American

I’m as intimidated about making fish tacos for California friends as they would be to make chili for me. But I’ve learned the rules: No baking the fish, no guacamole (makes the fish soggy), no flour tortillas (although there’s some dispute on that point)? And you should hear the unprintable things they say about versions that include mayonnaise! It just so happens that I agree on all those points, except for one, which my Cali-friends will discover when they read this: I have actually made pretty darn crisp catfish in the oven. When it’s just you alone in the kitchen, and you don’t feel like frying, I won’t judge.

After moving from Austin to Boston, I would periodically get such a jones for Tex-Mex food that nothing would satisfy it but a casserole dish full of enchiladas stuffed with chunks of smoked turkey and slathered in a spicy-sweet green mole sauce. They had been a favorite of mine at Z’Tejas, at the time a funky place on 6th Street, but now a small chain with outposts in Texas, Utah, California, Arizona, and Washington State. I was thrilled when the Austin American-Statesman ran a recipe for the enchiladas a few years after I left town. It enabled me to invite over a mix of fellow Tex-pats and native New Englanders and have everyone marveling at the revelation that is a chocolate-free mole sauce. All these years later, the revelation for me was how easily they morphed into soft tacos, still with that unusual combination of smoked turkey breast and mole verde. For this, the smoked turkey should be cut from a very thick slice, so either buy a whole or half smoked breast yourself and cut it from there, or ask your deli to custom-cut a 1/2-inch slice or two.

I have to admit, it was a little strange writing a recipe for breakfast tacos, as much as I love them, because I think of them as so free-form. In my college days in Austin, when I powered my way to class by eating a couple of these every morning, I would change up the order pretty much each time. Cheese and salsa are must-haves, but otherwise my favorite combination is potato, egg, and chorizo. But you can also add (or substitute) black beans, avocado, bacon, and the like, in whatever lineup gets you going. Leftover breakfast foods, such as hash browns, are welcome additions, too. This makes two hefty tacos: a hearty breakfast or brunch.

One of Austin’s oldest restaurants is the venerable Texas Chili Parlor; its motto is “E Pluribus Chili,” and its signature dish comes in three levels of heat: X, XX, and XXX. The X is fantastic: plenty spicy, but you can still taste the other flavors. To my taste, XX is just slightly over the line between hot and too hot. And the XXX—well, let’s just say they make you sign a waiver before you can order it, and I never have. Besides the basic chili, my favorite item on the menu is the cheese enchiladas topped with the chili. They call them Frieda’s Enchiladas, and in all the years I went there, I never asked who Frieda was. I guess my mouth was always full, on fire, or both. This is my interpretation based on countless samplings. Now, this recipe may make enough for two servings, depending on your appetite and whether you eat beans and rice on the side, but I confess: I’m usually a four-enchilada man, meaning I have to commit to some extra time at the gym, but it’s worth it.

My brother Michael once told me the two questions I should ask anyone who claims to make real (i.e., Texasstyle) chili. Question one: What kind of beans do you put in it? Question two: What kind of tomatoes do you use? Both are trick questions, of course, because the answer to both is none. There are no beans and no tomatoes in real Texas chili. The full name is “chili con carne,” and that’s what it means: chile peppers with meat, and very little else. When done right, it’s a beautiful thing. With only one kind of chile and at least 6 hours of simmering, it’s got the round flavors and slow-burning heat that define a “bowl o’ red.” If you want something hotter, add up to 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, or to taste. I usually make at least two servings, because after eating the first one (with saltines, grated Cheddar cheese, chopped onions, and, okay, even pinto beans as long as they’re on the side), I love the second serving on a hot dog or burger, or as part of enchiladas (page 64).

This is like a taco in soup form. It is not a traditional tortilla soup, but a black bean backdrop for a double or triple hit of corn (stock, tortillas, and fresh kernels), plus just-cooked shrimp. Like a taco, it’s hearty and satisfying without being fussy, and once you have the black bean soup base (page 52) ready and waiting, it’s a snap to put together.

