Make ahead

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How to be blown away by your own gazpacho

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If you cook a lot, you've probably made gazpacho before. Maybe you've even made it dozens of times. But how often has it blown you away?

Just as I thought.

And just as we're heading into prime tomato season, it seems the right time to give the perennially popular cold soup – whose birthplace is southern Spain – a fresh look. As I wrote in a story that snagged me a James Beard Journalism Award some years ago, the soup's roots go back a long way: It was born sometime between the 7th and 13th centuries (depending on who you ask). In any case, it pretty clearly predates the arrival of tomatoes in Europe, which may come as a surprise to anyone who knows gazpacho as a cold tomato soup with cucumbers and peppers thrown in. In fact, gazpacho was originally a cold soup of pounded bread, garlic and salt with olive oil and vinegar pounded in. Some of those ingredients are often forgotten by modern American cooks, which is one of the many reasons gazpacho so often falls flat. Bread is essential for body, garlic for a little bite and vinegar for zing; a olive oil adds silkiness and its own fruity personality. 

In the summertime, when the weather's hot and tomatoes are bursting with flavor, gazpacho is one of my favorite things to make and eat. 

I approach it one of two ways. If I want a quick-as-possible version, I soak bread in sherry vinegar, toss it in the food processor with chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, a red bell pepper, a little water, garlic, salt and a pinch of red pepper, give it a whirl and serve it right away with a couple of ice cubes in the bowl. Chopped cucumber, peppers and maybe scallions go on top as garnishes. It's pretty damn good.

Gazpacho garnishes tight.jpg

 

But if I want a version that's absolutely stunning, I take just a couple of extra steps – peeling and seeding the tomatoes, straining the intensely-flavored juice that runs out of them and adding that to the sherry vinegar-soaking bread. I use a vegetable peeler to peel the red bell pepper. And after I purée the soup in the food processor, I give it a whirl with an immersion blender, to make it super-smooth and silky. The few minutes extra results in a gazpacho that's out-of-this-world elegant. 

A great Andalusian gazpacho depends on two things: ripe tomatoes with fabulous flavor, and the right balance of ingredients – including the vinegar and olive oil. If you get your hands on great tomatoes and use them in this recipe, I'm pretty sure you'll be blown away: 

Either way, I generally use the same or garnishes. If I make the super-smooth version, I'll take more care by dicing them finely rather then chopping them in a hurry – and sometimes add radishes and/or avocados. I can't think of a more stunning vegan summertime starter.

You can also follow the lead of chefs, and get all creative with the garnishes. Want to go super-splashy, maybe for a special dinner party? Top each bowl with a spoonful of lump crabmeat or diced cooked shrimp (or boiled tiny bay shrimp), plus some diced ripe avocado and a few pretty sprigs of frisée.

Whether you go the super-smooth route or the quicker route, I think you'll love it. Go ahead: Give it a whirl! 

 RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

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Summer dessert slam-dunk: Make this dazzling (and fool-proof!) stone-fruit tart

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After many a summer afternoon spent pitting peaches, slicing fruit, testing crusts and going back to the drawing board, I've finally got it: a stone fruit tart that's more than just beautiful. This one has that elusive quality we're all about at Cooks Without Borders: It's crazy good.

There are definitely crusts that are quicker to put together, but this one – my go-to short crust, adapted from Lindsey Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts – is preternaturally tender and buttery. Seriously, you won't believe how great it is. Though it takes some time (you'll want to start it in the morning, or the day before), there's not a lot of work involved, it's all about resting and chilling the dough. Best of all, it's easy and fool-proof: no rolling involved; you just press it into the tart pan.

Here's how easy it is: Combine flour, salt, lemon zest and a touch of sugar. Add butter, cut into pieces, and work the butter in with your fingers till it looks like this. Sprinkle on a tablespoon of water mixed with half a teaspoon of vanilla, work that in, gather it in a ball, wrap it in plastic, and chill it half an hour.

Now flatten the ball, set it in the tart pan, and use your fingers and palms to flatten it completely and press it into the corners. Keeping flattening and pressing, moving the dough around with your palms and fingers, until it evenly covers the pan. If it seems like it won't work, or it's not enough dough, or whatever, don't worry – it will work. When you're done it will look like this. Poke some holes it with a fork (that's called "docking" the crust, so bubbles don't form under it as it bakes), cover it with foil and stick it in the freezer half an hour or overnight. 

Bake it in a 375 degree oven till it's golden brown. Let it cool slightly, and you're ready to fill it.

Now the real fun begins. Spoon some preserves on the bottom of the crust: peach, apricot or plum, according to your taste and the stone fruit you're using, and spread it around. Gather your stone fruit: I used nectarines, black plums and apricots for this one. Peaches are great too, of course. If you can't decide between peaches and nectarines, consider that nectarines don't have to be peeled (neither do plums or apricots). Pit then and slice them into six or eight wedges each, depending on the size of the fruit. I used medium-small nectarines, and cut them each into six wedges; same for the apricots. 

Arrange the slices, starting with the outer edge of the tart, around the periphery, skin-side down, making them stand up against the edge of the crust as vertically as you can (which may be not very). 

Make another row, using a different fruit if you like (or the same one – whatever, it's your tart!). Use that second row to nudge the first row up vertically. I used nectarines on the outside row, then plums. Then do another inside that one: I used apricots. Then another, then fill in the middle, just standing them up any which way. 

Drizzle melted butter over the fruit, sprinkle it with sugar, then sprinkle it with thyme leaves, if you like. I love that, but if you don't like the idea of herbs on your fruit, you can just leave it off – or add a different kind of depth by cooking the butter before drizzling until it's browned and nutty-tasting. A note about the sugar: I only used a tablespoon, resulting in a tart with bright fruit flavor. It was just right for me, but I wondered if it was on the tart side for others. My friends and Thierry – who has a serious sweet tooth – said it was just right for them; they wouldn't want more sugar. If you like things on the sweeter side, use 1 1/2 or 2 tablespoons.

