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!

Outrageously luscious comfort from your pantry: Hello, huevos rancheros!

Huevos rancheros is the opposite of a salad. It’s warm, and saucy. It’s rich and spicy and comforting. With everything we’re all going through these days, you deserve to have it for lunch — even in the middle of the week.

Does the steaming, rich, gooey extravaganza seem like something that can only be had in a restaurant? It’s not! It’s actually super easy to make at home.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you had everything you need to make it already in your kitchen:

• Corn tortilla

• Eggs — or even a single egg

• A can of diced tomatoes

• One of those tiny cans of diced green chiles

• Half an onion

• Two or three garlic cloves

Maybe you don’t have garlic cloves, but you have some garlic powder. Maybe you don’t have that little can of green chiles, but you have some red pepper flakes or Tabasco. Maybe you don’t have corn tortillas, but you have masa harina and you know your way around a tortilla press. You’ll manage. I’ll walk you through it.

Probably you do have salt and cooking oil of some sort. Queso fresco or cotija — or even feta or goat cheese or one of those bags of pre-grated fiesta mix? I’m sure you’ve got one the above. Cilantro? Yes! Totally not essential, but lovely if you have it.

If you have a can of pinto beans (or some dried ones and you put up a pot first thing in the morning), you can have dreamy side dish, too. Or maybe you have black beans. But don’t even worry if you don’t: Your belly and your soul will be in a very happy place when the noon-time whistle blows.

We made this indulgent lunch from stuff we happened to have lying around.

Here’s how to achieve the lunch that we all absolutely deserve.

First, toss together a ranchera sauce: blitz a can of diced tomatoes with some diced green chiles from a can and two or three garlic cloves. Set it aside. In a saucepan, sweat half an onion, then add the purée and salt. Simmer five minutes. Taste it: Wow. Sauce whipped up from cans has no right to be that good!

Lightly fry a tortilla or two. Blot and put ‘em on a plate. Fry an egg or two in your tortilla oil, any way you like ‘em — over-easy, sunny-side-up. Slide the egg onto the tortilla, spoon ranchera sauce over. Garnish with whatever you’ve got — crumbled cotija or cheese from a bag, a fresh sprig of cilantro or two.

Don’t you wish you had a ripe avocado? Man, I actually had one and forgot I did. A few slices on the side would have been awesome. (Still kicking myself!)

You’ve already heated up that can of pinto beans or refried beans. Spoon that next to the eggs.

Got it? Here’s the recipe:

If you want to make pinto beans, wash a pound of dried pinto beans, place them in a large pot, add 10 cups of hot water and half an onion, sliced, and bring it to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to very low, cover the pot, and cook — stirring occasionally — till the beans are tender. It might take anywhere from 90 minutes to 2 1/2 hours, depending on the beans. Add more hot water as you go along if they need it toward the end (you want it very liquidy). 10 minutes before you want to eat them, stir in salt to taste. That’s the basic recipe; throwing in some garlic and herbs (thyme, bay leaf) in the beginning is lovely too.

If it’s only huevos rancheros that you’re after, you can put that together in twenty minutes. Is it a date?

Meanwhile, tonight, if you can’t sleep, think about all the ingredients in your pantry and fridge that you’d love to find a delicious use for. Give me a list in the comments below. I’ll dream up something enticing for you to make.

Freshly baked pita bread can happen in your very own oven

There’s nothing like pita bread straight from the oven to scoop up just-made hummus or baba ganoush, swish into a lentil soup, or to wrap around left-overs — drizzled with tahini and hot sauce and brightened with fresh herbs.  

It’s not difficult to make pita — or khobz in Arabic — even if you’re not a seasoned baker. And it’s super fun. There’s an incredible reward at the end, when you look into the oven and see those bad boys magically puff up into bready balloons. You can actually watch them inflate!

It’s a lovely, soul-sustaining project to cheer up a day when you’re stuck at home for, ahem, whatever reason. Fresh-baked pita freezes brilliantly, so you can save some for later — or zip some up in a plastic bag and freeze it for an at-risk friend or relative who can’t leave home for groceries. (They’ll be perfect with the soup you made for them!)

During the pita baking process, there is a lot of resting and rising and waiting between steps — perfect moments for whipping up that hummus or baba ganoush, or chopping the vegetables for soup.

We are big consumers of pita at our house, largely thanks to my own personal baba ganoush and hummus addiction. The pitas are usually store-bought, and much to Thierry and Wylie’s chagrin, I usually come home with the whole wheat ones — which honestly are usually more like chewing on particle board than eating bread. In any case, we really consider them vehicles for the dips.

