Sonoko Sakai's 'Japanese Home Cooking' is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years

A few years back, when Cooks Without Borders was just a wee thing, I developed an obsession with okonomiyaki.

A thick, luscious savory Japanese pancake, okonomiyaki is filled with vegetables and seafood or meat, painted with an umami-rich okonomiyaki sauce or tonkatsu sauce, perhaps squiggled with mayonnaise and definitely topped with bonito flakes. The bonito flakes — katsuobushi in Japanese — are so thin and light that they catch air currents and wave around, looking like they’re alive.

There’s a bit of a cult in the U.S. around okonomiyaki. After I wrote a story about the crazy pancake for The Dallas Morning News (in 2016), I decided to find or develop a recipe for Cooks Without Borders.

Easier said than done! Too thick, too pasty, too gloppy, too weird — I couldn’t manage to get it right. Recipes were scarce, sketchy, flawed, and I was flailing developing my own. Unable to nail the batter, I resorted to buying something called “okonomiyaki flour” in a Japanese supermarket. The store-bought okonomiyaki sauce I was painting them with was cloyingly sweet. None of it was working.

After something like Okonomiyaki Number Twelve, Thierry begged for mercy. “Stop!” he cried. “Yamero, kudasai ! やめろください!”

Kidding. Thierry does not speak Japanese (nor do I).

The point is, there is now a book that has an okonomiyaki recipe that works: Sonoko Sakai’s delightful Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

Thanks to Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, we can now make okonomiyaki at home.

Whether or not a wild-looking savory pancake speaks to you at all, if you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume. Published last November, it is now a finalist for a prestigious 2020 IACP Cookbook Award in the International category.

To so many of us, Japanese cuisine means high-flying restaurant food — the kind of precise and specialized dishes chefs spend years (or even decades) learning to execute. I’ve never wanted to make nigiri sushi at home, for instance, as it depends on sourcing the best and most interesting fish, treating them properly, having the knife mastery to slice them to their best advantage— oh, and getting the rice right, which is an elaborate subject in itself. Yakitori — skewered chicken — involves grilling the poultry over blazing-hot binchotan (Japanese charcoal), something I wouldn’t be able to manage at home, even if I could find the binchotan. Because the places I’ve lived — Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas — all have such great Japanese food, I’ve always preferred to leave it to the pros.

However, going back to my childhood in L.A., I always loved another kind of Japanese cooking, something much closer to home cooking. It’s the kind of humble, approachable fare that Sakai features in Japanese Home Cooking.

You might start with something quick and easy, like a cucumber sunomono. One taste of the Sanbaizu dressing — mirin, rice vinegar and soy sauce simmered very briefly then cooled — and I was back at Tempura Hiyama, the beloved neighborhood mom-and-pop of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Sakai’s cucumber sunomono with wakame seaweed is garnished with grated ginger and toasted sesame seeds.

Sakai adds wakame (the same seaweed that’s common in miso soup), along with glass noodles and grated ginger, but you could go even simpler with just the cukes, dressing and sesame.

If you want to go into Japanese cooking in any kind of depth, you’ll want to put dashi in your bag of tricks; not surprisingly, Sakai leads off her book with a chapter about it. A quick stock made from nothing more than katsuobushi (those same shaved bonito flakes that wave around on top of the okonomiyaki), kombu (a dried seaweed) and water, it is the basis for much of Japanese cooking — just as veal stock is the foundation, or fond in French, of French cooking, but it’s even more ubiquitous in Japanese dishes. Dashi is easily achieved — just heat a piece of kombu in water, remove it, and drop in a bunch of bonito flakes, let them steep for two minutes then strain them out.

Kombu (upper left), katsuobushi (lower left) and water combine to make dashi (right).

Miso soup with shimeji mushrooms, tofu, lemon zest and scallions

I like Sakai’s approach to it. She’s quick to let readers know that rather than discarding the spent kombu and bonito flakes, you can (and should) use them to make a secondary dashi. While the first one is good enough to sip on its own (and has lots of culinary uses), the secondary dashi is good for miso soup and for seasoning a wide variety of dishes. Miso soup, by the way, is super easy to make once you have dashi: Just stir in some miso and add whatever else you like — tofu, mushrooms, wakame seaweed, etc.

Sakai provides recipes for several other dashis as well, including two vegan versions (one using only kombu, and the other kombu and shiitakes). That’s a splendid solution for vegans who are limited to what they can eat in a Japanese restaurant: It’s super easy to make vegan miso soup at home.

Also useful is a section about shio koji — which is the easiest way for home cooks to get in on the koji craze that has captivated chefs. To prepare it, get your hands on rice koji — rice that has been innoculated with koji (you’ll find a link to purchase it in the recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon below). Massage that together with salt and hot water, let it ferment 5 days and you’ve got a useful ingredient that you can use to rub into napa cabbage leaves to make a quick pickle, or onto meat, chicken, salmon or other fish as an overnight (or up to three-day) marinade. As Jonathan Kauffman explains in the Epicurious story linked above, it concentrates the flavors in those proteins, adding umami depth.

Sakai’s recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon, which she calls her “‘no-recipe’ salmon dish,” proves the point; the extremely simple prep is a great one to add to your repertoire. See some nice fillets in the supermarket? Slap that shio koji all over them and figure out when you’ll eat them later. After overnight koji marination, give the fillets a quick wipe, run them under the broiler and dinner’s ready in less than minutes. While the salmon’s broiling, you can grate some daikon and ginger, which make a really nice garnish.

Koji-Marinated Salmon with grated daikon and ginger

Looking for dishes to round out the Koji-Marinated Salmon? Sakai’s “Potato Salada” (as it is called in Japanese) is wonderful, with lots of cucumber along with carrot and green beans. (And we have other dishes in our new Japanese section — check out the Spinach with Sesame Dressing.)

To make the Potato Salada, Sakai has you whip up some Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese tahini). Our adaptation includes those instructions, but also provides a hack using store-bought mayo and tahini. (We hope Ms. Sakai doesn’t object — it was pretty good!)

I have not yet had a chance to make any of the noodles in the book, but the chapter is enticing, with beautifully photographed recipes showing how to make handmade soba, udon and ramen. Sakai, who was born in New York and grew up in Japan, Mexico and California, lives in Southern California, where she gives cooking classes — including very popular classes on soba-making. So this is definitely something I’ll want to explore. There are also recipes for tofu and miso (which takes from six months to a year and a half to ferment!), and for mochi. A pandemic’s worth of projects!

Meanwhile, what she writes about rice is illuminating. I’d been pulling my hair out during the pandemic because I couldn’t find sushi rice, and Thierry, Wylie and I were all craving sushi.

