Croque Monsieur is essentially a toasted cheese and ham sandwich. Put a fried egg on top and you've got a Croque Madame (the egg is supposed to resemble a lady's hat). What makes the difference between a toasted cheese and ham sandwich and a Croque Monsieur is the cheese – in a Croque Monsieur it comes in the form of a creamy cheese sauce. And boy, does this make a difference!
Whenever I want a simple, tasty breakfast, weekend dinner, or late night supper, I pull out some tomatada, a classic Portuguese tomato sauce I always have on hand. This is a riff on a traditional recipe, but instead of firing up the oven for just an egg or two, as the original requires, I make it on the stove. Less than 15 minutes later, I'm sitting down to eat.
Sandwiches can be assembled up to 2 hours in advance, and kept covered at room temperature. Toast immediately before eating.
There are almost endless possibilities for variation here. Potatoes are my favorite thickening agent for garlic soup, but it can also be thickened with a roux of flour and butter or with bread, the traditional choice in the South of France, where this dish is a specialty. Onions and scallions can be used instead of leeks, although the soup won’t have the same subtle taste. If you use the leeks, include most of the green leaves.
In old New York at Christmastime, bakeries sold stacks of paper-wrapped and beribboned stollen, the beloved German holiday bread. When I serve samples of fresh-baked stollen at the bakery, the customers' faces light up with discovery. Once I served it and a customer asked what he was eating. "It's stollen," I said. With a straight face, he replied, "Well, you should give it back!" This recipe, inspired by pastry chef Dieter Schorner, is extraordinarily light and flavored with rum-scented raisins and other fruits and nuts.
When I have no vegetables on hand, I make this soup, which requires only onions and leftover bread. Grated Gruyère, one of my mother’s favorite additions to the soup, is a great flavor enhancer.
Bread and Butter Pudding is classic British mommy food and one of the easiest puddings to make. It's a great way to use up left over bread — white, (the classic), brown, brioche, even stale croissant, the method is the same whichever you use. If you're feeling particularly decadent, smear the buttered bread with a little marmalade or jam before baking.
My father uses the microwave. Working with about 5 chestnuts at a time, he slits each chestnut almost all the way around its circumference, leaving the shell connected in one spot (there is a black dot on the chestnut that he uses as the hinge). Then he lays the nuts on a plate and microwaves them on high power for 40 seconds. The shells pop open like clams. He wets his fingers in cold water and pulls off the shells before the chestnuts cool. Repeat until all the chestnuts are peeled. The fresh ones really are better than the jarred, and he says it takes him only 15 minutes to do a pound.
What a surprise it was to taste tomatoes this sugary, a vivid reminder that they are in fact berries, not vegetables.
The simplicity of this Calabrian dish is stunning, and for that reason there is no point in even thinking about it until that time in late summer when utterly ripe, red, and flavorful garden tomatoes are in season—preferably from your own or a neighbor's garden. That's where the flavor lies—there and in the use of fine extra-virgin olive oil, good crunchy sea salt, a zesty dash of hot red chili, and, of course, the charcoal fire on which the tomatoes are set to roast. Toast the bread over the charcoal embers after you finish the tomatoes, so it will be crisp but not tough and hard.