Best is when I can make it up north to my favorite Lebanese bakery and buy the freshly made ones, still warm in their plastic bags. There I usually buy both white ones and whole wheat. The white ones are gloriously puffy, fluffy and delightful; the whole wheat pitas — while undeniably better than the mass-produced ones — are, I have to admit, on the punitive side.

Because pitas are so ubiquitous through the Levant, I kept imagining that they couldn’t be all that hard to make, and learning how was getting higher and higher on my bucket list. Mine could split the difference between white and whole wheat and go fifty-fifty. The pita of my dreams! Surely it was attainable.

A couple months ago, I took the pita plunge — reading everything reliable I could find and starting to play with recipes.

Many of the recipes that looked serious enough for me to want to try them required a stand mixer, which I don’t own. (I never wanted to develop recipes that require one because I don’t feel a stand mixer should be a required piece of kitchen equipment.) Very few of the promising recipes I found called for more than a token amount of whole wheat flour.

Looked as though I’d have to develop my own. To do that I began swapping out whole wheat flour for half of the all-purpose flour in a couple of different recipes, sometimes adding extra water to compensate. Claudia Roden’s method in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food almost got me there, but the dough didn’t rise quite as much as I wanted it to.

Finally, I turned to Anissa Helou’s award-winning Feast: Food of the Islamic World, hopeful about Helou’s method because she has written such wonderful baking books (I love Sweet Middle East and have Savory Baking from the Mediterranean on my wish-list). Also, because pita bread (khobz) is literally the very first recipe in Helou’s 500-plus-page tome, I knew she must take her khobz very, very seriously.

Helou’s recipe calls for instant (fast-acting) yeast, and I wanted to use active dry yeast. (This may be a TMI situation, but active dry yeast keeps for a long time, and I wanted to develop a recipe that could be made without dashing to the supermarket; if you keep active dry yeast, flour, olive oil and salt on hand — which is so easy to do — you’ve got the makings for pita.) So I had to veer from her first few steps, and also had to find the right flour to water ratio.

But I was able to keep the heart of Helou’s method, the part that gets us from shaggy ball of dough to rolled-out discs ready to go into the oven. From Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s book Zahav, I borrowed the excellent idea of baking the breads on inverted baking sheets preheated in the very hot oven.

Watching the pitas puff inside the oven is the first payoff.

None of the recipes I consulted warned of what can happen if you let the baked pita breads cool completely before storing leftover breads: They can get stiff and crackly, not what you want. I added Roden’s suggestion to put them in a plastic bag as they come out of the oven, keeping them soft and pliable.

I hope you dive in and give this pita project a go; the process of kneading and rolling and waiting for the dough to rise is so wonderfully tactile, giving such a lovely rhythm to a day spent at home.

And the first payoff — that gasp of delight when you peer inside the oven and see the pita breads poofing up like balloons — is so much fun. The second payoff? That’s when you pull the first one apart and taste it — and marvel that it actually came out of your very own oven. Quick — get the baba ganoush!

OK, OK, enough lallygagging — to the recipe!

RECIPE: Pita Bread

Comfort cooking: These soothing, delicious, soulful soup recipes are made for the (weird!) moment

Our master recipe leads to a magnificent soup built from whatever you have in your pantry.

Just a couple months ago we were close to proclaiming 2020 to be The Year of the Soup. Now, all of a sudden soup seems like, ahem, just what the doctor ordered.

Step away from the InstantPot. Looks like we’ll all be spending much more time at home, so might as well make the best of it by embracing the pleasures of slow, luxuriously lazy cooking.

There are so many reasons to make soup right now — or tonight, or tomorrow, or this weekend or next week:

• You’re stuck working at home, you can put a soup on to simmer in the morning, and you have perfect lunch, and dinner. And lunch tomorrow. And dinner the next day.

• It’s the perfect thing to make for an elderly friend, relative or neighbor who needs to stay home. They can eat some now and freeze the rest for later. It’s easy to double a recipe so there’s plenty to go around.

• It’s the ultimate comfort food for a scary, upsetting time. The act of soup-cooking is soothing (sweating an onion, stirring in spices), and the scents and sounds are soul-sustaining — while you’re working, or playing with your kids, or binge-watching or video chatting.

Joan’s Chicken Soup: best in the universe!

• If someone in your household is under the weather, chicken soup is certainly in order (and my mom’s is the best in the universe). Keep chicken in freezer just in case.

• If you haven’t made it out to the grocery store, and you need to create a meal from what you have around in the pantry, our master Sunday Super Soup recipe tells you how to turn whatever you have into something delicious.

