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Delicious, soul-warming super-detox lentil-kale soup: Why wait till January?

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It's only mid-December, and I'm already feeling like eating clean – at least in-between holiday parties and festive feasts. And here in Dallas, it's soooooo cold outside! 

What could be nicer, in such a circumstance, than the prospect of a big pot of soul-warming soup simmering on the stove? I'm thinking green lentils. And turmeric – for its strong anti-oxidant properties. And baby kale. And then a bunch of other stuff to make it delicious. 

That's what I thought yesterday morning, when it was 70 outside but I knew it was headed down to the 40s by the afternoon. 

I already had everything I needed to make the soup coming together in my head, except one key ingredient: I headed out at around 11 to pick up a cello-pack of baby kale at Trader Joe's.

By lunchtime the soup was ready – and the house filled with wonderful aromas. That's how quick and easy it is to achieve. 

The only work is chopping a few aromatic vegetables (onion, celery, carrot, garlic) and opening a can of tomatoes. (Make sure your tomatoes don't have sugar in them, or the soup won't be so detoxifying.) Sauté the veg in a little olive oil, add turmeric, coriander and herbs, then  the lentils, tomatoes and water. 

Did I mention that the recipe is vegan?

When the lentils are tender, throw in a bunch of baby kale, then let a cook a few more minutes till it all comes together. Lentils cook pretty quick, so it'll be done in just about an hour. 

Oh, baby – it turned out even better than I dreamed: lightly spiced, aromatic, earthy, soulful and satisfying. I knew Thierry would want some: Lentils are one of his favorite foods. But even Wylie (yes! He's home for winter break!) went along for the ride – that's how good it smelled. He'd just awakened at noon (college kids!) and had a bowl with us, just after his bagel and coffee. He loved it.

Here's the best part.  When I woke up this morning it was 15 degrees outside – 4 with the wind-chill factor. The tree is now decorated. We have plenty of firewood. This evening, we're going to our friends' holiday open house. 

Meanwhile, I know what I'm having for lunch.

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Ta-dah! This glorious roast lacquered duck is a game-changer for duck-lovers

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Ten months ago, a recipe for Chinese lacquered roast chicken from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes changed my life. It's brilliant and simple, and because it changed my life, I thought that was the end of that, recipe-development-wise. But the first time I wrote about it, my friend Michalene said, provocatively, "Have you tried it on a duck?"

I couldn't wait to give it a go. Unfortunately, it flopped: The duck's skin burned before the meat was cooked enough.

A mission was launched. I felt this duck could work, and I would find a way to make it work – even if I had to roast a hundred ducks. 

The very next try I got incredibly lucky – hitting the timing and temperature exactly right. What I got is what you see here: a gorgeous, shining, crisp-skinned duck whose meat was perfectly seasoned, wonderfully tender and incredibly succulent and flavorful. I couldn't believe something that insanely delicious was that easy to achieve. I made some Chinese steamed buns to go with it, and served it with cilantro, sliced scallions and hoisin sauce from a jar. But the duck needed no accouterments – it was incredible on its own.

Carving this gorgeous duck was almost as fun as eating it.

Carving this gorgeous duck was almost as fun as eating it.

You don't have to give it an Asian spin, though. The duck works beautifully as the centerpiece of a festive European- or American-style feast, surrounded by things like roast potatoes or sweet potato gratin and Brussels sprouts or braised Tuscan kale. 

Here's how easy the killer duck is to achieve.  It takes some time – two days – but very little effort.

Two days before you're going to serve it, you paint the bird with a glaze made from half-honey and half-soy sauce, and scatter salt on it. Slide it (uncovered) on a pan in the fridge. Next day, paint the bird all over again with the leftover glaze, and let it sit uncovered in the fridge overnight again. Next day, roast the bird at 450 for ten minutes, turn the temp down to 325 and let the bird roast for two hours. 

That's it. No flipping the bird or basted or fussing about it in any way. No need to make a sauce to go with it – it's that delicious. It's the perfect dreamy dinner for two or three people.

But here come the holidays, I thought. Wouldn't it be great to make two ducks and make them star of a dinner for four two six? So I invited a couple of friends over, and made glazed two ducks. Into the oven they went, and when my friends arrived, the house was filled with their enchanting aroma.

An hour later, after nibbles and drinks and general optimistic glee, we took our seats at the table. But these two ducks were not as wonderful: Set just next to each other on their rack set in a sheet pan, they crowded each other, preventing even browning. One side of each bird was a wee bit flabby, and I had to turn them and leave them in the oven longer, monkeying with the temperature to brown them properly.

Back to the store I went, seeking more ducks. 

Fresh ducks have a funny way of showing up in stores at exactly the moment I'm not planning on making one. It's just like the hair-dryer in the hotel rule. If you pack a hair dryer, you'll find one in your hotel room when you check in. If you don't pack one, you won't find one.

Serve the lacquered ducks with roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes or sweet potatoes, and you've got an American-style holiday feast.

Serve the lacquered ducks with roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes or sweet potatoes, and you've got an American-style holiday feast.

