Tres leches cake is having a big moment. We love the super-luscious version from Mely Martínez's new cookbook

Pastel de tres leches, or tres leches cake — Mexico’s star dessert — is enjoying a drenchy-sweet moment of glory.

The fluffy-creamy vanilla sponge cake, soaked in a mixture of creams (usually condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream, and topped with whipped cream, has become an Instagram and Tik Tok star during the pandemic.

As G. Daniela Galarza wrote last week in an excellent story in The Washington Post:

“This past May, the month in which Trinity Sunday often falls, searches for “tres leches” were up 25 percent from May 2019. More than half a million posts are tagged #tresleches on Instagram, and on TikTok, nearly 25 million videos feature hands and pans whipping up batter for a tres leches cake.” 

Galarza’s story points to MM Pack’s illuminating 2004 story for the Austin Chronicle, “Got Milk?: On the trail of pastel de tres leches,” and then goes on to provide illuminating context and background.

The cake does not have a long history; it is probably only about a quarter-century old, according to Pack’s superb sleuthing. Nestlé, a major canned milk producer, introduced manufacturing plants around World War II in Mexico, and a recipe for pastel de tres leches was included. More investigation led Pack to find its antecedent: a dessert involving bread soaked in wine and layered with milk custard and fruit or nuts) came to Mexico in the 19th century.

All that is well and good, but The Great Confinement of 2020 continues to trigger cravings of comfort food and sweets. Fortunately, there are 9 and a half grillion versions to choose from.

The New York Times’ Melissa Clark, who may be some kind of dessert psychic — and who confesses to enjoying eating sweetened condensed milk straight out of the can — presciently published a recipe for a Seis Leches Cake (“A Milky Cake Where More is More”) in January.

We love the version Mely Martínez offers in her just-published cookbook The Mexican Home Kitchen, which we reviewed last month. Hers is not a sponge cake, but a somewhat denser vanilla cake with a lovely crumb; it takes longer (overnight) to soak up all those leches, but the result is outstanding.

About to attack my second slice of Martínez’s cake, on a whim I poured over it a splash of Plantation Pineapple Rum. Holy moly — it was insanely, wildly, wickedly good! Next time I’ll follow Martínez’s suggested variation and add a quarter cup of it to the milk mixture to soak in overnight.

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Tres Leches Cake

Deviled Duck Legs Provençal: a rich, herbal, piquant and crunchy example of how recipes evolve

Recipe provenance is a hot topic among food writers at the moment, as efforts to avoid cultural appropriation and give creators their proper due is top-of-mind. In his “What to Cook” column last week, New York Times food editor Sam Sifton announced changes to the way that important publication will be acknowledging provenance in its recipes henceforth. 

We applaud the Times’ new focus on transparency. Here at Cooks Without Borders, we’ve always tried to be mindful of crediting creators whose recipes we’ve adapted. And now, as we are in the process of adding recipe cards to each of our recipes (yaaas!), we have been simultaneously taking stock of our own acknowledgement of provenance — fine-toothing our recipe archives to shine the spotlight a bit brighter on recipes’ originators. 

Sometimes it even results in a name-change for a dish, usually one we’ve adapted from a cookbook. Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino, for instance, is now A16’s Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino. Although we had previously acknowledged Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgren and their 2008 cookbook, A16 Food + Wine, as the source of the recipe, we thought it would be even better to commemorate the provenance directly in the dish’s name. 

Still . . . the whole issue of who actually creates recipes is often much more complicated than who wrote them down and got them published in a book, or served them in a restaurant. The truth is that dishes generally evolve over time — getting tweaked, changed, added to, zhuzzhed and riffed on by cooks around the world, in the course of years and decades and centuries. Occasionally a brand-new dish springs fully realized from the head of a creator, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. 

Deviled Duck Leg Provençal served with saucy braised lentils

So, if we adapt a recipe for, say, moussaka from a cookbook author who learned that recipe from a home cook in Greece, how should we handle that? It’s not as simple as it might seem. Certainly we credit the cookbook author in the headnote, but probably not in the name of the recipe. It’s totally a judgement call, and we try to err on the side of too much credit rather than too little. That said, it’s the home cook back in Greece who gets the short end of the wooden spoon, which is not ideal. 

Now and then, we’re able to trace the evolution of a dish — at least somewhat — and I always find it uncommonly satisfying.

Deviled Duck Legs Provençal is a case in point. I was introduced to it by a Los Angeles Times story by Regina Schrambling back in 2003, shortly before I joined the staff of the Times. In the story, Schrambling explained that she found the basis for the dish — duck legs rubbed with Dijon mustard and coated with bread crumbs — in Madeleine Kamman’s book In Madeleine’s Kitchen. Shrambling’s own touches were adding herbes de Provence and swapping panko for regular bread crumbs. 

Now that that’s straight, consider the dish itself: slow-baked duck legs, rich and meaty, with a bright tang of Dijon, lovely herbal notes and the delightful crunch of panko. For something so easy to achieve, it’s pretty damn fabulous. 

Serve it on undressed spring mix, as Shrambling suggested lo those many years ago, or on arugula or frisée, and let the salad sop up the duck’s juices.

Or go the lentil route, and simmer up a saucy batch of French green lentils braised in red wine with mirepoix. We haven’t put together an actual recipe for those lentils yet, but they’re a snap to make. Cut a carrot, a stalk of celery and about an equal amount of onion or shallot into small dice, sweat those in a little olive oil with a branch or two of thyme, add French green lentils, coat them with the mirepoix mixture and let them cook a minute. Add some red wine to cover, bring to a boil, let the alcohol cook off, then lower the heat and simmer till the lentils are just tender, about 20 or 25 minutes depending on the lentils, stirring now and then. Add more wine as necessary to keep the lentils happy (you can also add water or chicken broth if you prefer). Keep it a little wet and saucy at the end: You’ll want that winey sauce.

Want to make it even more luxurious? Whisk in a little butter at the end.

Aw, go on — you deserve it.

RECIPE: Deviled Duck Legs Provençal

Glorious and festive, Moroccan-ish couscous with chicken, lamb, chickpeas and veg exuberantly celebrates autumn

My version of Chicken and Lamb Couscous — one of my favorite things to eat in the fall (and into the winter) — is absolutely unpedigreed; I didn’t turn it up from a Moroccan cookbook; it wasn’t taught to me by a Tunisian friend.

Rather, way back when I was 20 or 21, a friend gave me a copy of one of the awesome Time-Life The Good Cook cookbooks — the one titled Pasta, which had just been published. Tucked between sections about rolling out fresh pasta dough, stuffing and cutting ravioli and layering lasagnas was one called “Couscous: A Full Meal from One Pot.” Couscous was included because couscous grains, made from semolina flour, are technically pasta. Pictured and explicated was the process of achieving a magnificent-looking platter of couscous topped with a saffron-and-cinnamon-scented stew of lamb, chicken, vegetables and chick peas.

I was instantly captivated. My only experience with such a dish at that point was feasting on it at two then-well-known Los Angeles restaurants, Dar Mahgreb and Moun of Tunis. The book showed how to dampen the grains, rake the moisture through with your fingers, steam them in a couscoussier (real or improvised), make the stew and serve it with harissa and a tureen of broth.

As anyone who has ever used the books in that (long out-of-print) Time-Life series knows, they are technique-based, with lots of step-by-step photos, and recipes only at the end. So literally for decades, I’ve made this couscous by following that rough guide, guessing at the amounts of ingredients, tweaking and changing things over the years, without looking at an actual recipe. I followed brief and sketchy instructions in a sidebar to make harissa.

When you think about it, it’s actually the way you learn to cook at home, if you have a parent who cooks teaching you: a little of this, some of that, until it looks like this. It’s why I treasure the series, a project that was overseen by Chief Series Consultant Richard Olney.

