Rice & Grains

John, my sweetie, loves my wild mushroom risotto, which I used to make with a little brandy in it. John loves Johnny Walker like a brother, so I make his risotto with Scotch—more than a little, too. (Sadly for him, the alcohol cooks off. However, the smoky flavor left behind is great with the earthy mushrooms. To the wise: The better the Scotch, the deeper the effect.)

This meal is a lazy-man’s version of paella. (But we lazy, big-mouthed, big-appetite girls can dispatch this dinner pretty easily, too!)

Remove the seeds from only half the jalapeño pepper. The heat lives in the seeds and this dish is a balance of heat with sweet.

When it comes to this one-pot wonder, even Campbell’s never made it this good! Use a large, deep-sided skillet or medium soup pot for this recipe.

Feel free to make this dish in all four seasons. I just call it “Spring Chicken” because it tastes light and crisp, like spring air, and because “Spring Chicken” sounds more appetizing than “Leeky Chicken,” which was what I called an earlier version of this recipe.

Gloria Estefan taught me how to cook plantains in the microwave and her husband, Emilio, gave me the urban, updated idea of lightening up some Cuban-influenced dishes. The result is this menu, my interpretation of Metro-Retro Cuban cooking. This dinner is also delicious made with seasoned grilled thin-cut chicken breast, seasoned in the same manner as the steak.

The wonderful actress Ming Na taught me this recipe. It was handed down to her from her parents, who owned a successful Chinese restaurant for twenty-five years. It’s not fair! Ming Na is gorgeous and talented and she can cook, too! But, we can console ourselves with these Chinese meatballs. The chopped cabbage is served in a pile, the meatballs in the middle: a head surrounded by a mane . . . a lion’s head. Ming uses mushroom-flavored thick soy sauce. I cannot find that product where I live, so I use finely chopped shiitakes and aged soy sauce.

Serve the soup in shallow bowls and pass crusty bread for mopping.

This is comfort food at its finest. It blends Italian risotto with the idea of American macaroni and cheese to create a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. And because we love the crisp juicy flavor of apples with our Cheddar cheese, we decided to take things a little further and use cider to deepen the flavors of our risotto. That hint of tartness balances out the richness of the dish. If you happen to have them around, fresh chives are a wonderful finishing garnish.

This is an excellent technique for a dinner party or any occasion when you want to spend time with your guests instead of standing over the stove. The risotto will be firm and toothsome, but you can treat this as traditional risotto and finish it with a dollop of extra virgin olive oil or butter and some freshly grated cheese for added creaminess. It’s a nice change of pace served with sautéed chicken with a quick pan sauce of white wine and fresh herbs, crispy skate in brown butter with capers, or a garlicky stir-fry of seasonal vegetables.

When I was visiting the Luberon, we wound our way up to the top of the hillop village of Bonnieux and stopped at the Musée de la Boulangerie. There, in an ancient house, the history of bread and baking is traced. Among the ancient pots and pans were shallow unglazed earthenware bowls called at the museum “tians,” which were and are used much like Dutch ovens for cooking vegetables in the embers of a fire. In the south of France, there are many recipes for tians, layered casseroles of vegetables sometimes mixed with eggs and sometimes with rice and served in the Jewish way as a main course for a dairy meal. In this recipe, a nice substitute for the spinach would be Swiss chard, also a vegetable used since antiquity.