Sakai explains that any short-grain rice can be used for sushi — including Arborio, which I had in my pantry. I’d had no idea! I cooked that Arborio according to her instructions for Basic White Rice, and turned it into sushi rice, using her seasoning formula — 2 batches of basic white rice (about 8 cups) seasoned with 1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and a tablespoon of sea salt. Perfect sushi rice! With it I made some simple maki rolls. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

With hardly an exception, the recipes in Japanese Home Cooking work perfectly — which is incredibly rare for any cookbook these days. I test-drove a lot of them (fifteen, at last count), and still have many on my can’t-wait-to-try list (Kombu-Cured Thai Snapper Sashimi, as soon as I can get my hands on some great fish, and Soba Salad with Kabocha Squash and Toasted Petpitas in the fall!).

Honestly, this is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years. The writing throughout is clear, charming, thoughtful and frequently illuminating, and Poon’s photos are gorgeous. Already it has given me the tools to feel like a pretty confident Japanese cook, which is quite a gift indeed.

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors by Sonoko Sakai. Photographs by Rick Poon. Roost Books, 300 pages, $40.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Koji-Marinated Salmon

RECIPE: Potato Salada

Dreaming of a Mexican beach vacation? This vibrant aguachile from Colima will (almost!) take you there

You might have to squint real hard to pretend your patio — or a picnic table at your city park — is in fact a beach in Mexico. But take a bite of this gorgeous, suave shrimp aguachile and it’s not hard to feel thousands of miles away.

In the last few years in the United States, aguachiles have eclipsed ceviches as the raw seafood treat grabbing attention; in Mexico, they’ve been popular much longer. Unlike ceviches, which involve a relatively long soak in lime juice for the raw seafood, aguachiles get just a very brief bath in serrano-spiked citrus (aguachile means water infused with chiles).

The dish was born in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, as an excellent story published last year in Eater explains. And though you find aguachiles in restaurants from Mexico City to Houston to New York City to Los Angeles using just about every type of seafood, including scallops, tuna, snapper and yellowtail, on Mexico’s west coast where they were born, they are all about shrimp. (Not from the start, though, as Michael Snyder’s Eater story explains.)

Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez’s aguachile at Billy Can Can in Dallas

It was an aguachile that helped revive me after two and half months of confinement, when Thierry, Wylie and I ventured out to a restaurant a few weeks ago. We dined on the patio at Billy Can Can, our favorite modern Texan dining saloon (which I helped open in 2018 when I worked for the company that owns it.)

The dish was gorgeous and bright; I loved the way the dabs of avocado purée played with the lime and chile, and the shrimp had beautiful texture and flavor — unlike the rubbery, eraser-like creatures that over-soaked ceviche shrimp often become.

I asked Olivia Lopez, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine who created the dish, to tell me about it. She got a dreamy look in her eye as she started talking about making aguachile back home in Tecomán, her hometown in the state of Colima — which is about 700 miles south of the part of Sinaloa where aguachile was born. Her friend Nayely would make it, and they’d take it to the beach, where they’d enjoy it, with toastadas, along with coconut water or beers.

Billy Can Can Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez | Photo courtesy of Billy Can Can

Colima is one of the most important lime-growing states in Mexico, she told me (the other is Michoacán), and on the road from their home in Tecomán to Playa El Real, “all you see are lime trees and palm trees. And a lot of lizards.”

For Billy Can Can’s aguachile, Lopez blanches the shrimp before their lime-serrano soak, as her customers don’t love the idea of raw shrimp, she says. To compensate for that and prevent over “cooking” from lime, she adds olive oil to the sauce.

We were thrilled when she generously offered to share her recipe with Cooks Without Borders. But could we have it the raw shrimp way, just as Lopez makes it for herself at home — the way her friend Nayely did in Tecomán? Lopez was happy to oblige.

Happily, it’s very easy to do. And it’s so spectacularly delicious that we will be making it frequently — as frequently as we dream of a beach vacation in Mexico, which is to say constantly.

In our version, raw, butterflied shrimp get a quick 10-minute dunk in lime juice with a little salt and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. (“Yes, they use that in Mexico!” Lopez says.) The marinating juice then gets puréed with serrano chiles, cilantro and avocado, and the beautiful, emerald-green sauce that results gets tumbled with the shrimp. Transfer it to a platter, dress it up with sliced cucumber, avocado and red onion, and Playa El Real is yours. You can find tostadas in a Latin-American supermarket, and probably young coconuts for coconut water as well.

One small detail: The aguachile is meant to be eaten immediately, so the shrimp doesn’t get overcooked in the lime. It did take Lopez and her friends a few minutes to get to the beach with it, but that’s OK, she says; you just want to be sure to eat it within an hour.

Honestly, once you behold that gorgeous dish you’ve made in your own kitchen, I don’t think you could wait that long.

RECIPE: Aguachile, Colima-Style

Celebrating two centuries of African American cooking, Tipton-Martin’s ‘Jubilee’ earns a coveted Beard Award

A piece of culinary news that in less turbulent times would have made a much bigger noise got a bit drowned out last week: Toni Tipton-Martin’s deliciously inspiring Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking won the 2020 James Beard Award for the best American cookbook. It’s a shame the moment was missed because a robust, thoughtful and groundbreaking celebration of African-American cooking and culture could not be more timely.

A formidable scholar, culinary historian and cultural historian as well as a cook, Tipton-Martin won her first Beard Award four years ago. That was for The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks — an annotated bibliography of the author’s collection of rare, historical African-American cookbooks, published in 2015. 

To create Jubilee, Tipton-Martin culled more than 100 recipes from those books; collectively they represent her curation of seminal African-American cooking. Being honored with the Beard Award honor puts them squarely in the center of the American table. 

At Cooks Without Borders, we had just started cooking from Jubilee when Covid shut us in mid-March. I was eager to explore the enticing recipes, sticking Post-its on scores of recipes for which I couldn’t yet procure the necessary ingredients: Deviled Crab, Okra Gumbo, Peach-Buttermilk Ice Cream. 

But there were plenty of dishes I was able to make, and with delicious results: a Biscuit-Topped Chicken Pot Pie, the Savannah Pickled Shrimp I wrote about last month, wonderful Sautéed Greens that felt like the best thing imaginable for our immune systems during a pandemic.

As I flipped through, enjoying the beautiful photos by Jerrelle Guy, I was taken with Tipton-Martin’s stories, and her background. Like me, she grew up in Southern California (we were both born in L.A., six months apart). Just out of college, she joined The Los Angeles Times as a food and nutrition writer (I served there as Food Editor 23 years later).  