• If you want to celebrate spring without venturing to a farmer’s market or crowded store, here’s a miraculously vibrant soup to whip up from those frozen peas you forgot about.

You can even stock your larder for a soup-forward near future.

THINGS TO PICK UP AND KEEP STOCKED

Dried legumes: lentils (French green, black, red); split peas; white beans (cannellini, limas, navy); kidney beans; black-eyed peas (for good luck, which we all need!)

Canned tomatoes

Jars of roasted peppers (in case you lose access to fresh ones)

Spices: Coriander seed; cumin seed; cayenne; turmeric; powdered ginger; dried chiles/crushed chile pepper; Aleppo pepper; black pepper

Boxes of chicken and/or vegetable stock (if you want to make easy purées of fresh vegetables)

Rice and soup-appropriate pasta (small elbow macaroni; all those really tiny shapes like orzo, ditalini and stellini; egg noodles)

Salt (how awful would it be if there were a run on salt?)

Onions and other allium-family members: garlic, shallots. Leeks are optional.

Herbs: If you’re worried about access to fresh herbs, stock up on dried thyme, oregano, rosemary, herbes de Provence

Fresh ginger, which keeps refrigerated a long time

Aromatic vegetables like carrots, celery and turnips (they last longer than you might think)

A mix of fresh and frozen greens and other veg to throw into soup (spinach, peas, broccoli)

If you eat meat, meats you can freeze if you don’t use them right away: ham hocks, whole cut-up chicken, cut-up lamb shoulder, beef shanks and such

OK, then — let’s cook some soup! Here is a link to our Soups page, where you can find our master Sunday Super Soup, Black Bean Soup with Roasted Vegetables, Joan’s Chicken Soup, an assortment of lentil soups, an Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup and more.

Is there a soup you’d like us to dive into and create a killer recipe for? Please let us know in a comment! In fact, since so many of us are stuck at home, we’d love to hear from you in general — how are you doing, what are you cooking, how do you feel about soup, what’s your favorite? Stay safe and healthy, everyone. We love you.

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!

Wow your friends with Chinese lacquered duck (or chicken!) to celebrate Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year celebrations will begin on Saturday, January 25 and continue for 15 days until the Spring Lantern Festival on February 8. If we know you as well as we think we know you, you’ll be looking for some spectacular Chinese dishes that’ll wow your friends and family.

This weekend, the gorgeous lacquered duck pictured here can be yours — and remarkably easily, believe it or not. Though a couple days of preparation are required, there’s very little work involved — basically you just slap a marinade/glaze on the bird, stick it in the fridge, forget about it till the next day, brush on more marinade, then pop it in the oven the next evening.

In other words, bird alert: If you want the amazing lacquered duck on Saturday night, you’ll need to start preparing it on Thursday. We’re telling you now, so you can run out and buy your bird in swift order. In our neck of the woods, ducks disappear out of supermarkets like Whole Foods and Central Market after Western new year, but you can always pick up beautiful ducks (and for a lot less money) at Asian supermarkets.

Here — take a look at the recipe so you can swing by the market later. There are only four ingredients (duck, salt, soy sauce and honey), and you probably already have three in your pantry!

This spectacular lacquered duck can be yours!

Or center your Lunar New Year kickoff dinner around a lacquered chicken. Same drill, but the chicken can be achieved in as little as 12 hours advance notice. And oh, baby — it is outstanding as well.

We are working on some new recipes that would be perfect to serve with either, and hope to get them posted in the next day or two. In the meantime, you’ll find some tasty accompaniments like baby bok choy with whole garlic and two versions of fried rice in our Chinese cooking section.

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!

Who can resist these two stunning winter salads? Nobody!

Escarole salad with 6-minute eggs, crispy prosciutto, lemon and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano

It sort of feels like escarole is having a moment — at least if the latest salad addition to the offerings at Billy Can Can, one of our favorite restaurants in Dallas, is any indication. There, executive chef Matt Ford recently introduced a delicious grilled escarole wedge with delicata squash, honeycrisp apple, pepitas and blue cheese to his modern Texas menu.

Escarole’s not a winter green that reliably turns up at the supermarket, but when it does, and when it looks good, we grab it. Especially in winter, when you never know whether you’ll find frisée or endives or radicchio (or none of the above), creating a salad around what’s available and looking great is sound policy.

The inspiration for this particular salad comes from another Dallas restaurant, Sprezza, where we swooned over the combination of lemon, prosciutto, bitter greens, rich egg and shaved parm a couple years ago. Last night the salad was the perfect lead-off to roast lamb with root vegetables; some kind of succulent braised pork, or crispy chicken thighs with fennel would be killer on its heels, too. For a simpler vibe, you could just as happily follow it with a simple pasta (like spaghetti aglio e olio) or even a pizza delivered to your doorstep. (To be perfectly honest, though, we can totally see just having the salad for dinner with a glass of Italian white, maybe a Roero or a Pecorino.)