Into the oven it goes; half an hour later it comes out.

Pretty, ain't she? You can serve it a little warm, or completely cooled; it's great for entertaining, as you can make it in the morning, if you like, and let it sit all day. Serve it just like that, naked, or with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or maybe a dollop of lightly sweetened crème fraîche.

Happy summer.

 

 

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Did someone say 'butterflied leg of lamb'? Fire up the grill for a dreamy Mediterranean dinner

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Border-free cooks, this may be the perfect summer dinner – especially if you're in the mood for Mediterranean flavors. Grilled butterflied leg of lamb, with asparagus spears thrown over the coals at the same time. A couple of fabulous salads to start, from the James Beard Award-winning cookbook Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. A gorgeous tart to make the most of sweet-and-ripe summer stone fruit. 

It's ideal for laid-back entertaining (eat outside!) as nearly everything can be done ahead. 

Friends were coming over last night, and I knew we'd want to relax and hang out, maybe have some nibbles before dinner and a glass or three of rosé before I lighted the charcoal on my old-fashioned Weber. A butterflied leg of lamb on the grill sounded about the right speed; I've been craving summer's char. 

Flipping through Zahav, I happened upon a couple of salads that spoke to me.

The first was quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh. Irresistible, right? So smart of chef Michael Solomonov (who wrote the book with Steven Cook) to swap quinoa for the traditional bulgur wheat, and toss in peas to play with the mint. No need to use fresh peas when frozen ones (so stress-free) do just fine. 

The dish was as wonderful as I'd hoped – and then some.  I'm going to make it again, pronto. The recipe serves 4 to 6, but next time I'll probably double it so I have some left over for the next day. So good! I can't wait for you to try it and tell me what you think.

I served that as a first course before the lamb, but first we had nibbles: some marinated gigante beans I found at the olive bar at Whole Foods (speared with toothpicks – crazy, right?); spicy pickled okra (also from the olive bar); roasted salted cashews; and Castelvetrano olives (my faves).

But the star nibble was charred eggplant salad from the Zahav cookbook. To make it, you char halved eggplants on a grill or stovetop grill – I used the cast-iron grill that fits right on my stovetop – cut-side down, until the flesh is "like pudding" in texture. It took a long time – about 45 minutes. Alternatively, you can do it under a broiler (cut-side up). Scoop out the flesh (discarding the charred exterior), and use a spoon to beat it to creaminess with minced raw garlic and olive oil; then you stir in salt. The recipe called for topping it with half a cup of chopped fresh parsley, but that turned out to be too much; I cut it down to a quarter cup, stirring half of it into the salad and using the rest as garnish on top – just right.

It was pretty delicious – the proportions were otherwise perfect – and I served it with triangles of whole-wheat pita bread toasted in the oven. I felt it would be even better with a zing of acid, so I squeeze in half a lemon, and it went from delicious to dreamy. 

If you own the cookbook, you might notice that the photo with the eggplant salad recipe is more reddish in color than mine turned out, flecked with something that looks like small bits of roasted red pepper or tomato. Hmmm. Very intriguing. There is a variation offered: adding a cup of tehina sauce turns the salad into baba ganoush (eager to try!). But no other variation is mentioned. It seems like a recipe ripe for improvisation. 

The timing on this dinner is very easy, as you can made the eggplant salad, tabbouleh and dessert in advance, letting the lamb bask lazily in its marinade (olive oil, red wine vinegar, crushed garlic, chopped mint and cilantro, salt and pepper). Rather than keeping the lamb tied up after it's bones have been removed, you unroll it so it's flattish – that way it absorbs more marinade, cooks more quickly and gets more charred surface. The marinade, meanwhile, is one you can play with, depending on the flavors you want – maybe rosemary and/or thyme instead of mint and cilantro, or more or less garlic, maybe Aleppo pepper or cayenne rather than black pepper. You get the idea. You can marinate it for a couple of hours, or overnight.

Once you're ready to grill and the coals are hot, wipe the marinade off the meat (be sure to bring the meat to room temp for about an hour first) and spread the lamb flat on the grill. Toss some asparagus spears in a little olive oil and salt and throw them on the grill next to the lamb after the lamb has been on there two or three minutes. Keep the grill covered to prevent flare-ups, and flip the meat after 6 or 8 minutes. You'll want to keep an eye on, as it the cooking time can range from 12 to about 22 minutes total depending on how hot the coals are, the size of the cut and how done you like it. If you're going for medium-rare, aim for an internal temperature of about 130. But don't worry if it goes past that – even if it's done to medium it's really good. 

Got it? Here's the recipe:

Once it's done, be sure to let it rest for at least 10 minutes, so it's as juicy and tender as can be. Go ahead and serve the tabbouleh as a first course (or whatever you've dreamed up – the tabbouleh is also really good with the lamb!). By the time you're done, the lamb will have rested long enough. Slice it (across the grain), laying the slices on a platter and pouring over them any juices that have collected on the plate as it rested.  Oh, man – you are in for a treat! Serve it with the asparagus. If you're tired of asparagus, you could just as well have done zucchinis quartered lengthwise on the grill – that would be great with it, too.

Stone fruit tart with thyme

"We should have started with this!" That's usually Thierry's refrain come dessert-time; he has a sweet tooth. I was really, really happy with the way this tart – which starred nectarines, black plums and apricots – turned out.

