This dish is packed with bold flavors of garlic, spice, and vinegar and balanced out by the rich, creamy grits. The hint of rosemary pairs nicely with the piney hop aromas of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. This dish is so bold it needs a smooth beer like Pale Ale to cleanse your palate between bites.
It’s all right there for you in the title. Sweet shrimp is sautéed until just cooked through, and fregola (a tiny toasted pasta from Sardinia) is added to the pot to toast in the melted anchovy butter and spices with some cherry tomatoes. I love Calabrian chiles packed in oil and use them here for some punchy heat, but if red pepper flakes are within closer reach feel free to use them instead. Once the fregola finishes cooking, return the shrimp to the pot to warm them through and serve straight from the pan. Serve with many bottles of chilled red wine.
This is it. My favorite dish in the world and the grandmother of Sichuan cuisine. Translated literally as “pockmarked grandmother’s tofu,” its totally apocryphal origin story is identical to a half dozen other food origin stories: it starts with hungry crowds and a cook with few ingredients but plenty of creativity. The result is an inexpensive stew that uses simple ingredients—soft tofu, ground meat (traditionally beef, but frequently pork), fermented chile bean paste, a handful of Sichuan peppercorns, and plenty of red-hot chile oil—to create simple, soul-satisfying fare.
Red rice is a traditional Southern dish (and a tradition in other cultures as well), and I love the nostalgia of it. This version is an update that makes it into an easy one-pot meal where you don’t have to cook the rice ahead of time. And there are so many variations. You can add cheese. You can serve it as a side instead of a main. You can make a vegetarian version. My children love it. My favorite thing is the way the rice gets crispy on top. It gives the dish that extra bite and texture that makes me happy.
The recipe for this hearty, garlicky bread soup comes from Rosa Filipe of O Barro restaurant in Redondo, Portugal. According to Filipe, the soup is often nicknamed “beggar’s soup” because it contains no meat or fish.
After all the conversation on this week’s episode about soup, the Splendid Table team decided to do a blind-tasting of readily available, commercial chicken stock of their own. Be warned that this was definitely not a scientific nor totally fair exercise thanks to the limitations of pandemic grocery shopping. However, Managing Producer Sally Swift sent each team member, Francis, Jenny, and Erika a care package with four different chicken broth brands and enlisted their spouses to prepare the tasting so that it would be a truly blind-tasting.
RICE PILAF WITH ORZO ŞEHRİYELİ PİRİNC PİLAVI
Region: İzmir, all regions
I have known Renée all my life. She called my dad Uncle Hershey because of all the Hershey bars that he would bring to her family on Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Renée attended college in Spain, and met and later married a Spaniard who serenaded her below her balcony. It all sounded so romantic. On her visits back to Santa Barbara, our families always got together, and she made the delicious paella she had learned in Spain from her husband’s Uncle Alphonso. I still have my handwritten index card with this recipe, and at the top I wrote just two words: “Yum Yum!”
Tarragon was made for chicken and mushrooms. Its muted aniseed flavour is somehow both bold and gentle; the sponginess of the mushrooms just soaks up the tarragon and their earthiness marries with it beautifully. The second wonder of this dish is its simplicity – just throw everything into the pan, place the chicken on top and roast.
Ask the fishmonger to cut the grouper into 1-inch cubes for you and remove the shells and veins from the shrimp. You’ll want to purchase clams that are the same size so that they cook evenly. Adding the clams to the stock while it comes to a boil helps speed up the process.