While intensely cravable and satisfying, the escarole salad is simple to put together and forgiving, just the ingredients mentioned above tossed in lemon juice and olive oil with some lemon zest, a squeeze of anchovy paste for extra umami and lots of black pepper. You can follow it faithfully or play with it, adding or subtracting eggs, prosciutto and parm depending on the richness and saltiness you’re after. Ready then? Here you go.

In a different winter mood, when brainstorming what to serve as an appetizer for a special evening with friends during the holiday season, we often find ourselves reaching for some combination of winter greens (whether it’s Belgian endives, frisée, curly endive or escarole), a crustacean (crab or shrimp) or smoked fish (usually trout) and radishes. After that, depending on whim and what we find, we might add avocado or celery leaves or stalks, maybe snip in a few chives, grate some Meyer lemon zest — even toss in some tobiko (flying fish roe), for that delightful little pop in the teeth.

Celery, endive and crab salad

These kind of salad never fails to deliver and delight; it always feels light, elegant and festive. And again, it’s easy to put together.

Here’s a pretty basic version — endives, radish, celery and crab meat — to use as is, or as a road map. And a pro tip: If you swap out smoked trout for the crab meat, you can usually pick up everything you need at Trader Joe’s.

Fresh pistachios: delicious seasonal discovery with a delightful Persian pedigree

Fresh, raw pistachios in various states of undress

Hello again – we’ve missed you! Please pardon our two-year hiatus; we are excited to be back with a new outlook, new recipes in the works and an energized sense of discovery.

Have you ever had (or seen) fresh pistachios? When we stopped into our favorite Middle-Eastern grocery to pick up some locally raised grass-fed lamb for a Greek recipe we’re developing, we were stopped in our tracks in the produce department by a bin filled with these beautiful fresh pistachios, $3.99 pound. Immediately we thought of the cover of one of our favorite sources of inspiration, Judy Rodgers’ The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, whose cover is a gorgeous still life of nectarines, prosciutto and green almonds, some of them popped out of their thick, fuzzy green husks. We used to find those in the spring at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, but we’d never seen fresh pistachios.

Fresh pistachios in and out of their shells. The top one is khandan – laughing.

We asked a young woman who was scooping some into a bag how they’re eaten – do you toast them, we asked, or roast them, or . . . ? “I don’t know,” she said, “I have to ask my mom.” Happily Mom was at hand to advise: “We just peel them and eat them raw,” she said. “They’re delicious.”

Actually, getting to the nutmeat is a two-step process: You peel the moist husk off to reveal a pale beige shell, which, more often than not (at least with the batch we bought) is opened a sliver to reveal the kernel. In Iran, pistachios popped a little open in this way are referred to as khandan – laughing.

That adorable detail comes care of Alan Davidson’s trusty tome The Oxford Companion to Food, the only book in our collection that had anything at all on the subject of fresh pistachios. (No mention in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, or Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, or Michael Solomonov’s Zahav, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. We haven’t cracked every book, though – maybe there’s a mention somewhere!). And very little is found online.

Fresh pistachios out of their shell. The (edible) papery husk is deep red-to-brown-to-green, and the inside is green.

Davidson’s entry offers plenty of interest, though. Pistachio trees generally produce good crops every other year. “The kernel, which is about 15 mm (0.5”) long in cultivated nuts, is unique among nuts in being green, not just on the surface but all through. The green is due to the presence of chlorophyll.”

So, the $64,000 question: How do they taste? Beautiful! They have a lovely, delicate flavor, like a very gentle version of the dried pistachios we know, but slightly sweet, a little floral and almost milky, with a tender texture almost like a raw English pea, edamame or fresh fava. They’d make a wonderful nibble with a glass of rosé, or maybe chopped roughly and sprinkled over a salad of burrata and (to take a cue from the late Judy Rodgers) sliced nectarines and prosciutto. And something tells us they’d fabulously flavor ice cream or gelato.

Hopefully, when we trek back up again to the Middle-Eastern grocery, we’ll find them again. If you happen to know anything about them (we did read that black or grey moldy ones are toxic!) or have cooked with them, we’d love to hear about it in a comment. In the meantime, rosé here we come!

Bastille Day cooking made easy: How to conjure a rustic, fabulous French summer feast

This year's Bastille Day feast starts with make-ahead smoked trout pâté, served with crackers and endive leaves.