OK. I'm not going to go on and on about the tart; instead I'll tell you more about it in a separate post. For now, here's the recipe:

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Thrill of the chill: Poached arctic char with dill sauce tastes like summer in Scandinavia

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Oh, wait – it's not summer yet? It's certainly heating up! And when the going gets hot, Scandinavian-style cold poached salmon makes a delicious centerpiece for a dreamy chilled dinner or lunch.

Traditionally, this is done with a whole salmon – and that's fantastic for feeding a crowd. But what if you just want to do a salmon fillet? What if it's just dinner for two? Or what if you go to the fish counter and beautiful arctic char fillets are on sale? 

Grab that fillet and get ready to poach. It's so easy and yield such great results that if you've never done it before, you'll wonder where the technique has been all your life.

 

Lay the fillet skin-side down in a smallish roasting pan (or a fish poacher, if you happen to have one, which I don't). Cover it with cold water and add enough salt to make it taste like the sea. You don't need to add other flavorings to the water, as the both char and salmon have enough lovely flavor on their own; char's flavor is a little more delicate. Bring the water to a simmer, turn off the heat and let the fish sit in the hot water for 25 minutes. Transfer it to a platter and chill it. That's it. Garnish it with slices of lemon and sprigs of dill, if you like. 

You probably don't even need a recipe, but here it is:

A 1 1/4 pound fillet serves two or three; poach two fillets if you want to serve four to six. 

Serve it with a mustardy fresh dill sauce, and asparagus and boiled red potatoes – both are which delicious if they happen to crash into that dill sauce. I nearly forgot: cold cucumber salad's great with it, too!

Here's how to make the cucumber salad: 

And the dill sauce . . . 

And here's the best part. Make the fish and the dill sauce (and cucumber salad, if you're doing that...) in the morning, or the day before. Then you just pull 'em out of the fridge and serve. How's that for chill?

 

 

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Say hello to a super easy (and crazy good!) berry and peach crisp

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In case you haven't noticed, I love love love fruit desserts.

A few days ago I found myself in possession of a fridge drawer full of ripe peaches – placed in chilly purgatory against my better instincts. I get so excited during the season that I overbuy (how is it possible that I'm the only one in the house who snacks on them?), and in Texas almost-summer, they go from ripe to fuggedaboudit in no time flat. So into the fridge they went . . . and joined an embarrassment of blackberries and raspberries. 

Peaches . . . blackberries . . . raspberries . . . hey, wait a minute. Sounds like a crisp just waiting to happen! 

The simple topping on this one, inspired by one I've made a million times from Lindsey Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts, is something every fruit-dessert-lover should have in his or her repertoire. Nothing more than flour, brown and white sugar, salt and a pinch of cinnamon with some slightly softened butter worked in with your fingers and toasted almond slivers added at the end, it puts just the right not-too-sweet crunch on top of luscious fruit. Years ago something gave me the idea (David Lebovitz's blog maybe?) that you can double the amount of crisp and freeze half of it, so if a windfall of ripe peaches or nectarines comes your way, you can quickly achieve a repeat performance. Brilliant.

So, what to do with the fruit? Peel and pit the peaches (about two pounds) and slice 'em into a bowl. Rinse a few baskets of berries (blackberries, or a combo of blackberries and raspberries) and add them to the peaches. Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour and two tablespoons of sugar on the fruit, toss it gently, and turn it into a baking dish. Smooth out the top a little, then distribute the topping over all. Pop it in an 375 degree oven for about 35 minutes, et voilà. The juices, peach and berry wonderfulness mingled together – concentrated and syrupy – bubble up through the crust here and there as it bakes.

Sometimes I serve it warm with vanilla ice cream. Sometimes I whisk some crème fraîche into whipped cream and serve it with a dollop of that. This time I just made good old fashioned whipped cream (lightly sweetened, with a glug of vanilla) and plopped that on each slice.

It was so good, all that juicy fruit bursting with flavor topped by that miraculous layer of brown and buttery crispness, that we nearly wept. 

No one stopped at one piece.

Perhaps you'd like the recipe?

 

 

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Celebrated Dallas restaurateur Monica Greene shares a favorite dish from her Mexico City childhood: ropa vieja

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Monica Greene in the Cooks Without Borders kitchen 

Most Texans see a brisket and think: barbecue. Monica Greene, the legendary Dallas restaurateur, sees a brisket and thinks: ropa vieja.

Everyone in town knows Monica, who visited Cooks Without Borders headquarters (my kitchen!) recently as an honored guest cook. She's no longer in the business; her last (and short-lived) restaurant – Monica's Nueva Cocina – closed in 2012.  Nevertheless, her impact on Dallas' vibrant modern Mexican cooking culture is undeniable and indelible. A pioneer of the movement, she and chef Joanne Bondy introduced the city to dishes like cabrito tacos with apple-plum butter and veal shortribs braised in mole rojo when they opened their ground-breaking restaurant Ciudad in 2000. Her long-running Deep Ellum place Monica's Aca y Alla introduced a generation of Dallasites to the joys of Mexican eating.

What her fans might not know is that Monica, who grew up in Mexico City, also loves to cook.

"Cooking is my favorite thing in the world," she tells me as she slices onions, chops carrots and celery, fills my giant stockpot with water. She's here to make ropa vieja, a shredded cold beef salad that evokes her Mexico City childhood. 

Warm and gregarious as she is, she established her reputation as the face of her restaurants, running dining rooms. "From the very beginning, people told me 'you stay up front.' So when I opened my restaurant, I was a door person. But whenever I had a chance, I'd go work in the kitchen."

The first order of business is getting the brisket trimmed and simmering: It will need nearly three hours to cook to tenderness. Once Monica cuts it in half and drops it into the stockpot of simmering onions, carrots, celery, garlic, herbs and cumin seeds, we take our time and put together all the components of the salad. And yes, we talk – and talk and talk.