What I love about this chicken and lamb couscous is that you can make it as simple or as complicated as you like. Make your own harissa — soaking and grinding dried chiles and spices — or buy a tube (it’s really good). Go through the extraordinary process of moistening and rubbing and steaming couscous grains two or three times, or make a box of instant couscous in five minutes flat. Soak dried chickpeas overnight and simmer them for hours with the lamb and chicken, or add a couple cans of chickpeas toward the end.

You can buy harissa — the fiery North African chile sauce — in a tube, can or jar — or make your own.

And you know what? No matter how many shortcuts you take, the dish is always glorious — even if it isn’t faithful to any particular traditional recipe.

So why would anyone go through the trouble of making the couscous the longwinded traditional steamed way? Because it’s much lighter and flufflier. (More about that in a future story.)

Our recipe is a two-fer, offering the easiest possible version and a more elaborate one. Go either route — or choose the elements from each that appeal. Most often, I use dried chickpeas, but take the quickie route with the couscous grains, using instant. Every couple of years I make a batch of homemade harissa, which I use if I have it. (We’ll feature a recipe here soon!) Otherwise, I’m happy to use store-bought, a condiment I always like to have around. My preferred brand is one that comes in a tube, Dea from France; I also like one Trader Joe’s sells in a jar, from Tunisia.

The stew itself is made by simmering lamb and chicken pieces with onion, carrot, spices (including harissa), tomatoes and cilantro, then adding turnips, more carrots, zucchini and roasted red pepper. As mentioned, the chickpeas get simmered with the meats (if they’re dried) or added with the zucchini (if they’re canned). Optional roasted winter squash is added on top, along with grilled merguez sausages (also optional).

Stick with the amounts of vegetables or meats I suggest, or adjust them up or down, depending on what you have on hand. Do you prefer white meat chicken to the legs and thighs the recipe suggests? Swap ‘em. Want to toss in some yellow crookneck squash? Do it.

One moving target for me over the years has been winter squash. I’ve never been crazy about the boiled pumpkin The Time-Life book suggested. At some point I started roasting acorn squash, adding that at the end, but lately I’ve been using delicata squash — which I love because the flavor’s beautiful and the skin is very tender. Other times I do without.

To serve the dish, pass the platter of couscous piled with meats and vegetables around the table, along with a separate pitcher of extra broth, and a dish of harissa. Diners help themselves to the grains and stew, pouring on as much extra broth as they like. Pro tip: place a small dollop of harissa in your soup spoon, stir in some broth to liquify it, and sprinkle it over the stew.

Honestly, it’s pretty dreamy. The batch is gigantic, which is great if you’re feeding a big crowd. Use less meat and water, if it sounds too big for your crew. That said, it is just as delicious the next day. Or two. Or three. I enjoy the leftovers as much as round one.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

RECIPE: Chicken and Lamb Couscous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Hm. What was the problem?

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

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

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

RECIPE: Rabbit in Gremolata

RECIPE: Spaghetti alla Carbonara

RECIPE: Meat Sauce Bolognese

RECIPE: Potato Gnocchi with Butter and Sage Sauce

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

One of our 5 (five!) fabulous potato salads is sure to make your Fourth phenomenal

Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

My family has put me on a potato salad time-out.

That’s because I’ve made so much potato salad during The Great Confinement that we’ve each gained about 9,000 pounds. OK, I’m kidding — but it’s surprising we haven’t, considering the carbo count these past few months.

In more normal times, I try to avoid potatoes in favor of lower-carb vegetables — and when I eat them, they’re a rare treat (like sweets for some people). But in confinement, I’ve given myself license to eat them at will. After all, they’re so delicious. And comforting. And affordable. And available. You get my drift. If ever we deserved to indulge in a potato fancy, it’s now!

Plus, it’s great to have potato in the fridge. We have to cook every night, and it goes with most everything. It’s great with a work-at-home lunch. And it can even be a dazzling little stand-in for boiled potatoes in a main-course niçoise salad.

It’s been so omnipresent in our kitchen these months that one day we’ll probably describe something that’s everywhere as “ubiquitous as potato salad in a pandemic.”

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Potato salad is an ideal vehicle for a garden’s-worth of herbs, as in the Herb-Happy Potato above. With its vinaigrette dressing, this is the sole vegan entry in our bunch; it’s also gluten-free.

An old-fashioned one, such as Toni Tipton-Martin’s from her Jubilee cookbook, can take you all the way back to childhood. (Both are super-quick and easy to make.)

I love the Jubilee one because it’s rich in hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks blend lusciously into the mayo-based dressing, there’s a hint of sweet pickle relish and a nice celery crunch. If you’re going all-American classic with your July 4 menu, this is the one for you.

On the other hand, if you want to play it a little more exotic, consider a Japanese potato salad — we have two to choose from. One is from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking (which we recently reviewed); the other is the one chef Justin Holt serves at his Dallas ramen hot-spot, Salaryman. (And that one sports a prize on top: halved ajitama marinated eggs — like the ones you find garnishing bowls of ramen.)

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.

Oh, man — I’m getting a starch high just revisiting them in my brain!

Finally, there is the one that predates the other four on Cooks Without Borders — the one we named Best Potato Salad Ever before we knew there’d be such heavy competition.

That’s Wylie holding a batch of it, before he and Thierry put me on potato salad time-out.

What makes it so good? It gets a luxurious richness from soft-boiled eggs, delightful tang from cornichons and shallots and lift from an array of herbs, all in the form of a New-Wave Gribiche.

I think any one of the fiHve would be a welcome guest at your picnic or party tomorrow. You can make them ahead, or not. Oh, and by the way, they’re all easy-going — in case you want to swap potato types, or swap shallots for scallions, and so forth. Whichever you choose, enjoy. I’ll be jealous.

Happy Fourth!

[RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Salaryman Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada]

[RECIPE: Best Potato Salad Ever]

Say hello to the green gazpacho of your dreams

There are a grillion versions of green gazpacho out there — many of them likeable, some (like Yotam Ottolenghi’s in Plenty) lovable. But I’ve never found one that made me stop and say, OK, you are the green gazpacho of my dreams.

I enjoy versions with yogurt, but the green gazpacho of my dreams is vegan. And even though a gazpacho without bread is technically not a gazpacho, the green gazpacho of my dreams is gluten-free. That’s because when I crave green gazpacho, I’m craving something very clean and pure. I’m wanting something intensely chlorophyllic, and herbal — but also tangy.

The green gazpacho of my dreams is something I can throw together in a flash, as a satisfying and energizing lunch, or a refreshing prelude to a lovely summer or late spring dinner. It should be basic enough to make for myself and family on a weekday, but gorgeous enough to start off a celebratory dinner party with friends (if we are ever able to do that again!).

It has to have body, and a little richness. I’ve seen recipes for versions involving avocado, but I’m nor looking for that kind of unctuousness. (Though I do adore diced ripe avocado as a garnish on classic Gazpacho Sevillano.)

Sometimes the way out of a culinary conundrum like this is to go back to the basics. I looked to traditional ajo blanco, the cold almond and garlic soup from Malaga, Spain that’s also known as gazpacho blanco, white gazpacho.

Yes! Raw almonds add just the right body to this soup, without the tannic bite that’s so nice with the walnuts in Ottolenghi’s Plenty version. If almonds work here, perhaps raw cashews would as well. I tried that on round two, and liked it even better — it imparted a little more roundness and depth. But either works great.

You’ll want to use your best sherry vinegar and olive oil in this soup; they are more than just supporting players.

