The gorgeous simplicity of a classic oyster stew has had a hard time lately. Chefs want to do the multi-ingredient razzle-dazzle with a dish that is perfect when you just leave it be.

In this case, taking the easy way out gives you the best of the best. Oyster stew is that occasional luxury you can pull off on a work night. A handful of ingredients, a pint of shucked oysters and you have one of the great dishes of winter.

Note: You could have the sauce done two days ahead. The making the meatballs a day ahead not only releases you from last minute angst, it works magic on how flavors are exchanged between the meat and sauce.

My fingers are crossed that this recipe has done the trick for a recent caller.

Tara called into the show asking for a meatball recipe. She needed very special meatballs since they could change her life. She wanted to propose to her boyfriend with the dish he loved, spaghetti and meatballs. But she’d never made meatballs before. Here’s the recipe we came up with and I hope it has made the both of them very happy.

Cook to Cook: Just remember, meatballs beg for improvisation with vegetables, all kinds of breads, cheeses, and leftovers. I like Mario Batali’s observation, “The mistake people make with meatballs is they think they’re all about meat.” Here is where to begin.

This sauce completes our Meatballs and Spaghetti for Romance

Note: Unsweetened cranberry juice can generally be found at Trader Joe's as well as select health food and gourmet stores.

Note: To toast caraway seeds, place them in a small skillet. Heat the skillet over medium heat, just until the seeds become aromatic, 1 to 2 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally to keep the seeds from burning.

Note: Adapted from "The Mustard Book" by Rosamond Man and Robin Weir.

The salad can wait in the fridge for several hours. Add the mint just before serving.

Crisp jicama and unripe mango with hot chile and lime are naturals together. And in a salad they refresh like nothing else.

Here they were originally Mexican drink snacks - cut in long sticks, rolled in lime, hot chile and salt. Their leftovers went into the fridge and a couple of days later their juices had collected at the bottom of the container into what could become a great tasting dressing -- tart-salty-sweet and hot -- practically dictating an Asian salad. With my everlasting love of the rice noodle, and being fed up with winter, this dish fell into place.

There are some table sauces that every nation takes to its heart -- for us it’s probably HP, Heinz ketchup and Colman’s mustard, but in Malawi the market is pretty much sewn up by a brand called Nali, who make a tasty hot sauce with various intonations. My favourite was the ginger one, closely followed by the garlic, and I’ve kind of mixed and matched them together to come up with this recipe.

There are more species of fish in the Rift Valley than in any comparable area -- that is to say, more freshwater fish in the lakes there than in all those of Europe and North America put together - so from teeny-weeny ones that get fermented and ground, to big mammas chopped up in the markets, you see a lot of fish in Malawi. Back home, I used red bream, but you can use any other portion-sized fish that’s fresh and sustainable. Apart from a maize porridge mush called nsima (not exactly yummy to me, but very cheap and useful for filling hungry tummies), rice is the other main carb of choice. They have a particularly delicious rice over there called Kilombero, with long and thickish grains. I was excited enough to carry 3kg (6lb) of the stuff back with me, but dismay doesn’t touch the sides of what I felt when I opened it up and it was a bad batch alive with l’il critters. Over the years of bringing foodstuffs back home this has happened to me more times than I care to remember, and every time it still seems so unfair after one’s gone to all that effort.

In America, we don't seem to steam food very much, but it's one of the great techniques of cooking. In Asian cuisines, steaming is very, very important and probably as popular as frying or baking.

If you visit a typical home kitchen in southeast Asia, there aren't a lot of appliances. You might just have a single charcoal burner or a single gas burner. So to prepare a meal, you're either making one thing at a time or working in layers. When you're steaming, you can cook a whole meal on one stove at one time. You can have your fish in there and maybe something above it in another tray and then maybe something wrapped in banana leaves above that. You steam it all at once.

Lustily spiced, cooled with fresh herbs, and sharpened with lemon, this type of lentil soup is what Moroccans eat to ward off the chill of the desert night.

Harira looms large in Moroccan culture, often served at weddings and other celebrations, but the soup practically unites all of Morocco during the holy month of Ramadan. Then, no food or water is taken from sunrise to sunset. But once the light fades and cannons announce the end of the day’s fast, that is the moment of Harira, the one “break fast” dish all Moroccans eat each evening. Served with dates, dried figs, fried honey cakes and other finger foods, each diner takes his Harira as he pleases.