So, with two more friends invited for Saturday night duck dinner, on Wednesday I headed to the Whole Foods Market where I'd recently seen those gorgeous fresh ducks – at a much lower price than the last place I picked up a couple. (They set me back a whopping $45 each at Central Market; at Whole Foods they wanted $30-something each for 4 1/2 to 5 pound ducks.) When I arrived at Whole Foods this time, alas, there were no ducks to be had. I almost called another Whole Foods, when I thought better of it, deciding instead to head to the giant Asian supermarket, Super H-Mart, that's only a 10-minute longer drive from home. 

I thought I'd find fresh ducks at Super H-Mart, but I only found frozen ones. That was the bad news. The great news: The nice-looking Long Island ducks were only $16.50 apiece. Fortunately, they defrosted quickly enough for me to glaze them on Thursday. 

This time I solved the even-browning problem: I set them as far apart on the sheet pan as I could before roasting them. I thought I'd have to rotate the birds halfway through roasting for even browning, but those ducks continued to brown evenly as I looked in in them now and then. The space between them did the trick. Oh, man, they looked good – and they were!

This time I served them more Euro- or American-style: We started dinner with a baby kale and sweet-potato salad, then had the duck with roast potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts with pancetta. It was a super-easy dinner to put together, as I literally never turned on the stove. (I'm lucky enough to have two ovens, though you could always make the potatoes ahead of time and reheat them and roast the Brussels sprouts while the duck is resting.) 

I'll let you go now. I know you'll want to run off and procure a duck or two. 

Here's the recipe:

Be sure to let us know how you love it! And happy holidays from Cooks Without Borders.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land of Fish and Rice

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

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

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

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

Taste of Persia

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

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

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

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

Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors

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

Summer Fruit and Almond Cake

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

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

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

Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking

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

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

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

Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking

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

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

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

Mozza at Home

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

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

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

SWEET MIDDLE EAST

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

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

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Chicken soup is the most soothingly delicious (and supremely restorative!) thing in the world for what ails you

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How are you feeling? Not so great? Yeah, I thought so. 

When someone sneezes chez moi, I reach for a chicken – to make soup. It's what my mom always did. And I've always used her recipe.

And if the husband or the son or whoever happened to sneeze isn't actually under the weather, all the better: The chicken soup idea has been planted, and I can't shake it. As the soup simmers, it fills the house with wonderful smells. Chicken soup was the fragrance of my childhood (along with Chanel No. 5, but never at the same time). And I always find diving into a big bowl of chickeny broth with carrots, celery and noodles to be supremely restorative. No one needs to be ailing for chicken soup to be a splendid idea. 

Lots of cultures celebrate chicken soup. There's Chinese wonton soup, Thai thom ka gai (with coconut and lemongrass), Mexican tortilla soup and many more. I love them all. 

Jewish penicillin

Jewish penicillin

But for Ashkenazi Jews, no matter how far-removed we are from the old country (wherever in Eastern Europe that may be), it's a primal dish, a cornerstone of Jewish culture – right up there with bagels and chopped liver. And like bagels, it's one of the few Ashkenazi dishes to have infiltrated mainstream American culture. Campbell's Chicken Soup: Is that Jewish, or American? You get my drift.

Fragrant, delicious chicken soup is very easy to make – easier, I'd say, than running out to a deli to pick some up, should you happen to be in possession of a chicken, celery and carrots. In fact, if you've never made it before, once you try it, you'll wonder why it took you so long to make your own.

It goes like this: Cut up a chicken, ask the butcher to cut one up for you or buy one already cut up. The benefit of the first two are you can keep the back and neck to put in the soup -- they add lots of richness. Cover it in cold water, bring to a simmer, and skim. Add aromatic vegetables: onion, carrot and celery. My mom always added parsnip, too, so I follow suit, but it's not essential. If you skip it, add another carrot. Throw in a bunch of dill. Let it simmer an hour and a half or two hours. 

Add salt and pepper, and it's basically done. My mom always cooked fine egg noodles separately, put some in each bowl, and then strained some soup directly into each bowl, along with some carrots and celery. She would give us a plate of the chicken separately, and I shudder to think now that we often ate it with ketchup.

 I usually strain the whole soup –– reserving the chicken meat, carrots, celery and parsnip and adding them back into the clear soup. Put some cooked noodles in each bowl, and ladle it in.

My recipe includes measurements, but you don't have to measure things to make chicken soup; it's a soup made by feel. My mom never put garlic in hers, but I often do – especially if the soup is serving as Jewish penicillin; then I throw in a whole head, separated into cloves but not peeled. Sometimes I add a leek, or parsley. Have extra chicken parts in the freezer? Throw those in, for sure, and add a little more water. 

OK. That is my mom's gift to you. Wear it in good health. 

 

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Turkey tetrazzini is the mac and cheese of Thanksgiving leftover dishes

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You've had your fun with the turkey. Now you want the tetrazzini. 

What? Never made it or even tasted it? If you love mac and cheese, this is for you – it has that some kind of old-fashioned comfort-food creamy, luscious appeal.

In fact, I always make a bigger bird than I think I'll need for Thanksgiving so I'm sure to have four cups or so of leftover turkey meat after everyone has had their fill of next-day bone-gnawing.

