her 368-page book explores China’s Lower Yangtze (Jiangnan) region, of which Shanghai is the gateway.  Dunlop explains in the thoughtful introduction that the region is known as “the land of fish and rice,” and she offers plenty in that regard: recipes for stir-fried shrimp with green tea leaves; a gingery Zhoushan fish chowder with tomatoes and potatoes; Shanghai fried rice with salt pork and bok choy. But it's not all fish and rice: There are cabbage-wrapped “lion’s head” meatballs, a gorgeous-looking dish of slivered pork with flowering chives (yay!), drunken chicken and wow – Nanjing New Year’s salad, an enticing vegetarian recipe, and just in time! 

 Dunlop even offers a recipe for soup dumplings, known outside of the region as “xiao long bao” (and in Jiangnan as “xiao long man tou”). “Be warned that these are a little fiddly,” Dunlop writes – “Chinese people don’t normally make xiao long bao at home.” Duly warned – or duly dared, depending on your point of view. Sounds to me like a delicious project for a wintry day.

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

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Taste of Persia

“When you assemble all the greens and herbs called for in this recipe, it’s hard to believe that the eggs with hold them.” Sold! The Persian Greens Frittata in Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Kurdistan is definitely something I want to make. Author Naomi Duguid's beautifully photographed book expresses perfectly what I love most about Persian food: so many fresh herbs.

I can’t think of a better guide to the cuisine than Duguid, an IACP Cookbook Award and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author with a passion for culinary travel.

In Taste of Persia's pages, I found many of the dishes I fell in love with in the Iranian restaurants of Los Angeles (a.k.a. “Tehrangeles,” with its huge Iranian population), such as classic Pomegranate-Walnut Chicken Stew. And I yearn to make others that are unfamiliar but that look incredible, like Easter Stew with Tarragon – a gorgeous braise of lamb (or beef) and lots of green herbs and spices. Duguid suggests easy-to-find tomatillos as a substitute for the stew’s sour plums, which sounds smart. 

Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan by Naomi Duguid, Artisan, $35

Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors

I have a bunch of Diana Henry’s beautiful books, including A Bird in the Hand, for which the British author won a James Beard Award. But for some weird reason, I’ve only recently started cooking from them. From her newest book, Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors, I’ve only made one recipe – Summer Fruit and Almond Cake – and it was not just spectacular, but incredibly easy and gorgeous. (I adapted an autumn version for the blog.)

There are a grillion great ideas in these pages: Toasts with crab and cilantro-chile mayo. Pappardelle with cavolo nero (Tuscan kale), chiles and hazelnuts. Baked sausages with apples, raisins and hard cider. Her tone is easy and warm, her recipes super approachable.

I particularly love her dessert sensibility; I can hardly wait for summer to come around so I can try her hot cherries with grappa and ice cream. Meanwhile, how do lemon-ricotta cake or cardamom-scented Turkish mocha pots sound?

Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors by Diana Henry, Mitchell Beazley $32.99

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Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking

Michael Solomonov's cookbook – inspired from his Philadelphia restaurant Zahav – has been written about so much it seems silly to review it at this point, so I'll keep it short and sweet. His much-touted hummus recipe, as printed in the book, is a little glitchy; that's probably why you find it tweaked when adapted in food magazines and on blogs. But so many of the recipes in the exhilarating 368-page book are superb, and the photos and writing are so compelling one is inspired to cook anything and everything.

Some of the smashing recipes: charred eggplant salad; Moroccan carrots; quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh; pargiyot (chicken skewers) three ways; twice-cooked eggplant; Malabi custard with mango; and marzipan. Meanwhile, Solomonov's recipe for tehina, the "secret sauce" around which the whole cookbook revolves, is so good I had to resist shooting it into my veins.

Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook, Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $35

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Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking

If I could have an endless supply of Japanese pickles, I’d be a happy girl. With Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking by Masaharu Morimoto, my dream may soon be a tangy-salty-umami-rich reality. The chef-owner of Philadelphia’s Morimoto (and other restaurants in the U.S., Mexico and India) gives us a whole section called “Tsukeru” – to pickle. (So glad to learn a useful Japanese verb!) The book also supplies the basics of how to make the ever-important stock known as dashi, how to make hand-made udon, and plenty of great-looking homey dishes like takikomi gohan (dashi-simmered rice with vegetables); tonjiru (hearty miso soup with pork and vegetables) and oyako don (chicken and egg rice bowl).

If you’re dubious about how approachable a chef book might be for a humble home cook, this may relieve the anxiety: The book is peppered with boxed nuggets of “Japanese grandmother wisdom.” Things like “When you grate daikon, keep in mind that the fatter top portion of the radish tends to be significantly sweeter and less bitter than the narrower bottom portion.” Who knew? If you’re shopping for someone into food trends, take note: There’s no okonomiyaki in Morimoto’s book, but there is a recipe for uber-trendy Hawaiian-style poke rice bowl.

Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking by Masaharu Morimoto, Ecco, $45.

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Mozza at Home

Nancy Silverton, one of my favorite chefs, has always understood what we really, really want to eat right now. Consider this inspiring headnote to her recipe for Bean Salad with Celery Leaf Pasta: “I love celery, and the leaves, combined with parsley leaves, make a refreshing alternative to the more common basil pesto. You might not use all the pesto for this salad. Serve leftover pesto with fresh burrata, or spoon it over grilled chicken or fish.”

Is that inspiring, or what? If there’s a cook on your list who loves Italian food, this is the gift to get. Not convinced? Try this: Saturday Night Chicken Thighs with Italian Sausage and Spicy Pickled Peppers. She had me at “Saturday Night Chicken Thighs.”

Mozza at Home, by Nancy Silverton with Carolynn Carreño, Knopf, $35

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SWEET MIDDLE EAST

 I was first drawn in by Lebanese-born Annisa Helou’s enchanting Instagram feed, which takes us from London to Sicily to France to Dubai and back. And so when a review copy of her latest book, Sweet Middle East, appeared in my inbox, I cheered: Now I get to try her recipes. Turkish macaroons (acibadem kurabiyesi), Moroccan aniseed biscotti (feqqas), Persian saffron ice cream (bastani sa’labi), Syrian semolina and nut cake (h’risseh) – it all sounds and looks so good!

Sweet Middle East: Classic Recipes from Baklava to Fig Ice Cream by Anissa Helou, Chronicle Books, $24.95.

