Vegan

These are my downfall—as are french fries, sweet potato fries, or anything else that involves spuds and a deep-fat fryer. I can resist the fudgiest brownies, chewiest cookies, or even the loveliest threelayer cakes, but I cannot walk away from a single salty potato chip. I’m a believer in the golden rule of party giving: Feed your guests as you would like to be fed yourself. No wonder my cocktail parties invariably include potato chips. I often serve them with Chipotle Ketchup (page 254), but sometimes I crave them bare with just a light shower of plain or fancy salt and a large glass of good red wine.

High’s Café is located in Comfort, Texas (about twenty-three miles south of Fredericksburg). In addition to their tasty sandwiches and homemade soups, friends Brent and Denise make the best hummus ever. A wonderful informal party appetizer, hummus is easy to make, healthy, and a favorite for kids and adults alike. I serve it with toasted pita wedges and either carrot or celery sticks (or both) for dipping.

Why does coconut sorbet taste so rich, even without cream or eggs? Well, because there’s plenty of fat in the coconut milk itself. It’s one of the easiest sorbets in the world to make, thanks to the prevalence of decent canned coconut milk, but I like to give it a spark of heat, too. Eat this on its own, or with a cookie or other dessert of your choice. It goes especially well with chocolate. Remember that to make good ice cream with a machine that requires a prefrozen canister, you need to plan ahead and put the canister in the freezer at least 2 days before you’re going to make the ice cream. (I store mine there.)

Because I was so used to the watery texture and bland taste of regular tofu, the flavor and texture of marinated and baked tofu was a revelation: a little chewy and nicely tangy from the addition of soy sauce. I know you can make it yourself, but the store-bought kind is so easy to come by that I can’t pass it up, especially because it improves even further with more cooking, such as broiling it along with asparagus to add crispness and color. This recipe is my concession to being outdoor space–challenged, meaning that instead of firing up my trusty Weber like I used to when I had a yard, I crank up the broiler to get a similar flame-kissed effect, without the smoke, of course. If you have a grill, by all means feel free to use a perforated grill pan or vegetable basket for the asparagus and tofu, cooking them until they get charred spots.

This is one of my go-to vegetarian meals, probably because the almonds and almond butter (one of my addictions) helps me forget the dish is meatless. The combination of textures also helps make this dish satisfying, and the salad keeps well at room temperature, making it perfect for brown-bagging. The recipe scales up easily, and any leftovers can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 3 days. Almond butter is available at natural foods stores, many supermarkets, Whole Foods Market, and Trader Joe’s.

My introduction to the joys of room-temperature farro salad came years ago in Boston, when I wrote an article about two chef-couples’ different approaches to an outdoor dinner party. Gabriel Frasca and Amanda Lydon, who have since taken over the storied Straight Wharf restaurant on Nantucket to much acclaim, cooked the farro in the oven, then combined it with, among other things, fresh cherries, blanched and sautéed broccoli rabe, and pecans. Besides scaling it down to single-serving size, I stripped down their method considerably, standing in fresh arugula for the broccoli rabe so I don’t have to cook it, adding protein in the form of chickpeas, and using dried cherries instead of fresh because I can get them year-round.

The best thing about kimchi is this: It packs so much flavor and complexity, you can use it to make lightning-quick meals that taste as if they took hours to prepare. This fried rice, for instance, comes together in mere minutes. Cutting up the cauliflower might be the most time-consuming part. And yet this dish is downright addictive. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a large nonstick skillet for this fried rice, but it will take a little longer to cook.

When I told Sam Fromartz, a fantastic home baker who blogs at Chewswise.com, that I was playing around with pizza doughs, he persuaded me to try his take, which uses spelt, an ancient variety of wheat with a wonderfully nutty flavor and without the bitterness of whole wheat flour. Spelt is a little tricky to work with because it stretches very easily, but the addition of white bread flour brings structure. This no-knead dough, based on versions by Jim Lahey and Peter Reinhart, benefits from a long rise, preferably overnight. The result is a very flavorful dough, perfect for home pizza-making. Like the No-Knead Pizza Dough (page 104), it is sticky and loose, but comes together in a beautiful crust. It also requires a little forethought: You can make the dough in the evening for use the next day, or in the morning to use in the evening.