She grew up in the tony Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, a neighborhood she describes as  “home to the black elite — doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and white-collar professionals.” There, at the home her mother treated like an “urban farm,” she thrilled to tender lettuces, avocados and California stone fruits plucked from the garden. 

Some of my favorite recipes in the book are very vegetable-forward: those greens; a delightful Layered Salad with Garlic and Herb Dressing; an old-fashioned Country-Style Potato Salad that took me back to my own Southern California childhood (it is nearly identical to the one my mom used to make). 

Until she wrote The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin felt isolated as a food writer. “My culinary heritage — and the larger story of African American food that encompasses the middle class and the well-to-do — was lost in a world that confined the black experience to poverty, survival, and soul food,” she explains in her intro. Jubilee “broadens the African American food story. It celebrates the enslaved and the free, the working class, the middle class, and the elite.” 

For me, In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, exploring a powerful African American cookbook has taken on a different quality; it feels more urgent. A month ago, I was skimming through, enjoying, cooking, hanging out with the book. Now I’m more focused — on Tipton-Martin’s intentions, on the stories of the cooks, on the ingredients and what they mean, on the origins of dishes. 

I’ve learned, for instance, that gumbo, from the beginning, was all about okra; in several West African languages the word for okra is gombo. The vegetable, Tipton-Martin writes, is  “mucilaginous when sliced and cooked. Devotees love that slime; it thickens gumbo and gives the stew body.” Native American Filé, also known as sassafras flour, came into the gumbo picture as a thickener later, as did roux, which came from French and Creole cooks. “After that, soups thickened with any combination of these ingredients started to bear the name ‘gumbo.’”

Now I really need to cook that gumbo I’d been eyeing for months. Yesterday I ventured out to the supermarket, where I’d only just spotted okra a few days before. It was gone, and so was the crabmeat. So the gumbo will have to wait. 

But I don’t have to wait to recommend Jubilee — not just to cooks and people with a passion for food, but to everyone who wants to better understand African-American culture.

In an interview in March with Saveur magazine, Tipton-Martin was asked what she hopes people will gain from the book besides the beautiful recipes and scrumptious food. “One answer,” she said, “would be to determine what we can all do in our own spheres of influence to bring down the barriers constructed through the stereotypes that divide us.” 

Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, by Toni Tipton-Martin, Clarkson Potter, $35

RECIPE: Layered Garden Salad

RECIPE: Country Style Potato Salad

RECIPE: Sautéed Greens

Say hello to the green gazpacho of your dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is your ticket to summer-long green greatness:

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

RECIPE: The Greenest Gazpacho

Our Cluckin' A List: Cooks Without Borders' 5 most popular chicken recipes

For poultry-lovers, it probably comes as no surprise: The most clicked-on stories and recipes on Cooks Without Borders are those that celebrate chicken.

This all came home to roost last week, when a fried chicken recipe by one of our favorite L.A. chefs easily and quickly smashed all our records.

Without beating around the hen-house, here are the Top 10:

#1: Fried Chicken LudoBird Style

Crunchy, craggy and preternaturally juicy — with a delightful whiff of the South of France via herbes de Provence — chef Ludovic Lefebvre’s take on fried chicken broke the popularity index the very day it was published. If you’ve never made fried chicken before but always wanted to, this is the recipe for you. Here’s the story, and here’s the recipe.

#2: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

This is the chicken that changed our lives a few years ago — and then inspired a duck. You can see it before it was carved up at the top of this story.

#3 The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

An infatuation with Urvashi Pitre’s viral InstantPot version of the popular Indian dish got us wondering about murgh makhani’s origins — which led us to the Butter Chicken King, Monish Gujral. Gujral’s book On the Butter Chicken Trail unlocked some secrets, and an interview with Gujral helped put everything in perspective. Our recipe (adapted from Gujral’s and approved by His Highness) was born.

#4 Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooker Version)

We loved J. Kenji López-Alt’s astonishingly easy chile verde on Serious Eats, and felt a few minor tweaks could make it even better. Doing so proved to be a bonding experience for a stodgy boomer and a plucky Gen-Z’er. We’re currently working on an old-fashioned, slow-cooking, aromatic and soul-stirring stove-stop version.

Here’s the quick-and-easy miracle recipe.

#5 Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

Our easy-going soy-based marinade is the ticket to fabulously flavorful grilling all summer long.

Is there a chicken dish or technique you’d like us to tackle? Let us know in a comment!

RECIPE: Fried Chicken LudoBird-Style
RECIPE: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde

RECIPE: Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

How Ludovic Lefebvre's insanely delicious Fried Chicken LudoBird Style turned me into a fry queen

I have a confession to make: Until last week, I had never made fried chicken.

Yes, I know, it’s weird. I’ve always been an otherwise fearless cook. Partly it’s that deep-frying thing: I’ve never made frites, either, and by extension I’ve never made French fries. But there was also a lack of motivation: Why attempt something so challenging and messy when the pros do it so well?

I’d gotten it into my head a month or so ago that at long last I’d dip my proverbial toes in the hot oil. Fabulous looking recipes in two cookbooks-of-the-moment had caught my eye: one in Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking and another in Sean Brock’s South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations. The books are each nominated for both a James Beard Award and an IACP Cookbook Award this season. I’d read a heap of background material about frying chicken, and deep-frying in general, so I had sense of the landscape. A deep-frying thermometer was ordered and on the way. Time to stop being such a fry-baby.

Wylie was rarin’ to go. Every afternoon, he’d say, “Tonight — fried chicken?” I kept coming up with excuses. We were missing an ingredient. We didn’t have the right sides. Not enough oil. Deep-fry thermometer hadn’t arrived. Couldn’t decide which of the two recipes to try. Mercury in retrograde.

Then, the day the deep-fry thermometer showed up, I saw a post on Ludovic Lefebvre’s Instagram feed: The Los Angeles chef would be making fried chicken on his IGTV series, “Ludo à la Maison.” I’m a Ludo fan from way back, and had been wanting to check out the French chef’s live cooking show. In this episode, he’d be preparing the “buttermilk Provençal” fried chicken served at his two LudoBird restaurants.

No more excuses. We’d watch the live show on Saturday afternoon, and maybe even cook along. Friday night I brined the chicken according to Lefebvre’s advance instructions.

You might be saying, why on earth would you look to a French chef as a guide to an iconic dish of the American South?

I suppose because I suspected Lefebvre would make it comfortable and relatable.

Which he did: So entertaining and instructive watching him butcher the chicken, as Krissy videotaped, provided commentary and read real-time questions from viewers. At some point their young daughter Rêve wandered into the kitchen, wanting a piece of chicken; she then hid in the pantry.

