30 Minutes or Less

When I make this dish I buy the Asian-style baked tofu so I don’t have to marinate it. It is difficult to find in regular grocery stores, but you can find it at most health food or specialty stores. If you can find it, you can skip the marinating and just stir in the teriyaki sauce at the end. For you meat eaters, a chicken breast can be used instead of the tofu.

A tuna melt is one of the easiest things to make when you are eating alone. It really doesn’t take much more work than a tuna sandwich, but because you eat it with a knife and fork, it always seem more like a meal than just a sandwich.

For you non–spinach eaters out there (including me): Don’t be turned off by the spinach in this recipe! I always made this with just the cheese filling, but one time, when I had my back turned, my sister added spinach to the filling. She insisted that it would look better and I wouldn’t even taste it. Although I hate to admit it, she was right. Besides that, it’s worth it just for the shock value of when you ask your mom to buy spinach.

This is one of my favorite after-school snacks. It tastes great and it makes a lot, so I can eat it for a few days in a row. Although it tastes better cold, I am usually too impatient (and hungry) to wait for it to chill, so I eat it warm the first day and then cold the rest of the time.

Taco Salad is awesome because it is literally a whole meal in one salad—and a vegetarian meal at that. If you want to add meat to the salad, you can cook and drain 1 pound of ground beef, stir in 1 tablespoon of chile powder, and spoon it onto the salad before you add the cheese. Tortilla shell bowls can be difficult to find, but you can just line a bowl with tortilla chips and get the same effect.

I was intimidated by the prospect of making a broccoli cheese soup, but I like it so much, I had to try. The recipe we came up with turned out to be one of the fastest, easiest soup recipes I’ve ever tried. Just to clarify, a bunch of broccoli is what you buy rubber-banded together in the store: a stalk is one of the pieces within the rubber band, and florets are the flowery tops.

This dip is so easy it’s embarrassing, but we included it anyway because we love it. We usually make it in two smaller pans, one using chili with meat for me and one with vegetarian chili for Megan. This is the perfect after-school snack, taking less than ten minutes from walking in the door to munching away in front of the television.

There’s nothing like the pleasant crunch of crisp, freshly toasted nuts. And there’s nothing worse than biting into an acrid, rancid nut. Since nuts have a relatively high amount of oil, you should taste a couple before using them to make sure they’re still fresh. Hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts are particularly susceptible to spoilage. Buy nuts from a store that sells in high volume and turns over its stock regularly and store them in a cool, dark place in a well-sealed container. Nuts can also be frozen in zip-top freezer bags. Most nuts taste much better if they’ve been toasted, which brings out their flavors and gives them a crunchy contrast in ice cream. The only nuts I don’t toast are pistachio nuts, since they’ll lose their delicate green color. Buy fresh pistachios from a good source so they’re crisp and vibrant green.

You don’t need me to tell you that Peanut Butter Patties are the best when embedded in any chocolate-flavored ice cream. Use a commercial brand of peanut butter when making these since natural-style peanut butter will make them too runny. If you want tinier pieces in your ice cream, simply shape the mixture into smaller patties. And although they’re rich, if you want more to add to your ice cream, it’s easy to double the recipe.

I was going to call these “Walnuts Gone Wild” but took a less seamy route and decided on simply Wet Walnuts. You can draw your own conclusions. But there’s nothing indecent about these maple-glazed walnuts, except how good they taste.

These easy-to-make peanuts will make you feel like a chocolatier assembling a world-class candy bar. If you’re anything like me, you can’t keep chocolate bars around the house without breaking off a hunk every time you pass by, so by all means double the recipe if you want, just to make sure there’s enough for folding into the ice cream later on.

This is one of my all-time favorite and most requested recipes. These nuts are lots of fun to make, and you’ll feel like a real candy maker as you triumphantly tilt your first batch out of the pan. Whole almonds get cooked in a syrup, simmering until the sugar crystallizes and clings to them, creating a crackly caramelized coating. This recipe can easily be doubled.

I used to cringe every time someone would start a sentence with, “When I was your age…,” knowing that I was in for a lecture, heavy with nostalgia for days gone by. Nowadays, though, I find I’m doing the same a little too often for comfort. But it’s true, when I was younger (perhaps your age), my local ice cream parlor would serve, alongside their gloriously overloaded ice cream sundaes, little paper cups filled way up to the brim with buttered pecans roasted in real, honest-to-goodness butter, for just five cents. Five cents! Yikes! I think I’m becoming my parents.

If you’re as wild about sour cherries as I am, you’ll be as happy as I was to discover that big jars of them are available in Eastern European markets and specialty grocers (see Resources, page 237). They come packed in light syrup and are a fraction of the cost of their pricey Italian counterparts, and they’re simple to candy yourself. Once cooked and cooled, if you wish to mix the cherries into ice cream, drain them of their syrup completely (until they feel dry and sticky), and then fold them into your favorite flavor. I recommend White Chocolate Ice Cream (page 33), or try the Toasted Almond and Candied Cherry Ice Cream (page 60). Or simply use one, or more, to top off an ice cream sundae. (Save any leftover syrup to mix with sparkling water to make homemade sour cherry soda.) This recipe calls for 3 cups of cherries, which includes their syrup.

All raspberry sauces need not be created equal. Unlike the previous sauce, this one is loaded with big, chunky raspberries. It was inspired by a sauce that baking guru Nick Malgieri whizzed up during a cooking demonstration, and I’ve been making it ever since.

I’m a big fan of the all-American blueberry, and why not? They’re so easy to transform into a versatile sauce that’s equally at ease atop Philly-friendly Cheesecake Ice Cream (page 62) or alongside Hollywood–healthy Vanilla Frozen Yogurt (page 49). Or forge a Franco-American alliance by adding crème de cassis, the deep, dark black currant liqueur from Dijon (see the Variation at the end of the recipe).

This sauce is so intensely flavored that just a minimum amount is needed for maximum impact. It goes particularly well over anything sharp and lemony, such as Super Lemon Ice Cream (page 85) or Lemon Sherbet (page 116).

Coulis is a fancy word that simply means a sauce made with fresh, uncooked ingredients. Feel free to change the mix of berries as you wish, depending on what’s available. If you find fresh red currants at your market, the tangy little berries are a wonderful addition.

When I see the first gorgeous baskets of strawberries at the markets, I know that spring has truly arrived and winter is a thing of the past. Since their season lasts throughout summer, you’ll find that this sauce goes perfectly well with any of the summer fruit and berry ice creams, sorbets, or frozen yogurts in this book.

We all need heroes in life. Someone to look up to, whom you idolize, and who does something that radically alters your life forever. For me, that person is Henri Le Roux, who makes caramel-butter-salt caramels (nicknamed CBS) in the seaside town of Quiberon, on the Atlantic coast of France. The residents of Brittany are famous for consuming shocking amounts of butter, most of it heavily flecked with coarse sea salt to preserve and complement its buttery goodness. When Monsieur Le Roux unwrapped one of his buttery, meltingly tender salted caramels and popped it in my mouth, I knew I’d found my hero. To get the same flavor, be sure to use a good-quality kosher or coarse sea salt, such as fleur de sel (see Resources, page 237), recognizable by its delicate, shimmering crystals. It makes quite a difference.