Here is your ticket to summer-long green greatness:

As you can see in the recipe, the ingredients are basic, easy to keep on hand for when a craving comes knocking. No need for advance planning, as you don’t need to chill it; just plop two or three ice cubes in each bowl before you serve. Or make it ahead, and chill it in the fridge. For maximum delight, garnish it with a flurry of soft herbs — any combination of dill, chervil, parsley, cilantro, basil, mint, chives, tarragon, celery leaves and sliced scallion greens (OK, those last two are not technically herbs, but you get the idea). Or just add a swirl of your best olive oil on top.

RECIPE: The Greenest Gazpacho

Quintessential Tex-Mex in your own kitchen — from Margarita to rice and beans (plus a bonus dessert!)

Everyone’s craving comfort during The Great Confinement. We’re also starved for the kinds of foods we love to eat out. If you happen to live in Texas, the idea of Tex-Mex hits all those emotional notes like a gorgeous, plaintive minor-scale chord. And if you don’t live in Texas, a soulful plate of cheesy, tangy chicken enchiladas verdes with rice and beans — and an icy Margarita to go with it — probably sounds pretty good to you too. (Right?)

But hey — we don’t have to dream. It’s not difficult to make all those Tex-Mex specialties at home. And during this time of cooking three meals a day, seven days a week for most of us, the idea of the leftovers involved are pretty attractive too.

I must confess, though I cook a lot of Mexican dishes, I don’t usually mess with Tex-Mex — that’s because it’s so much easier to go out for good Tex-Mex in our neck of the woods than it is to make Mexican rice and refried beans. But the craving got to me, so I dove in — and wrote a story for The Dallas Morning News, because I know others in my city are craving these things too. (If you hit the paywall and live in Dallas, subscribe! If you hit the paywall and don’t live in Dallas, just keep reading — you’ll find all the recipes here as well.)

In case you’re not a Texan, I’ll tell you what you need to put together to experience Tex-Mex nirvana. Unless you abstain from alcohol, you’ll want to start with a round of Margaritas. In Texas restaurants, you’d have a whole list of them, often including frozen ones. Partly because I’m prone to brain freeze, I personally skip those and go for a classic one, on the rocks with salt.

I put Wylie in charge of crafting the perfect Margarita (only natural, as he used to work as a bartender). In restaurants, Margaritas tend to be super sweet (even “skinny” ones). We favor and old-school style that balances the sweetness of orange liqueur with enough tart lime juice. Wylie experimented (and we tasted and tasted and tasted) until he came up with the perfectly balanced Classic Margarita on the Rocks. Recipe below.

Queso is the second order of business for most Texans who find themselves in a Tex-Mex situation. Though I’ve lived here more than a decade, I’m still more of a Californian, so I go for guacamole. If you want to make queso, Lisa Fain, a.k.a. The Homesick Texan, author of Queso!, has you covered recipe-wise.

If it’s guac you’re after, we’ve got your back. Ginding ingredients like cilantro, serrano chiles and onion in a molcajete before adding the avocados results in something much more compelling that what you get in most restaurants. And even if you don’t have a molcajete, you’ll be able to knock it out of the park.

Now to the main course: enchiladas, rice and beans. Who could argue, right? There is always at least one person at every Tex-Mex table who goes for some kind of enchiladas, which always come with that fantastic Mexican rice and sumptuous refried beans; chicken enchiladas verdes are pretty universally adored.

They’re a snap to put together using leftover chicken or a supermarket roast chicken and salsa verde from a jar, but SO much better if you roast your own bird and make your own roasted salsa verde: The deeper flavor and juicier meat take the enchiladas to another level.

Chicken enchiladas verdes are a crowd-pleaser.

Tortillas are another story entirely: Store-bought corn tortillas work better for this than hand-made ones. Dip each one in hot oil to make them pliable and help them soak up flavor. That’s a worthwhile upgrade from the easy alternative, zapping them in the microwave to soften them.

Here’s our recipe, which also gives basic chicken-roasting instructions. Alternatively, you could roast some chicken thighs — just season with salt and pepper, and roast at 425 for about 25 minutes.

To go with those luscious enchiladas, you’ll want rice and beans. Hopefully, you can get your hands on dried pinto beans. If so, cook up a pot of frijoles de olla the day before your Tex-Mex feast. No soaking necessary; just pour 10 cups of boiling water over a pound of beans, add a sliced onion and a few cloves of garlic, simmer till tender then add salt. It’s weird how insanely delicious they are just like that; and you’ll have some extra to enjoy as the refried beans (frijoles refritos) recipe doesn’t use the entire amount. Let them cool overnight in their liquid and they’ll be waiting for you. You’ll need lard or bacon fat to fry them, along with a little more white onion.

Meanwhile, there’s something deeply satisfying about making this Mexican Rice. It feels like a weird and silly recipe while you’re executing it (it is adapted from Diana Kennedy’s out-of-print classic The Cuisines of Mexico). But the result is wonderful. We added more tomato and simplified the recipe a bit.

That’s our basic package for the quintessential Tex-Mex experience.

Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream

Hopefully we can get a flan recipe together soon; that would be a fitting ending. In its stead, consider Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream. It’s one of my favorite dessert recipes we’ve done here at CWB, and I’ve been thinking about it every time I open the fridge and see strawberries. I thought the likelihood of scraping together the rest of the necessary ingredients was slim, but then I realized if I made half a batch I could do it: with 3/4 pint strawberries, 3/4 cup cream, 1 1/2 egg yolks and a tablespoon of Mezcal (someone was being polite as we drink ourselves out of house and home — there were two tablespoons left!). Maybe you’ve got access to those things too.

Want to add other Mexican touches to your Tex-Mex party? Our Mexican Cuisine page has much more — including a recipe for tangy Taquería Carrots that would be great with the Margarita and guac.

Let us know how your feast turns out. Send pics! Leave comments! Until then, be safe and healthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy dancing. Keep it green.

April 25 is Slow Food Youth Network's World Disco Soup Day: Let us help you build a rockin' soup!

Four years ago, Slow Food Youth Network founded an annual international event — World Disco Soup Day. On that day each year, parties are thrown in which food waste is turned into a disco soup. The goal is to end food waste, raise awareness around zero waste, feed people and celebrate when you do save food.

This year’s event is coming right up: Saturday, April 25.

It’s easy to celebrate saving food when what you create from food scraps is delicious. Which it can always be — and we’re here to help show you how to make it so.

As part of the event, SFYN are asking participants to upload recipes from their elders that make delicious use of food scraps. I was about to do that, but when I was asked to start uploading ingredients and quantities, I realized it wasn’t going to work: This isn’t the approach we take when we cook this way. Instead, we peer into the fridge and think about how we’re going to use that cup of leftover black beans and those two boiled potatoes, those three celery stalks that are about to wilt and the cupful of arugula that’s too limp for a salad.

More often than not, we make a soup. And from now on, I’ll think of it as a disco soup! (Thank you, SFYN!).

We kicked off New Year’s in January by proclaiming 2020 The Year of the Soup, and gave a master recipe for making a Sunday Super Soup from stuff in the pantry and leftovers in the fridge. Here’s the story (which walks through how to change your relationship with food scraps), and here’s a more formalized version of the master recipe:

I’m hoping SFYN’s young members find the master soup recipe useful. (I’m a member of regular Slow Food USA, the Dallas Fort Worth chapter.)

If you’re not accustomed to cooking this way, now is a great time to start! You can be super mindful of not throwing out usable food scraps this week. Save everything. I use a dedicated zipper bag for odds and ends trimmed from carrots and onions, stray herbs, etc.

And we will help you strategize! If you find yourself with a cupful of white beans, some celery and half an onion, for instance, we’ll tell you how to turn that into a salad that makes a lovely lunch — or your own disco soup for next Saturday!