Ludo set up three stations for consecutive pre-fry dipping and dredging: first flour, then buttermilk, and finally seasoned flour. For the third, Ludo poured in a few spoonfuls of buttermilk, rubbing it into the flour to make it lumpy. So each piece got a dip in the plain flour, then the buttermilk and finally the lumpy flour mixture — which Ludo smushed into each piece of chicken, pressing hard to create a super shaggy coating that would form that gorgeous craggy crust. (Surprisingly, he had removed the chicken’s skin.)

The seasoning itself was pretty interesting: Most notably and unconventionally, it included a generous scoop of herbes de Provence.

He poured the oil into a Dutch oven, explaining that it shouldn’t go higher than halfway up the sides of the pot. Good, important knowledge. He talked about the importance of having the oil at precisely the right temperature: between 325 and 350 degrees F. And not frying more than two pieces at a time, as introducing chicken into the oil immediately lowers the temperature, and three pieces would lower it too much.

Watching him tend the chicken once it was in, checking its progress every couple of minutes and pulling it out when it was gorgeously golden-brown: All this was completely confidence building.

An hour later, Wylie and I were excitedly setting up our own dredging stations, heating the oil, fitting a sheet pan with a rack to received each fried piece.

We set the table. Poured ourselves glasses of wine. Checked the temperature of the oil. Dredged the first two pieces, and started frying.

How liberating! And how utterly, crunchily, juicily delicious the result. Honesly, this was some of the greatest fried chicken any of us had ever eaten; we couldn’t believe how fabulousness of the result. I felt like constant monitoring of the oil temperature was key.

Thank you, Chef, for showing us the way in.

And thank you all for reading. If you happen to fear deep frying — even just a tiny bit — I hope you’ll dive in, too. Come on in; the oil’s fine! Here’s the LudoBird Style recipe:

If you’re not entirely comfortable, watch the video first, then fry. Please post a comment and let us know how it goes. Oh, and by the way, if you clean your oil carefully after frying, you can re-use the oil at least several times. The headnote in our recipe gives the details.

Next deep-frying deep-dive: pommes frites.

RECIPE: Fried Chicken Ludobird Style

Quarantine special: Marcella Hazan's ragù bolognese meets luscious handmade pappardelle

Last year, when L.A.’s handmade pasta genius Evan Funke published his cookbook American Sfloglino: A Master Class in Handmade Pasta, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. His then two-year-old Venice pappardelle palace, Felix, had pasta-loving Angelinos swooning. Chef Funke was getting big-time buzz with the book, whose forthright hashtag, #fuckyourpastamachine, said everything you needed to know about its handmade approach.

The book has since been nominated for a James Beard Award for its gorgeous photography, by Eric Wolfinger — whose beautiful how-to shots are at once sensuous and highly instructive; the pics of Funke’s finished plates are almost painfully attractive.

Wylie had just moved in with us post-college to start a job search, and when the book arrived in the mail, we devoured it together. If ever there was a book to appeal to the current Gen-Z zeal for extreme DIY immersion, this was it.

We knew immediately what we had to do. We had to attempt the book’s two holy grails: sfloglia all’uovo (egg dough, for pasta) and ragù della Vecchia Scuola, the old-school meat sauce bolognese that, once you have procured all the ingredients and equipment, is a seven- or eight-hour project.

We blocked off not just a Saturday, but the whole weekend. For the ragù — which Funke learned at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese in Italy (which is also where he learned to make pasta) — we had to purchase a meat grinder. (We bought an inexpensive cast-iron manual, hand-crank number.) I already had a food mill, suggested to make the passata di pomodoro (tomato sauce) that is another ingredient in the ragù. So a half-hour plus for that before you can even start the ragù. 

The ragù recipe calls for grinding together beef chuck, pork shoulder, pancetta, prosciutto and mortadella — nearly four pounds in total. Plus five ounces of strutto, which is pork fat. It yields two and a half more quarts of sauce than you need for the recipe, which is a good thing, as the recipe is so time consuming. 

Gathering the ingredients was its own adventure, and then the grinding, etc., followed by five to seven hours of cooking time. We had a grand time in the kitchen, Wylie and I.

The sauce was outrageously good, profoundly delicious. The transformation — after hours and hours and hours of simmering — was so striking, its depth extraordinary. At some point, it seemed like it all just melted together. It wasn’t ready, and then it was. Patience was an important ingredient.

It was also so rich that when we looked at what was left over in the fridge the next day, we were shocked by the white of all that strutto. Incredible that we had ingested that much fat. No wonder it was so good. Round two, the leftover ragù with dried pasta, was also profoundly delicious, but frankly, I wonder how long it’ll be before I’m moved to devote another weekend to making that sauce again.

As the ragù simmered that Sunday we made the pasta. I’ve owned a pasta machine — the old-fashioned, hand-cranked Atlas-type — since I was 19, and used it regularly for years, so the prospect of making dough and rolling and cutting pasta was not daunting. I’ve long understood that the dough requires a half-hour or 45-minute rest before rolling so the glutens relax, in order to get tender noodles. 

With Funke, the only equipment requirements are a rolling pin, a knife and a scale; a bench scraper and a spray bottle of water are handy. You also need a very large board for rolling out the dough into an immense, round sfoglia. 

Once you dive in, there is a lot of kneading and shaping and several hours of resting, and quite a lot of super-precise rotating and rolling of dough — whose desired thickness Funke measures in the thickness of a stack of Post-It notes (9 Post-It notes for pappardelle, 4 for tagliatelle). And then curing, which is more resting, and then cutting. We probably should have attempted pappardelle first, but we wanted to make Tagliatelle al Ragù della Vecchia Scuola, the book’s flagship recipe. 

Pappardelle made from a simplified method inspired by American Sfloglino

The resulting pasta, I have to say, was outstanding. Was it blows-it-away better than what I’d always made with my machine? Um, no. Better, but not that much better. If we are going to be painfully honest.

However, I really enjoyed the process. It’s just wonderful to knead the dough by hand, and roll it out into a beautiful, thin, giant round (even though it takes forever). Few cooking projects I’ve attempted have been that satisfying. So you know what? It has now become my preferred way to make pasta. I’m sure I’ll use my machine again, but only if I’m short of time. 

Too late to say long story short, but here comes the payoff. When the Covid-19 crisis first struck, and there was a run on dried pasta, I wrote a story for my local paper, The Dallas Morning News about how to make fresh pasta without a pasta machine — using a much simplified version of Funke’s method. We couldn’t tell the difference on the plate; it was wonderful. 

I wanted to offer a recipe for a ragù bolognese as well, but now was not the time for Funke’s Vecchia Scuola sauce, for many reasons — prime among them the long list of special ingredients, which were just not possible to procure. Instead I turned to the late great Marcella Hazan’s seminal 1973 The Classic Italian Cookbook, to page 127, to be precise: Meat Sauce Bolognese Style. 