In this recipe, some liberties have been taken, but hopefully we have not offended tradition. The often-used lamb, chicken, chickpeas and eggs weren’t included, and our accompaniments were modified by what is to be had close to home.

The soup can wait a day in the refrigerator. Add the final fresh coriander garnish at the moment of serving.

Cook to Cook: Greek walnut and honey baklava pastries cut into small bites can stand in for the honey-drenched fried cakes often eaten with Harira in Morocco.

This is what I call a sleeper recipe. At first glance it doesn’t look like much -- a whole chicken rubbed with a little fresh ginger, roasted, and served alongside elbow macaroni tossed with diced tomatoes and the roasting juices. Exactly what makes this dish so remarkable is hard to pinpoint, but there’s a wonderful alchemy that occurs when the chicken, ginger, and tomato all come together. It’s comforting, a little exotic, and truly delicious. To create a maximum of pan juices -- since these become the sauce for the noodles -- I add the giblets to the roasting pan and pour a bit of white wine over the chicken partway through roasting. During roasting, the drippings, the wine, and the roasted giblets cook together, creating a savory jus. The chicken also roasts on a rack to encourage the drippings to caramelize a bit as they hit the hot pan, developing even more flavor. I make this year-round using canned tomatoes, but if you make it in the summer, by all means use fresh ripe tomatoes.

The inspiration for this dish come from Lulu’s Provençal Table, by Richard Olney, one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. When I first read the recipe, I was immediately taken with the idea of tossing roasting juices onto hot pasta. In this version, I’ve tweaked the flavors and method some, but the concept of combining tomatoes, ginger, and pan drippings remains true to the original. I confess that I did experiment with other shapes of pasta, thinking that a different shape might make the dish more sophisticated, but I returned to the simplicity and familiarity of elbow macaroni. If you decide to branch out, choose a short shape with enough squiggle, such as cavatappi, to hold the sauce.

Plan ahead: For the best flavor, season the chicken 8 to 24 hours ahead of roasting.

Wine: Youthful fruity Provence rosé or Grenache-based rosé from Navarra Spain. ]]> 2012-01-17T16:53:47Z 2012-02-22T17:45:58Z

In the Mexican state of Veracruz, a local recipe calls for simmering fish in a rich sauce of garlic, tomatoes, capers, green olives, and chiles. This version uses grouper, but any firm white-fleshed fish will do.

Here’s a simple and tasty soup that I think of as a “starter soup” -- even someone who has never cooked could make this without any trouble. The amounts are pretty flexible, and the technique basic, and the result delicious.

Like many of my soups, this one really adapts to your taste with its garnishes. Try it with a spoonful of smoky salsa, or some crumbled queso fresco, or a plain white goat cheese. A drizzle of fruity olive oil on each serving is great, as are home-made croutons.

Sturdy black kale, leeks and sweet potatoes keep their distinct textures and flavors in this chopped green soup, and the combination of tart, fresh lemon with toasted cumin just shines.

Any kind of kale can be used in this soup. I usually make it with Russian kale, but you could use dinosaur kale, or curly leaf kale - or all of them. Yams can be used in place of sweet potatoes if that’s what you have on hand.

To make ahead: Prepare through Step 4 (omitting the lemon), cover and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Season with lemon just before serving.

This chard and spinach soup gets complex flavor from slowly cooked onions and lemon juice, while a sprinkle of rice gives it body and a velvety texture. Serve with a swirl of fruity, fragrant extra-virgin olive oil for richness.

Wrapped, the cakes keep well in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.

If you can melt chocolate and stir, you can make these cakes, and no commercial mix has chocolate as good as this. Quality chocolate is like breeding: it always shines through. Gooey chocolate pockets stud the cakes, while the cake itself is nearly as dense as fudge.

There is a real bittersweet edge here. For the kids add another 3 tablespoons of sugar. For yourself, keep the adult attitude; put the young ones to bed, light the candles, and pour two glasses of port.

You could turn this recipe into a cake by baking it in a 9-inch springform pan lined with parchment. Increase the cooking time to about 35 minutes.