Because I'm almost French (I've been married to a Frenchman for almost 22 years; one of these days I'll get around to applying for French citizenship), I love to celebrate Bastille Day. Going to a restaurant isn't usually what I feel like doing, partly because there aren't many good French restaurants in Dallas, where we live.

Referred to in France as le Quatorze Juillet, or la Fête Nationale, or la Fêt' Nat – never Bastille Day – the holiday rarely falls on a weekend, which creates a quandary: How to pull together something deliciously French after working all day?

This year, I think I found the answer: Make it rustic and easy, prepare a couple things the night before, invite friends over after work and light up the grill. 

Mikie's marinated olives can be made the night before.

Laid-back apps – like marinated olives, asparagus vinaigrette, a freeform savory tart, maybe a saucisson or some store-bought pâté with baguette toasts – are totally festive with glasses of rosé, chilled Lillet garnished with orange slices, or (my favorite!) Ricard. 

Or hey – why not pour a pet nat, since it rhymes with Fêt' Nat! What's a pet nat? It's short for pétillant naturel – the natural sparkling wines, often from France, that are hugely popular in wine circles these days. (If you're new to the natural wine phenom, here's an excellent article, co-authored by my friend Michalene, explaining it.) 

Flipping through award-winning cookbook author Georgeanne Brennan's beautiful new book, La Vie Rustic: Cooking & Living in the French Style, I found plenty of delicious-looking inspiration, starting with her super-easy recipe for smoked trout pâté. 

Honestly, it couldn't be easier: You just mash together smoked trout with crème fraîche, lemon zest, chopped tarragon and one or two other things, pack it in a crock and that's it. While you can make it just before serving (in no time flat), it's the perfect thing to mix up the previous evening and let chill in the fridge. Serve it with Belgian endive leaves and crackers or toasts. Brennan writes in her book that it also works well with smoked salmon – something I'll be trying soon (with dill or fennel leaves, probably!). 

Also inspired by Brennan's book, I've lately become addicted to grilled artichokes. But while Brennan serves them with a yogurt-and-mayo-based herb dip (which also looks really good), I've been pairing mine with garlicky aïoli, one of my favorite substances in the world. This summer I can't get enough of it.

The artichokes can be mostly prepared the night before, as well – boil them, trim out their chokes, stash them in the fridge and make the aïoli (which probably even gets better as it sits overnight; the garlic mellows). When you're ready to serve them, just brush the artichoke halves with a little olive oil and plop them on the grill – along with halved lemons as a squeezable garnish, if you like.

For a main course, you can keep it super simple: Throw some duck breasts or a butterflied leg of lamb on the grill. You can even pick up a roast chicken (very French!) or two at the supermarket; serve it with Dijon mustard and cornichons, and French side dishes. You can blanch some haricots verts, for instance, and toss them with a little red wine vinegar, your best olive oil and some minced shallots; finish with fleur de sel and lots of freshly ground black pepper. 

Or make a warm French lentil salad – which you can either toss together in less than a half hour and serve warm, or prepare the night before and serve room temp.

Here's the easy, forgiving recipe:

Or, you know what? You can even do without a main course altogether, and just serve a bunch of delicious nibbles – French wine-bar-style. 

For dessert, there are lots of possibilities. One of the easiest is also one of the most delicious: a berry and peach crisp. Put the almond topping together the night before, and it's very quick to put together and throw in the oven. Top it with whipped cream, or crème fraîche (you should have some left over from the smoked trout pâté), or a combo. Or serve it with vanilla ice cream. 

Otherwise, if you make pastry cream the night before, you can put together a quick and easy berry tart – with the colors of the French flag!

Here are those two recipes:

Alternatively, you could make a chocolate mousse or pôt de crème the night before (yikes - I need to create some chocolate French recipes for the site – will do that soon!) Or play hooky from work and make a gorgeous stone-fruit tart. Or make profiterôles – cream puffs filled with ice cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce. That's another easy recipe I'll put together soon.

You could also do what so many French people do – pick up something lovely at the bakery.

Or take a tip from my French relatives, and slice up a ripe peach into the glass of red wine you've been sipping. It can't get any easier – or more delicious – than that.

So, want more ideas? Take a spin through Cooks Without Borders' French page – updated recently with a bunch of new recipes. Sound good?

Happy Bastille Day! Vive la France!

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

From Paris' trendiest tables to yours: Whelks with basil aïoli are a snap to make

If you've been to Paris in the last few years (I just got back!), you know that bistronomie – laid-back bites in relaxed, new-style bistros – is Parisians' favorite way to dine these days. Expensive, elaborate menus dégustations (tasting menus) are pretty much for tourists and rich old fogies. OK, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but that's how it feels.