It's pretty simple to achieve. Boil up half a box of spaghetti. Sauté some mushrooms. Make a white sauce by sprinkling flour on the mushrooms, cooking till the flour loses its raw taste, whisking in chicken broth and milk (or a combo of milk and half-and-half, if you want it richer, or even all half-and-half), then cooking till it's thick and creamy. Stir in chopped turkey, the spaghetti, grated Parmesan cheese and seasoning and turn it into a buttered baking dish. Top with Parmesan-enriched bread crumbs and bake till the top is golden-brown.

Then serve it up. Underneath that golden-brown, crunchy top it's rich, creamy and savory: old-fashioned comfort food at its best.

Preceded by a simple green salad and joined by a glass of full-bodied white wine, it's the perfect post-Thanksgiving dinner. 

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Crazy-good classics: Leslie Brenner's favorite Thanksgiving dishes

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One day in the early autumn of 2006, a conversation I had with one of my colleagues at The Los Angeles Times, where I was Food Editor at the time, would change Thanksgiving for me forever. And not just me: What came out of that conversation -- with my colleague Russ Parsons, a longtime food editor, staff writer, cookbook author and one of the best cooks I've ever had the pleasure to know -- changed Thanksgiving for dedicated home cooks all over America.

Russ was somewhat obsessed at the time with technique for roasting poultry (and other meats) practiced by Judy Rodgers, the gifted chef-owner of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. (Rodgers passed away in 2013). If you've ever been to Zuni Cafe or cooked from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, you may have feasted on its famous roast chicken. The secret behind its incredible flavor, succulence and crisp, golden-brown skin is generously salting the bird a day or two before you roast it, then letting the skin air-dry for hours. It's a trick Rodgers learned from old-school home cooks in the French countryside. Try roasting a chicken this way, and you'll never do anything else.

Anyway, I was as enamored of the technique as Russ was. One day I said to Russ, "Hey, Russ, have you ever tried giving a turkey the Judy treatment?" 

A look of amazement crept across Russ' smiling face. I think he ran out of the office without looking back -- eager to get his hands on a turkey and try it.

In the following weeks, Russ developed the technique for the turkey -- he called it dry-brining. It was a smashing success. The flesh was incomparably flavorful, with a wonderful smooth texture, and fabulous crisp, golden-brown skin. The technique was a snap, there was no basting, and no wrestling the bird into a bucket of brine and finding a way to store it during the week when refrigerator space is at such a premium.

At the paper we did comparative tastings -- of turkeys roasted after conventional wet-brining (always good, but an unwieldy mess), and high-temperature roasted birds and steam-roasted birds (another technique we were loving then). The dry-brined bird blew the other turkeys out of the water.

Russ tweaked and refined the technique, we published the recipe and our readers went crazy for it. Within a couple of years it had been picked up by papers and magazines all over the country. Now if you ask a serious home-cook how they make their Thanksgiving turkey, likely as not they'll say they dry-brine.

I can't even imagine doing it any other way: It's that good. That's why, from that season on, a dry-brined turkey has always been the centerpiece of my Thanksgiving table. (Thank you, Judy! thank you, Russ!)

Meanwhile, for me Thanksgiving isn't the time I feel like experimenting and being adventurous; it's the day I want to sink my teeth into dishes I know and love. I crave familiar flavors. For me Thanksgiving is the day to celebrate comfort food. (Probably the fact that as I restaurant critic I'm constantly tasting new things every night, rarely able to zero in on something I just happen to love, has something to do with it . . . ) 

Therefore, I always make the same things, year after year after year. The dry-brined turkey. A really good Cognac sauce (not gravy!). Chestnut-porcini stuffing. Brussels sprouts leaves with pancetta and mirepoix. And a luscious, savory sweet-potato gratin. You'll find recipes for all of the above in this post. I also serve a simple cranberry sauce and a relish tray, and for dessert, it's classic pumpkin pie all the way. 

So, back to our turkey. As Russ has always pointed out, the path to the magnificent bird is really more a technique than a recipe. 

All you do is apply Kosher salt -- quite a lot of it -- to the surface of the turkey. Seal it in a plastic zipper bag. Let it sit for three days in the fridge, during which time the salt works its magic on the flesh. By the end of three days, the salt will have soaked in. You take the bird out of its bag, its flesh moist but not wet at this point, and let it air-dry in the fridge for six or eight hours. The roasting part couldn't be easier: Start it breast-down on a rack in a roasting pan at high heat, turn it breast up, drop the temperature and let it finish roasting like that. That's it. No basting is necessary. The bird will be brilliant.

In case you're not yet a dry-brining convert, I'm excited to share the technique and recipe with you.

Along with the recipe you'll find my personal contribution: the really good sauce. It's not a gravy, but a sauce -- made by deglazing the roasting pan with Cognac. Ready for the recipes? Here you go . . . 

Now let's talk about the sides.

Naturally there has to be stuffing, and my stuffing of choice is one made from country bread enriched with chestnuts, porcini mushrooms and lots of celery and herbs. It was inspired by the stuffing my mom always made -- which didn't have mushrooms, but did have lots of rich roasted chestnuts.

And she taught me a trick that gives it amazing body and texture: add a lightly beaten egg or two. I used to stuff my turkey, and make additional stuffing to bake outside the bird. But in recent years I've chosen to keep the roasting simpler and quicker (and probably safer, from a food-safety point of view) and just bake the stuffing in a casserole outside of the bird. Honestly, I find it to be just as delicious. 

Here's the stuffing recipe:

Onto the potato question. I know there are people in the world who serve both regular potatoes and sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, but that's not the way I was raised. Chez nous, it was sweet potatoes all the way. 

In my house, we were spared the candy-sweet concoctions involving marshmallows and pineapple. But I did grow up with sweet potatoes that were given a brown-sugar boost. They weren't terribly sweet, but they were sweeter than I liked; I'm a huge fan of sweet potatoes' deeply sweet natural flavor. The sweet potato recipe of my dreams walked into my life the year after Russ developed his "Judy bird," as he called it, when my friend Regina Schrambling published her recipe for a savory sweet potato gratin -- also in the L.A. Times.  

I've made it every year since: It's a simple dish, achieved by peeling and slicing sweet potatoes, layering them -- seasoned -- in a baking dish, pouring a mixture of heavy cream and fresh thyme over them and baking. 

Yes, it's super-simple. And really killer. I hope you'll love it as much as I do.

Finally, a green veg. Many years ago (fifteen maybe? I'm guessing...) I fell in love with a recipe in Chez Panisse Cooking for Brussels sprouts leaves with pancetta and mirepoix (mirepoix is the classic trio of diced onion, celery and carrot). It was long before the Brussels sprouts craze took hold; I remember telling a friend this was a Brussels sprouts dish for people who didn't like Brussels sprouts. 

To be perfectly honest, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to prepare, as it requires pulling all the leaves off of each Brussels sprout. But the payoff is great: You get all the wonderful Brussels sprouts flavor -- heightened by mirepoix and pancetta — without the dense texture of biting into a little cabbage-head. Bertolli's dish, made bright and lively with a splash of vinegar at the end, is light, airy, vibrant and super-flavorful. 

OK, I hope that's enough to get you inspired for the big day. I always round things out with classic pumpkin pie and a straightforward cranberry sauce.  With any luck, I'll manage to put recipes for those in your hands by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. 

Have any questions — about planning, cooking these dishes, anything? Do let me know in a comment — I'd love to hear from you and I'll do my best to help!

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Nervous nibbles: 5 irresistible election-night snacks

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The big night is finally here! Everyone's been so swept up in prognosticating and the frenzy of voting, who's had time to think about snacks for return-watching tonight?

Since I know you already voted (right?! If not, please stop reading this now and GO VOTE!), let's project ourselves into this evening. After you vote, you can run to the supermarket.

OK, now it's six p.m. We've all snuck out of work early (after voting, of course!!!). Everyone is jittery as we gather round the TV.  Need drinks and nibbles. Your friends will bring the drinks. You can make these easy nibbles.

Amazing cheater hummus

Swipe a warm pita triangle through smooth-as-silk hummus, and you won't care who's ahead in Florida. (OK, maybe I exaggerate slightly.) It's too late to soak garbanzos overnight, so here's a super-quick and easy recipe for amazing cheater hummus, made with canned chick peas. It takes all of about ten minutes to achieve.

No one will know the chick peas used to live in a can!

Sevillian marinated carrots

 

Whether you're looking for a vegetarian snack, or you're after a nibble the color of Donald Trump's hair, this classic tapa will spice up your evening.

Charred okra

Got okra? Char it.

Got okra? Char it.

Here's another great vegetarian snack, and you don't need a recipe for this one. Procure a basket of okra, and slice each one vertically. Heat a stove-top grill (let it get really hot), brush the grill with a little olive oil, and place the okra cut-side-down on the grill. Use tongs to turn them over once they're nicely charred, and char the other side. Transfer to a platter, sprinkle with your best salt and, if you like, some kind of red pepper: Aleppo, Espellette, red chile flakes, whatever you've got. Ready, set, nibble.

Lamb meatballs

Spear these with toothpicks.

This one does double-duty: irresistible nibble and soothing comfort food. For a crowd, make a double batch. Spear 'em with toothpicks and prepare to swoon.

Guacamole, salsas and chips

Our recipe for guacamole will satisfy the baddest of bad hombres; roasted salsa verde makes a great complement. Are you so nervous you can't get anything done today? Then go all-in, and make the salsa borracha, too. Don't forget the chips!

Oh, one more thing: Don't forget to VOTE!!!

 

What to cook now: classic split-pea soup and baby kale-sweet potato salad

Even if you're among those who sort of wish kale had not taken over the world, there's a good chance you'll love this salad, which stars tender, earthy-yet-eminently-palatable baby kale. I tossed it together on a whim last winter, as I thought the ingredients – which sounded so nice together (baby kale, roasted sweet potato, toasted pecans and pomegranates) – would also look gorgeous together and taste great together.

They did! It was a huge hit, and I've made it many times since, including last night – when it seemed just the thing with simple, classic split pea soup – which I've been craving since autumn started to really kick in here in North Texas.

On weekends in fall and winter, I often roast two or three sweet potatoes (garnets are my faves) in case of sudden salad urges like this. They're also great, reheated in the office microwave, for a luscious, satisfying (and super-healthy) desk lunch. 

Autumn weekends are also a great time to simmer up a big pot of soup. Thierry's absolute favorite is my simple, classic split-pea soup, which you can almost make with your eyes closed (it's that easy).

