Vegan

If you like, trim the stems of the mushrooms even with the caps—they will look neater that way. Save the stems for vegetable stock or chop them for a vegetable soup. The mushrooms keep for a few days in the refrigerator. If you want to keep them longer, top them off with enough oil and vinegar to cover them completely. The oil will float to the top and seal out air. They’ll keep a couple of weeks like this.

For a pasta dressing

To top baked fish fillets, scallops, shrimp, or chicken breasts

You know how I feel about “recycling” food—making sure we don’t waste anything. This is the perfect place to use a big piece of day-old or 2-day-old bread. Even the trimmings from the bread can be turned into bread crumbs. Why buy them when you can make them yourself? The zoccolo will be crispy on the outside, tender inside. The longer it sits in the juice from the mussels, the more it will absorb.

This aromatic puree is designed to be a base ingredient and is a great way to build flavor and texture without adding fat. It eliminates the need to add a lot of butter and cream to Macaroni and Cheese with a Crusty Crunch (page 174), for instance. You can stir it into just about any sauce or soup for a fat-free flavor punch.

I first learned how to make a real French vinaigrette when I was eighteen years old and living with a very generous chef in Paris. It was actually his twelve-year-old daughter who taught me. The first thing she did was separate two eggs and put the yolks in a bowl; these were followed by Dijon mustard, then vinegar, then olive oil—fat (egg yolk) followed by fat (olive oil). It’s the Dijon–sherry vinegar combo that really makes this dressing—and those are both fat-free. A shallot puree provides the thick texture you normally get from creating an egg yolk/olive oil emulsion. Use this to dress salads and cooked vegetables—both hot and cold.

French fries are maddeningly delicious, but consider that a large order of McDonald’s French fries contains about 500 calories and 25 grams of fat before you dip them into ketchup or mayo. I think it’s time for French fry rehab, don’t you?

I learned that sweet potatoes are the single healthiest vegetable. They’re loaded with carotenoids, vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. You can dress them up a bunch of different ways, but this simple puree is ideal.

We eat a lot of swordfish when we are in Sicily, where my mom is from. She always orders a salad of oranges and fennel or oranges and onions to accompany it. When I cook swordfish anything at home, I always have oranges in the salad, for Mama.

I have a very beautiful friend, Mariel Hemingway. She eats all organic foods, only fish, no meat, and she includes no carbs whatsoever in her diet. She makes a double dinner every night: one for her, one for the fam. However, when she makes this one really crazy blender sauce, it gets passed to everyone. (Mariel makes half of her food for each day in a blender.) The sauce is awesome with chicken, pork, meat, or fish. This is my version of her specialty. I call it Mariel’s Sauce for “Mish”—meat or fish.

Why should potatoes have all the fun? These cute little French green beans are a lower-carb, lower-fat alternative to pommes frites, also known as: a pile of fries. Pair these with any of the Burgers, No Buns.

This makes a gorgeous whipped topping that is fabulous on margaritas or strawberry lemonade. We’ve also been known to use it for garnishing fresh berries and various dessert preparations. It’s a nice introduction to using Methocel and xanthan gum together to create foaming action. Unlike whipped toppings made with other products, such as Versawhip, these preparations can tolerate heat and moderate amounts of fat in the mixture simply because Methocel is such a good emulsifier. In this recipe we are able to shear the Methocel directly into the base because we are working with an entirely liquid medium. For this recipe we use 1 percent Methocel F50 and 0.15 percent xantham gum.

We pursued the idea of using low-methoxyl pectin to create a fruit and vegetable adhesive that would allow us to create entirely edible terrines that were held together with an almost invisible but flavorful glue. This technique was the result of that exploration. First, we make fruit-flavored solutions with 0.5 percent calcium lactate or calcium gluconate. The choice of one over the other is based on taste. Calcium lactate is derived from lactose and has a slightly acidic taste. Calcium gluconate is derived from glucose and tastes slightly sweet. Calcium lactate has slightly more available calcium than calcium gluconate, although not enough to make a difference in most applications. You will sometimes find blended calcium under the label calcium lactate-gluconate. Then we impregnate the fruit with the calcium by vacuum sealing them together. It takes about five minutes for the calcium to be absorbed by the fruit, after which time we open the vacuum bag and pat the fruit dry. Next we dissolve 3 percent pectin in water at 203°F (95°C) to hydrate it, then let it cool. Once the pectin is cool, we brush it on one piece of the calcium-infused fruit and lay another piece on top. Then we vacuum seal the fruit to compress it together and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight. The following morning when we cut open the bag, we will find that the fruit has been sealed together with a pectin gel. The pectin gel is soft and seamless in the preparation. The resulting presentation is as beautiful as it is delicious. We enjoy the terrine sliced and served with seared scallops and crumbled blue cheese on hot days, and served warm with crispy soft-shell crabs on cool evenings. Even slicing and topping it with thinly shaved prosciutto is an elegant preparation.

We originally developed this recipe with homemade ramp kimchi. Then we tried it with the Red Cabbage Kimchi. You could substitute any other pickle of your choice. To make these spicy, crunchy snacks, first we puree the kimchi with tapioca flour to form a dough. We chose tapioca because it has a very bland flavor, allowing the taste of the added ingredients and seasonings to stand front and center. We rolled the dough into thin sheets and steamed it for fifteen minutes to gelatinize the starch. We then dehydrated the steamed dough in a low (180°F/80°C) oven, flipping it over every so often until the sheets of dough were dry and brittle. Using this method we needed the dough to dry out to a level of 4 percent moisture for optimum puffing to occur. Since we were unable to effectively evaluate the exact percentage of moisture, we decided that completely dry was the best way to maximize our results. Then we broke the dehydrated dough into pieces and fried them in 400°F (205°C) oil. The kimchi cracklings puffed beautifully, tripling in size and creating gorgeous, crispy pieces that resembled traditional cracklings or fried pork rinds. A quick sprinkling of salt and we were happily crunching away.

Applesauce is a classic example of a delicious and down-home recipe that sometimes suffers from syneresis, or separation of liquid from the gel. In this recipe, we use crabapples for a slight twist on the original. We like them for their tartness and color; they make a beautiful pink sauce. You’ll find that crabapple sauce will make a striking counterpoint for a variety of dishes, both sweet and savory. The little bit of xanthan gum added at a ratio of 0.1 percent of the total weight of the other ingredients makes it almost perfect.