This glorious cream cheese, caper, caraway seed, and paprika combination, spread over sour black bread or over slices of any dark or brown bread, is rhapsodically unbeatable.
Sort of a scrappy extramural stuffing, this is a warm mix of crispy, tender and chewy chunks of bread, moistened with vinaigrette and turkey drippings. It is a holiday variation on our traditional bread salad—I've substituted dried cranberries for the usual dried currants. Tasting as you make it is obligatory, and fun. I recommend you allow a little extra bread and vinaigrette the first time you make this recipe, so you can taste with impunity. For the best texture, use chewy, peasant-style bread with lots of big and little holes in the crumb. Such loaves are usually scaled at 1 or 2 pounds; plan on 1/4-pound bread per person. I don't use sourdough or levain type bread for this recipe, finding the sour flavor too strong and rich for this dish. And make sure to use day-old bread; fresh bread can make a soggy, doughy salad.
Eggplant gets kind of mushed up as it cooks in the hobo pack, which actually turns out to be a good quality, particularly if it’s getting mushed up with tomatoes and garlic.
This is a pretty winter antipasto requiring almost no work.
This Latin-inspired hobo pack features one of our favorite Caribbean tubers, the yuca (pronounced yook-ah). Also knows as manioc or cassava, yuca is shaped like a long, narrow sweet potato. Its rough outer skin looks like scaly bark, often thickly coated with wax applied to keep it fresh during shipping. When cooked, the stark-white flesh has a slightly sweet, rather buttery flavor and a somewhat glutinous, chewy texture that works particularly well in situations like a hobo pack. Yuca takes a bit of preparation before you can combine it with the other ingredients, since it has both an underskin and a fibrous central core, both of which need to be removed.
A tricky dish to do in volume, and hence, I tend to forget to make it at the restaurant, but it is easy for the home cook. An obvious friend to bacon and eggs, these lacy cakes are also good with almost any roasted meat or bird. The sweet-salty flavor and crispy texture is irresistible and appeals to those not usually fond of sweet potatoes. These hash browns are also very pretty made with a combination of starchy, yellow sweet potatoes and a little bit of orange yam. (Don't use all yams; by themselves they form a wet, dense mass, not a lacy cake. They don't have enough starch to stick together and form a crust. They do, on the other hand, try to stick to the pan.)
Asparagus gain a depth of flavor from the intense heat of the oven in this preparation. This is magnified if you use a cast-iron frying pan because it holds the heat.
Alexander will like these olives. The seasonings are straight from his time. These are a good foil for the cheese and tomatoes, coarse bread, and cool wine, besides being classic finger food. Since the olives keep about two weeks in a refrigerator, it is a generous recipe.
Scallions come in many shapes and sizes, from tiny and red to thick and green and very, very long. A stack at the St. Paul market labeled "table onions" were nearly as long as King Alfred leeks and just as sweet. Potatoes are, of course, delicious with leeks, so you can expect they'd be good with scallions, and they're a perfect vehicle for herbs, whether bracing parsley, a handful of chervil, tarragon, or whatever herb you love.
Inspired by a recipe from Moghul Microwave: Cooking Indian Food the Modern Way by Julie Sahni, in hot weather this rice begs to be served at room temperature. It is a foil for the rest of the menu, excellent with the cantaloupe, the raita, and the ribs.