30 Minutes or Less

Two keys to a great roast beef sandwich are rare roast beef and good, crunchy, warm sourdough bread. We added some spicy horseradish cream to give it a kick.

This dish can be served as a sandwich filling or as a stand-alone salad accompanied by favorite lettuces and veggies. We use canned tuna packed in spring water because it’s lighter than tuna packed in oil, and we make sure the apple is tart and crisp. Granny Smith apples are fine, but also Mutsu, Honeycrisp, or any good local crispy, tart apple will do. Add half the dressing at first and see if you need more—it’s up to you how well coated you want the tuna and apples to be.

This is a real deli-lovers sandwich, topped with Emmenthaler, which is a good sharp Swiss cheese. You’ll have enough Russian dressing for six sandwiches; you can keep the extra for a week in the refrigerator.

This classic sandwich relies on good ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced bacon, and top-quality crusty bread. Although you might normally shun iceberg lettuce, this is one instance where its crunchiness is welcome. Feel free, of course, to substitute another lettuce such as romaine.

This sandwich is a French import made by dipping a basic ham and cheese sandwich into a beaten egg before sautéing it in butter. It’s like a savory French toast sandwich. It’s best made in a cast-iron skillet since cast iron distributes the heat very evenly. Ask the deli clerk to slice the ham very thin, and use good-quality French bread.

If you didn’t think waffles could taste good and be good for you at the same time, these will change your mind. Besides the taste of fresh applesauce, the addition of flaxseed meal, wheat germ, and whole wheat pastry flour imparts a wholesome flavor. If you choose to buy applesauce rather than making it from scratch, the waffles will still be very good, but nothing compares with homemade applesauce made with crisp autumn apples.

This Bubby’s version of Dr. Seuss’s whimsical creation will satisfy kids and adults alike. Serve this children’s classic with Home Fries (page 209) or Stone-Ground Hominy Grits (page 207).

Andouille, a spicy Cajun sausage, is a must in dishes like jambalaya. Here, along with another favorite Louisiana ingredient, crawfish, it flavors a delectable scramble that will make you think of New Orleans. You may use either fresh or frozen crawfish tails. In case you’ve never eaten them, crawfish tails have a flavor that is somewhat like shrimp, only sweeter.

Those who like a little extra kick in their eggs will enjoy this dish. Customize it by adding a little extra jalapeño, which will increase the heat. The clean, bright flavor of cilantro is excellent here, and it adds color as well.

The key to making a great broccoli omelet is to slightly overcook the broccoli. One of the best cheeses to pair with broccoli in many a dish is Cheddar because of its sharp, tangy taste.

If you’re using fresh crabs, you want to use the meatiest ones you can find, such as Dungeness crabs from the West Coast. The little blue Maryland crabs are good, too, but they are a lot of work to get the meat. I usually figure about one-third of the whole crab weight will be meat. So, for every pound of crab, you might get one-third pound of cleaned meat. If fresh crabs are not available, you can usually find freshly picked lump crabmeat at your fish market. If all else fails, frozen pasteurized canned crab will suffice. Serve with Asparagus Potato Hash (page 210).

In my house, eggs in the hole were also called one-eyed sailors. Whatever they are called in yours, this is a great dish that children will love. It consists of bread with a hole punched in the middle, griddled with butter, and an egg dropped into the hole and then flipped over to griddle the other side. Depending on the thickness of your bread, or the type of bread, you could create a little “eye patch” by griddling the punched-out part and setting it on top of the egg. This dish is quite versatile. For a more sophisticated variation, try adding basil and Parmesan cheese or a smear of anchovy paste, a clove of roasted garlic, a slice of goat cheese, American cheese, or sharp Cheddar. Put a blanket of crispy fried ham over the “little sailor.” For a romantic brunch for Valentine’s Day, you could use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to punch out the hole in the middle of the bread. For heartier appetites try cutting a larger hole in the bread and cooking two eggs rather than just one.

Sometimes you just need the taste of some eggs cooked in butter or cream. Shirred eggs fit the bill: They’re baked in hot fat or heavy cream. At Bubby’s, we use either butter or bacon fat. They are baked in the same dish in which they will be served—a 4-inch oval ceramic ramekin is perfect.

I often take bright young leaves and their sprouting shoots, cook them briefly in boiling water, then toss them into sizzling butter seasoned with garlic and lemon as an accompaniment for grilled pork belly, a roast fillet of lamb, or a nice piece of fish. That said, it still takes up more room on the plate than the meat. Red Russian kale, which I often cook in this way, is finer boned than the curly plumes we know so well. The heavily laced leaves have a fragility to them, and wilt quickly after picking. For all their gentility and mauve-pink blush, they still carry something of the coarseness of the stronger stuff.

I often come home from Chinatown with a squid and a bag of choy sum. The fishmonger will have done most of the dirty work for me, leaving me to give the body sac a final rinse before slicing. Squid is ideally suited to this quick, high-temperature cooking.

February 2008. The garden is all frost and cabbages. Here and there the occasional fat seed head, some purple sprouts on bending stalks, and piles of sticks that I have pulled off the trees that overhang the vegetable patch. The earth is crisp underfoot. Soup days. The winter cabbages, especially Savoy and Protovoy, are blistered with webs and hollows that seem made to hold a sauce of some sort. At its simplest, this could be melted butter or hot bacon fat, but a cream sauce seems an especially attractive idea on a cold day, adding suavity to a coarse flavor and at a stroke tempering the leaves’ stridency. The juniper in the spiced cream that follows makes this a perfect accompaniment to ham or roast pork, though I have been known to eat it with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

The brassicas are much revered in Chinese cooking, and dealt with elsewhere in this book, but the white cabbage, with its waxy leaves and crisp stalks, makes an excellent candidate for seasoning with the saltier accompaniments. On cold, rather gray days, the sort of day when nothing much happens, I often crave robust, dominating flavors—perhaps in a quest to inject some vigor into the occasion. Strident greens tossed in lip-tingling oyster sauce can be such a dish. In the last four or five years, this has become one of those recipes I use as a “knee-jerk” accompaniment—an alternative to opening a bag of frozen peas. It is excellent with grilled pork chops, though I have also eaten it atop a bowl of steamed rice before now.