Cook to Cook: The pan you choose will change the baking time of this and other recipes. Here, the dark pan called for gives you fudge cakes in 16 to 18 minutes; shiny pans lengthen the baking time by a few minutes more. We use a dark (not black) nonstick metal pan for this recipe.

The sauce can be made several days ahead and kept in the refrigerator

Greek pastas are so seductive, especially the ones done with tomato sauces. I think of them as another world to plunder. Cinnamon always scents the tomatoes, along with garlic, oregano, and wine. This sauce was inspired by the work of Greek culinary authority Aglaia Kremezi.

It began as hers, but over the years of cooking, the mix of seasonings became my own, along with the occasional additions of lamb or chicken; and I have substituted goat cheese for her feta. It turns to cream in the sauce.

Cook to Cook: You will love the unruliness of this hollow pasta. It fights the fork but picks up all the goodness of the sauce. This recipe is one of the few that call for you to break the pasta before dropping it into the pot.

Keeps for 3 to 4 months in a dark, cool cupboard

]]> 2011-12-22T20:51:54Z 2011-12-22T21:04:50Z

Once, wherever chestnut trees grew, the nuts were important food for the poor, and yet their taste is luxurious. This chestnut soup, one of my very favorite soups, presents its main ingredient beautifully. It happens to be French, although chestnut soups are made in many places. Chestnuts can be had only during the end-of-the-year season, of course, and the flavor of the soup depends on their quality — the best, when hot, have an aroma of honey — and on the clear flavor of the chicken stock. Along with that, milk is a light, traditional addition that respects chestnut flavor, but for years I’ve instead added cream, as below. Make your stock with a generous quantity of leeks, or reboil it with leeks before adding it to this soup.

If you don’t have homemade stock, don’t resort to canned, whose taste of can permeates anything to which it’s added. Instead, make a different chestnut soup, such as this one from the Limousin, also very good: cook the chestnuts in water together with the typical winter soup vegetables (onion, leek, carrot, turnip, potato), put everything through a food mill (a blender or processor risks making too fine a purée), and then add butter, milk, and cream.

The drawback to chestnuts is the peeling, which, depending on the batch, can be tiresome. Some cookbooks say chestnuts can require an hour or more of cooking after peeling, which may be true of some kinds, but overcooking the chestnuts or the soup at any point will send the chestnut aroma into the air — lost forever.

Spruce’s piney terpene flavor is an acquired taste. Drinking a soda made exclusively from spruce twigs would be not unlike imbibing the essence of forest, but when blended with more traditional root beer flavors (such as -sassafras and sarsaparilla) and especially a good hit of ginger, spruce’s pine essence is refreshing and cooling. Spruce beer was an American colonial favorite, since spruce had preserving qualities similar to those of hops.

Early soda makers frequently sold their wares at stands, but Roy Allen and Frank Wright, the owners of A&W Root Beer, were the first to build a full-service restaurant chain based on a soft drink. In the early 1920s they opened the first A&W drive-in restaurant, featuring “tray-boys” offering curbside service. By 1933 there were more than 170 franchised A&W outlets, and in 1960 there were 2,000 nationwide.

As a professional cook, I have a wall of cookware: copper from France; enamel-coated French or Dutch ovens (the nationality depends on the manufacturer); high-tech, stainless-steel sauté pans; thin pots for boiling pasta. If I go into a fancy, tricked-out designer kitchen, and there's a rack with all the same kind of pots, I know that person doesn't actually cook. Different pots are needed for different reasons. And even with all my expensive professional cookware, the pan I reach for the most is, without hesitation, my grandmother's cast-iron skillet.

I am generally a fan of using frozen spinach in recipes that require a lot of spinach. It's always a good idea to have a bag or box in the freezer for a quick meal, and certainly on a weekend morning.

This recipe was originally created to accompany the Cereal Milk Panna Cotta. It was one of those first-swing, home-run hits. It is incredibly simple to make and equally as versatile in its uses. Put some in a plastic bag and take it on the go as the best snack ever, or use it as an ingredient in Cornflake-Chocolate-Chip-Marshmallow Cookies.

I am neither brave nor bold enough to make just a chocolate chip cookie. Everyone’s mom or grandma makes “the best” chocolate chip cookie. And every one of those chocolate chip cookie recipes is different. So, out of respect, we dared not compete. Instead, we made a delicious chocolate chip tribute cookie—one of our most popular cookies—by accident.