Scallops are a solo cook’s friend because, like shrimp, they come in easy-to-manage amounts, cook quickly, and take well to all sorts of preparations. Here, they help bulk up black bean soup into a meal. Look for “dry-packed” scallops, which are shipped without the extra water and additives that dull the flavor of wet-packed scallops, making them sweeter and easier to get a nice crust on. If you can find them, you don’t need to rinse and pat them dry.

When I was growing up, one of my mother’s holiday specialties was something she called “Texas Salad,” similar to something others call taco salad, although hers didn’t include ground beef. It was basically a head of iceberg lettuce, a couple cans of pinto beans, a block of Cheddar cheese, a bag of Fritos, and a whole bottle of Catalina French-style dressing, along with a red onion and a tomato or two. Okay, here’s my confession: I loved it, the first day more than the second (although others in my family would say the reverse). My tastes have gotten a little more sophisticated since then, but I still appreciate what my Mom was going for: sweet and sour, crunchy and fresh, a little protein, and a little fat. I’ve had fun updating it, but, Mom, you’ll notice, I’ve kept all your principles intact.

My friend Karin and I moved to Boston at about the same time, and of all the things this fellow Tex-pat and I missed the most, at the top of the list was the spicy, smoky, black-flecked salsa at La Fogata restaurant in San Antonio, where Karin grew up and where we both loved to visit when we were in college in nearby Austin. In those days, La Fogata would sell you the stuff to go, but only if you brought your own container. Karin would fly back to Boston with a gallon jug in her carry-on, something that wouldn’t go over too well with the TSA anymore. Nowadays, you can order the salsa online, but it’s not quite the same, no doubt due to the preservatives required to make it shelf stable. After I saw a take on the recipe at SpiceLines.com, I started experimenting and developed my own. In addition to gracing the top of Tacos de Huevos (page 87) and going into Spicy Glazed Mini Meatloaf (page 65), the pungent, garlicky condiment is good on grilled pork chops or steak. Of course, it can be served as an appetizer with tortilla chips. The recipe doubles and triples easily.

Have you ever had a turkey croissandwich on an airplane, or in a country club, or at a catered corporate event? The ones made with mass-produced croissants and stuffed with turkey cut in half? We always want to like them, but they’re always so disappointing. So we came up with one we love. The mustard croissant is very similar to the kimchi croissant in technique, but it is stuffed with meat, cheese, and condiments instead of blue cheese. You can substitute your favorite meat-and-cheese sandwich combo, if you prefer, for the turkey and Swiss.

One summer we had the idea of putting a frozen ice cream pie on the menu at Ssäm Bar. It would be sliced and stored in the freezer, so all the cooks had to do was get it on a plate, put some fruit on top of it, and—booya!—send it out to the table. Not a lot of work for the already-slammed savory cook. But that was during the time when we were operating out of a portion of the tiny, tiny basement at Ko, and there wasn’t any extra real estate for a professional ice cream machine. So we took a little time to think about how we could cheat the process a little—basically, we needed to get rid of the churning while freezing. We ended up finding that our sweet corn cereal milk was the milk that took to the task the best—the freeze-dried corn and Cap’n Crunch combo has this intense corn pudding flavor. It’s so tasty it can be diluted with a lot of fatty, bland cream and still pack a punch of corn flavor. The high proportion of cream, fortified with the starch from the cereal and corn, creates an “ice cream” that freezes soft but hard, a texture kind of like Häagen-Dazs. Because it gets loose and pourable as it defrosts, the “ice cream” is best for molded frozen uses, like this ice cream pie, or poured into, say, Popsicle molds to make ice cream pops. Once we had this crazy intense corn ice cream, we set to making a crust corny enough to match it. That process led us down the road to developing our corn cookie, which is the sleeper of all the Milk Bar cookies. It looks so harmless, so plain, so yellow, so un-cookie-like. It’s also my grandma’s favorite. Her house is surrounded by cornfields, so she’s my authority.

This mellow-yellow milk is good straight or over cereal, and it’s great poured over toasted cornbread. We use it mainly in a filling for an ice cream pie (see page 45).

This classic Argentine condiment gets a bit of a Southwestern spin, making it ideal for brisket barbacoa tacos.

Unless you want to be prepping all day, you should purchase prepared pizza crust. Boboli crusts work for this, as do Tiseo’s and Baker’s Quality frozen pizza dough.