She tells me about her childhood in Mexico City, where she was the seventh of eight children: four boys and four girls. Their mother died when she was three, but she has fond memories of gathering with her siblings every evening around the big butcher block in the center of the family kitchen, where their cook would prepare dinner. All eight kids, and inevitably their friends as well.

"Every once in a while," she says, "you got to choose what we had. I wanted to eat two dishes. One was a chicken breast wrapped in an apple. I've never seen it anywhere else in my entire life. You boil the apple to take off the skin, wrap a pounded chicken breast around it and roast it. The other was ropa vieja." 

The dish, which translates as "old clothes,"takes a different form than the well-known Cuban version, in which the braised shredded beef is served warm, like a stew. Monica's Mexico City iteration is a cold salad.  "In the north, they pan-sear and brown and seal the meat, then put it in the oven." In the south, you boil it; the beef serves as a vehicle to the other flavors: pickled onions and tomatoes and avocado and cilantro. "It’s more of a symphony."

Monica slices nopal – a cactus paddle – before boiling it.

She talks, too, over the course of an afternoon – the kind of lazy, cooking afternoon I love – about some of the challenges she has faced in her life. How hard it was to find a job after making the transition from Eduardo Greene more than 20 years ago to Monica Greene, at a time when people didn't know what to make of such an evolution. At that point she had become a beautiful woman (she shows me photos on her phone) and she felt like a woman, but the way she looked and felt didn't match the name on her drivers' license or social security card. 

Now she's reinventing herself once again, taking time off to travel – she has just returned from Mexico (where she reconnected with one of her brothers) and then Bali. She's in Dallas for a week, spending as much time as possible with her grandchildren, and then she's off to her second home, in Aspen, Colorado for a month – or five.  "I realized I'd been working 41 years," she says, "and I wanted to take a sabbatical and pursue my passions. I have to travel – before there's a time I cannot walk up the pyramid." 

She's also writing. "I took a couple of classes at the Aspen Writers Foundation," she tells me. "They were workshops, basically. And I found I have a lot of passion for it." One project is a Mexican cookbook. "I've been working on it for two years." She's also working on a children's book ("I'm an illustrator also") and a book of fiction. "It's partly the story of my life," she says. "I think when most writers write fiction, they're writing about themselves."

Between anecdotes and bons mots, memories of her aging father succumbing to Alzheimer's and a fabulous reunion with a cherished brother, everything starts to come together for the salad. Rounds of purple-edged Bermuda onions turn to tangy pickles, perfumed with allspice and kicked with habanero chile.  A cactus paddle is declawed, sliced, boiled till it taste like desert green beans. Eggs are boiled ("We're going to overcook them a little," she says, "because we're going to do the yolks in powder and the whites in strips.") Lime juice, jalapeño, vinegar, oil and a whole lot of cilantro get whirred up into a dressing that will pull all the flavors together. Rosé is poured, with predictions of tequila flowing in the near future.

"I don't use technique," she says; "I use tradition." Still, it's fun watching her slice Roma tomatoes, using her knife to liberate their hearts full of sees and coax them into flat obedience on the cutting board, ready to be sliced into even strips. "Yes, I can cut fast, but that's like making love too fast."

 Monica pushes the egg yolks through a strainer, crumbles queso fresco, as I slice avocados to her specs. Neighbors show up, hungry and excited. Monica tosses the ropa vieja, then arranges it on a platter. 

It's got everything: richness, depth, wonderful tang, the prodigious perfume of cilantro. You can serve it just like that, Monica says, or spoon some onto round, fried tostadas for some crunch. 

Dinner is just as relaxed as the cooking was. "It's even better with tequila," Monica suggests, and wow! She has brought a bottle of Casa Dragones. Out come the shot glasses, but this is special, for sipping.

She's right. Tequila and ropa vieja is a match made in heaven. 

Her gift to you: This recipe. Hope for leftovers, but don't expect them.

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A million delicious ways to put asparagus on your springtime table (including some new ones!)

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Goodbye, Brussels sprouts. Hello, asparagus – springtime's A-list vegetable.

Of course fava beans, English peas and artichokes rock the season as well, but asparagus stands apart, as it's so abundant and easy to get along with. If asparagus were as expensive as it was once upon a time, we'd likely celebrate it as a luxury, up there with morels and ramps and fiddlehead ferns. But it's not – which is why it finds a starring role on my table several times a week when it's in season.

There are a million delicious things you can do with it, from steaming to roasting to grilling to braising, sautéeing or stir-frying – even shaving the stalks with a peeler and adding them raw to a salad.

Most traditional is steaming it – in one of those upright baskets. I've never owned one; instead I trim the ends, use a vegetable peeler to peel the stalks halfway up or more, lay them flat in a wide pan and simmer them in salted water. After draining the stalks well, you can dress them in butter and serve them warm or send them to the table with a fluffy, lemony hollandaise. Or dress them in vinaigrette (that's lovely served warm, at room temp or chilled). Or keep them naked, chill 'em and serve with mayo. 

Easiest is roasting asparagus. A turn in the oven gives it a completely different character, no less delicious. Just snap off the tough bottoms or trim them with a knife, lay them on a baking sheet with a teaspoon or so of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, roll the stalks around to coat them, and roast for 17 minutes (for stalks of medium thickness) at 400 degrees F.

Grilling is nearly as easy: Brush the stalks or roll them around in a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt, toss them on the grill or a hot grill pan and cook until they're just tender.

One mistake people (including home cooks and many a restaurant) often make: undercooking them. They shouldn't be crunchy; they need to be tender. How to know when they're done? Use tongs to lift them up by the middle of the stalk. When they're done, they'll droop a bit on either side. 