Hazan’s ragù differs from Funke’s in a few ways. First, Hazan’s calls for nothing more exotic than ground lean beef; its other ingredients are staples, easily gotten. Second, one of the ingredients is milk, so it’s a different type of ragù bolognese. Third, Funke has you put the celery, carrot and onion through the meat grinder. And finally, Hazan’s requires only 3 ½ to 5 hours of simmering, compared to Funke’s 5 to 7. 

I tweaked Hazan’s just a little, for convenience and yield’s sake; notably Hazan’s called for ¾ pound of ground beef, which I upped to 1 pound, and she called for 2 cups of canned tomatoes, which is slightly more than a regular can and a lot less than a large can; I evened it out to one 14.5-ounce can for my adaptation.  

The recipe, striking in its simplicity, doesn’t look like much. But putting it together is just the kind of lazy, laid-back slow cooking that seems so soothing right now, and enveloping the tender, floppy handmade pappardelle in Hazan’s ragù — deep and soulful and tender as well — was a pure and profound pleasure. I highly recommend it.

RECIPE: Fresh Handmade Pappardelle

RECIPE: Pappardelle with Marcella Hazan’s Ragù Bolognese

Delicious last-minute gift for Mother's Day this year: a fabulous dish, with a cookbook to follow

An outsized jar of fabulous pickled shrimp — and the cookbook it came from — would be the Mother’s Day gift that keeps on giving this year.

The recipe comes from Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, which was just nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Cookbook in the American category.

In this weird-ass season otherwise known as The Great Confinement, buying gifts and commemorating special occasions can be incredibly challenging. But I have an idea for you — based on what I’d like, if I were a mom. (Which I am.) Make your mom (or your partner whose mom-ness you’re celebrating) a big jar of of this pickled shrimp (here’s the recipe):

You can enjoy it together for Mother’s Day brunch or dinner, and tell her you bought her the wonderful cookbook, which she’ll soon receive. Do this part today; here’s a link to Jubilee on Bookshop. If you buy it there, you’ll be helping to support independent booksellers.

The book really is special; in fact, I’m working on a review of it, which we’ll publish soon, but I thought I’d offer a sneak preview with this recipe. And back to the recipe: Your mom will probably have quite a bit of pickled shrimp left over — which is actually great news, as it’ll keep her supplied in nibbles that’ll result in Zoom happy hour happiness for days.

The shrimp needs to pickle overnight in the fridge, so you’ll have to make it today (Saturday) or tonight in time for tomorrow. And a jarful of this happens to be gorgeous. You could tie a big bow around it.

Your Mother’s Day dish-plus-cookbook doesn’t have to be shrimp-plus-Jubilee. It could be any dish (maybe as part of a meal) that would be nice on Mother’s Day, plus a cookbook-on-the-way.

Maybe it could be Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh, and Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking (the cookbook it comes from). One of my favorite dishes, from one of my favorite cookbooks, it’s absolutely perfect for this time of year (I made a double-batch last weekend, and fell in love with it all over again.)

You get the idea. We are in process of expanding and updating our cookbook coverage, and I wish our Cookbooks We Love department were a little more filled in. At least you can get some ideas there, and I promise to have it expanded and developed soon.

To add to that, here are a few of my all-time favorite cookbooks that will soon be added to that collection:

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers

Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey R. Shere

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook

The New Spanish Table by Anya von Bremzen

That’s just a few — need to run, so you have time to cook up Mom’s gift! Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

Anissa Helou's 'Feast' delivers delicious inspiration from around the Islamic world

Life can get in the way, during normal times, of plumbing the depths of the cookbooks on our shelves or coffee tables.

The Great Confinement of 2020 has changed all that: So many of us are seeking deeply immersive cooking projects to delight us, distract us and give us strength. The most far-reaching of them can also transport us somewhere far away from the confines of our kitchens.

Coming up on its two-year publication anniversary, Annisa Helou’s Feast: Food of the Islamic World has been my nearly constant companion since about a month before quarantine locked us in. Within its 530 pages there are so many beguiling flavors to discover, so much culture to soak in and so much to learn that honestly, I don’t feel cooped up at all.

The book, which won the James Beard Foundation Award last year for best International Cookbook, takes us on a journey around the Muslim world in more than 300 recipes — from Helou’s native Lebanon to Senegal to the west, Turkey to the north, Tanzania to the south and Indonesia to the east, with stops in Morocco, Egypt, India, Iran, Xinjiang and much more along the way. The sweep and scope and depth of the project is just incredible; it’s an awesome achievement.

Author of many other acclaimed cookbooks, including Modern Mezze, Mediterranean Street Food, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean and Lebanese Cuisine, Helou is a gifted cultural guide who tells a great story. (I’ve been following her on Instagram for years; it’s always lovely to see what she’s cooking and eating as she travels around the world.)

Lebanese fatayer, spinach-filled pastries

The most unexpected story in Feast tells of her quest to taste a roasted camel hump, which begins when she’s invited to take part in a feast in the United Arab Emirates in which a roasted hump would be the centerpiece. It doesn’t work out for her as hoped: Separated from the main part of the feast with the other women, Helou is disappointed to be served some “positively nasty” camel meat rather than the hump, which is reserved for the men. The story ends a couple years later, with Helou purchasing her own baby camel in Dubai, having it slaughtered, massaging it with saffron, rose water and the Arabian spice mixture b’zar (cumin, coriander, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, etc.) and roasting it herself.

“The hump looked gorgeous as it came out of the oven,” she writes, “crisp and golden. Both the fat and meat were scrumptious — the baby camel must have been milk-fed. The meat was pale and tender and the fat very soft . . . . Apparently, people also eat the fat from the hump raw. I will have to try that next time around.” She then proceeds to offer advice for buying your own hump to roast, along with instructions to follow her recipe for Baby Goat Roast, subbing the camel hump for the baby goat.

Most of the stories and recipes are, fortunately for those of us who actually want to cook from the book, much more accessible than camel hump.

Among the dishes I’ve made (so far) and loved were a Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons; a classic Tabbouleh, Kafta (lamb skewers) that I served as Helou suggested with a beautiful Onion and Parsley Salad; savory, spinach-filled pastries called Fatayer; the Turkish salted yogurt drink Ayran, an Indian Mango Lassi and Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding. A year ago I bought a rakweh (Turkish coffee pot) and started making Turkish coffee according to the slapdash instructions on the coffee package. Helou’s primer on brewing qahwa (bringing water to a boil, stirring in coffee and sugar, reducing heat, simmering till it foams up, removing from heat and repeating once or twice till no more foam happens), takes it to another level. What a gift!