Gorgeous, fabulous and ridiculously easy to make: This autumn fruit and almond cake has it all

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For years I'd been meaning to cook from one of British author Diana Henry's beautiful cookbooks, like the one she won a James Beard Award for last year, A Bird in the Hand. And so when a review copy of her new book Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors landed in my inbox, I seized the moment. So many of the recipes look wonderful: toast with crab and cilantro-chile mayo; Indian sweet potatoes with chickpeas and coconut; roast lamb loin fillets with a minty-almondy Sicilian sauce called zhoggiu; roast eggplants with tomatoes and saffron cream.

I know, right?

But it was a sweet from her chapter on fruit desserts that I couldn't resist making right away last month – a summer fruit and almond cake. Here's what's amazing about it: You throw all the cake ingredients into the food processor, whirr them up, pour them in the pan (an 8-inch springform pan), top them with fruit (arranged "higgledy-piddledy" – how great is that?!) and pop it in the oven. Can you imagine anything easier? The recipe calls for ripe nectarines, unripe plums and raspberries; I used blackberries instead.

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Summer fruit arranged "higgledy-piddledy" on top of the batter

It turned out great! Super-moist, with a nice crumb, lightly (but not overpoweringly) almondy, with just the right balance of fruit to cake. The fruit became lushly flavorful with that nice long stay in the oven. 

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I would have happily made it every week or two, except for one thing: Summer ended.

Since we are now into early autumn, I thought the same almond cake featuring shoulder-season fruit – figs, plums and blackberries – could be fabulous, and Henry mentions in her headnote that you can swap out other fruit. I jumped on the occasion to feature some gorgeous ripe Mission figs I found in the supermarket, along with late-season plums and plump blackberries.

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I gathered the ingredients: the usual flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt and vanilla, plus sour cream, almond extract, crumbled marzipan. Henry's recipe called for superfine sugar, which I can never find in the supermarket, so I tried regular sugar, which worked just fine. The fruit gets tossed in sugar too; I used less than Henry suggests, as ripe figs are sweeter than nectarines. 

I popped it in the oven and baked it, for a very long time – her recipe calls for an hour and a half, but mine took longer both times. Start testing it after an hour and a half; you know it's done when a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out pretty clean (the fruit will mess it up a little; you just don't want raw cake batter on the skewer). Let it cool in the pan, then remove the ring and dust it with powdered sugar. (Pro tip: Put a spoonful of powdered sugar in a fine-mesh strainer, and use the spoon to tap the strainer on the side over the cake for a soft, even dusting.)

Ready to give it a spin? Here's the recipe:

And hey – I'd love to hear what you think if you try it! Or even if you don't – does it look good? Awful? Might you bake it in the future? What do you think??? We could have so much fun if y'all would leave comments!

Quick, summery bok choy-and-radish kimchi is the perfect intro to Korean cooking

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Korean cooking is one of the hottest trends out there now – in more ways than one. (Yep, this food can be spicy!) Not only are chefs all over the country using Korean techniques and ingredients and riffing on Korean dishes, but Korean cookbooks are being published left and right. 

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Lately I've been cooking from three new ones. Robin Ha's Cook Korean!: A Coming Book With Recipes has been making a splash (and I just finished putting up a traditional cabbage kimchi from that book). 

And there's Koreatown: A Cookbook by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard – I'll be testing a recipe from that one later this week. 

In the meantime, I made one dish I think you'll love – a light, summery bok choy and radish kimchi that's quick and easy to make. It's the perfect introduction to Korean cooking. And maybe the perfect introduction to Korean eating, as well – Wylie's friend Michelle, who had never tasted Korean food, loved it. 

The recipe comes from K Food: Korean Home Cooking and Street Food by Da-Hae and Gareth West, a British couple. Los Angeles Times food editor Amy Scattergood recently featured it as Cookbook of the Week. "This is the first non-traditional kimchi that Gareth and I ever made," the authors write in the headnote. "The juicy, crunchy bok choy and radishes make it feel fresh, light and summer – quite different from the typical cabbage kimchi."

Sold! I had to try it.

It's a good introduction to basic kimchi prep. First you trim, wash and brine the bok choy and radishes. The brine is just a mix of salt and sugar you toss the vegetables in, and let them sit for half an hour. Meanwhile, you make a "glue" – a spicy kimchi base you then rub all over the veg. Following the instructions as published, though, I didn't have nearly enough glue to rub all over the copious amount of bok choy, so in my adaptation, I upped the yield of the glue by fifty percent. It's a lot of bok choy when it's raw, but it shrinks way down, and you'll be happy to have lots.

Another little issue: The instructions say that you can eat it immediately, but that it's "best after it has had 3 or 4 days at room temperature to ferment," after which you can store it in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, no instructions were provided on how to do that. I will figure that out later, and let you know. 

Meanwhile, It's really good, so I wanted you to have it right away. I tasted it immediately, as soon as I was done rubbing the ingredients all over – good. Then I covered it in plastic wrap and let it sit overnight in the fridge. The next day it was really good. Refreshing, spicy, fun and yes – ideal for summer. I think you'll love it. Do let us know!

Ottolenghi meets Zahav: Introducing the ultimate hummus recipe

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First there was Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's recipe for hummus, published in  Jerusalem: a Cookbook in 2012. Then there was last year's sensation – the hummus tehina from Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook's Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, which just won the 2016 James Beard Book Award for Book of the Year. Finally, we had an easy way to make amazingly smooth, creamy and fabulous hummus, and America went nuts over it. 

Now that the excitement is simmering down, I started simmering up: I have at last (after receiving a review copy) given Solomonov's recipe my full attention and put it to the test. 

Yes, it is wonderful. But it's also somewhat more complicated than it needs to be. And there were a few minor issues. It needed more salt, and my chickpeas cooked much quicker than Zahav said they would. The recipe said they would be tender in about an hour; mine were falling apart after 25 minutes; 10 minutes later they were mushy to the point of being waterlogged, resulted in too-watery hummus. Covering the pot of chickpeas simmering over medium heat made the pot overflow the first time I tried it; next time I tried lower heat, but the same thing happened. 

I wondered: How did this differ from Ottolenghi and Tamimi's recipe? So I went back to that one for guidance. They didn't cover the pot. And their estimated time to tenderness was "between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the type and freshness" of the chickpeas, "sometimes even longer." 

Aha. Two great recipes. How about synthesizing them, taking the best, most thoughtful aspects of each? The goal was to achieve maximum flavor and amazing creamy texture with a minimum of time and effort. (Of course if you want a quickie cheater version using canned garbanzos, you can do that, too.)