Just let us know in a comment at the end of this story. (PLEASE comment — we are eager to hear from you and engage!) We’ll suggest ideas — and everyone else can jump in an we can toss them back and forth.

In the meantime, we’re going to be thinking about ideas for cold disco soup, in case the weather is fine whether you might be on Saturday. Green gazpacho!

Sound good? Save scraps! Please share this story, with the hashtags #worlddiscosoupday #wdsd20 #Re_generation #fillbelliesnotbins #slowfoodyouthnetwork #sfyn

Plan for a big ol’ disco soup on Saturday, April 25. And stay safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay safe, healthy and well fed, everyone.

RECIPE: Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture

RECIPE: Classic Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad

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

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

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

My new BFF (sorry, Teach!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

RECIPE: Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Pea-Ricotta Dip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and don’t forget the Taquería Carrots.

Need a lift? Throw together a batch of these spicy, zingy (addictive!) taquería carrots

UPDATED: August 2, 2020

First came the cravings for comfort carbs: mac and cheese (or any pasta smothered in sauce); warm chocolate chip cookies; sourdough bread. There’s a reason the boxes of pasta were the first edible things to disappear off the shelves in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After a week or two of that, I started craving anything tangy: the lemons and limes that were so hard to get our hands on, som tum (Thai green papaya salad); dill pickles.

I also kept thinking about the zingy, hot, crunchy pickled carrots we used to love munching in L.A. taquerías. Known in Mexico as zanahorias escabeches, they are super easy to achieve with very limited resources. And four and a half long months later, they still keep hitting the spot.

If you have any carrots in your fridge — and any kind of chile peppers — you can make these in just a few minutes. The carrot slices are cooked very briefly in a half-vinegar, half-water solution with salt and aromatics; chiles and onion are added off-heat to keep the flavors fresh.

They are just the thing to make a video-chat happy hour with friends even brighter. Mix a margarita, open a beer, show off your glorious carrots, crunch away, and dream together of a bright and pickly future.

RECIPE: Taquería Carrots

Celebrate Norooz — Persian New Year — with an emerald-green ash-e-reshteh New Year's bean soup

We could all use a little lift, even on the first day of spring, the day Norooz (also known as Nowruz) — Persian New Year — is celebrated.

This gorgeous vegetarian soup, which traditionally celebrates the spring holiday, involves ingredients you might well have on hand; dried spearmint and saffron are about as exotic as the ingredient list gets. Both of those are used to make the garnishes you’ll finish the soup with: mint oil and saffron water.

Most challenging might actually be the ingredient that in normal times would seem the most mundane: dried linguine. If you have just a little — a third of a pound is all the recipe calls for, and you could certainly use just a quarter pound or less, or really use any kind of long noodle — you’ll be good to go.

The recipe starts with a cup of mixed dried beans and lentils, and you could use almost any kind in any combination, so gotta love that, too. Simmer them till they’re nearly tender, then throw in a bunch of greens — spinach, parsley and scallions. If you don’t have fresh spinach, frozen will work just fine. Cook the pasta and drop it in.

That’s basically the soup, which then gets garnishes: sliced onions sautéed with turmeric, the mint oil, a dollop of yogurt and saffron water.

It’s so beautifully green and herbal and perfumed that it seems to promise that everything’s going to be all right. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Happy spring. Happy new year!

Baba ganoush fever: How can burnt eggplant become a dip that’s so friggin’ brilliant and addictive?

Five years ago, an 800-year old chickpea dip suddenly became a global obsession. Now, something tells us that baba ganoush — the smoky, lemony eggplant dip that’s a mezze-table favorite all over the Levant and beyond — may be about to steal the spotlight from its foodie-star brother.

Baba ganoush’s charms can be elusive to those of us who dwell in the Americas. Unless we have Levantine roots, we may not have been exposed much (if at all) to exemplary baba — or muttabal, as it’s called in Syria. The stuff you find in supermarkets, if you do manage to find one baba ganoush among the grillions of plastic hummus tubs that have taken over the refrigerated case, tends to be pale-flavored and forgettable. Meanwhile, I’ve read recipes that suggest adding Liquid Smoke. Liquid Smoke!

I knew that the babas that turned my head over a lifetime of eating in Lebanese restaurants were the unabashedly smoky ones. But somehow, I never wondered how they got their smoke. Or what gave the best ones their wonderful creamy texture. Or how much tahini, lemon or garlic would make a baba ganoush sing.

Somewhere in the back of my semitic mind I understood that the dish was related to the eggplant “caviar” my Jewish grandma used to make. (She roasted eggplants, cutting them in half first, but never long enough to get them smoky, and there was no tahini involved after that.)

Happily — life-changingly, perhaps — it’s easy to make a brilliant one, especially if you have access to an old-fashioned charcoal grill like a Weber. You can also make a pretty outstanding one using your kitchen broiler. In case you want to cut to the chase and achieve immediate baba bliss, here’s the recipe:

The technique is simple: Poke holes all over whole eggplants, then roast them, either under your broiler or directly on coals on the Weber, turning them once, until they’re completely charred and seem to collapse.

Eggplants roasting directly atop live coals in a Weber grill

Cut them in half, scoop out the flesh — which will have taken on wonderful smokiness — place in a sieve and mash the flesh over a bowl to get rid of its bitter liquid and achieve a lovely soft texture. Separately, whisk together tahini and lemon juice till fluffy, then add the mashed eggplant, crushed garlic and salt. Spread the dip on a serving plate, drizzle on some good olive oil and scatter with chopped parsley, and you have baba ganoush heaven. Really, it’s that easy.

And it’s a fun dish to make. It’s fun charring the eggplants on the grill, and delightful when you whisk the tahini and lemon to fluffiness. It’s even fun to pull the flesh out of the charred skins with your fingers.

Once roasted, the flesh inside is meltingly tender.

More on technical details in a moment, but first a word about baba ganoush’s history.

Curiously, I was unable to turn up much background about the dip, especially anything definitive. There’s no entry for baba ganoush (or baba ganouj, or baba ghanoush, or baba ghannuge, its alternate spellings) in The Oxford Companion to Food, or in The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture that takes up probably way too much real estate in my cookbook case. Unlike the Wikipedia page for hummus, which boasts two fulsome paragraphs about origin and history and nearly 700 words about regional preparations, Wikipedia’s baba ganoush wisdom is weirdly scant, pretty much limited to a stab at its etymology. (Baba, everyone agrees, is Arabic for “father” or “daddy,” and the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that Ghannuj is “perhaps a personal name.”)

The most intriguing tidbit I turned up came from my brilliant former colleague at The Los Angeles Times (now retired from the paper), Charles Perry, who wrote in a 1997 story about eggplant and its history that “The ancestor of today's baba ghanouj was flavored with ground walnuts instead of tahini.” Beyond that, we have only found speculation about the dish’s history. (If you are an expert, please weigh in with a comment! I am attempting to contact Charlie, who published Scents & Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook in 2017 — which I just ordered — and who I’m pretty sure possesses more intelligence on the subject; will update if successful.)

I found recipes for baba ganoush in some of my favorite cookbooks — including Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and Arabesque and Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem, and Annisa Helou’s splendid Feast: Food of the Islamic World, which won a James Beard Award in 2019. Online, J. Kenji López-Alt offers his serious take on Serious Eats; The Washington Post’s Smoke Signals columnist Jim Shahin wrote about it and gave a smoky recipe in 2018.

There are lots of recipes out there that include yogurt — which is also wonderful, but not the classic, and many recipes that simply roast the eggplant but stop well before optimum smokiness has been achieved.