Roasted asparagus and radishes from Steven Satterfield's Root to Leaf cookbook

Last spring I fell in love with Steven Satterfield's recipe for roasted asparagus with green garlic and radishes, from his then-just-published cookbook Root to Leaf: A Southern Chef Cooks Through the Seasons. I haven't been able to find green garlic where I live in North Texas, so used regular garlic, Satterfield's suggested substitution. Simple and fabulous, the dish instantly became a regular player in my spring repertoire. Best of all, it's so easy to put together you don't even really need the recipe: Just cut the asparagus into 1 1/2-inch lengths, cut the radishes into quarters and toss both in a bowl with a little olive oil, finely chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet, baking dish or roasting pan and roast in a 400 degree oven till they're just tender, about 15 minutes. Want more specifics? Here's the adapted recipe:

Last weekend I fell in love again: With a technique for braising asparagus in butter I gleaned from a recent story and recipe in the New York Times by David Tanis. 

Butter-braised asparagus with herbs

The technique is brilliant: Place asparagus spears flat in a pan with a good deal of butter and a little water, salt and pepper; cover the pan and cook till the asparagus is just tender. Remove the asparagus and reduce the cooking liquid to nice sauce. Tanis adds lemon zest, lemon juice and chopped herbs, then garnishes the dish with herb leaves. It was super, though I had to tweak the recipe a bit (mine needed more liquid and longer in the pan; I added more water and a little more butter. I'll add an adapted recipe here once have time to retest it (watch this space!). In any case, butter-braising gives the asparagus a rich and luxurious silkiness and this too will become a go-to treatment chez moi. I love the lemon and herb flavors with it, but it should be great without them, too.

Meanwhile, in case you're wondering about the photo that leads off this post, that's a salad of shaved raw asparagus, sautéed asparagus and black lentils from Michael Anthony's V is for Vegetables, which just won a James Beard Foundation Book Award in the category of Vegetable Focused and Vegetarian. Again, this recipe needed some adjustments (more acid in the dressing, for one thing), but it's pretty swell, so I'll tweak and provide an adaptation soon! (I was wowed last fall by Anthony's cooking at Untitled at the Whitney Museum in New York City, so was excited to cook from his book). 

Asparagus with new-wave gribiche

Are you still with me? I want you to have all these asparagus ideas and recipes in one place. Another great way to serve asparagus is with sauce gribiche, whether the new-wave version shown in the photo above, or a slightly more traditional one. Just simmer the stalks in salted water, roast or grill them (as explained earlier in this post), and dress with the gribiche of your choice. Here's the new-wave gribiche recipe:

And here's an adaptation of Judy Rodger's four-minute egg gribiche from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: 

Just one more direction, and it's a good one: Stir-fry asparagus Chinese-style. I wrote about this version adapted from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes in mid-February, when springtime was still a dream away.

I know you want the recipe. Here you go:

Now let's get cooking!

 

 

 

 

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Artichoke vinaigrette: an easy, elegant, French (and vegan! and healthy! and make-ahead!) appetizer

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Growing up in California, I took fresh artichokes for granted. After all, Castroville – the town that bills itself as "the artichoke capital of the world" – is right there in the central coastal part of the state, not far from Monterey. I used to love stopping there on road trips and seeing the giant concrete artichoke sculpture that greets you at the edge of town.

In the spring and summertime, my mom always steamed artichokes and served them as an appetizer with melted butter to dip the leaves in. I love them even more dipped in mayo, or a mustardy red wine vinaigrette. Wylie loves it with balsamic vinaigrette.

A classic French way to serve artichokes is  à la vinaigrette – that is, actually dressed in the vinaigrette; shallot vinaigrette suits them particularly well. Pouring the sauce over them while they're still warm lets the vinaigrette penetrate the leaves – no additional dipping sauce required. An artichoke vinaigrette is also pretty beautiful. It's great as a sit-down starter at a dinner party or as a sharable treat before the dinner gets started. 

A few years ago, I served boiled artichokes as an appetizer to new friends in Texas, and was surprised that they found them exotic. "How do you eat them?" they asked. We showed them how to pull off a leaf, dip it in sauce, scrape off the meaty part (closest to the crown) with your teeth and discard the rest of the leaf. When all the leaves are gone and only the thin, prickly ones at the heart remain, you pull those off, scrape the fuzz off the crown with a spoon, and eat the heart  – the prize! – which is also delicious dipped in mayo or vinaigrette.

 

Many cooks boil artichokes rather than steaming them. I've prepared them both ways, and find that boiling them in plenty of salted water gives them the best texture. Acidulating the water with lemon juice (as some cooks do to prevent discoloration) is unnecessary; I find the results to be the same with unacidulated water. Instead, after I trim them, I simply rub the cut surfaces with half a lemon.

For a party of four to eight, I often make two artichokes and serve it with another app or two. For a dinner party, you can serve one per person, or for a more casual dinner, one for every two to share.

So, how to trim them? You can get all fancy, and remove the chokes if you want to, but I usually don't. 

Once you do it once or twice, it's easy. Using a sharp serrated knife, slice off the stem, creating a flat surface for the artichoke to rest on. Then slice off the top straight across – removing the tops of the inner few rows of leaves. Next use your fingers to break off the tough row or two of small leaves around the bottom.

 

Finally, use kitchen scissors to snip off any remaining leaf tips (be careful – there's a prickle at the top of each). Rub the cut surfaces with half a lemon and they're ready to cook.

Boil them in lots of salted water in a covered pot. Don't worry if they bob up to the top; flip them over with a spoon once or twice so they cook evenly. While they're cooking, whisk together the vinaigrette. 

Drain the artichokes upside down, then dress them with the vinaigrette. Voilá. Easy, chic, delicious and healthy. And there are a couple of bonuses: You can serve them warm, or make them ahead, serving them chilled or at room temperature. And . . . they're vegan!

Ready to try? Here you go!

