Rice & Grains

The best thing about kimchi is this: It packs so much flavor and complexity, you can use it to make lightning-quick meals that taste as if they took hours to prepare. This fried rice, for instance, comes together in mere minutes. Cutting up the cauliflower might be the most time-consuming part. And yet this dish is downright addictive. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a large nonstick skillet for this fried rice, but it will take a little longer to cook.

I’m a longtime fan of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, cookbook authors who produce glorious books with a journalistic approach to food writing. Their stories and stunning photographs illuminate the culture behind the food of such places as Southeast Asia and lesser-known parts of China. They’re also great fun to talk to, and when I interviewed them about their ways with fried rice (which they often make for themselves at home when one or the other is traveling), they insisted that for my own eating pleasure I make sure to always have nam pla prik in my refrigerator. This Thai condiment is simply fish sauce and chiles, which sounds like an almost lethally pungent combination, but when you make it, something magical happens. Each ingredient tames the other one, an effect that increases the longer the sauce sits in the refrigerator. This recipe is designed to use leftover rice, such as the stuff that comes in spades with Chinese takeout orders. Fresh rice doesn’t work as well because it sticks. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a nonstick skillet for this recipe, but it will take longer and won’t be as much fun.

Like so many other American cooks, I learned to make risotto from Marcella Hazan—not directly, of course, although wouldn’t that be great? This is a quintessentially summertime recipe; make it when fresh corn, tomatoes, and basil are all converging on your local farmers’ market or farmstand. Risotto is one of those dishes that makes great leftovers—especially to form into balls, stuff with cheese, roll in bread crumbs, and fry to make arancini. So if you like the thought of that in your future, feel free to double or triple this recipe. Eat this with a vibrant green salad and some chewy bread for a filling supper.

I used to have such trouble making corn tortillas at home, using instant masa flour, that I always assumed the good ones I encountered in Texas and Mexico must have been made from scratch, and I pictured the cooks soaking the dried corn in lime, grinding it by hand, that sort of thing. Then on a trip to Mexico City a few years ago, practically every restaurant kitchen my sister and I saw, even those where the tortillas were beautifully flaky and delicious, had the same bags of Maseca brand masa that I used. Why I couldn’t get the results they did, using the same thing (which is really nothing more than corn treated with lime)? I called my friend, Mexican Cultural Institute cooking teacher Patricia Jinich, for a lesson, which turned into two, which turned into further emails and phone calls. It seems I wasn’t using enough water. Granted, I was following the proportions on the package, but Pati showed me that when I increased the proportion of water, the tortillas pressed more easily and looked smoother on the edges. Most important, when following her other techniques, such as her double-flip method, the tortillas puffed up when I cooked them: a sign that they had the internal layers required of a good corn tortilla. Making corn tortillas at home takes a little practice (and, of course a cast-iron tortilla press, which costs less than $20). If you don’t have access to good Latin markets, it’s worth it.

When the cooking times match up, it only makes sense to cook a protein and a starch together, as in this combination of fish and rice. It’s almost a one-dish meal, and I say almost because you do need to pull out a little bowl to make the spicy-sweet salsa while the pot simmers on the stovetop. This features my favorite way to make rice, an adaptation of the traditional coconut-milk rice that tastes good but is high in fat. The proliferation of coconut water as a healthful drink found in most supermarkets gave me a lighter—and, frankly, better—way to do it, and I haven’t looked back. Be sure to buy juice labeled 100% coconut water, as some juice-pack brands have other flavorings you wouldn’t want here, and some canned products include sugar and preservatives, defeating the purpose altogether.

One of my college hangouts was a scruffy Austin restaurant called Les Amis, which my friends and I called “Lazy Me,” in honor of the decidedly unhelpful service. The food was dependable even if the waitstaff wasn’t, and a standby for me was a simple bowl of black beans, rice, and cheese, priced so even students without trust funds could afford it. Later, I learned that the combination of beans and rice is one of the most nutritionally complete vegetarian meals possible. While beans are one of the vegetables that takes better to canning than others, if you make a pot of your own from scratch (page 47), the taste and texture are incomparable. When Les Amis finally closed, torn down to make room for a new Starbucks, I missed not just the peasant’s bowl, but those inattentive waitresses, too.