In the Ko basement one day, Mar overtoasted the cornflake crunch for the cereal milk panna cotta. She was pissed. I was pissed. But we refused to let it go to waste. I was already well versed in making a cookie out of anything left in the pantry, and we needed a dessert for family meal anyway. So we made cookies with the cornflake crunch, and we threw in some mini chocolate chips, just to make them appealing to the cooks in case the overtoasted cornflakes were a bust, and some mini marshmallows, because we were eating them as a snack, and why the hell not. It was just family meal.

The cooks freaked. They requested the cookies for family meal every day after that. And so the cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow cookie was born—love at first bite and a shoo-in on Milk Bar’s opening menu.

Holiday Cookie variation: We’re awfully fond of celebrating the holidays with annoying decorative knickknacks. Or, rather, my mother loves to buy annoying decorative knickknacks and send them to us, and we love to make it look like a holiday just threw up in our kitchen. We like our cookies to celebrate the holidays too—that’s how we came up with our winter “holiday” cookie, a cornflake-marshmallow cookie with crushed candy canes in it.

Popovers are wonderful for Sunday morning breakfast with jam or apple butter or honey. They're most dramatic when baked in a popover pan, but you can make them in 1/2-cup/120 millimeter ramekins if you wish.

The goal with vegetable broth is to make a good-tasting, well-balanced liquor with no one vegetable dominating the flavor.

]]> 2011-12-15T20:31:18Z 2011-12-22T20:11:45Z

This after-dinner drink is like a little ray of boozy citrus sunshine at the end of a heavy meal and should be served very cold, in little shot glasses. If you’re lucky enough to find some lemons with stems and leaves attached, these would make a very beautiful label or gift tag.

This salad is a natural for buffets because it can stand at room temperature for a couple of hours.

Imagine this. Just when your dinner party guests are expecting an oh-so-common green salad, you sashay in with a platter of Mediterranean brilliance -- fresh orange slices scattered with the black and red of olives and onions. The dressing? Orange zest and freshly ground coriander seed warmed in olive oil, then drizzled over the oranges with dustings of salt, sugar, and black pepper. To top it all? This is the salad that never wilts.

Cook to Cook: Warming the ground coriander (and any other spice) and orange zest in a little olive oil helps ignite their flavors.

I know it is a cliché, but this soup really can be made in less than an hour and tastes like it simmered all day. Minestrone lends itself to variations, so improvise with the ingredients that you have on hand. If you were wise enough to freeze pesto at the end of the summer, you can turn this soup into Minestrone alla Genovese by stirring about 1/4 cup of the pesto into the pot just before serving.

Kitchen Note: Like all soups that contain pasta, this will thicken on standing. Thin with additional broth or water if needed.

Fresh greens beans, juicy sauteed mushrooms and shreds of browned onion bake in a creamy sauce. Do the beans up to a day ahead, saute the mushrooms up to 3 hours ahead. Assemble everything and bake it off when you need it. Use organic ingredients if possible.

The Bonus - A Variation: Lynne's own recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup. This recipe makes a delicious homemade cream of mushroom soup — make it even 2 days ahead. Cook the beans and onions as directed below. Just blend together the beans with half the soup and bake. Serve the other half of the soup as a special treat on another evening.

Best prepared a day or two before and gently reheated when ready to serve.

A truly delectable brisket, this has the distinction of being the only recipe in this book where the lid on the baking pan is left ajar. If you prefer a richer sauce, substitute half beef broth and half wine for the water. Tip: It’s really important for the flavor and the color of the finished sauce to slowly cook the onions until deep golden.

Best prepared a day or two before and gently reheated when ready to serve.

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.

To eat, combine a little piece of the fish, some rice, and a bit of sauce in each bite. Andrea is a masterful recipe writer; her recipe appears here untouched.

Caramel Sauce is a cornerstone of Vietnamese cooking. Its ability to impart incredibly savory-sweet flavors is the key to simmering meats, seafood, eggs, and/or tofu for everyday kho dishes. The inky sauce also lends rich brown color to grilled meats, much as molasses does in American barbecue.