Other recipes that I found to be almost perfect have some tiny little detail I felt could be improved. For instance, Serious Eats’ López-Alt calls for not pricking the eggplants, so they’ll cook more quickly and peel more easily, but he also points out unpricked eggplants will explode in your oven (yikes!). In addition, he calls for spinning the flesh in a salad spinner as a way of quickly getting rid of the bitter moisture in them after roasting, which I find cumbersome and messy. I much prefer Roden’s quick and easy solution: mashing the flesh with a fork in a strainer over a bowl; this is much faster than the slow-drain many other recipes call for, and adds no extra work as the flesh needs mashing in any case. (And not puréeing in a food processor, as some recipes recommend — you want to retain some lovely texture and not make it too smooth.)

Chasing optimal smokiness, perfect balance and the creamiest texture has kept me experimenting with recipes for a couple months in order to come up with the best method and proportions. I found that whisking the tahini with lemon juice, as in customary in some of my favorite hummus recipes, results in a baba with superior creaminess. (That idea came from a recipe in Arabesque for the variation of baba ganoush that includes yogurt.)

Yesterday, we finally put it all together — the proportions I favor, and the whisking, which left just one question to answer: Which is better, roasting the eggplant over live coals or under the kitchen broiler? And if one was better, how much better?

We put the two cooking methods to the test, by making two otherwise identical versions of baba ganoush, one using eggplant roasted on live coals (on a chilly Saturday afternoon in February!) and the other in the broiler.

Once they were ready, I spread them on their respective serving plates. Here’s how they looked before garnishing:

Baba ganoush prepared over live coals (left) and baba ganoush prepared in the broiler

The photo probably doesn’t do justice to the visual difference, but the one done over live coals looked more emulsified and somewhat deeper in color. You could tell in whisking them, the live coals version was a bit silkier; though the eggplants seemed to be cooked about as much as the ones in the broiler, the ones done in the Weber were meltier.

In terms of taste and mouthfeel, the difference was starker: The one done on the coals had much smokier flavor, and more depth. I had Thierry and Wylie blind-taste them: The one done on the coals was the clear and immediate winner.

However, they (and we) loved them both: The broiler version was absolutely delicious as well, if a bit subtler. I thought of stirring in some ground cumin, a flourish that seems popular in the version of the dish that comes from Persia. You might consider using a slightly heavier hand with garlic if you go the broiler route, or upping the tahini a wee bit. This is a great dip to play with, to tweak it until it is exactly as you like it — or just cook kind of free-form, adding tahini, lemon juice and garlic by feel rather than measuring.

Another traditional flourish is pomegranate seeds — and once autumn rolls around, the baba ganoush will certainly flow freely at my place, topped with ruby-red beauties.

Until then, I’m loving the essentialist version, and we hope you will too.

RECIPE: Baba Ganoush

Stodgy boomer, plucky Gen-Z-er share in unlikely Instant Pot epiphany; miraculous chicken chile verde results

A few weeks ago, Wylie chicken-shamed me. 

Maybe you know the drill: following a long day at the office, you stop at the supermarket on your way home and pick up a roast chicken. I was about to do just that, and texted home to see if I should pick up anything else. 

“Just buy a raw chicken,” said Wylie, who is temporarily living with us post-college-graduation in a figuring-things-out moment. “I’ll roast it. It’ll be so much better, and it’s so easy.” Who could argue?

While the hunt for a job in his field has not been thus far fruitful, he has taken full advantage of the parental larder — and our delight at being cooked for  — in order to develop his kitchencraft. 

Wylie making pasta dough from Evan Funke’s ‘American Sfloglio’

Like many fledgling cooks of his generation, Wylie really gets into cooking projects — the more elaborate the better. The most gleeful I’ve seen him since graduation was when we spent two days making tagliatelle al ragù della vecchia scuola from Evan Funke’s American Sfoglino cookbook — a process which started with putting various meats through a manual meat grinder for the ragù, and passing simmered tomatoes through a food mill. (My favorite line in the recipe: “Begin tasting for tenderness and seasoning after 5 hours.”) We used a rolling pin to roll the pasta dough, and a knife to cut it; Funke’s philosophy is summed up in his hashtag #fuckyourpastamachine. 

And so, when through a curious set of circumstances I brought a shiny new Instant Pot — one of those countertop pressure cookers — into the house, he regarded the thing with contempt.

Not that I blame him; it’s the way he was raised. But for reasons having to do with my consulting business, I wanted to explore the possibilities. And if by some miracle I took to the thing, well, maybe it would lead to fewer supermarket roast chicken situations post work-days.

Because precise timing is involved, and the thing was utterly foreign to me, I couldn’t just dive in and start improvising; I had to learn the basics first. I went to a couple of admired and reliable sources: New York Times Cooking and Serious Eats. 

It was at the latter that I turned up a recipe that looked so implausible I couldn’t wait to try it: J. Kenji López-Alt’s Easy Pressure Cooker Green Chili with Chicken. In other words, chicken chile verde. 

I couldn’t wait to show Wylie, who naturally scoffed. The recipe would have us believe that you could throw raw chicken thighs, onion, garlic, tomatillos, spices and chiles into the vessel, push a button and (once the machine came to pressure) 15 minutes later you’d have something gorgeous and profoundly delicious. 

First time around Wylie insisted on browning the chicken thighs on top of the stove first. So we tried it like that. Then we tried it exactly as written. Then we tried it giving the poblano, Anaheim and serrano chiles, along with the onion, garlic and tomatillos, a quick char on a comal, as you would in a traditional chile verde recipe. 

I’m here to tell you it was very good each and every time. We served it once with home-made corn tortillas (fantastic!), with handmade tortillas picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant when we were out of masa harina and couldn’t find any nearby (also fantastic) and with corn tortillas we bought at Trader Joe’s and reheated in the microwave (even that was pretty good).

• We stirred a couple tablespoonfuls of masa harina (a traditional thickener for these types of braises) into the finished dish: perfect! 

• We also added an optional garnish of crumbled queso blanco, which rounds out the flavors beautifully; if you’re wrapping the chile verde into tacos, some crumbled queso blanco added in each one is lovely.

What of our various other attempts at improvements? 

• Because the Instant Pot is all about ease, our recipe uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of using skin-on, bone-in thighs and then removing skin and bones (if the dish lost any depth of flavor as a result of not cooking with the bones, I couldn’t detect it). 

• Browning the chicken, however, did not noticeably improve the dish, so we jettisoned that step. 

• Charring the chiles and garlic cloves (in their skins) adds slight value — a subtle charry, roasty flavor — do that only if you feel like it and have an extra few minutes (meanwhile, it’s easier to seed charred chiles than raw). 

• Don’t bother charring the onion or tomatillos because the charry payoff is less, and it’s a little messier.

Though our version of the recipe — which we call Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooking Version) — calls for boneless, skinless thighs, of course you can also use bone-in, skin-on thighs as the original recipe suggests, simply removing the bones and skin before shredding the chicken. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one time I forgot to buy Anaheim chiles, and so just made it with poblanos — and there wasn’t much of a difference in flavor.

OK, then — a quick walk through. The only active time it takes to speak of is prepping the onion, chiles and tomatillos, which get husked and quartered; the chiles are seeded then roughly chopped, like the onion. (If you’re going to char the chiles, you’d do that before seeding and chopping, and you can toss the garlic cloves in their skins on the skillet, comal or griddle to char as well.) Toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a small pan till fragrant. Set the pressure cooker to SAUTE, and toss in all of those things, along with three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a pinch of salt. Once it sizzles a bit, seal the pressure cooker and cook on HIGH PRESSURE for 15 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken and shred it. Add López-Alt’s brilliant secret ingredient (Asian fish sauce!), along with salt to taste and a handful of cilantro, blitz the sauce — either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender or food processor — then stir in a couple tablespoons of masa harina. Shred the chicken and return it to the sauce. Garnish with more cilantro, and (if you like) some crumbled queso blanco. Serve it with warm corn tortillas and maybe some limes and more crumbled queso blanco.

