Judy Rodgers and her New Year's Eve Gougères

My favorite thing to do on New Year's Eve is cook for friends – because I love to cook, I love my friends and I don't really like going out on New Year's Eve, especially to a restaurant. If I entertain at home I can spend a luxurious day in the kitchen chopping and slicing and baking, enjoying the smell of something warm in the oven and the sizzle of onions and shallots on the stove. Then I get to enjoy the company of people I love best, spending hours at the table, sipping wine and eating and talking and laughing, and of course popping a bottle of Champagne at midnight. 

It has to be Champagne. It just wouldn't be New Year's Eve without it.

And every New Year's Eve, I think of Judy Rodgers, the late great chef-owner of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. Her Zuni Cafe Cookbook, published in 2002, is one of my favorite volumes of all time. One of the many recipes I love to cook from it is her New Year's Eve Gougères.

Gougères – French cheese puffs, served warm just out of the oven – are wonderful anytime, particularly with a glass of light red wine, maybe a village Beaujolais or a Côtes du Rhônes.

Sliced open and stuffed with great bacon, arugula and pickled onions, as Rogers suggests, they're a spectacular, and very festive, hors d'oeuvre – on New Year's Eve or any other eve.  Rodgers, who died two years ago this month, wrote in the recipe's headnote,"This was the most successful New Year's Eve hors d'oeuvre of the last decade, outselling foie gras, oysters, caviar, crab salad, and little truffle-laden pizzas."

There you go. They are a real treat – definitely something to consider whipping up on the last day of the year.

I treasure my copy of The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, not just because there are so many great recipes and ideas in it, but also because Rodgers signed it for me when I bought it at the restaurant many years ago. "For Leslie," she wrote, "always cook with heart." Rest in peace, Judy Rodgers. You will always live on through your recipes.

Happy New Year!

One of my favorite winter lunches: escarole salad with toasted walnuts and Roquefort

With all the feasting between the holidays, it feels like a perfect day for a salad. But I don't want to go all austere – it is the holidays, after all! Here's just the thing: one of my favorite winter salads – escarole with toasted walnuts and Roquefort. If you can't find Roquefort that speaks to you (maybe it's too expensive or over-the-hill, yellowy on the edges), or you prefer another blue such as Maytag, Fourme d'Ambert or Danish blue, go for it. The same goes for the escarole: The salad is just as nice with frisée or sliced Belgian endives (a combination of purply-red and pale green ones is really pretty). 

How to turn a humble celery root into a classic French salad, céleri rémoulade

Céleri rémoulade

This simple French salad – julienned celery root dressed in mustardy mayonnaise with herbs – is one of my favorite starters. And it's one of my husband Thierry's least favorites. That's because when he was growing up in France, céleri rémoulade was considered to be the worst of the worst: school cafeteria food. 

He always groans when I make it. And then he tastes it, and gobbles it up. 

Though you can use store-bought mayonnaise in this dish, making your own mayo for it transforms it into fabulous dinner-party food.

I think I've tried every possible way to make mayo – whisking it by hand, using a blender, a food processor and a mixer. Easiest and most reliable, I think, is a hand-mixer. My recipe for mayo makes about a cup, and you won't need that much for the céleri rémoulade; you can use what's left over to slather on sandwiches and make tuna salad. Or flavor it and pretend it's aioli, as so many restaurants do! 

Once that's done, prepare the celery root. Also known as celeriac, it's the ugly duckling of the vegetable world.

First, use a small, sharp paring knife to peel it. Don't worry if it seems like you're cutting too much away – you want to get rid of all the ugly hairy stuff. Then slice it into julienne matchsticks. You can do this using a sharp chef's knife by first cutting it into 1/8 inch slices, then stacking those slices up and cutting them into 1/8 inch julienne. 

The whole thing's much easier if you have a mandoline to get those first slices. (What’s the best mandoline? I love my Oxo, which is more than 15 years old; here’s a newer model. But friends swear by the much less-expensive Benriner brand.) Set it on 1/8 inch slicing, slice up the whole celery root, then make stacks and use your knife to slice into 1/8 inch julienne. If you have a hand-guard, be sure to use it. With their super-sharp blades, mandolines can be vicious!

Chop herbs and other flavorings for the sauce. Parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil are all nice in it, but even just parsley is delicious in the rémoulade. You can also chop up some capers and even cornichons, though those are optional. You'll want to give it a bracing dose of Dijon mustard, for sure. And sometimes I lighten it up with crème fraîche, though that's optional too. 

Once the sauce ingredients are combined, dress the julienned celery root with enough of the sauce to moisten it, then taste it and adjust the seasonings. Let it sit for an hour or two – or overnight – so the flavors meld and the sauce soaks into the celery root. Then serve it as a first course with a simple French dinner.

Ready to try it? Here's the recipe!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kid comes home from college: guacamole time!

Funny story about my molcajete – the mortar and pestle, made of rough volcanic rock, that I feel is essential for making great guacamole. Grinding onion, chiles, cilantro and salt together to a paste in the molcajete makes a base that gives the dip superb, deep flavor.

I've had my molcajete for decades – so long, I can't even remember where I got it. I was definitely living in New York, and it was before I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, so pre-1995. Somewhere along the way, after moves to Los Angeles and then Dallas, I lost the molcajete's pestle. I continued making guacamole, natch, but had to muddle along improvising with a wooden spoon or the pestle that belonged to my smooth marble mortar. Not good with that rough volcanic stone. At some point, I found a molinillo — a wooden tool, with a broad bulb of wood on the end, used to mix champurrado, chocolate-flavored atole. Somehow I thought I'd live the rest of my life that way, smashing chiles and cilantro and avocado with a molinillo. Feeling stupid about it one day, I started nosing around online and in cook shops. But (holy guacamole!) – a nice molcajete can cost $40.

Last summer, I happened to be shopping in a Fiesta supermarket in Austin, Texas, and found reasonably priced molcajetes for sale. That wasn't a huge surprise: A gentleman working in a restaurant supply had pointed me in that direction. What was a surprise was that Fiesta also sold the pestle part individually – for about three bucks! Eureka! But how silly I felt: Doing without something that could have been so easily and inexpensively obtained if I had just used my brain!

So now I have both parts – mismatched, to be sure – but I'm happy every time I see them together on my countertop.

So. The kid -- who just started in college this fall in Southern California – is  home for winter break, and what does he crave? My guacamole – every few days. Easily done. I'm going through avocados like they're going out of style.