If you’ve never had red beans and rice before, let me warn you that you just might become addicted to it. When you cook this dish, the house will smell amazing, and you will be eager to dig in every minute you wait for it to be finished. Make this with Honey Jalapeño Cornbread and thank me later.
One of my favorite ways to cook fish on a weeknight is on the stove. I save this dish for those especially busy days because it comes together in under 30 minutes. I like to use a firm fish, such as branzino or red snapper, which is less likely to fall apart than cod or other flaky fish. The method here is incredibly simple, just make sure to use a well-seasoned pan or a nonstick skillet and begin cooking the fish with its skin pressed down on the skillet. The scallion-lemon oil pairs well with anything, so you can also serve it with other dishes, such as roasted chicken. To keep the meal light but satisfying, accompany the pan-seared fish with a salad, such as Green Salad with Umeboshi Dressing, Cucumber and Fennel Sunomono, Potato Salad, or Loaded Vegetable Miso Soup in the winter.
A sweet-and-sour symmetry is inherent in my style of cooking. If it isn’t expressed through actual components of a dish, it’s delivered via side bowls or ramekins. Okra chow-chow has become one of my favorite media for attaining culinary harmony. And considering that okra is integral to Southern cuisine and agriculture, it’s also one of the clearest examples of two food cultures existing side by side and the ways they intersect. Serve okra chow-chow alongside scrapple (as I so often do), and you could consider this dish the poster child of Amish soul food.
The savory taste of this lemon, butter, and white wine sauce with capers over fish has made it a melt-in-your-mouth favorite in our family. The secret addition of cornstarch to the flour really helps the light coating stay on the fish while it cooks. Where we live in South Florida there is a wide variety of snapper available, such as red, hog, mutton, and yellowtail. All are delicious, and if you don’t have access to those varieties, another mild, white, flaky fish will work nicely.
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.
The greatest failure when making potato salad is overcooking the spuds—creamy mashed pota-toes is a no-go for any potato salad recipe. You want a waxy variety like fingerlings, Yukon Golds, or red potatoes; these varieties will keep their shape and texture when cooked right. Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, said it well in his 1988 cookbook Barbeque’n with Bobby, where he wrote under a recipe titled “Hunky Crunchy Potato Salad” that his mother’s potato salad was a “tasty quasi-mashed potato salad.” My pro tip is to season the potatoes while they are warm. Begin your training to be a queen.
For a turkey gravy that really tastes like the bird but doesn't require drippings, we began by making a full-flavored turkey stock that included not just the neck and giblets but also some excess skin and fat from the turkey—powerhouse sources of turkey flavor. We started our untraditional method for making turkey stock by simmering the neck, giblets, and trimmings in chicken broth in a Dutch oven (chosen instead of a saucepan for its greater surface area); doing so efficiently extracted flavor-packed juices and fat from the parts that browned and formed a rich fond once the liquid evaporated. We then sautéed chopped carrot, celery, and onion for aromatic depth; deglazed the pot with white wine; added more chicken broth; simmered the stock (covered to prevent evaporation) for about an hour; and strained out the solids. We didn't defat the stock, since the aromatic compounds in the bird's fat contributed a significant amount of turkey flavor. Then, to turn the stock into a gravy, we made a roux by toasting flour in melted butter and whisking the stock into the roux.
Paired with some crusty bread and a simple salad, mussels make a lovely light meal. But getting them perfectly cooked can be tricky, with most stovetop recipes inevitably turning out some overcooked and some undercooked mussels. We made cooking mussels absolutely foolproof by using our multicooker, which evenly surrounded the mussels with steam and resulted in a pot full of tender, plump mussels every time. On the pressure setting, we needed to cook the mussels for just 1 minute; on the slow cook setting (which heats up much faster than a traditional slow cooker) the mussels were cooked perfectly within half an hour. To infuse the mussels with lots of flavor, we sautéed garlic, thyme, and red pepper flakes in butter, and used wine as the cooking liquid. We finished the mussels with a sprinkle of fresh parsley. You can substitute 3 pounds of littleneck clams for the mussels; increase the pressure cooking time to 2 minutes. Discard any raw mussels with an unpleasant odor or with a cracked or broken shell or a shell that won’t close. Serve with crusty bread.