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The thing that probably makes Solomonov's recipe brilliant for a restaurant actually makes it cumbersome for the home cook: It calls for 1 1/2 cups "basic tehina sauce," which you have to make first. The recipe for it – a whole separate recipe – yields 4 cups.  That's great for a restaurant doing serious volume, but silly for a home cook making one batch – which is already a ginormous amount of hummus. Ottolenghi's recipe simply has you put those ingredients (tahini, garlic, lemon juice) directly into the food processor without making a separate sauce first. However, Solomonov's recipe, in breaking out the tahini sauce separately, does something clever: He has you drop whole cloves of garlic into lemon juice, pulverize them together in a blender, let the mixture sit and mellow for 10 minutes, then you press it through a fine sieve and discard the solids. It's the mellowly garlic-infused lemon juice that goes into the tahini. 

Great effect, but it's kind of a pain in the butt. I found a compromise: While the chickpeas are simmering, you crush the garlic through a press into lemon juice and let it sit and mellow till the chickpeas are tender. No need for straining, pressing, discarding. 

So here's how it goes: You soak the chickpeas overnight, with a teaspoon of baking soda to start breaking down the garbanzo skins so you get that amazingly smooth texture. Next day drain and rinse them, and simmer them (uncovered) in a lot of water with another teaspoon of baking soda. Drain them and purée in a food processor. With the motor still running, add tahini, the lemon juice-and-crushed-garlic mixture, salt and a few tablespoons of ice water. And let it run and run – until the hummus is incredibly smooth, creamy and light. 

Wow, is it incredible – wonderfully warm, nutty and vibrant. It almost seems alive.  You will be licking your spoons and rubber scrapers like a kid with Tollhouse cookie dough. Such a simple food, and such an amazing one. 

How I learned to stop worrying about nixtamal and make fresh tortillas from masa harina

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You can wrap just about anything in a freshly made corn tortilla, hot off the comal or griddle, and it'll be wonderful.

Well, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. 

In another lifetime, a hundred years ago when I was in my twenties and living in L.A., I made fresh tortillas all the time. I had a cheap aluminum tortilla press and a cheap aluminum comal (tortilla griddle); I'd picked up both in a Mexican grocery. You could buy a bag of masa harina (dried powdered masa) just about anywhere. I was in a serious carnitas phase: I'd fallen in love with Diana Kennedy's version in The Cuisines of Mexico, and I'd make that with salsa verde cruda and guacamole and a big pot of pinto beans to serve on the side. 

When I moved to New York to go to graduate school a few years later, I brought my comal and tortilla press and even my molcajete – though masa harina was not so easy to find.

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The tortilla press I've had forever

A few years after that, some time in the early 90's, I lucked into an opportunity to meet Kennedy, and even spent a long weekend cooking with her and the late, wonderful Peter Kump, founder of Peter Kump's Cooking School in New York. My friend Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch (I wrote about her in my post about pissaladière) had invited Kennedy and Kump to her 500 year-old stone farmhouse in Dordogne to spend some days cooking and soaking up the delicious and gorgeous region. Danièle knew I was a huge Kennedy fan, and was wonderfully generous to invite me along.

At some point during a weekend spent making pommes sarladaise in a big pot suspended from the hearth in the center of Danièle's living room, and confit de carnard and chou farci and I can't remember what all else, Diana and I got into a discussion about corn tortillas. I'll never forget her expression when I told her I was in the habit of using masa harina to make mine: I might as well have told her I was a regular at Taco Bell. She was positively scandalized.  She insisted that masa made from nixtamal – corn kernels cooked in a solution of lime (calcium oxide) and water – was the only legitimate masa. I knew all about it from her book, but when I'd gotten to the part of the two-page process that said, "Meantime, crush the lime if it is in a lump, taking care that the dust does not get into your eyes," I stopped reading. 

With Diana, I tried to defend my position, arguing that tortillas freshly made from masa harina are way better than anything you can buy at the store. "Better to buy masa at a tortilleria in your neighborhood," she countered. But there were no tortillerias anywhere near my hood – the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It wasn't even easy to find masa harina there.  The conversation seriously deflated me (this was my Mexican cooking hero!) and I think I lost some of my joy for tortilla-making.

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That's why last summer when a review copy of Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman's cookbook Tacos: Recipes and Provocations landed on my desk at work, I was delighted when the book fell open to the following: "In Defense of Masa Harina." "A warm tortilla prepared with harina may not hit the same celestial notes as one made with fresh masa," it said, "but it is still an absolute revelation if all you've ever tasted is reheated, store-bought tortillas. There's irrefutable value in that, so I stand by it." 

Well, of course I've tasted many a fabulous tortilla made from fresh masa, but I still think the ones you make from masa harina (all you need to add is water!) are pretty darn good. And once you get the hang of it, making them is easy – easier than making pancakes, in fact, because the dough is just harina and water.

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Though I'd already made tortillas a hundred times, I followed Stupak's instructions and found they worked perfectly, though I prefer the proportions of water to masa found on harina packages (1 1/8 cup warm water to 1 cup harina). You knead the water into the flour, roll it into a ball, and keep it moist under a damp towel while you work. "You want the texture to be as soft and moist as possible without sticking to your hands," is the way Stupak describes the right texture. 

 Set up a double griddle or two cast-iron pans and heat them so you have one side or pan hotter than the other. Line your tortilla press with plastic (so the dough doesn't stick). Roll some dough into a golf-ball-size ball. Open the press, plop in the ball, push down on the lever. Open the press, flip the tortilla onto your palm, peel off the plastic. (The thinner the plastic, the easier it is to peel off. I cut up thin, crinkly plastic bags like the ones you get at CVS if you forget to bring your own.) Drop the tortilla onto the cooler side of the griddle, cook for 15 seconds, then flip it over onto the hotter side and cook for 30 seconds. Flip it again (still on the hotter side) and leave it for 10 seconds, then flip a final time and cook 10 more seconds. At that point it may puff up a bit. Transfer it to an tortilla basket – or an insulated tortilla container (Stupak has a good section about which type is best – a "thick fabric tortilla warmer covered with culturally insensitive dancing chili peppers" was his favorite. He also explains why it doesn't work to reheat corn tortillas that have cooled completely.)

So, what shall we wrap these tender warm beauties around? That's a subject for my next post. Meanwhile, I can tell you what I put on the ones I whipped up tonight: Shredded store-bought roast chicken, diced avocado, white onion, cilantro, some leftover pinto beans, a squeeze of lime and a drizzle of leftover salsa borracha, also from Stupak's book. The salsa borracha – spiked with mezcal – was a revelation. That recipe's coming soon, too.

Meanwhile, in case you want to get some practice – or just have a fabulous vehicle in which to wrap leftovers (barbecue brisket is dreamy!) or do some creative taco improvisation – here's the corn tortilla recipe. Same thing I just gave you, but in a little more detail.

