Canned Tomato

Baking pasta with cheese on top creates a chewy and crispy topping kids will love. You can assemble the dish ahead and refrigerate it, then bake it right before dinner.

Curries can be quite mild or extremely spicy. It all depends on the type of curry powder that is used to make them—and how much is added. Feel free to adjust the recipe according to your own taste.

You can replace the zucchini with other vegetables, such as eggplant or bell peppers. Turmeric, which is related to ginger, is what gives curries and prepared mustard their distinctive yellow color. Look for it in the supermarket’s spice aisle.

Here is a meaty tomato sauce that doesn’t need to cook for a long time to be flavorful. And the sauce keeps well in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Soft hamburger buns work best with these kid-friendly sandwiches. Serve with pickles or potato chips.

Elegant enough for a dinner party but simple enough to prepare any night of the week, this pasta dish makes good use of quick-cooking shrimp and two types of tomatoes.

Take a break from ordinary tomato sauce with this crowd-pleasing pasta dish. Leaf-Lettuce Salad with Parmesan Crisps (page 27) makes a perfect starter.

This recipe is based on a Mexican dish created to use up leftovers. For an authentic touch, use fresh Mexican cheese (queso fresco) or aged (queso añejo) in place of feta. Look for both in specialty food stores and Mexican markets.

This version of vegetarian chili uses textured vegetable protein as a substitute for the ground beef. Although it looks a little like granola in its dry form, it absorbs the flavor of whatever you put in the dish, so in the end even meat eaters don’t realize it’s not really beef.

You’re probably skeptical about how such a standard meat and potatoes dish as shepherd’s pie could be made vegetarian, but it can definitely be done. This dish is great comfort food—white beans and veggies baked bubbly hot with a golden mashed potato crust.

You can make these empanadas whatever size you want. If you want to have something a bit more substantial, you can make them bigger and have fewer of them, or you can make them smaller and take them as an appetizer to a party. Either way: yummy.

For me, spaghetti sauce usually means a jar of whatever is on sale at the grocery store, so I wasn’t sure about how a spicy spaghetti sauce of my own creation would turn out. I have a tendency to forget that a little bit of spice goes a long way and end up sweating my way through meals. But this time I kept it under control and came up with something that isn’t particularly spicy at first but has a bit of a kick at the end. Spaghetti squash is the perfect way to keep calories in check. It has a taste and texture similar to pasta, but only about one-quarter of the calories.

I never realized that there were so many ways to make curry until a few of my friends got into a discussion of the virtues of the different types. There’s red, made with red chiles; green, made with green chiles; and yellow, made with turmeric. Countries all across Asia, from India to Malaysia to Thailand (and Mongolia!), have dishes called curries—all spicy. Then there’s the wet/dry divide, which has to do with how much sauce the dish has. In case you’re interested, this is a dry, yellow, Indian-style curry.

Who doesn’t like lentil soup? This soup is as easy as cutting up a few vegetables and putting them in the pot. The hard part—if you’re hungry—is waiting for it to cook. This is great on a cold fall day when you need a little something to warm you up. It reheats really well, and you can even freeze it if you have any extra.

This heady combination of seafood and tomato comes from the north, where it is traditionally made from small rice-field crabs called cua đong. To extract enough flavor, cooks use many crabs, removing their back shells and pounding their bodies. The crushed crab is combined with water, carefully filtered, and finally mixed with fermented shrimp sauce (mam tom) to create a broth base. When heated, the crab solids rise to the top, forming a rich, seafood-laden floater that is the signature of the soup. Sections of the floater are carefully spooned atop round rice noodles (bun) before the broth is ladled into each bowl. A garnish plate of raw vegetables, limes, and fresh herbs accompanies the soup. When I was a child, our family re-created this soup by using the tiny rock crabs foraged among the rocks at the local harbor. Nowadays, I make this more convenient and equally tasty version. Unlike many Vietnamese Americans (including my mom), I don’t use canned bún riêu cua soup base. Rather, I start with a live Dungeness crab and mix its meat and tomalley with ground shrimp and egg for the floater. Since Dungeness crab season (November through May) doesn’t coincide with tomato season, I use premium canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones. If you are substituting other types of crab, you will need enough to yield 6 ounces of meat.

This Southwest-inspired house barbecue sauce is used on its own or as the base of many sauces at Bar Americain. It is slightly sweet from the molasses, honey, and brown sugar and slightly earthy from the dried red chiles. It is the perfect sauce slathered on smoked ribs (page 149), or spiced up and spooned onto grilled oysters on the half shell (page 72). Adding bourbon transports this sauce from Sante Fe to Kentucky in a matter of minutes.

Beans and rice create an unassuming but essential backdrop for the quintessential Tex-Mex meal—leave them out and you’ll probably hear about it. Rosa Albiter Espinoza, who has worked for more than seven years in the Rather Sweet kitchen, makes her Mexican rice regularly for our lunch specials. She prefers Adolphus rice, a long-grain variety native to Texas. When I’m preparing a Tex-Mex spread for a party, I make sure to serve a pot of rice and plenty of refried black beans.

Beans and rice create an unassuming but essential backdrop for the quintessential Tex-Mex meal—leave them out and you’ll probably hear about it. Rosa Albiter Espinoza, who has worked for more than seven years in the Rather Sweet kitchen, makes her Mexican rice regularly for our lunch specials. She prefers Adolphus rice, a long-grain variety native to Texas. When I’m preparing a Tex-Mex spread for a party, I make sure to serve a pot of rice and plenty of refried black beans.

Puffy tacos have become modern-day icons of the San Antonio food scene. You can find the meat-filled, deep-fried corn tortillas throughout the Alamo City and—believe it or not—on the baseball field, too, where Henry, the Puffy Taco, serves as a mascot for the San Antonio Mission, a minor league team. I propose a build-your-own puffy taco party, where guests crowd into the kitchen to feast on hotfrom-the-skillet tacos stuffed with bison chili, a dab of guacamole, and whatever other fixings you set out. Ask friends to act as revolving fry cooks, so nobody gets stuck by the stove for too long, and in the meantime, assign others to shake up batches of Silver Bullet Margaritas (page 175). Diana Barrios Trevino, friend and the restaurateur behind San Antonio’s La Hacienda de los Barrios, gave me permission to use her famous puffy taco recipe. It was the recipe that beat TV chef Bobby Flay in a puffy taco “throwdown” staged for Flay’s popular Food Network show. If you can find fresh masa dough, use it to make the tortillas. Otherwise, dried masa mix will work just fine.

My mom was a veteran entertainer, and the Mexican décor of her home often influenced the menu. She insisted on doing things ahead and served a favorite casserole she called “sopa” at informal dinner parties. I never understood why she used the Spanish word for soup as the name of her casserole, but after browsing through several Texas community cookbooks, I discovered that a commonly used ingredient in a similar chicken tortilla casserole was condensed soup—cream of chicken, celery, or mushroom. Frankly, my inner chef’s code of conduct means I’d sooner come face to face with an ornery Texas longhorn than serve a casserole with a condensed soup base to my guests. But I remember loving my mom’s party sopa, and since she didn’t leave me her recipe, I created this meal-in-a-dish in her honor. I’ve nixed the soup shortcut, but I’m all for picking up a rotisserie chicken from the local market to ease the workload. Best of all, the casserole can be made ahead and refrigerated or frozen—on party day, just slide it in the oven.