This aromatic bread is made with a combination of bread flour and masa harina, which gives it a wonderful corn-y flavor. The thin, crispy crust yields to a moist, tender crumb, and, as the name suggests, it’s especially good toasted. While we find it easiest to make this dough in a stand mixer, it can also be made by hand; just be mindful of the amount of flour added during kneading so that the nice tender crumb you’re going for doesn’t become too dense.
Growing up, I awoke to the smell of this omelet cooking on most weekends, and my mom (whom our kids call “Nanima”) still makes it for the kids whenever they stay over. First, the potatoes are diced and sautéed until they’re perfectly tender, and then you add the spiced egg mixture. My mom would also pack it with onions, and we’d enjoy it with fresh paratha (a flatbread), yogurt, and green chutney; you can also serve it with Pickled Carrots. It’s kinda like a frittata but with all the Indian spices to warm your soul (and your taste buds). I love that the kids gobble it up and that they’re just as excited when they smell it cooking on a weekend morning as I was!
We’ve put this recipe here because, unlike the pot pies in the first chapter, this is a traditional pot pie with a bottom crust and a top crust, making it a double-crusted pie. This pot pie uses the carcass of the holiday bird to make a rich turkey stock. Making stock is a very flexible process, so use common sense rather than precise measurements. Of course it’s fine to use store-bought turkey stock, but homemade is so much better and takes less than 10 minutes of active time. It’s well worth the small effort, since the turkey is abundance itself and shouldn’t be wasted.
The classic tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce gets a wafu kakushiaji (“secret umami enhancer”)—sake, miso, mirin, and kombu dashi. For an even deeper layer of umami, make this sauce with chicken dashi or chintan dashi. What’s not to love? Serve this sauce over traditional pasta or udon noodles, or use it to make a wafu-ed lasagna
In El Salvador and much of Central America, quesadilla refers to a sweet cheese pan dulce, where the cheese is incorporated into the batter. Many folks use Parmesan cheese (for its funk) and pancake batter. I have also heard of Salvis in the southern United States using a cornbread adaptation of the recipe. I have made quesadillas countless times, and I have used only Salvadoran cheeses because they were the first items that revealed to me how obsessed Salvi folks are with food. Why? Well, my relatives always bring back pounds of cheese from El Salvador—queso duro blando, queso duro viejo, and queso morolique. These aged cheeses must be excellent if it’s worth leaving your belongings back in the homeland to make room for cheese in the suitcase.
If you cannot source Salvadoran cheese, you may use Parmesan cheese; in place of crema Salvadoreña, crème fraîche. This pan dulce is usually served with hot coffee. My relatives who recently visited from El Salvador, where they can get all kinds of quesadilla at any hour of the day, loved this recipe so much that they requested it two days in a row.
Fishcake recipes are always handy, featuring ingredients from the pantry. In Malta, similar patties are also made with corned beef. I like to serve these with plenty of lemon and a salad of iceberg lettuce. They are also nice eaten cold and can be added to a platt Malti.
Even though transplants and visitors to Atlanta complain constantly about the Southern humidity and heat, my favorite memories as a kid are still from summertime in Georgia—from climbing rocks in backyard creeks and swimming in Lake Allatoona to walking through the dancing fountains in Centennial Olympic Park and, yes, sipping sweet iced tea on the porch. After camping out in Seward, Alaska, with a dear friend and colleague, I learned firsthand about sustainable fisheries—and got a taste of wild Alaskan salmon. I was hooked.
This recipe was inspired by my love of salmon and the hot weather of a Southern summer that calls out for cool comfort food. The smoked salmon is chilled, with refreshingly cold basil, mint, cucumber, and green onion added to the roll along with the noodles.
Serve with Rice and Tortillas, garnish with cilantro & lime
This recipe from Nick Leighton and Leah Bonnema–hosts of the hilarious etiquette podcast Were You Raised by Wolves–pretty much sums up everything we look for on our podcast The One Recipe.
It’s a recipe with provenance. It comes from Cathy Burgett, a cooking instructor at the legendary Tante Marie Cooking School in San Francisco where, while he was still in High School, Nick took evening and weekend classes. It’s a simple, and adaptable recipe, as Leah learned, when she swapped in blueberries for the cranberries. And it yields a sneakily fancy result because, according to Nick, everything feels more fancy when it’s upside down.
Parkin is a form of oatmeal gingerbread common to Yorkshire and other parts of England where oats were grown in abundance. Dark and treacly, parkin makes the perfect accompaniment to mid-autumn holidays like Bonfire Night – an occasion for which it is often made. Once baked, cover well and allow to mature and soften up for a few days before serving.