Thierry, Wylie and I dined bistronomie-style each of four nights when we visited Paris earlier this month, and twice we found bulots – the small sea snails English-speakers call whelks. They seem to be having a moment! I'd seen and eaten them occasionally in decades past on plateaux de fruits de mer – chilled seafood platters – where they'd sometimes be mingled with oysters and clams on the half-shell and steamed or boiled bigourneaux (periwinkles). 

"Bulots mayo," is how they were announced on the blackboard menu at Jeanne A – a terrific little bistro in the super-hot 11th arrondissement. I had to order them (6 euros) – for the three of us to share with our other starters. 

They came chilled in a coffee cup, accompanied by a little pot of good, house-made mayo. So much fun! A couple nights later, there they were again – listed under "zakouskis" at Le Servan, which offered them with mayonnaise au piment for 8 euros. (Le Servan, by the way, was wonderful – the best meal I had in Paris this trip, also in the 11th.) 

Ding ding ding ding ding! A lightbulb went off over my head: We can make bulots at home! Why? Because I know where to find them – and very inexpensively: at Jusco, an Asian supermarket with a fabulous seafood selection, in the Dallas suburb of Plano. In fact, I'd picked some up (about $6 per pound) to toss onto a seafood paella just a couple weeks before my France trip.  

As I researched bulots on my return, I learned a few things. First, that they're also called buccins, though I've never seen them called that on a menu. Second, that they're traditionally served in Provence with aîoli – the super-garlicky mayo whose name has been appropriated by American chefs who want to make gentler flavored mayos sound chic.  And third, that whelks is a term applied to several different types of sea snails, which explains why they don't always look quite the same – some are striped or ridged; others are spotted and smooth.

In any case, they couldn't be easier to cook. First, give 'em a 10-minute soak in cold water, so they release any sand, and rinse. Then boil them in heavily salted water for 20 minutes. That's it. I went a step further and tossed some sliced onion, thyme and bay leaves to the water as it came to a boil, and added a splash of white wine – a court bouillon on-the-fly. 

But first I whipped up some aîoli – a real one, with lots of garlic. It's easy to make in a blender. I flavored half of it with chopped basil. Or you could add chopped or puréed roasted red pepper. Or you could serve the bulots with mayo from a jar, dressed up with a squirt of harissa from a tube. But even plain mayo – home-made or store-bought would be swell.

With the aïoli – and glasses of chilled rosé – they were outstanding, a fabulous pre-dinner nibble, ideal for laid-back entertaining. Serve 'em warm, or chilled, or room temp – with toothpicks, which you need to coax the meat out of the shell. Delicious fun indeed. Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Please let us know if you find them in your neck of the woods – and how you like 'em!

Having friends over for dinner? Be sure to invite Mikie's fabulous marinated olives

One of the best parts of visiting my hometown, L.A., is dinner or lunch at my friend Michalene's. I've mentioned Michalene – or Mikie, as her family and a few close friends call her – in many posts. It was Mikie, for instance, who wondered, after a recipe for Chinese lacquered roast chicken changed my life, what would happen if I adapted it to duck. (Answer: more life-changingly delectable fowl play.) 

I met Mikie in 2003, when she was Food Editor at the Los Angeles Times, but I'd long been a fan. Before arriving at the Times a couple years earlier, she'd been Dining Editor at the New York Times, producing the Dining section that quickly, under her tenure, became a must-read. I hadn't realized I wanted to work at a newspaper – in fact I thought I didn't. But the minute I met Michalene, who invited me for a drink to discuss the possibility of my coming on board as her deputy editor, and she talked so excitedly about her love for cooking, and eating out, and editing and writing and putting together a food section, I knew I had to give it a go. 

Before long, we became not just co-workers, but fast friends. That meant we cooked and dined together often. It's one of the things I miss most about living in L.A.

So, dining at Mikie's. There are lots of great things about it. Hanging out with Mikie, and her partner Dan (who happens to be an amazing cook, too, and an awesome bread baker). They have an spectacular view of the ocean, over their rows of vineyards, from their house in the Malibu hills, so dinner's often on the patio. They are warm, generous, thoughtful and altogether brilliant hosts. 

I always secretly hope, as I drive up Pacific Coast Highway toward their place in Corral Canyon, that Mikie will have made her fabulous marinated olives: They're just so much better than any other olives anywhere, perfumed with orange and herbs, and spiced just so – a dreamy pre-main-event nibble.

