Forget everything you have ever learned about flash cooking fish. In this southern Vietnamese “kho,” or traditional, homey braising recipe from Vietnamese scholar and author, Andrea Nguyen, catfish steaks are bubbled for an hour in a caramel sauce, resulting in deliciously dense pieces of fish cloaked in a sticky mahogany sauce.
My friends Pat and Denny have adopted this as a standard, but they put the cilantro on the side, and so can you if your family is polarized on the cilantro front. Pat and Denny also use low-sodium soy sauce, which is a great idea if you tend to have it around and handy. Even better is tamari sauce, which leaves the nuts sticky and shiny but not crusted to the pan (a drawback of soy); also, it's gluten-free. My friend Zarmik had this to say about the nuts: "Soy-glazed almonds were a revelation. I suspect I would think the same of soy-glazed cardboard. In fact, for the next few days, if it does not move, it stands a good change of getting soy-glazed."
Due in large part to its health-giving omega-3 oils, salmon has become one of the most popular types of fish consumed in the United States. I prefer to buy wild salmon for its flavor. The seared salmon and easy slaw are excellent served hot, room temperature, or cold.
Jenifer loves to make this salad with the boys. If there's time, she'll throw it together a few hours ahead of dinner, but she makes sure to add the herbs at the last minute or they lose the wonderful aromatic qualities that they bring to the salad in the first place. Serve more herbs in bowls for everyone to add as they like.
This shows just how delicious frugality can be.
Note: The fish in this recipe may be unsustainable. Check Seafood Watch for information and alternatives.
Quick, tasty, and nutritious, this makes a great midweek supper. The yellow bean paste is a great pantry ingredient, perfect for marinades and speedy home-cooked meals like this one.
Upscale Afghan cuisine has adopted a lot of British and Indian desserts—divinely delicate flans, rice puddings flavored with rose water. But in most poor Afghan towns and villages, the dessert I ate most commonly consisted of sugar-coated almonds, green raisins, and caramels imported from Iran. Jelebi was the first locally prepared sweet dish ordinary Afghans ate that I had tried; it is popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of India. It's supersweet, and probably should be served with a glass of milk or unsweetened hot tea. Jelebi is supposed to be eaten so hot it burns the roof of your mouth (which kind of goes against the idea of something that is supposed to be a treat, but that's life in a war zone, I suppose), but in Jalalabad, our crew would often buy a couple of pounds of the rings, put them in a big plastic bag, and then pick at them during our long daily drives around the violet and yellow filigree of mountain roads, listening to Najibullah's war stories and laments, sound tracks to Indian movies, and distant explosions of American ordnance outside Tora Bora.
You can vary the amount of water in this recipe in accordance with whether you want a proper soup or a more stewlike consistency.
There is a restaurant on the outskirts of Bangkok called Soi Polo. When I was there taping my TV show, I went to this restaurant three times for this dish. Fried garlic, fried shallots, and spice-infused chicken made it impossible to stay away! Seems others agree with me. The restaurant has become world famous for this chicken. Here's my version for you.