Cook to Cook: If possible, buy a whole fresh catfish (about three pounds cleaned weight) at a Chinese, Southeast Asian, or Latin market and ask the fishmonger to cut it into one-inch-thick steaks. If that is not possible, frozen catfish can be used.

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."

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.

Good to Know: A mix of sugar and honey in these citrusy cookies satisfies a sweet tooth, yet each thin, delicate cookie has only forty-four calories. Go ahead, have two.

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.

With their sticky, spicy glaze, these hens are a diminutive riff on our holiday turkey. The birds can be served with Butter-Roasted Cornbread -- a twist on traditional stuffing, made of cornbread with sausage, nuts, and cheese baked into it and then toasted into crispy croutons. That crunch makes them irresistible. Spoon them over the hens and serve with Roasted Grapes and Winter Vegetables and you have a dish worthy of a cover shot.

Cook to Cook: The cornbread can be baked 2 days ahead and refrigerated. Roast the vegetables early in the day and keep at room temperature, lightly covered. Toast the cornbread as directed in its recipe shortly before serving.

Antonin Carâme's invention of the classic soufflé in the early 1820s was made possible by new ovens, which were heated by air drafts instead of by coal. This new technology provided the more even cooking temperature needed for a soufflé to rise properly and stay risen. Initially, Carême made his soufflés in stiff pastry casings that were not eaten. Their straight sides were the inspiration for our current soufflé dishes. He went on to create hundreds of other soufflés including the Soufflé Rothschild, which originally contained real gold and was aptly named by its creator in honor of his employer, at the time the richest man in France. It consisted of a pastry-cream base lightened with beaten egg whites and flavored with chopped crystallized fruits macerated in Danziger Goldwasser, a liquor containing suspended gold crystals. More modern recipes often substitute Kirsch or Cognac.

In the 1950s, the dessert was served as the pièce de résistance in fancy restaurants such as Manhattan's La Caravelle. Classically, the soufflé was surrounded with fresh strawberries, though there were exceptions. The Whitehall Club in Chicago doused it with zabaglione sauce (I've adapted their sauce recipe from The Vincent Price Cookbook.) Michel Roux's delicious variation contains honey and crushed macaroons in addition to the traditional candied fruit. Roux bakes his soufflés in individual ramekins and serves them topped with honey ice cream. Unadorned is also fine, although a dollop of whipped cream or half-melted vanilla ice cream is always welcome.

The Whitehall Club used a mixture of sherry and Grand Marnier, which enhanced the flavors of the dried fruits. You can substitute the liquor used in the soufflé.

The fresh pasta can be made 24 hours ahead and air dried. The lasagne can be assembled a few hours ahead, but please don’t refrigerate it as it tends to dry out.

We hope this will be a revelation for you. It’s a far cry from that brawny work night stalwart picked up in the frozen food aisle. Consider this the long lost wayward sister of the lasagnes we've known and loved—glamorous, delicate, ethereal and a little daring around the edges --it is straight out of Italy’s culinary golden age, the Renaissance.

Here tomato is not a player. Instead, sheer sheets of pasta are layered with a light chicken ragù and sprinklings of nuts, raisins, spices, and cheese, with a touch of cream--echoing the bewitching mix of savory and sweet you’d taste at Renaissance banquets. Believe it or not, many of Italy’s lasagnes today share this light hand. Serve this when you want to get away from the expected, yet have a dish that’s easily done in advance.

Cook to Cook: When buying dried, boxed lasagne, look for the sheerest sheets. If using boxed pasta, use one less layer of noodles than the recipe dictates.

Wine: This delicate take on lasagne can be overwhelmed by a big, ripe wine, so look within Italy’s borders for a relatively light red like a Barbera, Chianti, Valpolicella or Brunello.

Popsicle molds are inexpensive, but don’t hesitate to turn the whole batch into a large container and serve it as sorbet.

Let’s keep this short and sweet: these frozen pops are indecently delicious and easy. The angels had to be on Sally’s shoulders when she conjured this one up.

There’s such an intense hit of chocolate you won’t believe there’s not a jot of fat in them, and they’re just the comic relief needed at the end of an impressive meal.

Cook to Cook: High-quality cocoa is a must here to get that velvety can’t-be-fat-free texture (Pernigotti, Valrhona, and Michel Cluizel are some worth looking for). And don’t forget the pinch of salt -- it really lifts the flavor.