Gribiche, gribiche, gribiche: A different take on the sauce that jazzes up everything

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Boiled shrimp with four-minute egg gribiche

Last month I wrote about a modern take on sauce gribiche, promising to follow up right away with more about gribiche. Forgive me – I got sidetracked by a startling hummus development! 

So, back to gribiche. I don't know how long gribiche has been around, but I do know August Escoffier gave a recipe for it in his 1903 Guide Culinaire. You've gotta love the way recipes were written then:

"Crush in a bowl the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, and work them into a smooth paste, together with a large tablespoon of French mustard, the necessary salt, a little pepper, and make up the sauce with one pint of oil. Complete with two teaspoons of parsley, chervil, and tarragon (chopped and mixed), as many capers and gherkins, evenly mixed, and the hard-boiled whites of three eggs, cut in short, Julienne strips. This sauce is chiefly used with cold fish."

A few notes: First, this is the 1969 American English translation of the French; today it would no doubt say "Dijon mustard" rather than "French mustard." Second, I love the phrase "the necessary salt." Third, by "make up the sauce with one pint of oil," I'm pretty sure he meant whisk the olive in slowly, as in a mayonnaise – though I was surprised not to find vinegar or lemon juice in the recipe. "Gherkins": no doubt Escoffier was referring to cornichons. 

Anyway, the effect would have been like a chunky mayo – and that's what sauce gribiche meant for the better part of the century. (Excuse me while I geek out on culinary history; if I'm boring you, just skip down to the modern part!) 

Fast forward to The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, which the late great Judy Rodgers published in 2002. In it Rodgers included a recipe for Four-Minute Egg Gribiche. 

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"This one is inspired by the mustardy gribiche the Troisgros brothers drizzled over beef carpaccio," she wrote, "and crowned with a pile of crispy hot fried potatoes, as an alternative to the familiar raw-egg steak tartar. " She goes on to describe the grillions of things you can do with it, from serving it with grilled fish or poultry to slathering it on sandwiches to putting it in potato salad.

Her version is much more like a mayonnaise than my modern take is. But it's much zingier, herbal and zesty than mayo, with wonderful texture.  Here's my adaptation of Rodgers' recipe:

It requires more a bit more concentration and technique than my easy modern version; you need to whisk all that olive oil in slowly so the sauce emulsifies (getting that mayonnaise consistency) and doesn't "break." But for some people it'll be worth it: Thierry loved it even more than he did my new-wave version. 

Roasted romanesco with four-minute egg gribiche

And if right about now you're thinking it would be fun to live with me because I cook, think again: I must have fed him gribiche twenty times that weekend! That day for lunch we had the gribiche three ways: with boiled shrimp (excellent); with boiled asparagus (wonderful) and with roasted slabs of romaneso (also very good!). Insanely weird all together: We had gribiche coming out of our ears! But that shrimp would be really nice as a main course for a Sunday lunch, or as a starter at a dinner party (the shrimp can be served warm or chilled). Or it would be great with cracked crab. Or roasted ham. Maybe even a roast tenderloin of beef. 

I'm not providing formal recipes for those very simple things, but happy to walk you through the three I made:

Roasted romanesco (feel free to substitute cauliflower): Slice the romanesco into slabs about 1/2-inch thick, place on a baking sheet, brush with olive oil, sprinkle on a little salt and pepper and roast in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes, or until just tender. Serve with sauce gribiche – the four-minute egg version or the new wave version. 

Boiled shrimp: Devein the shrimp, but leave the shells on. Drop them in court bouillon or boiling salted water and cook just thill they're pink and firm, about three minutes or so, depending on their size. Drain and serve. To make a quick court bouillon, fill a medium sauce pan about half way full with water, add a few glugs of white wine, half a sliced onion, a peeled and sliced carrot, salt, a few black peppercorns, celery leaves, thyme and parsley, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 or 20 minutes. Don't worry if you're missing an herb or two. Serious people would tie the herbs and peppercorns in a bouquet garni, but I see no harm in the stuff floating around. To me it's easier to fish out the shrimp than look for the cheesecloth. 

Boiled asparagus: Trim the bottoms, and use a vegetable peeler to peel the asparagus to an inch or three below the tips. Simmer in a pan of salted water until the asparagus are floppy but still firm-ish, about four minutes for average-size asparagus – longer for jumbos and quicker for pencil-thin. Don't want to peel? Roast them instead: 17 minutes in a 400 degree oven, et voilà.

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Best potato salad ever – thanks to new-wave gribiche

Oh: I almost forgot to mention. I had friends over for burgers last weekend, and made a batch of new-wave gribiche to see how it would do in a potato salad. Success! Here's an actual recipe:

A new cookbook, 'Soup for Syria,' aims to help food relief efforts for Syrian refugees

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Yesterday I was thrilled to find a review copy of a new cookbook, one that will appeal to just about every border-free cook I know, in my mailbox.  Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate our Shared Humanity collects recipes by Alice Waters, Yotam Ottlenghi and Sami Tamini, Paula Wolfert, Claudia Roden, Mark Bittman, Greg Malouf, Anthony Bourdain and many more. All of them are for soup, and proceeds of the book go to the Soup for Syria project, a humanitarian campaign that aims to ease the suffering of 3.8 million refugees by delivering food and foodstuffs to refugee camps. 

A photograph of a girl in a refugee camp faces a recipe for gondi by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Barbara Abdeni Massaad, a Beirut-based food writer and photographer, collected the recipes for the collection and photographed the people who are living in the camps. The project started when she was visiting a camp just 45 minutes from her home in the Bekaa Valley "where Syrian families crowd into plastic tents and children die of cold and hunger," as she writes in her introduction. "I try to sleep and ignore this reality, but it's impossible. I am not immune to the suffering of others."

The photos are beautiful; the people in them – particularly the children – are gorgeous. 

And the recipes, many of them simple, look wonderful. I've already put Post-its on a bunch I want to make (of course I'll share them with you once I do!). I have my eye on a recipe from Ottolenghi and Tamimi for Gondi, a Persian chicken soup with dumplings made from ground chicken and chickpea flour. Greg Malouf's recipe for fennel soup with lemon and cinnamon looks great, too. As does Paula Wolfert's recipe for lentil and Swiss chard soup (it's vegan!). Soup seems just the thing to cook for such a cause, as it's nourishing and nurturing.

Of course I'll share the soups with you once I make them, but thought you'd want to know about the project right away so you can help. The $30 book can be ordered through the Soup for Syria website.  The site also offers other ways to get involved in the cause, such as hosting a soup party where you can sell the book or take orders for it.