Here’s the recipe. Please (please!) let us know how you like it.

Or, if you’d prefer an old-fashioned, long, lazy and aromatic braised-the-on-the-stove experience, let us know that as well, and we’ll hurry up with Chile Verde (Stovetop Version).

[RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde]

Serve up irresistible classics on Super Bowl Sunday: glorious Texas chili and killer guac

When it comes to football munchies, I seem to be desperately out of touch!

A big chunk of America, it seems, is head-over-heels in love with an appetizer I’d never even heard of until today: Buffalo chicken dip. According to a story in The Huffington Post, the gooey, cheesy, spicy, chicken-y concoction is the most Googled Super Bowl snack in six states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii and Florida.

Really? OK, BCD fans — dip away! But if you prefer to make something more irresistibly classic on Super Bowl Sunday, perhaps a simmering pot of classic Texas chili — flanked by a molcajete-ful of killer guacamole — would hit the spot. And if you’re (like me) happier in the kitchen than glued to a football game, you could even round out the festivities with hot-off-the-comal handmade corn tortillas.

All sounds super delicious to me, especially on a chill February afternoon. Plus it’ll fill your living space with enchanting aromas.

On top of it, a legit Texas chili, built from a slab of generously marbled chuck, is fun and satisfying to make — and super interesting if you’ve never done it before. You could ask your friendly butcher for a coarse chili grind, but I think it’s even nicer to hand-cut it into half-inch dice.

Hand-cut beef chuck gives Texas chili incredible flavor and texture.

Brown the meat, then add to it toasted, then soaked and puréed ancho chiles, stir in some chile soaking water, charred onion, garlic and spices and let the whole thing simmer for a couple of hours. Then your job is just to sit back and enjoy the wafting aromas.

Wanna take a peek at the recipe? Here you go:

Then, shortly before the gang is set to arrive, whip up some guacamole. I’ve evolved this one — our family’s default guac — over the years. My guacamole insurance policy is shopping for avocados two or three days before I’m going to make it, in case I don’t find ripe avocados. Buy almost-ripe ones, and put them on the counter in a brown paper bag to let them ripen. If you find already ripe ones, they should hold fine in the fridge. Make the guac just before kick-off, for the best flavor.

A couple bags of tortilla chips, maybe some salsa fresca or salsa verde (pick ‘em up, or make one yourself), beers and Topo Chicos and whatnot, and you’ll be all set!

Here’s your ticket to guacamole:

And here are a few other recipes you might want close-at-hand: corn tortillas, salsa borracha and roasted salsa verde. In case this all just puts you in a Mexican mood, you can peruse our Mexican recipes section to see if something else catches your fancy.

That should do it for now. Happy cooking, happy eating — and may your favorite team win!

How to build the beautifully spiced, mega-healthy, plant-based, cross-cultural soup that could easily change your life

It’s only a few days into the new year, but we’re tempted to proclaim 2020 The Year of the Soup. Yep, we’re thinking it’s going to be a soup-flavored year.

Here’s why. First, plant-based eating is on the rise, and soup is the ideal form for plant-based, soulful hankerings — including vegan ones.

Also, we’ll be hearing a lot about the importance of foods with anti-inflammatory properties this year, as chronic inflammation is now recognized as a major contributor to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis, and anti-inflammatory eating is widely seen as kind of a “fountain of youth.” Soup is an ideal vehicle to load up on anti-inflammatory superstar ingredients like turmeric — the #1 anti-inflammatory food, according to Michael Greger, M.D., who recently published a compelling new book, How Not To Diet. Ginger and garlic are the second and third most anti-inflammatory ingredients: also great friends of soup.

The most anti-inflammatory components of food, meanwhile, are fiber and flavones — both of which are abundant in the type of super-soup we’re about to provide a blueprint for.

Then there’s the emergence of the zero-waste movement. Making a big ol’ super soup lets you use up produce in your fridge you might have otherwise tossed (or composted) — limp celery, greens that have seen better days, carrot and onion trimmings, the stems of the broccoli from that Chinese recipe you made that called only for the florets, to name just a few. Have a little bowl of leftover sautéed spinach or roasted carrots? Into the pot they go. Make this soup once, and you’ll find yourself saving many more vegetable trimmings going forward (we keep a dedicated zipper bag for that purpose, so it’s easy).

Stuff that came out of our fridge: broccoli stems from a Chinese stir-fry that called for florets only; celery leftover from a crudité platter; a couple of forgotten halved onions, trumpet royale mushrooms from a dish we bought too many mushrooms for. The tough and woody parts of the broccoli stems will get peeled away and discarded.

January is our favorite month to fall in love with soup all over again, following all the holiday revelry — especially soups with health-sustaining properties (as we wrote about three years ago). The health benefits of onions, garlic, leeks, shallots (all members of the detoxifying allium family) and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale have all been well documented. And hey — they’re all awesome in soup!

Meanwhile, who couldn’t stand to lose a little weight? (It’s our resolution this New Year’s, and, ahem, every year). According to Dr. Greger’s book, if you’d like to lose weight, soup is your super food because it’s so filling, nutritious, fiber-filled and low-calorie. This type of soup is legume-based, relying on lentils, one of our favorite foods as lentils are earthy, ancient and soul-satisfying. The fact that they’re (surprisingly to those who don’t know their charms) quick-cooking is a giant bonus: It means this dish cooks in no more than about an hour. An Instant Pot would be even quicker.

Green Lentil & Baby Kale Super-Warming Detox Soup

Do you like spices? Greger’s meticulous survey of medical literature finds that cumin is a powerful appetite suppressants, and he recommends eating it every day. He also touts the truly awesome health benefits of nigella seed, outlined in this medical review, which calls it a “miracle herb.” Both happen to be wonderful in hearty vegan winter soups, as they’re traditionally eaten with lentils.

Finally, there is the flavor factor: This type of soup is so delicious, satisfying and beautifully spiced that we’d be thrilled to eat it even it it weren’t fabulous for our health and good for the planet (especially if you go for organic ingredients and minimal packaging).

Convinced? Hungry? Although we are providing a recipe with this, you really don’t need one — you just need the method — which couldn’t be easier. If you have time to chop things up and wait an hour, you have time to make it. In fact, because we can’t think of what to name it, we’ll call it Sunday Souper Soup.

How to build a Sunday Souper Soup

1. Sweat onions (and other alliuM) and aromatic vegetables

   Heat two or three tablespoons of olive oil (or grapeseed, canola or sunflower oil) in a large soup pot till shimmering, add chopped or diced onion (as much or as little as you like), carrots, celery and any other aromatics you like and have handy (leeks and turnips are nice additions). Toss in garlic (as much or little as you like, or leave it out) — smashed cloves, chopped, sliced, whatever — chopped ginger (if using) and cook another minute or so. You can also add chopped or sliced fresh mushrooms at this point; if you do, let them cook a few minutes till they start to give up their water.

2. ADd spices

   Add ground spices such as turmeric (1 to 3 teaspoons is a good range; 3 makes it pretty turmeric-heavy), cumin, coriander seed, nigella seed. For best flavor use whole seeds and grind them yourself; toasting them in a small pan first adds depth, but isn’t necessary. You can also use pre-ground spices; nigella seed is generally used whole. Don’t know how much? Try a teaspoon of each you’re using (you can always adjust up or down next time). Stir in and cook two or three minutes.