 

 

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Taco party! Quick and snazzy ways to dress up freshly made corn tortillas

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Now that you know how to make wonderful hand-made corn tortillas (just mix masa harina with water, and you're nearly there!), you'll want to wrap them around everything in sight. 

If you feel like really stretching out and cooking, you might prepare a special taco centerpiece, like lamb barbacoa or carnitas.

But maybe you want to go super-easy. Have a stress-free taco party! Here are some ideas for fillings:

•Pick up a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket 

•Stop by your favorite barbecue joint and buy some sliced brisket or pulled pork 

•Use that leftover steak in the fridge: Toss it in a hot skillet or grill pan, then slice it in medium-rare strips, for bifstek tacos. They're great dressed with chopped onion, cilantro and any kind of salsa.

•Boil up some pinto beans for vegetarian tacos. Just soak beans overnight, drain, cover with water, toss in half a peeled onion (or a whole one), a couple cloves of unpeeled garlic, fresh thyme or oregano (optional), dried or fresh bay leaves (optional). Bring to a boil, lower heat then simmer till they're tender. Add salt to taste when they're done.

•Pick up some shelled and deveined shrimp from the supermarket and toss them on the grill or grill-pan. Or grill fish fillets.

•Have some leftover confit duck legs burning a hole in your fridge? (Ha!) They make great tacos. I haven't tried them with salsa verde, but I'm thinking it would be great. Or you could go sweet and add a dab of chutney and some chopped cilantro.

•When Thanksgiving rolls around, consider leftover turkey tacos

•Leftover braised short ribs make great tacos,, too. So do leftover stews (beef, pork, lamb, veal, chicken), pot roast, chops, leg of lamb

 

Really, your imagination is the limit. In their book Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman have recipes for smoked salmon tacos (with cucumbers, cream cheese and lime) and pastrami tacos (with pickled mustard seeds and pickled cabbage).

More tips:

•Have a couple of good salsas on hand, like a roasted salsa verde (easy to make), a store-bought salsa roja or homemade pico de gallo (diced onion and tomato, chopped cilantro, minced serrano or jalapeño chile, a little salt, a big squeeze or three of lime). If you're feeling more ambitious, try Stupak's amazing salsa borracha. 

 

•Set out bowls of any or all of the following: lime wedges, guacamole, crumbled queso fresco, sliced avocado, cilantro leaves, sliced radishes, chopped olives, chopped white onion, sliced scallions, sliced or diced cucumber

Oh, one more thing: Do yourself a favor and hand your hands on one of these inexpensive ($8 to $12) insulated fabric taco warmers. Stupak and Rothman tested every type out there, and concluded these work the best. I have to agree: Mine kept our tortillas warm for at least an hour. Maybe they would have stayed warm longer; I don't know – we ate them all too fast. They're easy to find online; I lucked out when my generous friends Keven and Georges gave me one as a gift last weekend.

 

OK, then – let's invite some friends and get that tortilla press going! 

 

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Crash course in Mexican cooking: lamb barbacoa tacos

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Here's a project to attempt if you're in the mood for a major cooking endeavor. It involves some advance planning – scouting ingredients, a day or so of advance prep, a long, slow roast (three hours) and an hour letting the meat rest. You'll make a serious salsa, for which you'll roast dried chiles, spiked with mezcal, and create adobo, the brilliant paste that serves as a marinade for the lamb. You'll learn how to simulate pit-roasting in your oven. You'll make handmade corn tortillas. 

A lot of work – and time – to be sure. But it's really fun (if you're the type of person who loves to spend quality time in the kitchen), and when you're done, if you're not already adept at Mexican cooking techniques, when the project is done, you will be. 

And you will have something incredibly delicious to show for it. Invite your more gastronomically inclined friends, people who will truly appreciate it. It's the moment to break out that bottle of great mezcal you're been hoarding.

Lamb barbacoa – pit-roasted lamb – is a specialty of Oaxaca. I had a wonderful rendition recently in Mexico City, at El Cardenal in the historic district. So when I found a version in Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman's new cookbook Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, I had to try it. Even if it meant chasing down ingredients in no less than four stores, two of them huge Mexican supermarkets. 

The most challenging was probably dried avocado leaves, which I found at one of the Mexican supermarkets (La Michoacana Meat Market in Richardson, Texas). I'm glad I bought three times the amount I needed, so I won't go through that next time. 

The two other challenges were fresh banana leaves, which I found easily at a Fiesta supermarket, and a boneless lamb shoulder. My local Whole Foods didn't have any kind of lamb shoulder; so I called Central Market (another well-stocked Dallas area supermarket) and the butcher was happy to bone one for me. I couldn't help but wonder, after making the dish, why it called for boneless. Maybe because it only called for two pounds? Still, my Dutch oven could have accommodated a larger piece of meat, and I would have been thrilled to have more barbacoa, so I think next time I'll try using a bone-in shoulder – or a piece of one.

So here's how the thing goes. The day before you're going to serve the tacos, make adobo. It's included in the main recipe. Five and a half hours or so before you want to make the tacos, take the lamb shoulder out of the fridge and let it come up to room temperature. Coat the roast in the adobo (very messy!).

Line a Dutch oven with banana leaves (this is explained more precisely in the recipe), then add a layer of avocado leaves:

Place the adobo-coated lamb shoulder on top . . . 

Cover it with more avocado leaves, then fold the ends of the banana leaves over it all and tuck them in.

Pour in a cup of water, cover the Dutch oven, and roast it slowly for three hours. After letting it rest at room temperature for an hour, unwrap the lamb, discard the banana and avocado leaves, skim the fat off the sauce and strain it, clean the Dutch oven, shred the meat and add it to the sauce. 

This is the moment when you know it was all worth it! The complex flavors go very deep. It's delicious.