All that's required is chopping an onion, slicing a few carrots, giving them a sweat in olive oil, adding split peas, water and a ham hock or smoked pork shank, and let it simmer and fill your living space with enticing aromas. It couldn't be easier or more delicious. The creamy, velvety texture is achieved just by the long simmer. Pull out the pork, cut or shred it up, put it back in and you're good to go.  Make it this weekend, and serve it all week.

Or invite friends over to be soothed by it at an election-watching party. Some crusty bread and sweet butter (dark rye or pumpernickle is great with it), a couple of cheeses – definitely some wine – and  you'll be ready for, well, anything.

Tender lamb meatballs with pine nuts and a touch of mint: Yes, please!

Are they Turkish? Are they Greek? North African? Sicilian? Who knows?! These particular meatballs are my own creation, and the combination of lamb, mint, parsley, onion, garlic and pine nuts would probably be at home anywhere in the Mediterranean.

They're really simple to prepare, as you don't brown them; you just drop them into a quick tomato sauce and let them simmer half an hour. That easy braise lets the meatballs stay tender, and it also lets the flavors of the lamb and the tomato sauce mingle deliciously.  

Combine the ingredients thoroughly, but don't overwork the mixture.

Sound good? Place all your ingredients in a bowl: ground lamb, bread crumbs, a couple beaten eggs, grated Parm (or Pecorino Romano, if you like), garlic, chopped parsley, dried spearmint, toasted pine nuts, salt and Aleppo pepper. Stir them together till they're well combined, but try not to overwork the mixture, so it stays light. 

Now grab a baking sheet or a platter, and form the mixture into meatballs. At this point, you can cover them with plastic film and stick 'em in the fridge if you want to cook them later. Or make them now, and you'll be eating in 45 minutes.

Next make a quick tomato sauce. Heat olive oil in a skillet, add chopped onions, a smashed garlic clove and a few sprigs of thyme, cook till the onion's soft, pull out the garlic and thyme, then add a can of chopped tomatoes, a little red wine and water, a bay leaf, salt and pepper. Let it simmer about 10 minutes, then drop in the meatballs. Cook them covered, shaking them now and then or turning them over, for half an hour.

They smell so good I find it hard not to pull one out before they're done and taste it. You know, just to make sure it's OK. (No one can tell you not to do this – it's your kitchen and you're the boss!)

So, how are you going to serve them – on couscous? We felt very Moroccan the night I did that. They're also great on pasta (yes, I know – couscous is pasta, but you know what I mean), or mashed potatoes. Or a soft polenta. 

Or you could serve them as an hors d'oeuvre. Just set them out in a bowl and spear them with toothpicks. Have you been dreaming of a trip to Istanbul, or Izmir, or Athens?

You're already there.

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Roasted branzino with citrus and thyme is a snap to make

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A whole roasted branzino: Doesn't that sound dreamy? And how about whole branzino roasted with sliced lemons, limes, oranges and onions, and twigs of fresh thyme? What would you think if I told you this was one of the easiest fish dishes you could possibly make – and also one of the most impressive? 

You'd say "sign me up" – am I right??!! 

OK, so first, branzino. You might know it as Mediterranean sea bass, or – its French name –  loup de mer. Some people call it branzini, which is also the plural of branzino in Italian (Italian pals, please correct me if I'm wrong!).  It's a delicately flavored fin fish with soft, white flesh – and it's surprisingly easy to cook. Even if you tried to ruin this dish, you'd probably fail. And roasting is my favorite fool-proof way to cook it. 

First, go to the store. Ask the fishmonger for whole branzini. One smallish one – about three quarters of a pound – per person is ideal. Two biggish ones are just right to serve three, which is what I used to do before the kid left for college. Ask the fishmonger to scale, gut and clean them, and snip off the pectoral fins (those are the ones on the side of the fish near the gill). If they forget to, you can do that at home -- just give them a snip with your kitchen shears or scissors. Tell the fishmonger to leave the heads and tails on, as it makes a nicer presentation. Unless you're the kind of person that can't bear to see them – then off they go. Roasting them on the bone results in the best flavor, and flesh that stays super-moist, so resist the urge to have them filleted.

OK, you've got your branzini. When you're ready to roast them, give them another rinse in the sink, focusing on the cavity. Pat them dry. 

If you're a confident cook, you don't even need a recipe for this; it's that simple.  Drizzle a little olive oil in a glass baking dish or other roasting pan. Scatter some sliced onion on the oil, then lay the fish over the onion. Season the fish inside and out with salt and pepper, tuck some fresh thyme and a few thin slices of citrus (lemon, lime and orange or any combination) inside their cavities, scatter more thyme, onion and citrus slices over them, drizzle with a little more olive oil, and roast in a 400 degree oven for about 35 minutes. 

Transfer them to a serving platter and fillet them at the table. You can be totally casual about it (as we do for family dinners), or – if you're serving them to guests (a double recipe makes a great dinner party for four) – you can fillet each, transfer to a plate, sprinkle with a few flakes of Maldon salt and freshly ground black pepper and offer a bottle of your best, fresh, fruity olive oil to drizzle over that lovely white flesh. 

What to serve with it? Some simple blanched-then-sautéed rapini or green beans, sautéed zucchini or spinach. Or start dinner with a simple arugula salad with shaved parm and good balsamic vinaigrette and follow with the fish, maybe with some roasted potatoes. 

OK. I'm making myself hungry. Do try this and let us know how it goes!

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

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

I know, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Crazy-good classic mac and cheese may be the most craveable comfort food in the universe

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You know you want it. Chefs tell me their customers demand it all the time. When I crave a rich, cheesy, creamy macaroni and cheese, I reach for the cheddar and a bag of elbow macaroni. You don't need to buy anything fancy; no bronze-die pedigree required. For this one I used supermarket large elbow macaroni, and it could not have been better. Yup, crazy-good. (Ding! Ding! Ding!)

It's simple and luxurious, and really easy to make. Boil up and drain the macaroni till al dente. Use the same pot to sweat chopped onion in butter, sprinkle on a little flour and cook it briefly. Stir in milk and cook a few minutes to make a white sauce. Stir in grated cheese, seasonings and the mac. Turn it all into a buttered baking dish, top with bread crumbs, dot the top with butter and bake in a hot oven till golden-brown.

You can riff on the recipe, adding ham or roasted chiles or crumbled bacon or whatever, but I'm a mac and cheese purist. Sharp cheddar is the cheese of choice (with a little Parm), but you can mix that up, too, throw in some Gruyère, if you're feeling French. Go ahead: Treat yourself. You deserve it. 

When I'm in the mood to indulge, a perfect dinner is a simple arugula salad, this classic, luscious mac and cheese and a glass of red wine. Right? 

Here's the recipe:

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5 delicious stay-cations for Labor Day weekend

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What's more luxurious than a long weekend stretching ahead of you with nothing to do but hang out with friends, relax and cook something delicious? That's the beauty of a stay-cation. And when you can travel somewhere exotic right in your own kitchen (or on your patio!), that's even more delectable. Here are 5 delicious ideas.

Cross a virtual border

Fry up some carnitas. Whip up some tortillas. Make a batch of guac. Squeeze a lime and make a margarita. Freeze up some strawberry-mezcal ice cream. Have a taco party, baby! 

Fly to South Korea

Make a batch of easy kimchi. Flip through a new Korean cooking comic book. Chill with some cold spicy noodles. Discover the joys of banchan. 

A fling in sunny Provence

Compose a salade niçoise.  Assemble a pissaladière. Devil a duck leg.  Showcase an orchard's worth of summer fruit on a tart. 

Three days and two nights in Tunisia

 

Take a dip in the medina. Visit the coastal town of Bizerte, all-inclusive. Conjure a couscous. Savor a cardamom-scented sweet. 

Beijing without the smog

Indulge in a cult fried rice extravaganza. Slice into a gorgeous, crisp-skinned lacquered roast chicken. Wiggle around in fabulous wontons. Fire up the wok and revel in baby bok choy. 

Or perhaps you prefer one of these other fabulous culinary voyages:

Wherever you wind up, don't forget to send us a postcard . . . .

xoxox

Happy border-free Labor Day!

 

 

 

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When life deals you zucchini, make these insanely delicious Greek fritters

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It happens to everyone at one point or another: You find yourself with zucchini coming out of your ears. Maybe you have a garden, and it's the end of summer. Maybe your friend has a garden, and she's gifted several pounds of giant veg to you. Maybe the heirlooms at the farmers market were so pretty you bought too many. 

Whatever it is, after a lifetime of looking for delicious things to do with the cartoonishly prolific summer squash, I've found it: The most insanely delicious zucchini dish ever. 

Barry making scottiglia in my mom and Warren's kitchen in Malibu

The fritter is the creation of my step-cousin Barry Kalb, who is a gifted cook, a former journalist and restaurateur and an all-around amazing person with a super-interesting story. 

Barry moved to Hong Kong in 1975 to work for NBC News, then became a staff correspondent for CBS News before heading to West Berlin in 1979 as Eastern Europe bureau chief for Time magazine. His Time gig later took him to Rome, then New York and eventually back to Hong Kong. In 1987, still in Hong Kong, he quit journalism and became a restaurateur – opening Marco Polo Pizza, the first "genuine, Italian-style" pizzeria there. The following year, he opened what he describes as the first authentic Italian restaurant in Hong Kong – Il Mercato, in the Stanley Market on the south side of Hong Kong Island. He ran it until 2002, when he returned to journalism, as an editor at Voice of America's Hong Kong bureau. 

These days Barry is writing fiction; he just published his second novel, a mystery – Chop Suey: A Tale of Hong Kong, China and the Chinese People.  (I'm not usually one for mysteries, but I'm looking forward to diving into this one!) He and his wife Suzi divide their time between Hong Kong and Thailand; they have a house in Phuket, which is where he was when my mom died in June. Barry flew out for her memorial (which we held, with lots of food and wine, at my mom's favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant) and to spend some extended time with Warren. 

To soothe ourselves and each other, we cooked. We needed comfort food. One night I made my mom's chicken curry, a family favorite. Another night Barry made a wonderful Italian braised meat dish, scottiglia con polenta – preceded by Greek-style zucchini fritters so delicious they blew us all away. 