Brazilian chocolate cake: Really, it doesn't get any better than this

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I can't remember the first time I tasted the Brazilian chocolate cake from Deborah Madison's The Greens Cookbook, but I do remember who made it: my friend Michalene. (She's also the genius who asked the gobsmacking question about whether I'd tried the magic lacquered chicken technique with duck. Now I have! It is going to work! I am developing it! Stay tuned!) But the cake. It doesn't look like the photo above once it's finished; what's pictured is the bottom half of the cake after I iced it with ganache. It just looks so luscious, I couldn't resist. Wanted you to keep reading. Forgive me. This is what it looks like when it's finished:

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I know, not as glam. I'm not much of a baker; yours will probably be more beautiful. Michalene's always is. Also it is not easy to photograph a bundt cake.

However – and this is a big however – I've made the Brazilian chocolate cake a jillion times, and every single time it has turned out great: moist, with a lovely, fine crumb, rich and magnificently chocolatey. Not too sweet. 

It is, quite simply, the perfect chocolate cake. When you slice it, you can see a stripe of that fabulous glossy bittersweet ganache in the middle, exactly the right amount. It is the little black dress of chocolate cakes: simple, elegant, necessary. It may look a little austere, but oh, baby, it is anything but. A cup of strong coffee in the batter gives it depth and dimension. 

Otherwise, there's nothing unusual about the recipe, which as far as I can tell is foolproof. When I last made it, a few days ago, I purposely fooled with the recipe. I used pastry flour instead of cake flour. I used room-temperature coffee instead of hot coffee. I used a 3.5 ounce bar of chocolate instead of the 3 ounces the cake part of the recipe calls for; same for the ganache. Both cake and ganache were perfect. 

I wish I had a slice right now. Thierry, Wylie and I polished it off pretty quickly. It is not only dreamy as a dessert, it's amazing the next morning (and the one after that) for a decadent breakfast. Wylie was home for spring break when I made it. Though he has never been a big fan of cake, he loves this one.

And you will, too.  Here's the recipe:

Fried rice SMACKDOWN! Lucky Peach vs. Mission Chinese Food - Round Two (Mission Chinese Food)

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After gorging myself on the superb Chinese Sausage Fried Rice from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes, I rolled up my sleeves the very next evening, put on my apron and pulled out the wok. Time for round two of the smackdown! 

First I made rice – Danny Bowien rejects using day-old rice as an old wive's tale. "How could old rice be better?!" he writes. "Come on. Use fresh warm rice, not a hard puck of cold rice." His recipe calls for 3 cups of rice, "from about 1 1/2 cups raw." Well, 1 1/2 cups raw yielded more than 5 cups; 1 1/4 cups yields more than 3 cups. Just to let you know in case you don't want to waste rice.

Then the prep: I sliced Chinese sausage, iceberg lettuce and scallions (no need to separate the whites and greens on this one), scrambled eggs and chopped cilantro. No need to mince garlic or ginger for this one, which is a plus.  

The salt cod had already been fried (though I neglected to give it a whirr in the food processor – no matter, the pieces were pretty small) and the mackerel confit drained.

Then I made what Bowien calls a rice stack: The rice goes in a bowl with the fried salt cod on top of it and the sausage on top of that. "You want the ingredients to hit the wok in reverse order," he explains, "sausage, fish, rice  – and the stack facilitates this."

Then, in a bowl big enough to toss the whole dish after the rice cooks, I combined the lettuce, cilantro and scallions. 

Then it was showtime! Blazing heat went under the wok and a few "heathy glugs" of oil went in. When it was nearly smoking, I pulled the wok off heat and scrambled the egg together with the mackerel very quickly, just 10 seconds or so and dumping them on a plate. Back on the heat went the wok with a little more oil and in went the rice stack. Bowien's description of how to fry it is clear and easy to follow: "Gently break up the stack and use the spatula to press the rice against the bottom and sides of the hot wok. Wait 10 seconds, then flip and stir the rice. Flatten and press again, and wait 10 seconds. Flip and flatten a last time." 

At that point you season the rice with salt, sugar and fish sauce, give it a stir, add the eggs and mackerel, stir again. Then scoop everything out of the wok and into the big bowl, where it gets tossed with the lettuce, cilantro and scallions. 

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Masterpiece finished! 

For the second evening in a row, I was bowled over: This was stupendous.

Honestly, I can hardly believe that a civilian (me!) can make fried rice this good. The previous night, my friend Carol, a self-described rice fanantic who happens to be Italian, had come over to share the Lucky Peach rice with me. But now, with Thierry away in France, I found myself alone with an entire batch of Mission Chinese Food Salt Cod Fried Rice. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much of it I ate all by myself.

OK, Let's just say most of it. Here is the recipe:

So, how do the two fried rices stack up?

Judging the smackdown

Deliciousness: The Mission Chinese Food Salt Cod Fried Rice was more luscious than the Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice, with bits of crunchy fish adding textural interest and serious umami; the Lucky Peach rice was a little drier, more like the classic good-bad Chinese food pork fried rice (PFR) I so fondly remember from childhood (down to the frozen peas), but with Chinese sausage in place of barbecue pork. Both had plenty of fluffy, moist egg. Of course the Mission Chinese entry involved Chinese sausage too, and even more of it; that one was more chock-a-block full of stuff – a bit more egg, plus the two kinds of fish. Both were truly delicious; both were perfectly seasoned. Minced garlic and ginger brought tasty dimension to the Lucky Peach rice, but I didn't miss them in the Mission Chinese Food rice, with all that fish-umami happening, plus the cilantro. The Mission Chinese Food fried rice was maybe just a little more strikingly fabulous. But I would happily eat a giant bowl of either one any day of the week. 

Mission Chinese Food Salt Cod Fried Rice Deliciousness: 10/10

Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice Deliciousness: 9/10

Ease of preparation: No question, the Lucky Peach recipe was much simpler to prepare. Other than cooking the rice in advance, everything was prepped and cooked in about 20 minutes. The Mission Chinese Food recipe was extremely involved, thanks to soaking/water changing then frying and food processing the salt cod, and making the mackerel confit. While I loved eating the mackerel confit on its own (and will definitely make it again), it got a little lost in the rice. Did it add much to the whole? Hard to say. Neither recipe needed significant tweaking (the only issue in either was how much raw rice yields 3 cups cooked in the Mission Chinese recipe, which is really minor); both were clearly explained and very easy to follow – even with the hot wok going. 