A couple weeks ago, with friends coming to a dinner with a Spanish theme, I thought, as I tried to figure out the tapas y pinxtos, hey – why don't I make Mikie's olives? I texted her, asking for the recipe, and she told me it's from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. – just tweaked a little. She adds orange zest, she tole me, and fennel seed. And she uses more vinegar than Bittman does, and less olive oil. Oh, and her technique is slightly different.

In other words, Mikie has made the olives her own. Honestly, I think it's the orange zest and fennel that knock them out of the park. 

How good are they? Well, I spent all day cooking to prepare for that dinner. I made bandilleros – all kinds of pickly and cured treats, prettily skwered. And some really nice tapas – piquillo peppers filled with brandade. And grilled asparagus with Serrano ham. And seafood paella. (OK, I blew the paella, if truth be told. Overcooked it terribly. Don't tell anyone.) Want to know what got the most applause? Mikie's olives. 

They take all of about five minutes to put together: It's just assorted olives (I like to use Castelvetranos, Picholines, Niçoises, Cerignolas and anything else that looks great – with pits), plus a few smashed garlic cloves, bay leaves, thyme branches, red pepper flakes, fennel seeds, orange zest, olive oil and red wine vinegar. Combine it all, and let it sit on the counter all afternoon – or even just an hour. Give it a toss with a spoon every now and then. That's it. 

Here's the recipe:

I will be eager to hear whether you love them as much as I do.

Easy pan-roasted seafood antipasto turns a simple pasta dinner into a special event

A funny thing happened on the way to my okonomiyaki.

You know, okonomiyaki – the Osaka-style seafood pancake that homesick Japanese transplants in America go wild for. It's sort of become a cult thing, maybe because it's crowned with katsuobushi – bonito flakes – which wave mysteriously around, making the thing look as though it's alive.

I'm working on a recipe for okonomiyaki; I promise.  You can see a video of my last attempt (it's close! nearly there!) on my Cooks Without Borders Instagram feed. In fact, I'd bought all the ingredients to make it a few days ago – squid, shrimp, scallops and more, thinking I'd nail it that evening.

"Oh, man," said Thierry. "Okonomiyaki again?!" Yeah, yeah, I'd already made it twice in just a couple weeks, but the third time's the charm, right? Recipe development can be a process of trial and error, and this one – which diverges from traditional ones – has proven to be tricky. 

But I'm nothing if not flexible, so I did a quick pivot – Japan to Italy. I knew there was a bottle of crisp white wine in the fridge, along with some parsley, and baby arugula. We have a giant rosemary bush out back. A warm seafood antipasto, I was thinking – that would be lovely with an arugula salad. It would be nice to eat light.

I turned to an old favorite cookbook for inspiration: Evan Kleiman's Cucina del Mare: Fish and Seafood Italian Style. Kleinman is a wonderful chef who for many years had a beloved restaurant in Los Angeles called Angeli that delighted Italian food lovers for decades. When I moved to Dallas in 2009 as a then-incognito restaurant critic, a commenter on one of the local food blogs tried to out me by posting my photo online. Ha! The photo wasn't me, it was Evan Kleinman. That cracked me up. Nice try, amici miei. 

The recipe I found was for pan-roasted squid, calamari arrosto. Kleiman gave the squid a toss with olive oil, fresh rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper, popped it in the oven, roasted it for 25 minutes, then gave it a squeeze of lemon and a parsley garnish. Nice! 

The seafood, tossed with olive oil, rosemary, garlic, cherry tomatoes, salt and pepper, is ready to go into the oven.

I used the same method with the shrimp, squid and scallops, tossing in some halved cherry tomatoes. It worked beautifully. And so easy. 

We poured glasses of crisp white wine, and I tossed an arugula salad. We sat down to a perfect, light, simple dinner, which incidentally would also make a lovely lunch.

In spite of its simplicity, the dish's taste is pretty snazzy. I'm always looking for an easy and delicious antipasto to jazz up a pasta dinner, and this certainly fits the bill.

Want the recipe? It's yours.

Serve it with good, crusty bread to sop up the delicious juices. 

Celebrate el Cinco de Mayo with Cooks Without Borders' favorite Mexican recipes

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know: El Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates Mexico's victory against France in the Battle of Puebla in 1862 – during the French-Mexican War – isn't much of a holiday in Mexico. It's definitely not Mexican Independence Day; that would be September 16. My smart Dallas Morning News colleague Cassandra Jaramillo explains it all here.)

In fact, given that el Cinco de Mayo is all about a war between two of our favorite countries, it wouldn't even seem to be one Cooks Without Borders would celebrate.

However . . . 

There is that irresistible cross-cultural thing. And there is the fact that it has turned into an American holiday that celebrates Mexican culture, largely through food. So, hey – we're on!