Barry's zucchini fritters

Why Greek-style?  Barry fell in love with the fritters that inspired them in Greece, where he and Suzi are building a house – on the island of Meganisi, south of Corfu, just off the larger island of Lefkada. "When we arrive in Lefkada, en route to Meganisi," says Barry, "we always head for our favorite restaurant on the island, Margarita's, which serves the best zucchini balls we've found anywhere in Greece (and which introduced us to the dish)." It was this fritter than Barry set out to recreate. What sets them apart from other zucchini fritters is tons of chopped fresh herbs – mint and dill and parsley – along with a healthy dose of crumbled feta. 

I think you'll love them, and they're easy to make. You grate the zucchini on a box grater, sprinkle it with salt, let it sit for an hour, then squeeze out the liquid. Mix the zucchini with egg, breadcrumbs, the crumbled feta, herbs, ground cumin and pepper, form the mixture into patties, dredge them in flour, and fry them on both sides in olive oil. 

Barry's were pretty big – about three inches, with a shape like a flattened ball – and required a fork to eat, which I'm guessing is how you eat them at Margarita's. (I hope I have the occasion to find out one day!) 

For my adaptation, I made them a little smaller – finger food – and added tangy yogurt sauce with punched with lemon zest, which is wonderful with the minty thing the fritter has going for it. Got zucchini? You want this recipe:

Do try it, and let us know what you think!

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Cedar-plank salmon: Nearly naked is the way to go

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Cedar-plank salmon

Wild salmon. Just hearing the phrase makes me yearn for it. 

For fish lovers, wild salmon is one of the most delicious things on the planet. But all too often, people fussy it up too much, or cook it too aggressively. In my kitchen, I love best to poach it gently, or cook it slowly skin-side down in a pan with just a few drops of olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt. Often I give it a quick turn to cook the other side for just a moment, then finish cooking it skin-side down. Cooked gently like this, it stays delicate and tender. And there's a bonus: It's easier to control exactly how done you'd like it.

When salmon on the grill sounds like the greatest thing possible, I reach for a cedar plank. The internet is giddy with recipes for cedar-plank salmon gussied up with honey-mustard glazes or citrus-ginger marinades or herb-and-garlic oils. You know what? They can keep 'em. To my palate there's nothing like the flavor of the wild fish enhanced only by the fresh woodsy cedar, salt and pepper and a little smoke. It's such an incredible luxury. 

And it's incredibly easily accomplished. Soak the plank two hours in water. Lay the salmon skin-side down on the plank, season with sea salt and pepper and set it on a grill over white-hot coals. Cover and wait 20 minutes. 

Remove the cover, transfer the fish to a serving platter or wooden board, and prepare to swoon. You can serve it with lemon wedges. Or not. 

 

One other thing: If you're nervous about the done-ness, you can use a thin knife to check the progress after about 15 minutes, gently separating the flesh at the thickest part. You want it still a little translucent in the center, and opaque on the edges. But you know what? In my experience, 20 minutes has always been exactly right. 

 

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Summer's most glorious make-ahead dessert: Cardamom-scented milk custard with apricot gel and crushed pistachio

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My friend Greg Stinson is one of the best cooks I know. Part of it is his impeccable taste. He also has a finely tuned instinct for what flavors will shimmer brightest right now, this second, this season. And he knows what flavors will sing together.

And so when he was shopping for a dinner whose dessert would be cool, soft cups of cardamom-scented milk custard (that much he knew) and he happened on some blushingly beautiful ripe apricots, Greg's instinct kicked in and he took the custard idea from good to great. He'd capture that wonderful fresh apricot flavor in a gel on top of the custard, one that would be soft enough to ooze saucily into the cool, lightly sweet, exotically perfumed pudding. He divined just the right garnish, too: crushed toasted pistachios. 

How lucky am I to have Greg as a friend? Lucky indeed! That dessert was the captivating finish to dinner at the home of Greg and his husband Tim Simmonds a couple weeks ago.  It began with flatbreads (handmade by Greg) topped with juicy slices of sun-warmed tomatoes from Tim's garden. Next came beautifully spiced chicken kebabs, saffron rice (with a nice bit of crunchy tadig on the bottom!) and a lovely salad of chick peas, okra, tomatoes, eggplant and onion. It was all wonderful. 

And then those custards: so cool, lightly sweet, creamy and rich (but not too), just amazing with the vibrant apricot saucy gel that tasted like a sun-drenched orchard. On top of it, they were gorgeous in their green glasses on Greg and Tim's table.

I know what you're thinking. Yes, if you're lucky you can still find apricots in the market. The dessert, which channels the flavors of Turkey or Tunisia with its cardamom scent, pistachio crunch and apricot exclamation point, is ideal for making head – perfect for a laid-back late summer dinner party. 

It took Greg a couple of tries to nail the dessert, and not surprisingly he didn't measure things or write down what he did. "But Greg!" I protested, "this could be a smashing Cooks Without Borders dessert!" He walked me through what he did and the approximate amounts he used. I took a couple stabs at home and the recipe is now ready for you:

The custard – and eggless one – is easy to make, and sets up quickly in the fridge. Pour it into pretty heat-proof cups or ramekins. Then quarter the apricots – no need to peel them – and cook them down with a little sugar and fizzy prosecco till they're soft and translucent. A spin in the food processor and a trip through a fine sieve and you've got your gel to pour over the custards. Let them chill till after dinner, then top them with toasted crushed pistachios and serve. 

What can we say but three cheers for Greg?! 

 

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How to grill the best Southeast Asian crispy-skinned chicken thighs

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There are days – usually on lazy summer weekends – when nothing hits the spot like grilled Southeast Asian-style chicken. The thighs are ideal: They turn out plump and juicy, super-flavorful, with incredible, nicely charred crispy skin. 

Toss together a marinade in the morning – fish sauce, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, lime, cilantro stems, scallions and such (you get the picture!)  –  and let them loll about, soaking up flavor, till you're ready to grill. So many Asian marinade recipes include sugar or honey, but I prefer one that's not sweet, and this one (I have to say!) is pretty great. 

Thighs are fabulous for grilling, first because dark meat takes so well to smoky flavor, and it doesn't dry out easily. And second because their fairly uniform shape makes it easy to cook them evenly. 

Still, a little care (and time) is required so they don't char to blackness while they're still raw inside. I use bone-in thighs because feel like the bone adds depth of flavor, but you can use boneless ones if you prefer. 

The trick is building a good, hot charcoal fire (I use an old-fashioned Weber grill) and moving the coals to one side. That's where you'll sear them till they're nicely charred but not burned, about 5 minutes on each side. Then move them to the less-hot side of the grill, cover the grill and let them cook till they're just done – about 20 minutes or so. Have an instant-read thermometer on hand in case you're not sure – they should be 165 degrees when tested at the thickest part.  

Got it? Here's the recipe:

Let 'em rest about five minutes, then get ready for crispy-skinned happiness.

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Let's dive into an icy-cold bowl of spicy Korean noodles

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On a hot summer evening, there's nothing more refreshing and gratifying than diving into an chilly bowl of lightly spicy Korean noodles. 

It's really like a salad and a noodle bowl tossed into one – a rare example of cold comfort food. There's shredded Romaine on the bottom, then noodles dressed with a luscious, spicy sauce, then an array of garnishes on top. Toss it all together, and eat. Want it a little spicier? Add some chile flakes. 

One nice thing about this dish is it's endlessly customizable. Use either Korean somen noodles or Japanese soba noodles. It would probably be good with glass (mung bean) noodles, too. Add or subtract toppings as you like.  Top it with a soft-boiled egg instead of a hard-boiled one. 

The dressing gets its body and spicy sweetness from raw apple and puréed kimchi. Want to make it vegetarian? Leave out the kimchi and fish sauce; use a little more soy sauce and spoonful of Korean chile paste instead. Leave off the egg as well, and it's vegan.

I'm excited for you to taste this. Please let us know how you like it!

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Luscious, crispy-edged, flavorful carnitas are (guess what!) super-easy to make

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I have one word for you: carnitas. Think about it: those super-flavorful, crispy-edged morsels of tender pork would be absolutely heavenly wrapped in a warm, handmade corn tortilla with a good dose of salsa verde. 

Here's the easy way to make those tortillas. And you have the recipe for zippy, deep-flavored roasted salsa verde. Just one thing missing. Where's the meat?

It probably seems as though great carnitas would be tricky or complicated to make, but it's actually a snap: You can make killer carnitas with very little effort – or expense. 

For years I was married to Diana Kennedy's recipe, the one in her classic cookbook The Cuisines of Mexico. It's easy, and I love the technique: Cut up a fatty piece of pork (I use pork shoulder) into smallish strips, cover it with salted cold water, simmer it till the water evaporates and the pork starts to brown in its own fat, brown the pieces all over, and that's it. Beautifully simple: just three ingredients, about an hour and ten minutes and very little work.

The thing is, done that way, the carnitas are very good – I've made them a million times. And they're definitely easy. 

Carnitas from Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico

But they're not crazy-good. The smallish morsels do have that nice crispness, but last time I made them I found myself wanting more lushness, more tenderness.

What to do? Lots of carnitas recipes, especially cheffy ones, call for one large cut of pork that you roast for hours in a Dutch oven, then pull apart with forks to serve. Nice, but a giant commitment, and you don't get so many crispy edges. Also, I'd rather not turn on the oven for three or four hours on a hot summer day. 

I wondered if maybe I could split the difference. If we started with medium-sized pieces of pork rather than smallish strips, we should get more textural contrast – caramelized crispness on the outside, and the kind of tender meat you can pull apart with a fork on the inside.

So that's what I did. I cut a pork shoulder into three-inch chunks, covered them in water and simmered them on the stove, then fried them in their own fat. 

Carnitas heaven!

The compromise works brilliantly. The carnitas, which cook about 15 or 20 minutes longer than the Kennedy way, get lots of crispy edges and caramelized flavor, but they're tender and luscious inside. Adding a few sprigs of thyme, bay leaves and pieces of orange zest to the water doesn't add much work, but it definitely add complexity.

Here's the recipe:

And of course you'll want to make some corn tortillas.

And some roasted salsa verde:

I know what you're thinking: guacamole would be great in those tacos, too. You're right. It's not necessary, but it does send them over the top.

OK! Definitely let us know how this one goes.