This simple technique, adapted from Jim Lahey of Co. pizza restaurant and Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, is based on his famous no-knead bread. It makes for a very sticky, loose dough that seems as if it won’t be easy to work with, but is very forgiving and performs well with the broiler method featured in the pizza recipes that follow. This dough requires some planning: You can start it in the morning and make pizza that evening, or start it the night before you want pizza for dinner.

I used to have such trouble making corn tortillas at home, using instant masa flour, that I always assumed the good ones I encountered in Texas and Mexico must have been made from scratch, and I pictured the cooks soaking the dried corn in lime, grinding it by hand, that sort of thing. Then on a trip to Mexico City a few years ago, practically every restaurant kitchen my sister and I saw, even those where the tortillas were beautifully flaky and delicious, had the same bags of Maseca brand masa that I used. Why I couldn’t get the results they did, using the same thing (which is really nothing more than corn treated with lime)? I called my friend, Mexican Cultural Institute cooking teacher Patricia Jinich, for a lesson, which turned into two, which turned into further emails and phone calls. It seems I wasn’t using enough water. Granted, I was following the proportions on the package, but Pati showed me that when I increased the proportion of water, the tortillas pressed more easily and looked smoother on the edges. Most important, when following her other techniques, such as her double-flip method, the tortillas puffed up when I cooked them: a sign that they had the internal layers required of a good corn tortilla. Making corn tortillas at home takes a little practice (and, of course a cast-iron tortilla press, which costs less than $20). If you don’t have access to good Latin markets, it’s worth it.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to make just enough soup for one serving, especially when the soup is based on long-cooking beans. But that doesn’t mean solo cooks have to go without their soup fix. This base uses two of my favorite ingredients, black beans and ancho chiles, to provide the backdrop for Black Bean Tortilla Soup with Shrimp (on page 53) and Black Bean Soup with Seared Scallops and Green Salsa (page 54). But that’s not your only option. Once the base is made, you could also add shrimp, chicken, corn, potatoes, crushed tortilla chips, leftover rice, and/or other salsas, in whatever combination calls out to you.

Beans certainly hold up better in the industrial canning process than many other vegetables, but there are still many good reasons to cook your own, not the least of which is the fact that so many canned varieties come packed with way more sodium than you need. Here’s my adaptation of bean maven Steve Sando’s basic stovetop method for cooking beans. If you have a pressure cooker or a slow cooker, feel free to experiment with it. This recipe gives the beans a relatively neutral seasoning that leaves them easy to take in different directions. If desired, you can add herbs and spices (torn dried chile peppers, toasted and ground cumin seeds, black peppercorns, oregano) to the cooking liquid, but resist the urge to add anything acidic, such as tomatoes, citrus, or vinegar, until the beans are cooked, or the skins of the beans will not soften as they should.

I got the idea from Lidia Bastianich to make soup bases that pack a lot of flavor on the weekend, then freeze them and thaw them as needed, adding various ingredients on the fly to take them in different directions. I like to concentrate the base, which saves freezer space, and then thin it out when I make a finished soup. Before you thin it out (and jazz it up) for the final soup, this base may remind you of a certain fluffy Thanksgiving side dish (minus the mini-marshmallows, thankfully), but there are some key differences. Besides the lack of cream or sugar, the most important one is the cooking method: Rather than boiling peeled cubes of sweet potato, I like to roast them, concentrating the complex flavor, which is highlighted by subtle hints of thyme and curry. This makes an especially vibrant backdrop to such treatments as Sweet Potato Soup with Chorizo, Chickpeas, and Kale (page 43). There are many other possibilities. You can sprinkle ground chipotle or pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika) for heat and/or smoke, or add toasted pecans, yogurt (or sour cream or crème fraîche), and other sausages or cured meats.