Mission Chinese Food Salt Cod Fried Rice Ease of Preparation: 6/10

Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice Ease of Preparation: 9/10

All-around awesomeness and wow factor: Both rate very highly. A steaming bowl of hot fried rice with fluffy egg and chewy, smoky Chinese sausage, excellent texture and flavor that you made yourself in your very own wok is terribly exciting and fabulous.

When Wylie came home for spring break and Thierry returned from France a couple days later, it was the first thing I made them. More on that later. After Wylie goes back to school, I'm thinking a batch of the Lucky Peach rice would be an absolutely dreamy thing to eat when Thierry and I are hunkered down in front of the TV to binge watch House of Cards or election returns. Will I ever make the Mission Chinese Food recipe again? Perhaps. But only if guests who really geek out over Chinese cooking come over. (Sherry and Fred: You are wanted in Dallas!) Otherwise, the Lucky Peach's simplicity-in-preparation quotient makes up for its slight fabulousness deficit in relation to the Mission Chinese Food recipe, creating – ladies and gentlemen – an all-around awesomeness dead heat.

Mission Chinese Food Salt Cod Fried Rice Awesomeness and Wow Factor: 9/10

Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice Awesomeness and Wow Factor: 9/10

Well, after all that, you might think I've had enough fried rice for the time being. You'd be wrong. Now I am consumed with creating the perfect fried rice recipe: one the marries maximum awesomeness and deliciousness with the minimum of effort and time. Interested? Be sure to check back soon!

Fried Rice SMACKDOWN! Lucky Peach vs. Mission Chinese Food - Round One (Lucky Peach)

It's the event of the season, the match-up we've all been waiting for: enticing fried rice recipes from two hot new Asian cookbooks. On the left is the Chinese Sausage Fried Rice from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach. On the right is Salt Cod Fried Rice from The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying. 

The Mission Chinese Food fried rice has a cult following and takes more than 24 hours of advance preparation – after a dedicated hunt for ingredients. You'll be required to soak salt cod in several changes of water for 24 hours, make mackerel confit in advance and fry-up the salt cod till it's hard as jerky, then shred it in a food processor. before you start. Are you up to it?

Meehan's recipe is the underdog, with no restaurant pedigree – though Lucky Peach magazine certainly has a cult following. You can put the whole thing together in a half hour, though unlike its opponent, it prefers (though doesn't require) that you use day-old cooked rice.

Both include Chinese sausage, scrambled eggs and scallions, and neither relies on soy sauce, which makes things interesting.

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Mission Chinese Food Cookbook's Salt Cod Fried Rice

We'll be judging the fried rice contenders in several areas:

–Taste: how delicious is it?

–Ease of preparation: Is it worth the time and effort?

–All-around awesomeness and wow factor

It's going to be a tough contest, and we have quite a bit of prep ahead of us, so let's get going!

Both require a trip to the Asian supermarket, though the Lucky Peach recipe offers substitutions if you can't come up with things like Chinese sausage (use bacon or pancetta), Shaoxing wine (dry sherry will do) and fish sauce (use soy sauce). For the purpose of this smackdown, I used the Chinese preferred ingredients. If you're thinking of making the Mission Chinese Food fried rice and you don't have access to salt cod, fresh or frozen mackerel fillets, Chinese sausage and fish sauce, just fuggedaboudit. Make the Lucky Peach recipe and call it a day.

Are you ready? 

After gathering all the ingredients, I started two days in advance, cooking jasmine rice beforehand for the Lucky Peach recipe. For the Mission Chinese Food recipe, I submerged the salt cod in cold water.  

A little background on the Mission Chinese Food recipe. "The spirit animal of this dish is the fried rice with salt fish and chicken at R&G Lounge in San Francisco," writes Danny Bowien, the Mission Chinese Food chef. (Wow – that was the site of one of my greatest food memories ever – a Chinese banquet ordered by Melanie Wong, one of the first friends I ever "met" online.) Bowien then riffs on the umami wonderfulness of salt cod: "I love the way it seasons and perfumes rice with a funky, fermented flavor. But I don't particularly love biting into a gnarly chunk of it. The aim of our Salt Cod Fried Rice was to capture that pleasant fishiness without the stank." His solution for his restaurant was to shred salt cod, then fry it. But customers complained there was no visible fish, "so we gilded the lily with chunks of rich mackerel confit."

OK, then – I went to work preparing the mackerel confit, which involved first filleting the mackerel I found in the Asian market. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, but it was really easy and actually quite wonderful.

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Mackerel confit

All you do is cover mackerel in vegetable or peanut oil in a saucepan and put it in a 300-degree oven for 25 minutes. Let it cool in the oil, then flake the fish into small chunks and either use it right away or cover it with the oil in a jar and store it in the fridge up to a week. It has a wonderful soft texture and lovely, lightly salty (though no salt was added), delicately fishy flavor, like a cheffy version of canned tuna. The fillet I had yielded more than the 4 ounces the recipe called for, so I'd have to think of a use for the rest of it (an amped-up mackerel-salad sandwich, maybe?). Anyway, it made me feel like confiting every oily fish I can get my hands on.

OK, first up: The Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice. 

As in all Chinese cooking, you definitely want to prep all your ingredients in advance, have them ready and all measured out – your mise en place. The book actually uses a master fried rice recipe, which is great, as it teaches you the technique.

To prep, I sliced Chinese sausage, measured out some frozen peas, whisked together a sauce (Shaoxing wine, fish sauce, sugar and sesame oil), beat two eggs, chopped garlic and ginger and sliced scallions. That was pretty much it – 20 minutes max. 

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The recipe calls for 3 cups of cooked long-grain rice, which you can get by cooking about 1 1/4 cups of raw rice. You put the rice in a bowl, break up the clumps with your fingers and make sure your mise is next to the stove. 

First you get your wok very hot, cook the eggs very quickly in a little oil and get them out of the pan. Add more oil, then add garlic, ginger and scallion whites (we kept white and green parts separate), cook just a few seconds, add the peas and sausage, and cook just till heated through. 

Now's the fun part. Dump the rice into the wok, toss it to mix, and use a spatula to spread the rice up against the sides and bottom of the wok, maximizing contact.

"Stir and fold once a minute" for 3 minutes, till the rice is hot and "a little charred in spots." Now pour on the sauce, toss it and continue the spreading, searing, tossing routine "until the rice is evenly colored and looks pleasantly dry." Now add the eggs back in, chopping them up and toss in the scallion greens. 

Ding-ding-ding! Finished!

