Keto

I often throw holiday parties with a casual theme. This dish was the centerpiece of a holiday-style Make Your Own Take-out gathering. You will never find anything like this delivered to your door in a brown paper sack, but if you do a little bit of chopping you’ll be famous for many holidays to come. P.S. Don’t wait for a holiday to make it.

I really love grilled chicken salad as a go-to, no-brainer supper solution, but the Chicken Caesar is so over for me—I need a few years off! So here’s another fresh chicken salad idea; eat your heart out, Caesar!

Chicken and applesauce . . . sounds like hospital food, huh? Well, if that were the only way to get this elegant, savory supper, I’d check myself in!

Fancy? Yup! Got people you need to impress? Invite them over . . . you’ll get the raise. Then you won’t be so tired.

This meal is high protein and high fiber, so it gets high marks.

Another easy chicken dinner: good for you, a good go-to, and good to go!

Meaty, easy, and Mediterranean-style, this recipe will make any list of favorites.

I came up with this one because we always have sweet vermouth on hand to make Manhattans, but we use it for nothing else. It’s a big bottle. This sauce is so good that we may actually need to get another bottle one day soon! (Who knew you could make such a sexy meal so simply? Hey, there are some things you should never be too tired for, wink-wink, nudge-nudge!)

Serve with a green salad.

This one is especially good at summer’s end.

Vanilla salt can add that mysterious sweet note that gives depth to many dishes without any actual sweetness. Its floral, fragrant aroma teases you into expecting sweetness and its deep flavor adds nuance to the background notes of a dish. We enjoy pairing it with fish, root vegetables, and other inherently sweet ingredients because this aromatic salt helps enhance their natural sweetness. Sometimes the flavor of vanilla can be overpowering and adding it this way can be just the right touch. We also use it for sweet preparations—for example, as a finishing salt for caramels, or lightly sprinkled on a chocolate tart.

I tasted this simple bleeding of two green vegetables at Irene Weil’s home in Nice (see page 170). Always a big hit, it is colorful, delicious, and a perfect vegetable dish, particularly for Passover. “You can make this dish with fresh peas, green asparagus tips, fava beans—the list is endless,” said Irene.

Nothing tastes so good to me as the intense flavor of a fresh tomato, picked at the height of summer, cooked down and seasoned with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil. This recipe exemplifies southern-French vegetable cooking at its best. I have served these tomatoes as an accompaniment to roast lamb (see page 234) or, in the summer, as a scrumptious first course. They are also great with lox, bagels, and cream cheese to break the fast of Yom Kippur.

After a recent trip to France, I told chef Daniel Boulud that I wanted to learn more about charcuterie. He suggested that I spend a day with Sylvain Gasdon, the charcutier at his newly opened Bar Boulud in New York. It turned out that some of the trends I had been noticing in French restaurants were the foundation of the menu at Bar Boulud, featuring charcuterie and lighter terrines. I asked Sylvain, who came from Paris to help Daniel, if he would teach me how to make a terrine, one for those who eschew pork. This is it!

When we were visiting Galimard, one of the perfume factories in Grasse, our guide was an adorable young French girl with huge hazel eyes named Cyrielle Charpentier. After we finished the tour, learning about the flowers from around Grasse that go into perfumes, Cyrielle let us try some of the essences. Noticing a chai, the Jewish symbol for “life,” on a chain around her neck, we asked her if she was Jewish, and she said that she was. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, an Italian Jew who also suffered during the war, lived near Grasse. When I asked her what foods she liked, she immediately named her grandmother’s tchoukchouka, a North African dish with tomatoes, peppers, and sometimes eggplant. The purists’ versions of tchoukchouka, this salade cuite, include lots of garlic and no onions, but I have seen some with onions as well. The beauty of this delicious recipe is that it is prepared in advance and tastes even better the next day, especially helpful for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, when cooking is prohibited and there is little time to prepare food—you do not have to fuss with a last-minute salad. It can also be used as a base for an egg or sausage dish, and is great as a sauce over pasta.

This delightful chutney is served with all manner of savory steamed rice cakes and pancakes. I love it with the Semolina Pilaf on page 222, but it may be served with most Indian meals. Store in the refrigerator 2–3 days or freeze leftovers.

This dish may also be made with ground lamb, or, for that matter, with ground beef. When using turkey, make sure your butcher includes both light and dark meat. White meat alone will be very dry. In Hyderabad, in the very center of South India, this keema (the Indian word for ground meat) is typically served at Sunday brunches with khichri (the dish of rice and split peas from which the British kedgeree was derived; see Rice with Moong Dal, page 213), pappadom for crunch, and pickles for pizzazz. Store-bought Indian pickles such as mango, lemon, or chili will do, but if you prefer, a sweeter preserved chutney would be just fine.

This very home-style Indian dish may best be compared to a New Orleans gumbo. It is the okra and tomatoes that give it the gumbo feel, but the seasonings are very North Indian. Serve with rice or with Indian breads.

Coat chicken legs with a spicy fresh-ginger– and cilantro-perfumed yogurt, then bake for an easy Indian weeknight dinner.

Here is another of my party favorites, as it is quite easy to prepare and may be done ahead of time and reheated. I do all the chopping in a food processor, which takes just a few minutes. You may, if you prefer, chop the onions by hand and grate the ginger finely and put the garlic through a garlic press. The results will be the same. I have used fresh spinach only because I grow so much of it; you may use frozen chopped spinach instead. For a dinner, I might serve this with Rice Pilaf with Almonds and Raisins, Eggplants in a North-South Sauce, and a yogurt relish.