3. ADD LENTILS, water, tomato

   Use green, black, red, brown, yellow or any combination. We love green and black lentils, which keep their integrity, so always include one or both of those. Red and yellow lentils break down quickly into a soupy texture, so it’s nice to include one of those as well. But any lentils are fine. Two cups is a good place to start (that’s enough for a big pot), but the anything between one and two cups (or more) is fine. Rinse them well and toss them in, along with water (6 to 8 cups) and a can of chopped tomatoes (including the liquid). What size can? It doesn’t matter — just depends on how tomatoey you like it. During tomato season, of course, you can use fresh ones, if you like. Now’s the moment to add a bay leaf or three and/or dried mushrooms, if you’re using them (They are optional). You can pause for a cup of tea now, or take the time now to survey what else is in your fridge that you might want to add, and cut it up.

4. ADD longer-cooking VEG

   All of the vegetables in this step are optional. If you want to use harder cruciferous vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, rapini, broccolini and the like, you can cut them up and toss them in just after the lentils, or wait 5 or 10 minutes to toss add them. If you’re using very thick, tough broccoli steams, you might want to peel away the tough part on the outside before dicing. If you have cauliflower rice, that can be added now or closer to the end. Also add eggplant (peeled and diced), green beans, scallions, diced potato or sweet potato — anything you’d want to simmer for 20 or 25 minutes or so.

5. ASSESS LIQUID, AND ADD SALT, PEPPERS/CHILES

   Check and see how your liquid is doing, adding a cup or two (or more) of water as necessary to get the soupiness you like. You can make it pretty soupy, or keep it thicker, like a vegan chili. Add salt (I start with about two teaspoons for a big pot and adjust up from there) and some kind of chile if you like (such as Aleppo pepper, cayenne, chile powder, Espellette pepper, etc.) Taste and adjust (you’ll adjust later again, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect — just don’t over-salt).

6. ADD LEAFY GREENS, TENDER VEGETABLES AND HERBS

   What kinds of greens are cluttering up your crisper drawer — when we last made this soup, we had a quarter-head of napa cabbage, half a bag of arugula that had seen better days and a few escarole leaves we had deemed too ugly for a salad. Slice up larger greens (as we did the cabbage and escarole), and toss in things like arugula, baby spinach or baby kale whole. Other greens that would work great here are bok choy. When we make this soup and we don’t happen to have tired greens sitting around, we usually pick up a bag of baby kale, arugula or baby spinach, and dump that straight in. This would also be the time to add quick-cooking vegetables like zucchini (diced or sliced cut into half-moon slices), along with any leftover cooked vegetables, chopped up or cut into bite-sized pieces. Add chopped parsley (including stems), dill, mint, basil or whatever other fresh herbs you like at this point as well.

7. TASTE, ADJUST SEASONING, ADD WATER IF NECESSARY, STIR AND SERVE!

Sunday Souper Soup is almost ready once the greens go in.

How to use your Sunday Souper Soup, and why it may change your life

(Maybe you can suggest a better name? Tell us in a comment or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com!).

• Make the soup on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon (though any day will do) and eat it all week. I’m happy to eat it once a day, either at lunch or dinner, every day for a week, but other people might get bored and want it every other day or so. Either way, it is so healthy, filling and satisfying that you’ll be much less tempted to overindulge — thereby helping with health-minded and weight-loss-minded resolutions. You may want to add some water when you reheat, as it tends to thicken over time in the fridge.

• You can freeze some of it and keep some to eat this week.

• You can add to it, with delicious results. We just heated up the last bowl of a batch, which wasn’t quite enough for the two of us. We happened to have some leftover roasted Savoy cabbage and mushrooms, so we chopped those up and tossed them in (adding a little water), and the cabbage and ‘shrooms gave the soup a completely different quality. Fantastic!

• It’s the perfect vehicle in which to use nigella seeds, turmeric, cumin, dried chile and other ingredients getting attention for their awesome health-promoting properties.

• We love serve it with harissa to stir in at the end (everyone likes a different spice level). Other hot sauces work just as well — and they all have added health kick.

In case it’s helpful, here’s the Sunday Souper Soup in master recipe form:

We’d love to hear what you think of it — and we’d love to hear from you in general! Let us know (or ask questions about it) in a comment, or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com.

Ring in the new year with soulful Persian soups starring The Black Eyed Peas

If you live in the American South, you know that black-eyed peas bring good luck for New Year’s. Hence the tradition, down where we live, of eating “Texas caviar” — sort of a cold bean salad starring the world’s cutest legume, along with chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeños, onions and such, dressed in vinaigrette.

And yet the chill of January is when we crave hot, soul-sustaining, legume-happy soups.

At Cooks Without Borders lately we’ve been in the throes of a Middle-Eastern obsession, which largely consists of poring through a few enticing cookbooks on our shelves that we hadn’t yet explored, and madly, impulsively, intrepidly cooking from them.

Two are titles by Claudia Roden, the award-winning Cairo-born, London-residing author: The New Book of Middle-Eastern Food (first published in 1968, and revised in 2000) and Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon (2006).

Taste of Persia, Naomi Duguid’s culinary romp through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Kurdistan had been beckoning to us from the shelf since it was published three years ago, begging to be cooked from. We’d also been itching to explore Salma Hage’s monumental tome, The Lebanese Kitchen (2012), Uri Scheft’s Breaking Breads: A New World of Israeli Baking (2016) and Anissa Helou’s charming book of desserts, Sweet Middle East (2015).

A few years back (following a years-long Yotam Ottolenghi crush) we fell head-over-heels in love with Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (and we wrote about it here and here).

Batoursh, a Syrian dish that layers lamb cooked with onion and pine nuts with eggplant and yogurt, from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

These days, Lebanese and other Middle-Eastern flavors have been front-of-mind again. Wylie, who is now on The Cooks Without Borders R&D and Development Team (lol), graduated from Occidental College in May, and we’re thrilled to have him at home as he’s job-hunting, having earned a degree in Diplomacy and World Affairs. His girlfriend, Nathalie (who also graduated this spring from Oxy, in Psychology), is staying with her parents in Qatar, as she applies to grad school. It turns out Wylie has the cooking gene, not to mention a passion for it, and that passion is perhaps not coincidentally (as Nathalie’s mom is Lebanese and her father is Syrian) expressing itself in a craving for babaganouj and warm pita bread and spice-laden lamb dishes and baklava, and an irrepressible urge to learn how to cook all of it.

So we’ll have plenty of delicious recipes coming to Cooks Without Borders in the near future, from all over the Middle East — a region whose culinary borders are rather more porous than its political ones.

But for now, we celebrate New Year’s — the Julian calendar’s New Year’s, that is. And that brings us back to soups that feature black-eyed peas. We turned up two of them last week, both Persian, both easy to make and both outstanding.

Ash-e-reshteh, a beans-and-greens soup that celebrates the Persian New Year. Naomi Duguid’s version, from Taste of Persia, features black-eyed peas.

The first, from Taste of Persia, traditionally celebrates Persian New Year, Nou-Roz, which is commemorated not in the dead of winter, but (more poetically) on the spring equinox. It’s called “New Year’s Bean Soup” in the book; the subtitle Duguid supplies, ash-e-reshteh, is the name it goes by in Iran.

As the soup is bursting with fresh herbs and greens along with all those soulful legumes and spices and the noodles that give it the reshteh part of its name, it seems to us perfect for the moment. That it happens to be plant-based is a big bonus: It is vegetarian as is, and vegan if you do without the optional yogurt garnish.

The toppings don’t stop at yogurt, though: There are also fried onions, mint oil and saffron water.

We also found a number of other versions of the soup that we can’t wait to try, such as one from Samin Nosrat published in The New York Times last spring. Another, published in 2012 in Saveur is care of Anissa Helou. They all build on greens and beans in varying combos, with piles of different fragrant herbs (fresh mint, dill, cilantro, parsley) going into to each, they all sounds positively dreamy.