Oh, man . . . heavenly! The egg is tender, and the dish is perfectly balanced, absolutely satisfying and fun. And it's big fun to make – I can't wait to do it again. Here's the recipe:

Next it'll be Mission Chinese Food's turn. Stay tuned for Fried Rice SMACKDOWN Round Two!

The Chinese lacquered roast chicken that changed my life

Now and then, a recipe comes along that feels truly life-changing. The short crust pastry for the lemon-raspberry tart I wrote about earlier this week was one for me. It wasn't a new recipe when I discovered it a few years ago – it had been right under my nose in the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook forever, but it was new to me when my friend Michalene pointed me to it. Today it's my go-to recipe for tart crust.

Now a Chinese lacquered roast chicken has changed my life.

There's nothing more delicious than roast chicken, and every cook should have a favorite recipe for it (at least one!) in his or her repertoire. For years, my go-to roast chicken has been the Judy bird – that is the Zuni Roast Chicken from Judy Rodger's The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It's the spectacularly flavorful, crisp-skinned chicken you have swooned over if you've ever gone to San Francisco's Zuni Cafe and ordered roast chicken for two. I will write about the Zuni chicken soon here on the blog and give the recipe, but the technique is basically this: Tuck fresh herbs under the chicken's skin, rub it all over with a lot of kosher salt, and let it sit in the fridge like that for one or two days. When you're ready to roast, wipe the chicken dry, heat a skillet on the stove, plop in the chicken, transfer it immediately to a very hot oven, and let it roast. No basting, but you  have to flip the chicken a couple times and fiddle with temperature. It always results in a fabulous bird.

When I don't plan ahead, I've used the Judy technique without the advance salting, and sometimes even without tucking herbs under the skin. It's still always excellent. I thought my abbreviated version was the simplest great roast chicken possible without a rotisserie.

So when I read about author Peter Meehan's roast chicken approach in the new cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, I sat up and took note. "We are advocates of a hot-and-lazy approach: one high temperature, one pan, one position, one great result." He talked about how seasoning a bird ahead of time and letting it sit uncovered in the fridge lets him have an easy dinner to pop in the oven anytime in the next three days, and now I was really sitting up straight. This man is sensible! When he wrote, "I started doing this after I fell under the spell of Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook," I dropped the book and ran out to buy a chicken. Invoking Judy's name confers instant credibility.

In the Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes cookbook, Meehan offers three roast chicken recipes. For me, it was a no-brainer: Lacquered Roast Chicken.

Irresistible, right?

Here's the deal. This is the easiest roast chicken recipe in the universe, and the result is magnificent. 

All you do is this: Paint a chicken with a mixture of half-honey, half soy sauce, then sprinkle it with salt. Let it sit uncovered in the fridge for one or two days, then roast it in a 400 degree F. oven for 50 minutes. That's it. No basting, no flipping, no lowering and raising temperatures. Let it rest 15 minutes, then carve it and here's what you get:

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I kid you not. The skin was wonderfully crisp, the meat super-flavorful and both dark meat and white meat were perfectly cooked. The white meat was moist, juicy and delicious as the dark meat. A miracle!  I can't wait to try it again.

Here's the recipe:

Want something smashing this weekend? Pick up a chicken tonight or tomorrow, paint it with lacquer and it'll be ready to pop in the oven Friday or Saturday evening. Or paint a bird with the lacquer on Sunday afternoon and leave it in the fridge so you can roast it for an easy weeknight dinner next week. And please let us know – in a comment here – how you love it!

Meanwhile, I told Michalene about it, and what she said glued me to the ceiling: "Have you tried it on a duck?" Oh, man.

NOTE: I later made the chicken again, and it required ten minutes longer to cook – about an hour total roasting time. When it's done, the skin will be mahogany, and the legs will wiggle freely at the joints "like you could almost tear them off," as Meehan writes. The internal temperature should be 165 degrees F at the thickest part of the breast and where the thigh meets the breast. Also, when you're preparing the bird, don't worry if some of the glaze falls off the bird – it doesn't matter. That's why we have foil lining the pan.

Ta-da! Presenting a custom-created, Cooks-Without-Borders reader-asked-for-it lemon-raspberry tart

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So I'm pretty excited about this: A reader who signed up for the Cooks Without Borders newsletter mentioned that she's craving a lemon-raspberry tart and would love a recipe. Hmm, I thought. That does sound awesome! Especially this time of year. 

I didn't know how I would make one, but I decided to give it my best. I knew what crust I'd use: Lindsey Shere's amazing short crust pastry from the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook. It's foolproof, easy to put together (even if it seems kind of crazy while you're doing it), doesn't require rolling pin skills (you press it in the pan with your fingers) and results in an incredibly tender and flaky crust. 

I thought it would be nice to marry a classic lemon tart – filled will lemon curd – with raspberries somehow. But simply garnishing a lemon curd tart with raw raspberries didn't sound great. I could create a raspberry tart with lemon pastry cream, but pastry cream is a pain in the neck; lemon curd is easier and more forgiving. 

I found inspiration in Shere's recipe for a simple raspberry tart. She has you brush a prebaked tart shell with melted, strained raspberry preserves, line the shell with rows of berries, bake it for only five minutes, and then glaze it. Why bake the berries only five minutes? "This brings out the perfume of the raspberries without softening and making them mushy," she writes. Bingo! I'd make a lemon-curd tart, pull it out of the oven five minutes early, add just a couple rows of berries (so as not to overwhelm the lemon flavor with too much berry flavor), bake it five minutes more, then glaze the berries.

It turned out great! Two pals and I nearly polished off the whole thing, in any case – after eating a giant dinner. My raspberries were sort of dull-tasting supermarket berries, but treating them this way heightened their flavor. 

Are you up for it? Here we go!

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First we make the crust. Don't be afraid: It's easier than you may think, and every time you make one it gets easier and easier. (Believe me: I'm not much of a baker, and I can manage it!). It's such a great crust that if there's one thing you want to learn dessert-wise, this crust might well be it. It's that good. 

To make it, whisk flour, salt and sugar together in a bowl, add sliced chilled butter and work in the butter with your fingers or a pastry blender until it looks like this:

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Add vanilla and water, gather it into a ball, let it rest 30 minutes, then use your fingers to press it into a tart pan. It may look at first like you won't have nearly enough dough to cover the pan, but you do – just keep pushing it around with your fingers until you have an even layer covering the bottom and sides.

Stick it in the freezer for a half an hour, then it's ready to bake: in a 375 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until it's golden-brown and baked through. Got it? Here's the recipe:

Now let's make the lemon curd. Again, this may sound scary, but it comes together really nicely – and it has beautiful, bright lemon flavor.