Up for it? Here's the recipe:

You can eat the lamb barbacoa wrapped in freshly made corn tortillas, maybe dressed with guacamole (that's how I had it in Mexico City). Or you can go all the way and make Alex Stupak's lamb barbaco tacos. If you do that, you'll want to make salsa borracha sometime during the roasting process, or the day before. This is the part where you get to toast dried chiles and reconstitute them, grinding them up with other ingredients.

Aquí lo tiene:

You'll also need to prep the other stuff that goes in the tacos with the lamb: mince some white onion, chop green olives, slice some limes and cucumbers. 

Here's what you have to look forward to:

Awesome, right? Here's the recipe:

Let us know, in a comment, how it all goes! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nothing says spring like strawberry-mezcal ice cream

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I don't know what inspired this exactly. Except it's spring, so I'm jonesing for strawberries. And it's spring, so I'm jonesing for mezcal. A friend was coming to lunch last weekend, and I wanted to cook Mexican. But dessert . . . strawberry shortcake? Nah. A big ol' Pavlova smothered in strawberries and cream? Nah. Almond cake with strawberries? Nah. None of it felt right to follow the lamb barbacoa tacos I'd planned. 

But ice cream! Who makes strawberry ice cream, anyway? I would! 

I figured I'd roast my strawberries, as they weren't exactly peak-season Harry's Berries (the fabulous ones I'd buy at the farmers market if I happened to be in Santa Monica). Roasting the supermarket berries would concentrate their flavor a bit. For some reason, when I thought about roasting them, I thought of hitting them with a little mezcal. In the back of my mind, I was remembering a wonderful nieve de naranja (orange ice) con mezcal my friend Michalene and I had when we were in Mexico City in February, at a restaurant called Fonda Fina. "Aha" moment! I thought mezcal might work well with the brightness of the berries. 

And so it did! Making the custard base is always easier than it sounds; just take it slow. Best to do this the day before you want to serve it, so the ice cream can set up in the freezer overnight – or at least for a few hours. In any case, you want to have time to chill the custard before it goes into the ice cream maker.

Want to leave out the mezcal? Just substitute half a teaspoon of vanilla. Or a teaspoon of aged balsamic vinegar. I served the ice cream with a couple of (store-bought) almond crisps.

Want the recipe? Here you go . . . 

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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. 

"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

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.

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:

 

 

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Celebrate spring with a sugar-snap pea salad with lemon and parmesan

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Spring is here – officially, anyway. In my hometown, Los Angeles, that means asparagus and fabulous strawberries and English peas, favas, nettles and morels. Where I live now, in North Texas, it means tornados and thunderstorms and hail. English peas? Not so much. 

I do find nice asparagus in the market, and good sugar snap peas – which I love to blanch lightly, slice up and toss in a lemony vinaigrette with snipped chives and grated parm. It was inspired by a salad I fell in love with a couple years ago over lunch with my girlfriend An-My at ABC Kitchen in New York. 

There's really not much to it. It takes a little while to slice up all the sugar snaps; after that, it comes together in a flash. I'm thinking it would be really nice served with frico, those lacy Italian parmesan crisps. (Remind me to scare up a recipe for them sometime soon!) 

Anyway, it's a lovely starter on its own.  Even if it's stormy outside, at your table it will feel like spring. Here's the recipe:

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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

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.

 

 

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Hummus fans rejoice: Introducing an amazing, easy cheater version

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I lied: I told you this post would be more about gribiche. But we need to interrupt our gribiche coverage to bring you breaking news on the hummus front: Cooks Without Borders has figured out how to make pretty amazing hummus from canned chick peas. 

No joke! 

If you're among those who caught hummus fever as chef Michael Solomonov's recipe for Israeli hummus tore up the internets last fall, or fell in love with Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's recipe in their brilliant cookbook Jerusalem (the excellent cooking blog Food 52 featured it a few years ago), you know how earth-shattering this is.

For those who are just catching up with it, here is the hummus situation in a garbanzo shell: Since time immemorial, creating hummus as smooth and fluffy as what you get in a great Lebanese, Israeli or other middle-Eastern restaurant involved soaking chick peas (aka garbanzo beans) overnight, simmering them for an hour and a half or two hours and removing their skins (can you imagine?!) before puréeing them. Sheesh! The brilliance of Ottolenghi's technique (which he apparently didn't invent, and which Solomonov also uses) is that it uses baking soda during the cooking process to soften the chick peas' skins so they don't need to be removed. 

Home cooks, meanwhile, who want to make a quick, easy hummus that's always at least as good as what you buy in a plastic tub at the supermarket, could simply purée chick peas in the food processor or blender with some garlic, lemon juice, tahini and salt, maybe a little olive oil. A hummus like that is fine, but never killer. It never has that amazing texture and deep flavor that a great one has.

I've been playing for the last few weeks with hummus made the Ottolenghi/Solomonov way, and I'll post about it when I'm ready to draw some conclusions. (There's more hummus to be made and tasted first!) But as I play, I can't help but wonder: Can we use this baking soda trick to radically improve the super-quick and easy version from canned garbanzos?

Yes, we can!

All you do is rinse the canned beans, simmer them for just five minutes in water and a little baking soda, and toss 'em in the food processor with some tahini sauce you've made while the garbanzos simmered. I found it pretty incredible that the skins could be softened enough to make a difference in just five minutes, but there you go. 

Was our cheater version as smooth as hummus made using dried-and-soaked garbanzos you simmer for an hour with baking soda? Well, if not, it was certainly close. It had been a week since I made a more involved one, but Thierry couldn't tell the difference: The cheater hummus was light, fluffy and soft, maybe more velvety than satiny. The flavor was very good, if not as extraordinary as the more involved way. It was terrific enough so that I'll certainly do it again if I'm pressed for time and want hummus. 