More on that later, no doubt. For now, we are enjoying Duguid’s take. Here’s the recipe we adapted:

The second soup, Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup), is one we adapted from a recipe in Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup) is adapted from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Roden calls for either starting with either lamb or beef as a base; we chose lamb. The only real prep involved is slicing an onion, chopping some parsley, dicing an eggplant and a couple of bell peppers and cutting a few potatoes in half, but the delicious effect is outsized: This one’s going straight into our repertoire.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do; here’s the recipe:

With that, we’d like to say happy New Year from our family at Cooks Without Borders to yours. Thank you for reading, thank you for engaging with us, thank you for returning after we disappeared and came back; we greatly appreciate it and look forward to serving you and feeding you many dishes, stories and photos that we hope will inspire you in the coming year. We wish you a healthy, peaceful, love-filled and delicious 2020!

Effortless summer baking: The (life-changing!) joy of frozen puff pastry

How much fun can a (relative sane) person have with a box of frozen puff pastry? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

I spent most of my adult life avoiding puff pastry. Well, I'm always happy to eat it, but make it? Not so much. I made it from scratch exactly once, a hundred years ago; that was enough. I'm not the type of person to spend endless hours rolling out layers of dough and butter and chilling it and waiting and rolling, etc. etc.

Until very recently, it never occurred to me that there were good brands of pre-made frozen puff pastry made with actual butter rather than hydrogenated vegetable oils. 

I know, right?! How out of it can a person get?!

Some months ago, I happened upon a box of frozen puff pastry in the freezer case at Trader Joe's that boasted an all-butter situation, snapped it up, stuck it in my freezer and nearly forgot about it. Then, when I was visiting friends in London last month, my dear friend Jenni’s wonderful sister Alison invited us for dinner. It one of these off-the-cuff affairs for 20 or so. What I love about the way these girls entertain is that they don't stress (even when 20 people are coming!); they don't worry if everything's not ready when people start arriving. Sometimes Jenni doesn't even start cooking until people start walking in the door! She and Alison understand that the important thing is to hang out with friends and family, and whatever winds up on the table will be delicious just because. 

They also happen to have some very good ideas up their sleeves. On this particular evening – a regular weekly Friday night dinner with extended family and friends – Alison pulled a savory tart out of the oven, placed it on a table out in the garden, and wheeled a pizza cutter through it to slice it into hors d'oeuvre bites. 

This is Alison's savory appetizer tart, before it was sliced into pieces. Doesn't it look *fantastic*? It was!

The thing looked so delicious, I was mesmerized. Free-form, golden-crusted, beautifully messy, it was strewn with greens and mushrooms and slices of some kind of marvelous-looking washed-rind cheese melted into it. It was even more delicious than it looked – some kind of serious umami savory action on that perfect, flaky crust. I stayed there, parked next to it, trying with all my might not to eat piece after piece until it was demolished.

After showering her with compliments, I asked how she made it. "Frozen puff pastry!" she said. "All butter."

That was then (about a month ago). Now, four savory tarts, three fruit tarts and a set of cheese straws later, I can't imagine life without a box of the stuff in my freezer. At. All. Times.

All-butter frozen puff pastry, where have you been all my life?

So far, I have found three brands. Perhaps there are more out there. Both the Trader Joe's and the Dufour Pastry Kitchens' brands are far superior to the Pepperidge Farms non-butter frozen puff pastry I used to use occasionally in the past (that's the one with the hydrogenated vegetable oil; it also includes high-fructose corn syrup). The Dufour Pastry Kitchens classic puff pastry contains only butter, unbleached unbromated flour, water, salt and lemon juice. It's not inexpensive: I paid $10.99 for a 14-ounce box at my local Whole Foods Market and $10.49 for a box at my local Central Market. The Trader Joe's pastry was nearly as flaky and delicious, and much less expensive: $3.99 for an 18-ounce box. The Dufour brand is one single large rectangle, which comes folded; the Trader Joe's brand is two rectangular pieces, wrapped separately, which is nice (you can defrost one at a time); they come rolled.

Just one problem with the Trader Joe's brand: According to a clerk at my local store, the chain only sells it during the last quarter of the year, presumably for fall and holiday baking. So unless you keep a box in your freezer for more than six months, you can forget about it for summer baking. (Mr. Joe, please change your policy! If you do, I'll make you a summer tart!)

Mr. Trader Joe, if you start stocking your frozen all-butter puff pastry year-round, I will make you one of these. I promise.

A third brand, White Toque, was $12.99 for a one-pound box at Whole Foods, but this brand is two rounds – which struck me as less wonderful for a savory tart to cut in small rectangles to eat as pre-dinner nibbles, but very nice for a fruit tart. The White Toque brand – which I've only spotted once – did not rise as high as either the Dufour or Trader Joe's brand, but it's possible it was because my refrigerator died, and after defrosting it sat in a less-than-optimal temperature for more than a few hours. I will give it another try next time I find it. Still, it worked just fine for a cherry-plum tart that I will blog about soon.

First I need to tell you the two ways all-butter frozen puff pastry has changed my life (and no, I'm not exaggerating). 

The first is the savory tart. I managed to approximate Alison's, although Alison used a really nice aged washed-rind goat cheese on hers, and I haven't been able to find anything like it 'round these parts.

But the great news is once you grasp how to put one of these tarts together, you can make one out of just about any kind of summer veg. The general idea is this: Thaw the pastry, unwrap it, and fold up the edges to make a rim, painting a little egg wash on them if you want glossy look. Make a filling of sautéed veg, add a couple of eggs beaten with a little cream or half and half, and either put some grated or crumbled cheese in the egg (feta, goat cheese, cheddar, etc.) or strew crumbled feta or goat cheese on top. Pop it in the oven. So easy.

You can riff on it endlessly, changing up the cheese or the sautéed veg, adding sliced fresh or chopped sun-dried tomatoes. It always turns out great, even if you're in such a hurry that you make a terrible mess of it – as I did with a zucchini, tomato and okra version in which I used too much egg and had a sloppy a edge, so egg spilled out all over the parchment.

My hastily-assembled zucchini, tomato and okra tart. With too much egg and sloppy edges, it spilled all over the parchment.

It was still pretty fabulous. (For that one I sliced the okra in half vertically and grilled them before laying them atop the tart, along with sliced fresh tomatoes, before popping it in  the oven.)

Even so, it looked – and tasted – pretty great!

The point is, these savories are so easy and impressive that they have already become a go-to appetizer for me for laid-back summer entertaining. A glass of rosé, a slice of savory tart – who needs anything else?

OK, here's the other way in which all-butter frozen puff pastry changed my life: They are brilliant to use for summer fruit tarts, including those that star unbaked fruit, like berries.  

Until I learned the joys of frozen all-butter puff pastry, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make a good tart using fresh strawberries. All you do is make a quick pastry cream – which is way less involved than you might think (much less tricky than making most custards), blind-bake a crust, spread the pastry cream on top, and cover with berries. If you want to be fancy you can melt some fruit jelly and glaze the berries, but you don't have to. 

I also made a pretty wonderful tart using mixed berries – blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. That one is super easy because you don't have to stem or slice or pit anything -- just toss the berries with a little orange liqueur before dropping them onto the pastry cream. 

Easy berry tart. How festive would this be for the Fourth of July -- or Bastille Day?

I'm thinking it could be the perfect, patriotic-hued dessert to serve on the Fourth. Or for Bastille Day! What the recipe? Here you go. 

RECIPE: Savory Summer Tart with Chard and Mushrooms

RECIPE: Easy Berry Tart