The Chicken Tagine recipe, which called for four poussin or Cornish hens rather than a generic chicken, required a bit of adjustment. I found Cornish hens, but they weighed nearly two pounds each, and eight pounds would have been far too much for the six to eight people the recipe was meant to serve. I punted and used a chicken instead, cutting it into four (two whole legs and two airline breasts, with wings attached).

Ayran (right), a Turkish salty yogurt drink, and Indian Mango Lassi

The dish was wonderful, and from it I learned so much about Moroccan tagines — the interesting thing about which, writes Helou, “is that instead of browning the meat at the beginning as with most other stews, the browning is done at the end after the meat has cooked and the cooking liquid has evaporated to leave only a silky sauce.”

That silky sauce happens thanks to a lot of finely grated onion and spices that melt over the course of the cooking time into a savory blanket.

I’d had no idea that there were four different types of Moroccan tagines depending on the seasonings used. Nor that many Moroccan home cooks cook the tagine in a regular pot, then transfer it to the beautiful ceramic tagine dish that gives the stew its name to serve at the table. “It is mostly street food vendors and rural folk who cook their tagines in earthenwear tagines,” she writes.

I found myself craving the dish again a few nights ago, when I stared into my (emptying) pantry and spotted a jar each of green Castelvetrano and black Kalamata olives — perfect for the dish. This time I cut the chicken into smaller pieces (leg, thigh, breasts cut in two with wing still attached to one half): even nicer.

Kudos for Helou’s pita bread recipe, which leads off the book. Not that I was able to test it word-for-word: in the time of corona scarcity, I didn’t have and couldn’t get the right kind of yeast. (The book calls for instant yeast everywhere yeast is called for, it seems; I only had active dry yeast.) But Helou’s method — more useful than others I found as I searched far and wide — did serve as seriously useful inspiration when I was developing my own recipe for half-whole-wheat, half-white pita bread.

It’s that kind of authoritativeness that has had me reaching for Helou’s book again and again as I develop any kind of recipe with roots or inspiration in the Muslim world.

Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad needed no tweaks.

There’s a caveat, though. As often as not, the recipes need tweaks, at best, or a lot of guesswork at worst. For a Hyderabadi Dumpukht Biryani, Helou has you marinate a princely amount of boneless lamb shoulder in a lot of yogurt, along with tenderizing green papaya (smart!) and spices. Are we meant to discard the yogurt when the meat goes into the pot? Who knows? Lots more yogurt goes in, so maybe not? If that’s the case, what a waste. I split the difference, shaking the yogurt marinade off most of the lamb pieces, but wound up with an epic fail anyway: There was way too much liquid, resulting in a drab and sodden mush, rather than the elegant, discreet rice grains that distinguish a well made biryani. I wound up picking the expensive lamb bits out of the inedible dish and making them into a soup the next day.

I came to understand pretty early on that rather than a book to precisely follow recipes from, Feast is a book to be inspired by, to learn from and to be guided by. So that even after the biryani fiasco, when Wylie decided to take on a kafta research project — finding and developing the best possible iteration of the Lebanese ground lamb skewers — I handed him Helou’s book. In the headnote for her recipe, she recalls going to the butcher shop in Beirut with her mother, who would carefully watch the butcher chop the meat for her kafta in order to make certain he used the right cuts (shoulder or leg). That inspired Wylie, after a decent version he had made with packaged pre-ground lamb from someone else’s recipe, to use hers, grinding his own meat from a leg of lamb. It was spectacular.

And when we plated the kafta with fabulous hummus, handmade pita and Helou’s Onion and Parsley salad, it transported us a million miles away from home.

There are so many more recipes and techniques I plan to explore in the book: Turkish meat boreks; scallion pancakes from China; a Saudi eggplant fatteh that’s said to be the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite dish; the Lord of Stuffed Vegetables; Moroccan meatballs with rice, harira and couscous with seven vegetables; Persian tadigh; a crab curry from Indonesia. I’ll soon be making up batches of her harissa and garam masala for my pantry.

And I’m eager to try out many of her desserts, once I can get the right ingredients. For now, here’s her Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding:

Helou even has a couple of recipes involving fresh, green almonds, answering a question I asked in a story last fall when they were in season.

To be sure, Feast is probably more a book for seasoned, confident cooks and armchair culinary travelers than for beginners who need to faithfully follow instructions. As for me, I’d buy it again in a heartbeat. And for friends who are ambitious, intrepid culinary adventurers, I will offer it as a gift.

Feast: Food of the Islamic World, by Anissa Helou, Ecco, 530 pages, $60

RECIPE: Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemon

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

RECIPE: Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad

RECIPE: Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding

This refreshingly minty Levantine-style salad is missing a key ingredient — that's why we call it 'fattoush-ish'

What — no toasted pita?! That’s why we call this minty, sumac-y salad ‘fattoush-ish.’

Fans of fattoush — the bread and herb salad that’s popular through the Levant year-round — are divided about how toasted pita, a key ingredient, should play in the bowl. Traditionalists like the pita soaked in the salad’s lemon, olive oil and sumac dressing so it’s soft, like the soaky bread in a traditional Tuscan bread salad. Modernists add shards of well-toasted pita at the last second, for a crisp crunch.

Traditionally eaten at iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast during every night during Ramadan, fattoush is delightfully light and refreshing. It’s a salad to riff on. Some cooks insist it must include purslane, the tangy salad herb that grows like a weed in the Mediterranean. (Stateside, you can often find purslane in Middle-Eastern or Mexican groceries.) Some versions of fattoush include green bell pepper; others don’t. Occasionally you see radishes. You can use scallions or onions, cherry tomatoes or regular ones, romaine or arugula, or both. Some versions go light on sumac, a bright-flavored, lemony spice; others play it up big. (Our recipe takes the middle sumac path.)

If you’re not already familiar with fattoush, it’s a great time to get to know it. Once you’re in possession of a jar of dried sumac and some dried mint (we favor spearmint), you might even be able to pull it together with ingredients on hand.

Craving fattoush’s minty, sumac-y, scallion-y flavors, I had everything but pita. (One of the challenges of The Great Confinement is not having all the ingredients required for culturally correct renditions of dishes.) I went ahead with the fattoush program anyway — and way glad I did.

Leave out the pita bread, as our recipe does, and suddenly you’ve got a delightful salad that satisfies anyone avoiding carbs: It’s gluten-free and paleo-friendly. It’s also just the thing to counterbalance all that heavy comfort food many of us find ourselves indulging in more often than usual. (Start dinner with fattoush-ish, and that giant plate of lasagna doesn’t count!)