And we've got some great things for you to cook, starting with my favorite guacamole, which you can whip up tonight. 

Here's the recipe:

So, guac and chips – and beers and margaritas. Then a Caesar salad.

But not just any Caesar salad; this is he most insanely delicious Caesar ever. No doubt you remember that the Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, so yes, it's Mexican. But this is a modern take – a boffo version of a recipe I thought could be improved.

 Next, the main event: carnitas. Killer carnitas! I promise you these are way easier to make than you might imagine. 

I know what you're thinking. This is a lot to whip up on a Friday evening, when you have to work all day.

How about this: You could just make the guacamole tonight and make a whole big fabulous Mexican feast tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. After all, it's not a real holiday, so you don't have to celebrate it on the exact day.

Meanwhile, as long as you're going to make carnitas, you really should have some wonderful warm corn tortillas to wrap them in. Right? 

Don't worry – I'm not suggesting you go through the elaborate process of making nixtamal. I know you don't have a molina to grind the corn; I don't either. I'm talking cheater corn tortillas made from mixing masa harina with warm water, rolling and pressing them into disks and throwing them on a griddle. Try this once, and you'll be hooked for life. Just don't tell Diana Kennedy.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? This is turning into a taco party. 

So you'll want some salsas. My favorite with carnitas is salsa verde, which is really simple to make; roasting the tomatillos and serranos takes it to another level. Pass around bowls of guacamole, cilantro leaves, chopped onion, queso fresco, sliced radishes and lime wedges and invite your pals. (Yep, they can bring the beer.) Taco party achieved!

Here's a bonus recipe, in case you're looking for an all-consuming Mexican cooking project: a lamb barbacoa recipe adapted from Alex Stupak's cookbook. 

This, of course, is crazy-good wrapped in corn tortillas. As long as you're going to all that trouble, you might as well make salsa borracha, too.

But wait – what about dessert?

Oh, I am *so* excited to tell you what we have in store: two of my absolute favorite recipes that have ever been on the blog. The first, perfect for this season (and for this holiday) is Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream. 

As you can imagine, it is really good with a sip (or 10) of mezcal. 

It would also be fantastic with another of my favorite desserts: the Mexican Chocolate "Situation." Sounds like something that could have led to the Battle of Puebla, doesn't it? Which brings us full circle. This recipe has been a reader favorite, too – border-free cooks who have made it have gone crazy for it. 

Starring the flavors of Mexican chocolate, these rich, creamy bars use almond flour rather than wheat flour, so they're deliciously gluten-free. 

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Mini strawberry Pavlovas may be the most brilliant Passover dessert ever

If ever there was a dessert meant for Passover, it's this one: mini strawberry Pavlovas. 

So, what's a Pavlova, anyway?

It's an Australian dessert named for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (so the story goes), following one of her tours through Australia. Traditionally it's a large, thick meringue disk – hard and crisp on the outside, soft and pillowy on the inside – topped with whipped cream and berries or other fruit. Made this way, it's sliced into wedges to serve. 

Sized individually, mini Pavlovas are just as impressive, not to mention great for entertaining as they're so easy to make and serve. 

Why are mini Pavlovas so brilliant for Passover?

Let me count the ways:

1. There's no flour, making the dessert welcome at the Passover table.

2. They star strawberries, just as the fruit comes into the full flush of its season. 

3. They're beautiful and impressive-looking, yet easy and fool-proof to make.

4. You can make their meringue bases ahead of time – even the day before – and cut and macerate the berries in advance. All that's left to do last-minute is whip cream and assemble the Pavlovas, which is no harder than assembling strawberry shortcake. They're easy enough to manage during the craziness of a seder. 

Pavlovas aren't just for Passover

Pavlovas are having a moment in restaurants – at least here in Dallas, where one of the city's top pastry chefs, Keith Cedotal, is turning out beautiful individually sized versions, filled with citrus mousse and mixed berries, at fashionable Mirador restaurant. 

Besides being chic and delicious, Pavlovas also happen to be gluten-free – just the thing for gluten-intolerant berry lovers who are accustomed to passing up the strawberry shortcake. 

When I say Pavlovas are easy to make, I'm not kidding. All you do is whip up some egg whites, beat in sugar and, if you like, a touch of lemon or orange liqueur. If you want to get fancy, add some lemon zest. Spoon them into messy circles on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for less than an hour, till they're light golden and hard to the touch. 

Layer them with whipped cream and strawberries (macerated in a touch of lemon liqueur or orange liqueur if you like), and there you are. If they're messy, or the meringues break that's OK – disheveled is part of their charm. 

Brilliant, right? Here's the recipe: