Dairy Free

My mother loved fresh peas and she’d routinely prowl local farmers’ markets to find them. Purple hull peas were her favorite, but she also had a thing for cream peas, black-eyed peas, or just about any fresh legume that showed up at the farmstand. She’d make us kids shell the peas, and I always suspected it was to keep us out of her hair. I didn’t mind, though. For some reason I enjoyed shelling peas. Naturally, I liked eating them better than shelling them and this recipe, which makes enough to feed a crowd, showcases peas and my mother’s other summer favorite, fresh corn. Just like my mother, I find fresh peas at Texas farmers’ markets and sometimes even at my regular grocery store. Any fresh southern pea (see Tip) will work, but I especially favor cream peas. Do not use green peas, which will not hold up. I use canned black-eyed peas if I can’t get my hands on fresh and the salad still shines.

Austin chef Jesse Griffiths and his wife, Tamara Mayfield, brought succulent lamb ribs to my Fredericksburg garden party, and everyone devoured them. Jesse cleverly ensures these ribs are partyfriendly for guests and hosts alike—the recipe can mostly be done in advance. The ribs are initially simmered on the stove top and then need just a very short turn on a grill before serving. Jesse and Tamara are co-founders of Austin’s Dai Due Supper Club; their dinners are movable feasts staged at various local farms, vineyards, hotels, and private homes featuring local, sustainably produced ingredients prepared onsite by Jesse. If you can’t find lamb, pork spareribs or beef shortribs will work equally well. If you use beef ribs, they’ll need to simmer for 4 to 5 hours. You can simmer the ribs up to 24 hours in advance, and the glaze will keep for 3 weeks in the refrigerator

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.)

When my Catalan friend Pep made me fideos, the Spanish dish that’s much like a paella but with pasta instead of rice, the first thing I thought was: delicious. The second: What a great thing to make for one. You don’t have to boil the pasta, the whole dish can be made in a single skillet, and you can scale it down easily. I like to make it with sardines because they last so long in my cupboard or refrigerator, they’re considered one of the more eco-friendly fish in the world, and they give the pasta a salty, funky taste I love. This makes a hearty meal for one, but you can easily stretch it to serve two with a salad or another vegetable and bread on the side.

My friend Domenica Marchetti knows her pasta. She’s the author of several fantastic books on Italian cooking, but the latest, The Glorious Pastas of Italy, is probably the closest to her heart, so I had to ask her what kind of dish this mother and wife might make for herself on a night she’s alone. She picked something that she grew up with, that her family made just once a year as part of the traditional Italian “feast of the seven fishes” on Christmas Eve. It dawned on her that she didn’t need to wait for the holidays to make it, and now, neither do I. It’s right up my alley. In fact, the day she sent me the recipe, I looked in my fridge and pantry to confirm I had every single ingredient on hand. I couldn’t help but smile; dinner was sealed, deliciously.

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.

I’m a longtime fan of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, cookbook authors who produce glorious books with a journalistic approach to food writing. Their stories and stunning photographs illuminate the culture behind the food of such places as Southeast Asia and lesser-known parts of China. They’re also great fun to talk to, and when I interviewed them about their ways with fried rice (which they often make for themselves at home when one or the other is traveling), they insisted that for my own eating pleasure I make sure to always have nam pla prik in my refrigerator. This Thai condiment is simply fish sauce and chiles, which sounds like an almost lethally pungent combination, but when you make it, something magical happens. Each ingredient tames the other one, an effect that increases the longer the sauce sits in the refrigerator. This recipe is designed to use leftover rice, such as the stuff that comes in spades with Chinese takeout orders. Fresh rice doesn’t work as well because it sticks. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a nonstick skillet for this recipe, but it will take longer and won’t be as much fun.

Shortly after the first time I went to Cork Wine Bar, a bustling neighborhood restaurant a few blocks from me in Washington, D.C., I started making one of their signature appetizers for dinner parties. It’s simply bruschetta with sliced avocado, crushed pistachios, a drizzle of pistachio oil, and a sprinkle of fleur de sel. It is rich and pretty perfect as an hors d’oeuvre. When I started making it for myself, it wasn’t quite doing the trick. I wanted a little protein on there, as well as something to cut the richness. A can of one of my favorite products, smoked oysters, was the answer, as were tart green olives. I like to pump up the smokiness even further by tossing the oysters with a little smoked paprika, but I’ll leave that up to you. With or without it, this appetizer has grown up into a meal.

This is not the tuna sandwich of your childhood, but it hits all the right notes: richness from the oily tuna, starchy goodness from the chickpeas, bitterness from the arugula, a little tang from the artichoke hearts, and a hell of a tang from the Herbed Lemon Confit (page 4). If you don’t have some of the latter in your refrigerator, store-bought preserved lemon slices will do.

If you think this sounds something like a reconstructed salade Niçoise on bread, well, you’d be right, but the truth is, I got the idea in Italy, not France. On my first trip there, in Venice, I quickly became addicted to eating while standing up at one of the city’s many bars. Besides melanzana (eggplant) pizza, my favorite dish was a sandwich that seemed the ultimate in decadence, because it consisted of potato salad on one side and tuna salad on the other. When I started making it for myself, it seemed only natural to combine both salads into one, and then to throw a hard-cooked egg in there (who doesn’t like egg salad, after all?), along with a couple of olives for briny tartness.

The ginger packs a double-edged spicy punch in this sandwich, as fresh pieces in the chicken-poaching liquid and in powdered form in the avocado spread. Mango adds its sweet-tart, cooling magic.

Besides the Cochinita Pibil Tacos (page 95), this is the purest, least messed-with application of leftover Yucatan-Style Slow-Roasted Pork (page 66). In a riff on the North Carolina tradition of pork with a tangy coleslaw, I’m using green mango, which sounds exotic until you realize that it’s just . . . green mango. Unripe, firm, not-yet-ready-for-prime-time mango. It’s super sour, which is one of the reasons I like it. The other is that, depending on your supermarket, it might be even easier to find unripe mango than ripe mango. Of course, one turns into the other if you wait long enough.

To my mind, flatbread always calls out for eggplant or hummus, so why not eat the two together? I like to add to the complexity by frying up some extra chickpeas—something that, in greater quantities, makes for a fantastic party appetizer. Look for za’atar spice in Middle Eastern markets or buy it online from spice purveyors such as Penzeys.com.

I make fried rice with kimchi, ham, and egg so often that you’d think this pizza combination would’ve occurred to me in a flash. It almost did, but not quite: I knew I wanted to make a kimchi and ham pizza, but it wasn’t until I hosted a pizza party and friends tasted it that I asked, “What does it need?” One guest said, “An egg?” Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? I tried it again, and that runny-yolk richness pulled everything together. It always does. Now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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.