Or go ahead and add some pita: One piece, split in half and each saucer-shape crisply toasted, makes it legit. Break the two toasted sides into bite-sized pieces before adding to the salad. Traditionalists, please double the dressing and toss the pita shards in half of it a few minutes before you’ll serve the salad. Modernists, add the shards at the very last minute.

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Fattoush-ish

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken enchiladas verdes are a crowd-pleaser.

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

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

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

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

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

Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy dancing. Keep it green.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrate Easter, Passover (or spring in general!) with butterflied leg of lamb on the grill

It’s kind of strange that I find myself with these ingredients during such trying circumstances, but a well priced on-line special on semi-boneless leg of lamb and another on organic asparagus presented itself when I was scrambling to find groceries yesterday. Somehow, a delivery spot opened up — not always easy. An Easter/Passover miracle!

Maybe it’s by design on the part of the grocer: holiday foods on holiday special. If that’s the case, maybe it has happened to you as well. Or maybe later this spring you’ll find yourself in possession of a leg of lamb. If so, here’s what I’m thinking: Dust off the Weber (or whatever your grilling set-up; our base-model Original Kettle is already set up on our tiny patch of townhouse patio).

Since we’re outside so much less these days, and it suddenly turned into a gorgeous day in Dallas, grilling our non-or-every-denominational holiday dinner feels like just the thing to do.

A simple marinade of red wine vinegar, garlic, cilantro, mint and olive oil goes on the lamb two hours (or more) before you grill it. If you don’t have those particular herbs, but you have some thyme or rosemary — even dried — that’ll work just as well.

Because you open up the butterflied leg rather than tying it, there’s more surface area for grilling and a shorter grilling time. Depending on how hot your coals are and the size of your lamb leg, it should take between 12 and 22 minutes.

If you’re doing asparagus as well, just toss that in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and put it on the grill when you flip the lamb.

Here’s the recipe:

Happy spring, happy holiday. Hopefully happier days are ahead!

How to make the most of asparagus: Dress it up with a glamorous new-wave gribiche

If asparagus might be destined for your Easter or Passover table, I can’t think of a more spectacular way to serve it than dressing it with a new-wave gribiche. Based on the classic French gribiche, which is an herbal, shalloty mayonnaise, this fresher version was inspired by a 2015 cookbook from one of my favorite restaurants in L.A. In Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California, chef Travis Lett dressed some gorgeous fat asparagus with a sort of deconstructed gribiche and grated bottarga. Fantastic.

A few nights ago it struck me that this kind of new-wave gribiche is not only a glorious way to feature asparagus, but also to honor the egg — as eggs have become so precious these days. The recipe calls for just two of them, really spotlighting their gorgeousness when cooked just three minutes.

It’s also a great way to spotlight beautiful soft herbs — dill, chives, chervil, parsley, tarragon (whatever you’ve got).

Want to know more about gribiche? We took a deep dive into it a few seasons back.

This new-wave take on it is also wonderful served with simple fish preps, boiled shrimp or roasted vegetables, or stirred into a bowl of boiled-then-sliced red potatoes. Find more ideas here.

Here’s the asparagus recipe.

Wishing you all a wonderful Passover or Easter. Stay safe and healthy, everyone.

Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

Several months before The Great Confinement, I became obsessed with butter chicken.  

It began with a problem I needed to solve for a client, for which an Instant Pot seemed like a possible solution. Never having used one, I Googled — and found a nearly two-year-old New Yorker profile of one Urvashi Pitre, “The ‘Butter Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot.”

Butter chicken? I’d never given the dish much thought — always assumed it was an Indian dish concocted for American tastes, as chicken tikka masala is for the Brits.

How wrong I was. And how silly I felt, and still feel — mostly because of the missed opportunities to indulge in murgh makhani (butter chicken’s proper name) during a lifetime enjoying Indian food. 

Meanwhile, if exemplary butter chicken could be easily achieved at home in less than a half hour using an Instant Pot, well, then, I had to get an Instant Pot.

My young-adult son Wylie was living with us at the time. Though suspicious of the plug-in-pot contraption, he’d always been partial to the charms of butter chicken, so he was keen to give the recipe a whirl for dinner one weeknight. It was remarkably easy: You put nearly all the ingredients — chicken pieces, a can of diced tomatoes, spices and salt — in the Instant Pot and turn it on. Then you pull out the chicken, use a stick blender to blitz the sauce, swirl in butter, cream, more spice and cilantro, put the chicken back in, and that’s it. Wylie started prepping everything just as I was leaving my office to head home; when I walked in 20 minutes later, he was swirling in the cream.

Wylie’s first (Instant Pot!) butter chicken. Delicious — and so easy!

The Instant Pot butter chicken was astonishingly good: rich, nicely spiced, altogether satisfying. And in so little time, with so little effort. Bravo Urvashi Pitre! 

Urvashi Pitre, a.k.a. the Butter Chicken Lady, with her instant pot murgh makhani in Southlake, Texas

Now I wanted to meet the famous Butter Chicken Lady — who happens to live not 25 minutes from me. I had the perfect opportunity. Another one of my clients, in process of opening a new store and cafe in Southlake, Texas, asked me to recommend a local cooking personality for the store’s inaugural Supper Club series. The Butter Chicken Lady! The event was an instant sell-out, and the guests (some of whom flew in from other states) loved it. What a kick to dine on delicious murgh makhani seated literally next to the extremely delightful Butter Chicken Lady. (Check out her excellent blog, Two Sleevers, where you’ll find hundreds of quick-and-easy recipes.) 

Meanwhile, I was getting curiouser and curiouser about murgh makhani. What were the origins of the dish? Were they knowable, or, like most dishes, something with hazy beginnings, a dish that evolved over eons? Would other versions include onions, which were conspicuously absent from Urvashi’s version?

The simplicity of the answer to the origin question threw me for a loop: Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created, according to a 2018 Washington Post story, in the late 1920’s or early ‘30s in Peshawar (then India, now Pakistan) by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral. It’s exceedingly rare that a dish has origins so precisely knowable, but butter chicken’s origin story is uncontested, the smart story by Andreas Viestad asserted.

I found the piece just as I was headed to Massachussetts to visit Juliet, a brilliant web designer (and gifted cook) who is now my partner in Cooks Without Borders. As we drove from the airport to her house, I told her about the Post piece, which profiles Monish Gujral, the grandson of Kundan Lal — who also created (incredibly!) tandoori chicken. His grandfather had wanted to create a dish for his mentor that was lighter than the usual dishes of the region, so he had the wacky idea of roasting a chicken in a tandoor oven, which at the time had normally only been used for baking bread. Tandoori chicken was a hit that put the restaurant — Moti Mahal — on the map, and later Kundan Lal created butter chicken as a way to use leftover tandoori chickens. Bathed in a rich, tomatoey, buttery, beautifully spiced sauce, murgh makhani made Moti Mahal famous throughout India. After partition in 1947 (when Pakistan and India were separated), Kundan Lal moved to Delhi, where he opened his own Moti Mahal. His grandson Monish apprenticed with him, becoming a chef at Moti Mahal after graduating university, and eventually taking over the family business — now an empire of some 250 restaurants.