Want to try?

OK, toss whole garlic cloves (you can leave their skins on) in the food processor with salt and lemon juice. Purée briefly to chop the garlic, and let the mixture steep 10 minutes while you boil the garbanzos. Strain the solids from the lemon-garlic-salt juice, then put the juice back in the processor. Add tahini, pulse, then slowly pour in ice water through the tube as the motor runs. 

That gives you very light, lovely tahini sauce. Now add the garbanzos plus a little cumin (if you like that flavor), purée a couple minutes till very smooth, plate and garnish with olive oil and paprika – and more, if you like. I usually keep it simple, but you can get creative with parsley, whole garbanzo beans and such. 

Yippeee! Who says cheaters never prosper?

I think I can improve it still further flavor-wise (I'm going to play with adding more tahini, for instance). Once I have the very best version possible of the cheater hummus and the more involved hummus, we'll do a side-by-side taste-test. 

Meanwhile, I wanted to give you this recipe right away as it is very acceptable – way better than the stuff you'd buy in a tub.

Very good indeed with pita toasted or heated in the oven, and crudités. Who says cheaters never prosper?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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:

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:

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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!

 

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:

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.

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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Super bowl of soup: black bean with roasty veg

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Black bean soup vegetables

There's nothing more warming and comforting on a chilly winter evening – or a kicked-back Super Bowl Sunday – than a soulful black bean soup with a gentle zip of chile.  

I like to roast the soup's aromatic vegetables instead of sautéing them; roasting deepens and intensifies their flavor – so much that if you wanted to leave out the ham hock and go vegetarian/vegan, the roasted veg will carry the day. Grinding toasted spices – coriander and cumin – fills the house with a wonderful scent.

Black bean soup with roasty veg

There's hardly any work involved: Just dice the roasted vegetables, toss them in a pot with beans, a can of tomatoes, a ham hock and the spices and let it simmer a couple hours. Debone the ham hock, whirr the soup a bit with an immersion blender, drop in the diced ham and you're in business. Serve the soup in small bowls, garnished with cilantro and sliced scallions. Try it! And tell us how you like it. 

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My pissaladière: a French cook, three pounds of onions, a jar of anchovies and an overscheduled journalist add up to one snazzy starter from Provence

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Pissaladiere

There I was, caramelizing onions at midnight on a Thursday night. At seven the next morning, in between dressing for work and putting on my makeup, I found myself rolling out tart pastry, organizing anchovies, putting things in and pulling them out of a hot oven. My morning workout? Not happening.

It didn't seem completely batty to offer to bring a pissaladière -- a Southern French caramelized onion-and-anchovy tart -- to dinner at my friends' house on a Friday night when the event was a couple weeks off in the future. No problem, I thought, as I normally I work from home on Fridays. But as I stared down my schedule the Wednesday before, I found myself with back-to-back-to-back meetings at the paper downtown. Working from home was not in the stars. The dinner was a Francophile dinner party at our friends Keven and George's place (also downtown); the theme was Provence. Georges had bouillabaisse on the menu as the main course. So how to manage the promised  pissaladière?

No worries -- I'd prepare the ingredients on Thursday evening, assemble and bake it in the morning, drive it (gingerly!) downtown, and let it cool its heels in my car all day while I did my thing at the paper. A quick turn in Georges' oven, and we should be great to go.

Pissaldiere ingredients

Crazy? Perhaps, given all I have on my plate at the moment. But making this classic dish is much easier it would appear, and making the tart actually turned out to be a high point in a stressful week. Have I mentioned that I'm happiest in the kitchen?

More often than not, a pissaladière is made with bread dough, but I learned to make it from an old friend, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, who makes hers using pâte briseé  -- a savory tart crust. We could argue about bread vs. pâte briseé all day long, and Danièle is not from Nice (from whence the dish comes), but rather Dordogne. But I think she has it right: The flavor of sweet, deep onions with salty anchovies melting into them show more deliciously on a flaky crust.

Interesting side note: Danièle was a home cook, queen of the hearth oven in the kitchen of her family's 500-year-old stone farmhouse, when François Mitterand -- who was president of France at the time -- tapped her to be his private chef at the Élysée Palace. They made a movie about her a few years ago called Haute Cuisine; Catherine Frot did a wonderful job portraying Danièle. Here's an interview Epicurious did with Danièle when the movie was released in the U.S. In any case, she's a wonderful cook, and an amazing spirit. A true cook without borders if ever there was one.

Pate brisee

But back to our regularly scheduled tart.

So, the first thing to do is caramelize onions -- a lot of them. It's a slow caramelization, and I'm completely opposed (morally, gastronomically and vehemently) to adding sugar to speed the caramelization. Required: a sharp knife, a low flame and patience.

Slice thin about three pounds of yellow onions in a little olive oil (or better yet duck fat, if you have some) and let them cook very slowly for more than two hours, till they're deep golden and sweet. Then you drain them. While the onions caramelize, make your pâte briseé. Give flour and salt a whirl in the food processor, toss in bits of chilled butter, pulse till it has the texture of coarse meal, add an egg lightly beaten with a dollop of milk, let the motor run till it clumps together. Honestly, it's that simple.

Let the dough rest in the fridge half an hour, roll it out, fit it into a tart pan with a removable bottom, pour in the onions, smush them in nicely, garnish the top with anchovies, niçoise olives and bits of fresh thyme, pop it in the oven, and in 35 minutes, you have a gorgeous pissaladière. Click on the black bar below for the recipe.

Pissaladiere

Place in shopping bag, drive to the office, spend the day getting things done, arrive at K and G's, present tart, demand Ricard. (That's is the beloved anisette aperitif of Southern France.) 

Note to self: Next time I make this, do it on a weekend!