Basically you cook eggs, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, milk and butter – stirring constantly – over low to medium heat until the mixture thickens to the consistency of a thick cream. Let it rest five minutes, give it a quick whisk, then chill it. Once it has cooled down, pour it into the baked tart shell.

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Bake it in a 375 degree oven for 25 minutes, pull it out (leaving the oven on), add a couple of rows of berries, and pop the tart back in the oven for 5 minutes longer. Remove it from the oven, melt some strained raspberry preserves, stir in a little kirsch, and glaze the berries. Tart accompli! Shall we do this? Here's the recipe. Please let us know in a comment if you plan to try it – and if you do, how it turns out!

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Flavors of Spain and Morocco on a most unusual New Year's Eve

It has been a difficult and even terrifying holiday season – thanks to several tornadoes that tore through North Texas the day after Christmas – for many of our neighbors and friends around Dallas, where we live. 

For my friend and colleague Seema Yasmin, her husband Emmanuel, and Seema's mom, Yasmin Halima, it was truly an ordeal, as their house was completely destroyed by a tornado. Emmanuel and Yasmin, unable to get to the safest part of the house, huddled in front of the refrigerator, clinging to Seema and Emmanuel's two-year-old pit bull, Lily, as their kitchen was hit. Seema, a medical doctor-turned-journalist who specializes in infectious diseases, was away in Liberia, reporting on survivors of the ebola epidemic there, when she had news of the disaster. She cut short her trip and arrived back in Dallas – but not home; that was gone – four days later. Emmanuel, Yasmin and Lily were staying in a hotel. 

My husband Thierry and I had planned to spend a quiet evening at home for New Year's Eve, so we invited them over New Year's Eve dinner. What to cook for friends who've been through (and are going through) such a traumatic experience? Seema and Yasmin don't eat meat unless it's halal; "consider us piscatarians," says Seema. When I mentioned the restriction to Thierry, he had one gleeful suggestion: paella! 

Perfect. We'd start with tapas and a bottle of Cava (for those who would partake). I whipped out my favorite Spanish cookbook – Anya von Bremzen's 2006 volume, The New Spanish Table – for tapas ideas. For a first course, maybe I'd whip up something involving piquillo peppers, tuna and allioli – lemony, super-garlicky Spanish mayonnaise, which is also great stirred into seafood paella. For a sweet, I turned south, reaching for a lovely dessert of poached pears and prunes scented with bay leaf and orange from Paula Wolfert's The Food of Morocco.

I found some beautiful organic red Bartletts at Whole Foods, with a couple days during which I could let them ripen in a paper bag. I poached them New Year's Eve morning. It's a great dessert for a dinner party, as it can be made completely in advance. Wolfert's recipe calls for 12 prunes, but I say the more the merrier and double them; they're so good with the pears – which I planned to serve with some thin almond crisps I picked up at the store.

For tapas, I settled on Sevillian marinated carrots – zanahorias aliñadas – that I'd set out with fleshy, green Castelvetrano olives and smoked almonds. Then we'd have a passed tapa inspired by one I saw in Anya's book: slow-scrambed eggs with wild mushrooms (I was hoping to find some chanterelles), to be served in brown egg shells. I took the eggs in a more French direction, using butter (lots!) rather than olive oil and shallots rather than garlic, as we had so much garlic going on in the paella, carrots and allioli. I couldn't find chanterelles, so instead I snapped up some beautiful cultivated beech mushrooms and small, fresh shiitakes.

Just as Seema and company rang the doorbell, blam!!! I dropped a glass bowl filled with eggs that I was pulling from the fridge. Eggs and broken glass went flying all over the kitchen and beyond – landing in the dining room, the living room, the breakfast nook. Brilliant! Thierry scrambled (hah!) to clean it all up (bless his heart!) as I welcomed our friends, apologizing for the chaos and putting up a fence of chairs to keep Lily from stepping on broken glass in the kitchen. 

Later, as we sat at dinner, Emmanuel and Yasmin – still pretty shellshocked – recounted their terrifying ordeal; they didn't have time to get to a safe room, which was probably a good thing, as the room they thought safest was bisected by a garage door torn from its hinges. Emmanuel was barefoot when the tornado hit, and there was broken glass everywhere; he stepped on a nail as they were walking the streets looking for help. He was carrying Lily at the time, all 65-pounds of her. Yasmin had shards of glass hit her face.

We knew it wouldn't exactly be an evening of revelry, considering all they been through and all they had lost, but I was hoping – with food cooked with love, and good cheer and the warmth of a fire in the fireplace – to make their holiday just a little bit less dreadful.

Lily, a sweet creature who is in training to be a therapy dog, was quite nervous, but they had brought her bed – which we set up in the dining room so she could be next to us. Once she settled in, we broke out the tapas. While everyone nibbled on the carrots – garlicky, lemony and fragrant with herbs – and the olives and nuts, I put the finishing touches on the eggs, scrambling them slowly with sautéed mushrooms in butter till they were custardy. (Fortunately I had eggs to spare!) I had just the thing for serving them: a fabulous ceramic egg carton my friend Michalene brought me as a gift from South Africa a few years ago.

Seema seemed to melt."Oooh," she said when I brought the egg carton to the table and offered her one. "I love anything with eggs." There were only five of us and half a dozen eggs, but it wasn't hard to find a taker for the last one.

Next came the peppers with tuna. I wasn't able to find piquillos – those slender, pointed Spanish red peppers with a lovely bite you can buy (if you're lucky) in a jar already roasted. Instead I found jars of whole roasted Spanish Morron peppers. Not as nice as the piquillos, whose shape is perfect for filling. I spooned some allioli onto of our salad plates, set a pepper on each and tucked in fillets of fancy tuna I'd bought in jars, packed in olive oil, into the peppers. The combo was actually pretty good – especially with some crusty baguette to sop up the extra allioli. 

Seafood paella was the main event, of course. Our recipe is based on the one from Anya's book, though I've tweaked it over the years. This time I found some beautiful baby octopuses to use in place of the squid Anya's recipe calls for. About 20 minutes before our friends arrived, I'd started cooking the paella, knowing I could prepare it up to a certain point, then leave it off-heat on the stove. I popped it into the hot oven, letting it bake while we had the tapas, and pulling it out to rest while we had the peppers and tuna. 

Some red wine – Garnacha from Spain (for a few of us) – those poached pears and prunes, and before midnight, the exhausted trio (um, woof! quartet) was ready to head back to their hotel. But not without an invitation to come back soon and cook: Yasmin, who was born in India, has lived in South Africa – where she worked for an international non-profit aid organization – and has roots in Burma, is already missing the kitchen.