Having eyeballed the WaPo adaptation of Gujral’s recipe, I thought it looked remarkably quick and easy — maybe even as quick to put together as Urvashi’s Instant Pot version. “Let’s make it!” said Juliet. Leave it to my friend to have all the ingredients already on hand.

The WaPo adaptation had us quick-roast pseudo-tandoori chicken pieces in the oven, having slathered on a yogurt-and-spice coating, but not leaving it to marinate before roasting. The sauce came together quickly on the stovetop.

The butter chicken Juliet and I made from the Washington Post story.

Again, this was delicious — perfect for a flavor-happy weeknight dinner.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how close this was to the original; the tandoori-approximation seemed a bit quick and clipped, and did the dish maybe want a little more depth?

Monish Gujral’s book, On the Butter Chicken Trail, offers a recipe slightly different than the adaptation in the WaPo piece. It calls for making an actual tandoori chicken first, marinating a skinless chicken first in lime juice, chile powder and salt, and then in a yogurt-spice blend — for at least four hours altogether, so all those flavors soaked in — then skewering the soaked bird and roasting it in a tandoor oven or grill.

Most cooks I know do not have a tandoor, and grilling isn’t always an option, but those two marinades seemed very worthwhile, and I wanted to do something a bit closer to the original than the WaPo recipe. Chicken thighs strike me as more practical for most American cooks, always flavorful, of course, and easier to cook evenly in high oven heat than a skinless whole chicken. Our recipe calls for roasting the thighs on a rack over a baking sheet so the pieces don’t braise in all the juices that collect otherwise.

[EDITOR’S NOTE Oct. 19, 2020: In honor of the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, October 20, 2020, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Moti Mahal, we have published a new story and created a new, streamlined version of our recipe. The new version is called World Butter Chicken.]

I also adapted the wonderful garam masala Gujral uses, which gives the dish a gorgeous aromatic underpinning. (The recipe for garam masala in Gurjal’s book yields nearly a pound of spice mix — more than most cooks I know would use in a lifetime; I scaled it down to a twelfth of that.)

Kundan Lal Gujral, the creator of murgh makhani — a.k.a. butter chicken. Gujral also is credited with with creating tandoori chicken. Photo courtesy of Monish Gujral.

Finally, while Gurjal’s recipe calls for 14 medium-sized ripe red tomatoes, that is an awful lot of tomato for one chicken; one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes seemed and tasted like the right amount, and canned tomatoes are more practical outside of tomato season.

That left me with one question: While the WaPo recipe called for Kashmiri chili powder, with 2/3 paprika and 1/3 cayenne offered as a sub, the recipe in the book called for “red chilli powder” without specifying a type. I tested it with the paprika and cayenne combo, and that seemed perfect. But what was ideal — and how much does it matter?

I went straight to the source, and asked Gurjal, whom I had no trouble finding through Facebook.

Now I was just beside myself — first I got to meet the Butter Chicken Lady, and now I was corresponding with the Butter Chicken King himself! Juliet pointed out that he was really more like the Butter Chicken Prince, as he was descended from the dish’s creator, but to me the fact of his world-wide murgh makhani empire makes him the Butter Chicken King.

Gurjal clarified the red chile powder question: Kashmiri chile powder, or a commercial blend called Deggi Mirch (a powder of Kashmiri chiles and red bell peppers), or the paprika-cayenne alternative work well. I sent him my adaptation of his recipe pre-publication, we discussed the switch to canned diced tomatoes and my adaptation of his garam masala, and he approved of the whole package. He was careful to add that you don’t want to blend the sauce too fine; you want it to have a bit of nice texture.

When we chatted later on the phone, he told me about his two grown children (his daughter is a lawyer at the High Court in Delhi; his son is in law school in London). “When they’ve been away and they come home,” he said, “right away, they always want butter chicken.”

Of course they do. It may well be the world’s most beguiling comfort food.

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay safe, healthy and well fed, everyone.

RECIPE: Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture

RECIPE: Classic Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad

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

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

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

My new BFF (sorry, Teach!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

RECIPE: Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Pea-Ricotta Dip

Treat yourself: This Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken will add outsized joy to your life

If you can get a chicken, you can make this smashing dish.

We all need something delicious in our lives right now, and the ingredients to make many of our fall-back comfort foods have become, all of a sudden, unattainable. Depending on where you live and how you shop, it may be difficult or impossible to find pasta, eggs, dried beans and flour, for instance. Flour’s elusiveness is particularly annoying, as it stymies bread-baking, cookie making and cake creation.

Where I live, in Dallas, Texas, eggs are hard to come by, but we can get chickens — something my brother in L.A. failed to turn up in his extensive hunt yesterday.

If you live somewhere where you can put your hands on a bird — and you possess (or can get) a little soy sauce and honey — you can, with very little effort, make one of my favorite dishes ever: Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken. (Substitute tamari for the soy sauce, and it’s gluten-free!)

It comes from Peter Meehan’s 2015 cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes. Though it requires preparation 12 to 48 hours in advance, that preparation is super quick and easy, requiring only about 15 minutes of active prep: Combine soy sauce and honey, paint the bird with it, wait 15 minutes, paint again, sprinkle salt on, and tuck into the fridge. After 12 hours, or two days later, pop it in the oven to roast, hands-free — no basting or turning over the chicken (no need to flip the bird!).

Serve it with a stir-fried or steamed vegetable; fortunately things like broccoli, asparagus and baby bok choy have not been difficult to obtain. I love this recipe (also adapted from the Lucky Peach book) for stir-fried baby bok choy with whole garlic — and garlic, as we know, is great for boosting our immune systems. The book calls for a choice of baby or regular bok choy — or spinach (Meehan specifies regular, not baby spinach) or pea greens.

Ideally, you’d also want to serve the glorious chicken and beautiful veg with rice. I did manage to snag a bag of jasmine rice at the online supermarket this morning (I’d been seeking it for a week); otherwise it seems to be all manner of brown rice crowding the real and virtual shelves. With this chicken, and this bok choy, brown rice sounds positively dreamy.

We at Cooks Without Borders and your fellow cooks would love to hear from you in a comment — if you try one of these two dishes, how’d you like them? Any issues? Were you able to find appropriate ingredients?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and don’t forget the Taquería Carrots.