30 Minutes or Less

Here is a good way to use up leftover chicken that makes a full, satisfying meal.

It is so easy to make a vinaigrette, the classic French salad dressing, that I can’t fathom why so many people living alone go out and buy bottled dressings. Not only do they pay more, but the dressing never tastes as fresh, and you can’t vary the seasonings as you wish. So I beg you to make your own vinaigrette as part of your cooking life. The amounts I’m giving will be enough to dress two or three small salads, but you can double or triple the quantities if you’re an avid salad consumer and want enough dressing to see you through the week. Just refrigerate the extra in a jar, tightly sealed.

Use a gratin dish that holds about 1 cup if you’re baking only one egg , and a slightly larger dish if you want to do two.

Here’s a soup to warm your heart even on the bleakest day of winter. Use it as a guideline, and make your own innovations according to what you have on hand. The beans are very nourishing, the meat accent lends heartiness, and the greens are healthy, giving balance and color. It’s interesting how cooks of the past just knew these things instinctively.

Steamed mussels make a lovely dish to eat alone slowly, plucking the plump flesh from the shells as messily as you like and sopping up the heavenly liquor with chunks of French bread.

Make this simple shrimp dish often, but only recently did I discover how good it is served on a bed of farro (see page 190), which Lidia Bastianich introduced me to. It’s also delicious with rice, grits, or polenta. You’ll get a good two meals out of this amount.

I love lamb chops, and I can’t resist when I find a pair of loin chops at least 1 inch thick sitting side by side in a shrink-wrapped package at the meat counter. Expensive? Yes, and I don’t really need two of them. But I give in and set aside the uneaten portion of the second one to tuck into a small casserole of French lentils. It makes an appealing second dinner.

I can’t resist a piece of calf’s liver when I see it—all too infrequently—in the meat counter. It’s even better if you get it from a considerate butcher who will cut an even-sized 1/4-inch slice and spare you the finicky job of removing the outside membrane. Liver in a winey sauce is particularly good on a cold winter night; somehow I always feel my red corpuscles are strengthened by its rich meatiness. I like it with some potatoes alongside. If you have a couple of cooked potatoes, you can brown them in a little butter while the liver cooks, or if you don’t have them on hand, try grating a medium raw potato through the coarse holes of a grinder and make a quick potato pancake.

This is another super-cinchy piccolini that packs a big wow factor. Start with high-quality ricotta, mix it up with lots of other yummy stuff, put it in a cute dish, and bake until it’s all warm and melty. Serve this cheesy pot of deliciousness with lots of warm bread, and I guarantee people will call you a rock star!

A mess of greens is the thing to serve with this golden fried covey and gravy.

The Florida Sport Lobster Season is always the last consecutive Wednesday and Thursday in July. All one needs to join this sporting scene is a bully net—a regular net with the handle bent to form a ninety-degree angle. Just trap the lobster beneath the ring of the net, and when he kicks his tail up into the net, sweep him up and swoop him into the boat! If you keep some of this butter concoction on hand you can be ready to grill just about any seafood with a slather of citrus butter. (It’s handy to pack some in the cooler for grilling out because it does not leak like marinades and sauces might.)

Out in Galveston Bay right around Thanksgiving the flounder run. The channels and passes that head from the marshy shallows out towards the deep Gulf of Mexico are teeming with the flat fellows on their way back to the gulf for winter. A hook baited with shrimp and an angler patient enough to give the hook time to set can come home with the two-fish limit. In Mobile Bay in Alabama the flounder run in the spring is called the Jubilee; the fish are so plentiful they can be scooped up by the netful. A dusting of potato starch and seasoning on these and a belly full of aromatics is a jubilant celebration of the flounders’ run.

Back when I was in high school we hung out at Estella’s Tavern on Moonbeam Street. It had Formica tables, walls covered halfway with variegated shag carpet and then mirrored the rest of the way up, low lighting, and a hell of a jukebox that had the Nat King Cole song “Sweet Lorraine” on it. I remember some very-late-night meals of pan trout (which was most likely whiting) doused with hot sauce, fried, crisp, and served on slices of white bread—completed, of course, by cold beer in a can. Man, oh man, were those delicious! Pan trout are what we call just about any fish small enough to fit in a little skillet. Giving the fish fillets a coating of white bread crumbs and a good shot of hot sauce whisks me back in time and has me humming “Sweet Lorraine.”

Cooking spaghetti squash in the microwave steams the squash and the strands come out nicely—unlike cooking it in a conventional oven, which can cause the strands to bake to the skin. A simple quick fresh pesto is a snappy sauce for the steamed squash.

I like the browned bits that cling to the skillet, like the socarrat of a paella, when I cook this side dish for my family. I like it so much, in fact, that I serve everyone the fluffy top part and when I’m back in the kitchen I scrape that part off and serve it to myself.

When Ernestine Williams, mother of Ole Miss Colonel Reb and NFL football great Gentle Ben Williams, was teaching me how to make skillet fried corn, the top of the black pepper shaker fell off and a ton of pepper fell in the skillet. She scooped out as much as she could but there was still a whole lot that got left in. We liked it. Now when I make it I add a good bit of black pepper and a whole lot of garlic. You have to use fresh corn in this dish; frozen just won’t do if you want it to really fry up nice.

My cousin Daniel Foose fell in love with a girl he met in music school. Sueyoung Yoo and Daniel married out at our family farm, Pluto, on what might have been the hottest day that year, Saturday, June 30. Friends and family began to arrive the Wednesday before. As the bride and groom are both accomplished jazz musicians, she a pianist and he a bassist, most of the bridal party came with instruments in tow, and late-night jams filled the evenings. Sueyoung made kimchi, massaging each leaf of cabbage with rich chile paste and placing it in her groom’s great-grandmother’s soup tureen. Her soon-to-be in-laws, Uncle Jon and Aunt Caroline, had driven from Austin with a plug-in home-size chest freezer in the back of their Suburban rigged to a battery and filled with all sorts of slow-cooked Creole and Tex-Mex food for the reception. The reception came together in an eccentric perfection combining cooking from New Orleans, Korea, Mississippi, and Texas; and the band played well into the night. It is a joy to have Sueyoung in the family. Now out at Pluto we have kimchi buried in the yard and Korean barbecue is served on Christmas night.

Spring is a short-lived but well-loved season in the Mississippi Delta. All is verdant and lush with the scent of fresh-tilled earth in the air. When spears of asparagus are combined with farm-fresh eggs, to me, it all signals spring. I particularly enjoy this dish for breakfast with sourdough bread for sopping up the luxuriant, velvety cream sauce.

The Palestine Gardens is a miniature replica of sites from the Holy Land built down in the piney woods around Lucedale, Mississippi. For sixteen years Reverend Walter Harvell Jackson and his wife searched for a place to build his Bible-themed garden. After seven years of construction, the forty-acre garden opened in 1960 with Bethlehem, Jericho, and Jerusalem all constructed out of concrete blocks, and with its own Dead Sea. It has expanded over the years to include the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem artichokes do well in the kind of sandy soil and full sun they have down there in George County and will thrive in most gardens, producing the edible tubers and brilliant yellow sunflowers. I like to serve this over Israeli couscous, of course.

“Alligator pears” is what we call the big pale-skinned midwinter varieties of avocados. They’re also known as Florida avocados (as opposed to the more familiar California Hass variety, which has dark, pebbly skin). One type has the name Bacon and that is a great coincidence since they work so wonderfully together.