Vegan

Heads up, beginners and cheapskates! This recipe is so easy you don’t even have to turn on the stove (melt the coconut oil in the microwave!), which makes it ideal to make with kids or frugal old folks. If you want to reduce the fat in this recipe, you can omit the coconut oil, but be warned that the blocks won’t be as buttery. All the ordinary tricks you learned from your mom as a child apply: Chocolate can be added on the top or throughout, colored rice cereals are in play, even dried fruit or nuts can be tossed in to frighten or entice your young ones.

I don’t think I’m alone in my ever-so-slight embarrassment about being a fan of the Nilla Wafer. They are like the frozen burritos of cookies: You don’t particularly crave them, yet every time you’re checking out at the grocery store, there they are. They get eaten. And not because they’re the only things available; it’s because they are sneakily delicious. This is a tried-and-true cookie icon, no matter what anyone says.

Until Bob’s Red Mill came up with a totally affordable gluten-free oat, you would never have seen these in the bakery. Thank all that is holy—once again—for Bob’s! Today these cookies are a best seller in both New York and Los Angeles. If you hate raisins (I do . . . sorry, raisins!), try subbing in chocolate chips or dried cherries instead. If you’re some sort of oat maniac, you can dump in as much as another 1/3 cup of oats and be just fine.

Ah, the Stevie Nicks of cookies—all spun around, precious, and ethereal! A couple tips for making this recipe all your own: Try cutting back on the flour sometimes and ramping up the sugar at other times. In doing so you’ll learn what proportions make a soft cookie and what proportions give you a chewy version. You’ll also perfect the fine art of the crispy edge. If you’re a brave soul—and surely by now you are—try to assemble a few cookie sandwiches with your favorite glaze or icing in the middle.

Who can resist a madeleine? They are so charming, so fair—so impossibly French. These Proustian delights have always appealed to the buttery fringes of my soul, and they’ve always acted as the perfect foil to the rebellious and messy attitude of my first love, the American chocolate chip cookie. Plus I get to whip out my handy madeleine tray, which I cherish wholly and completely. Get yourself one and be the envy of your baby girl’s bake sale.

This is a perfect example of using the exalted Sugar Cookie as a launching pad. Once you’ve fussed around with it enough, you begin to understand its dormant qualities. What if you asked your brain what would happen if you had the foresight to roll a butter-taste-based batter around in a cinnamon-sugar mixture before baking? If your brain, schooled in the ways of the Sugar Cookie, answered that you’d get a wonderfully wrinkly explosion of the Snickerdoodle variety, you and your brain are well on your way to total cookie enlightenment.

This recipe is the foundation of a lifetime’s worth of holiday merriment, a blank but delicious canvas for you and your kids to customize until your hearts explode with happiness. By way of texture, I aimed for something traditionally crisp, playing up the flakiness and butter-tinged richness. Just roll out the dough; they’re a cinch. In general, just about any flourish you can imagine to add to the top—sprinkles? Gummi bears? frosting?!—will complement this cookie with a little density. There’s a photograph on page 46, so you know what you’re working with.

For the longest time, I might have been the only person in the tristate area completely oblivious to the beautiful oversize black-and-white cookies found in every bodega from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Have you had one? Me, I was never allowed because of my food sensitivities, of course. So when I went to the kitchen and started brainstorming ideas for iconic cookies, this was one of the first ones I tackled. Prepare to be bathed in the sweet comfort of vanilla-chocolate overload.

I’m a lady who unabashedly prefers her cookies thin, chewy, and intoxicatingly buttery. If I want a hunk of cake, I go for the cake section. This isn’t to say, however, that the preeminent cookie of my youth was not the mighty and comparatively meaty Chips Ahoy! And not those late-issue, M&M–flecked monstrosities, either. I’m talking the real-deal original flavor, in all their dry and crumbly wonder. This is my version of that wonderfully named cookie.

I’m Catholic by birth. Winter to us means Lent, which, to be honest, is about all I remember beyond the school uniforms. Anytime winter/Lent rolled around, the only thing we could count on was the house-wide hostility that would mount as we spent several weeks avoiding sweets and desserts in all their overindulgent forms. The colder months, you might recall, make up Girl Scout cookie season. In a unique show of torture, rather than simply not placing an order with the Scouts, our family bought a bunch, tossed them into the freezer, and stored them until Easter—about two months later. This recipe is for all you lifetime gluten-free folks who have never been able to enjoy a winter of Girl Scout Thin Mints—and for all you weak-willed kids who can’t help but break the Lenten period of atonement. Bless your hearts!

Not everyone has time to sit down to a plate of waffles or crepes made from scratch every morning. Before you ask who would even want to do such a thing, I will go ahead and say that I would, actually. But I hear what you’re saying. Granola is a wonderful alternative to a proper sit-down breakfast—a naturally light and easy choice that is as satisfying as any other baked breakfast item. When traveling, I pack this in a little baggie so I don’t starve to death when the flight attendants clink down the aisles offering sodium-soaked chips or dried-up cookies.

