This hot and fiery soup is seen only in the Indo-Chinese restaurants of India. When the weather is cold or I’m feeling unwell, I often make this soup. To boost the protein, you can add bits of leftover rotisserie chicken or tofu. Serve this with rice wine vinegar, Chilli-Soy Vinegar Sauce, or Indo-Sichuan Sauce on the side.
Mapo tofu has been on the menu since back when Mission Chinese Food first popped up in San Francisco. Over the years, we’ve tweaked the recipe approximately one hundred times, and this vegan version is the best yet, not to mention the easiest for the home cook. What used to take days to make is ready in less than an hour.
Note: This recipe calls for doubanjiang, a coarse reddish paste of fermented soybeans, broad beans, and chilies common in Sichuan cooking. Look for “Pixian” on the label, which means it hails from a town in Sichuan province known for making the product.
One of the countless ways Korean food excites me is that it employs extreme temperature—whether it’s serving food in the ripping- hot stone pots called dolsot or frozen bowls. I remember the chef world—myself included—nerding out when Noma served squid with broccoli in a vessel made entirely of ice, only to find myself, a few weeks later, eating naengmyeon out of one in Flushing, Queens.
There’s no ice bowl required for this dish, though I do take a page from a restaurant I went to in Seoul where they put the chilled broth into a slushy machine. My at- home version uses a savory- sweet granita to top the cold, super-chewy buckwheat noodles in a spicy dressing. The addition of dragon fruit powder is 100-percent not traditional and 95-percent optional, but it does add a little sweetness and an absolutely spectacular neon pink color. Got that trick from Starbucks.
Similar to red-braising (紅燒 hóngshāo) , when you cover and slowly cook an ingredient in a flavorful liquid, smother-braising (燜 mèn) is simpler and shorter and often relies on more delicate, lighter-colored condiments instead of dark soy sauce, allowing the color of the vege- table to shine through.
In this dish, the squash’s natural sweetness is complemented by the salty, savory fermented black beans, and the squash is cooked until buttery and tender, on the verge of falling apart. My favorite is kabocha squash, which has a velvety, starchy softness and flavor rem- iniscent of roasted chestnut, but any firm-fleshed winter squash, like red kuri, butternut, or Hubbard, will work.
Hot or cold, for breakfast, lunch, or dinner—things don’t get much more versatile than this fiber-filled frittata. Mix up the veggies to keep it seasonal and interesting for endless weekday options. It’s earned a regular spot on my menu.
This salad is my riff on kasha, the name given to toasted buckwheat groats cooked (in water or milk) throughout Russia and Ukraine. The word kasha basically translates as ‘porridge’ but although in the west we think of porridge as a breakfast food, kasha is commonly a comforting, hearty, savoury dish or side at lunch or dinner – often far less liquid and overcooked than oat porridge. By all means you can serve this salad hot, but I especially like it served at room temperature. The key really is toasting the buckwheat first – it brings out an extra nutty flavour and also stops it all from being too mushy.
Chelo means “plain steamed rice” in Farsi, whereas polos are rice dishes with other ingredients folded in, like pilafs—I included a few variations of these.
If there’s one piece of equipment you’ll see in every Persian household, it’s a nonstick pot. Although I almost never use nonstick cookware, for this recipe, it’s essential. It makes life easy when you want to serve the rice on a platter, or flip and invert it for easy release. Trust me and pay the money to invest in that peace of mind.
Priya Krishna’s One recipe is inspired by her colleague and friend, Tejal Rao of the New York Times. In Tejal’s recipe, Roasted Squash With Coconut, Chile and Garlic, squash is the star. But Priya switches up the vegetable, anything from cabbage to potatoes, when she makes this dish, as the main component of the recipe is truthfully the aromatic base of coconut, chili, and garlic. Keep these ingredients on hand and this dish may very well become a treasured staple for you as well.
Think of this as a sort of hot caprese salad —by cooking the tomatoes in a foil packet on the barbecue with their vines, aromatic herbs, oil, and salt, the flavors concentrate and intensify. They work beautifully with the mozzarella, as you would expect, with added interest from the crushed coriander seeds —simple yet luxurious
One of the most popular recipes in The Green Roasting Tin is the Indonesian gado-gado: crunchy potatoes with an addictive peanut, coconut, and chili sauce. It occurred to me that the dressing, slightly adapted, would work beautifully with grilled corn on the cob —and joy, it did! This is now a summer staple.