For the longest time, chile relleno was my favorite dish, and, really, what’s not to like? A cheese-stuffed poblano pepper, battered and fried, with a spicy sauce? Bring it on, right? Making it at home was a different story: Dipping that delicate pepper in the batter without the stuffing falling out was, well, beyond me. This version may seem involved, but believe me, compared to the traditional version, it’s positively streamlined. I like an almost burrito-like filling, with starchy rice or farro included, but there’s no egg binder, no batter, no oil to heat up (and splatter everywhere). It’s oven-roasted and vegetarian, but spicy and cheesy all the same. Eat with a small salad if you like.

In the physical universe, there is precious little closer to perfection than an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. Unlike standard cookies, they are never cakey or disappointingly hard, not too sweet, with the butter and oats finding common cause in each other’s virtues. So how do you improve upon perfection? Topping these cookies with a beautiful flaky salt brings out the cow in the butter, the hills in the oats, and the jungle in the chocolate. Topping them with the salt rather than just adding it to the batter sets the salt free to work its mojo with each of the ingredients as they combine in your mouth. For these cookies, I prefer Bali Rama Pyramid sea salt, which has really cool hollow pyramidal crystals and a great, snappy impact. The advantage of using a flake salt here is that it remains delicate even after baking. The Bali Rama Pyramid salt does a spectacular job of bringing just enough drama to the cookies to make them sparkle while keeping everything mellow enough to assure they remain a comfort food. Other good choices are Cyprus flake or Halen Môn, or, in a pinch, any good fleur de sel.

One of the earliest descriptions we got from our crack pie addicts was, “It’s like a pecan pie, without the pecans”—which I secretly hated. It’s so much more, and so much less. But one day we finally read between the lines and sarcastically, we thought, made a crack pie with pecans in the pie. It blew my mind a little. There aren’t too many boundaries in terms of the variations. So get crazy.

When we first opened Milk Bar, at 4 or 5 o’clock every morning we would make fresh cinnamon buns with liquid cheesecake rolled up into the dough instead of applying cream cheese frosting on top. Cinnamon buns are something I feel very strongly about, since my mother started a tradition of making (not-so-great) ones for breakfast on every holiday. (Sorry, Mom, but you can’t give a kid a Cinnabon and then expect her to be OK with cinnamon buns made with margarine and skim milk!) We’d make them before the crack of dawn so they’d be ready for breakfast . . . and then we’d sell most of them to people on their way home at night, ready to tuck in with dessert and some TV. So we decided to get smart and create something that was delicious, available, and fresh at any hour, and didn’t have to be made to order every morning: the cinnamon bun pie.

When I was a baker at a conference center on Star Island, twelve miles off the coast of New Hampshire, I learned to make this kind of cookie from one of the best bakers I know, Mandy Lamb. She would put different ingredients in the cookie each day or each week and have people try and guess what the random secret ingredients were. Because we were on an island in New England, when storms blew in, we were trapped. No one traveled to the island, and, more important, no boats with food on them came our way, either. We had to get creative and use what we had on hand. We might not have had enough chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies, but if we threw in other mix-ins as well, the seven hundred some guests would never notice the shortage of one ingredient—and the cookies would always feel brand new, because they were different every time. I found after many batches that my favorite compost cookies had my favorite snacks in them: chocolate and butterscotch chips, potato chips, pretzels, graham crackers, and coffee (grounds). Compost cookies always turn out great in my mother’s kitchen because she infamously has a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own. My brother-in-law calls them “garbage cookies”; others call them “kitchen sink cookies.” Call them what you want, and make them as we make them at Milk Bar, or add your own favorite snacks to the cookie base in place of ours.