So you went and invited everyone over for brunch one fateful Sunday morning. Sunday! The day you ordinarily sleep until eleven, don’t bother to wash your hair or change out of your pajamas, and end up watching TV upside down on the couch with newspapers and gossip mags strewn all over the floor. Tsk-tsk—it doesn’t sound to me like you’re quite ready for that hostess habit you picked up somewhere along the way. And yet here we are! Thank God there is this brunch-ready recipe you can prep the night before without even the most obnoxious of your foodie friends being any the wiser. Just get your dough and vegetables all set up and let them chill in the refrigerator overnight. Come morning, simply follow the quick baking instructions. If sweet potatoes sound too mushy for you, swap them out for 3/4 cup sautéed mushrooms.

Are you the type that religiously grabs whatever savory dinner leftover is in the refrigerator the following morning? Or maybe you’re the sort who is just as inclined to pull together a little salad as you are to devour a donut the second you roll out of bed. How about this: Do you prefer pancakes for dinner? I get it and I am right there with you. There’s no real rhyme or reason to what I eat and when, and some mornings I just can’t cope with the thought of an indulgent sweet, no matter how perfectly prepared. To this end, we need to give the savory breakfast back its gluten-free dignity. So I made some crepes. These guys are unimaginably easy to whip up, and it will take you no longer than fifteen minutes to have a hot, cheese-dripping meal set out before you. Plus they are pretty fancy-sounding, no? If you are too sleepy to caramelize the onion, these are just as good without it.

I know, I know: Honey is on the “absolutely not, you jerk” list for most vegans. And that’s fair enough. But what to do in such situations? Naturally I turn to agave nectar, my not-at-all secret weapon. EZ-PZ! The Honey Buns recipe is essentially a meddled-with Wonder Bun recipe that has been given the honey concoction and spruced up with vegan sugar for added texture. The extra sweetness we pick up from the honey-agave makes for a perfect day-starter for when you’re not feeling at all like paying attention to your alarm clock.

The slightest whiff of cinnamon and melted sugar is likely to send any lady into a nostalgic reverie for the food court of her youth. Today this recipe commands center stage at the bakery whenever we fire up a batch—no small feat considering the competition of fragrant apple muffins, nutty cornbread, and dozens of other aromatic samplings. You’ll find that BabyCakes NYC’s Wonder Buns have everything you’ve been missing for so long: that subtly sticky chewiness, the spicy pockets intermixed with the sweet streaks of joy, a dense but layered texture that is the stuff of dreams.

What better wintertime breakfast could there possibly be? The best part of this recipe, in my opinion, is that it delivers on all your gingerbread fantasies in a quick and easy way that sidesteps the comparative fuss of pulling together a full gingerbread loaf. Sheepishly, I’ll admit it here and now: I have been known, on occasion, to abandon the maple syrup and instead douse these with vanilla frosting or glaze . . . for breakfast. Give me the benefit of the doubt before you judge, please, and try it for yourself.

Pancakes! It is safe to say that besides ice cream, pancakes are my favorite food. Is that entire sentence strange coming from a gluten- and dairy-free baker? Probably. In any event, here it is, a recipe with all the buttery goodness added right in. Please note: I like my pancakes extremely thin, so expect that from this recipe. If you want them meatier, just add 1/3 cup more flour. You want another no-brainer of a recipe to go along with this one? How about the sweet aftertaste and the mildly chunky texture of banana mashed up against the crunchy outlines of the pancake crust and enveloped inside a slight billowy center? Take the day off work already! Personally—and by that I mean in this recipe—I sometimes add pre-mashed bananas so as to create a subtle fruit-to-batter mélange. But if you’re some sort of breakfast bungee-jumper or whatever, you could hack them up rough-like and have a deliciously rocky stack.

This sweet plum-dressed salsify simply tastes like nothing else. It has a unique delicate flavor that you wouldn’t expect from such a woody-looking stick.

I like the browned bits that cling to the skillet, like the socarrat of a paella, when I cook this side dish for my family. I like it so much, in fact, that I serve everyone the fluffy top part and when I’m back in the kitchen I scrape that part off and serve it to myself.

I was a boy-crazy preteen when I went on a trip to visit my friend’s grandmother Beauxma in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, in the sugarcane-growing region of the state. I was so taken by the story of the Evangeline Oak. In 1907, St. Martinville author Felix Voorhies wrote Acadian Reminiscences: With the True Story of Evangeline, inspired by tales told to him by his grandmother. The account of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux is said to be about the real people behind Longfellow’s tragically romantic poem “Evangeline,” about a woman looking for her lost love, Gabriel. In 1929, Hollywood came to town and filmed the movie Evangeline, starring Dolores Del Rio in the title role. After the filming, a statue of Evangeline (looking a lot like Dolores Del Rio) was erected on the spot marking the alleged burial place of Emmeline Labiche. As a whole, Southerners have never let the truth stand in the way of a good story; and now the stories of Emmeline and Louis and Evangeline and Gabriel have fused into one story told time and again beneath the spreading branches of the Evangeline Oak. In fact, Louisianans have taken the story so to heart that the Evangeline variety of sweet potato is fast becoming one of the state’s most popular sweet potatoes.