Food Processor

My dear friend Martha Deaton was raised in Malaysia, where she and her sisters learned to cook traditional Malaysian dishes from their mother. Martha’s sister, Margaret Hughes, has built a thriving London catering business based on the dishes of her homeland. The following is one of her most popular recipes. Although this dish, like so many Asian dishes, is traditionally prepared on top of the stove, I think it works well in the slow cooker. See what you think. Serve it hot, on a bed of steamed rice.

Making puddings is one of the tasks the slow cooker does especially well. This scrumptious blend of flavors found in Mexican chocolate and desserts is a wonderful ending to a meal, or an afternoon or evening snack itself. I like to eat it hot, warm, or at room temperature, topped with a generous dollop of whipped cream and with cocoa powder or grated chocolate.

This is one of the most beautiful marmalades I know of. As the delicate shreds of quince cook, they turn brilliant red and intensify in color as the fruit reduces to a fragrant, shimmering jelly. This preserve is terrific at breakfast or as a filling for Easy Marmalade Tart (page 93). It’s also great paired with slices of Manchego or Cheddar cheese, served with a glass of sherry. This marmalade was inspired by a recipe from Helen Witty’s book Fancy Pantry.

Figs have two seasons—the first figs appear in late summer and the second batch shows up around mid-autumn. If you miss the first one, not to worry—the second is usually more prolific and the figs are even tastier. Don’t be put off by fresh figs with skins that are split and syrupy; those are the ones that taste the best. For jam making, I like black Mission figs, which are the most common variety, but this recipe will work with others as well. Figs are high in natural sugar, which means that the jam cooks relatively quickly.

This very glossy, deeply colored sauce is especially good with Vanilla Ice Cream (page 143), but it also shines brightly alongside a fruit tart or a summer fruit galette.

This sauce bridges two seasons—it marries the citrus fruit of winter and spring’s rhubarb. Its delicate color and bright flavor makes it the ideal accompaniment to Ricotta Cheesecake with Orange and Aniseed (page 55).

Even when they’re in season, fresh apricots aren’t always easy to find, so I turn dried apricots that are available everywhere and at any time of the year into this delightfully tangy apricot sauce. I always use California dried apricots, which have a much deeper flavor than imported ones, and I highly recommend you do the same.

Although fresh raspberries are terrific in this sauce, frozen raspberries also work very well—especially good news when the berries aren’t in season. I can’t think of a lemony dessert that this sauce doesn’t complement.

The best strawberry sauce is made from the ripest strawberries. Look for ones that are red from top to bottom and all the way through to the core. If you take a sniff, they should smell like, well, ripe, sweet, strawberries. I don’t always strain out all the seeds since I sometimes like their texture and appearance in the sauce.

Mangoes, like most tropical fruits, will tip you off to their ripeness with their aroma. A good, ripe mango has a heady, syrupy scent, and when you hold it in your hand, it should feel slightly soft and a bit too heavy for its size. Although the plump, sweeter varieties, such as Hayden and Tommy Atkins, are the most tempting, slender and wrinkly Champagne or Manila mangoes that you might come across will surprise you with their gentle nuances. Depending on which variety you choose to use in this sauce, start with the smaller amount of sugar and add more if necessary. A spoonful of mango sauce is a nice complement to Coconut and Tropical Fruit Trifle (page 70) or scoops of Toasted Coconut Sherbet (page 152) nestled in cookie cups made with Sesame-Orange Almond Tuiles (page 212).

A thin layer of frangipane baked under a pinwheel of sliced fruit in a tart shell crust not only adds richness and the flavor of almonds to complement the sweet-tangy fruit, it also helps keep the tart shell crisp because it acts as a barrier between fruit juices and the pastry. Almond paste is available in the baking aisle of supermarkets. It is not marzipan, which has more sugar and is usually used for modeling and shaping.

These barely sweet crisp little cookies are the definitive Italian nibble. Not only do I serve them as perfect bites alongside a ristretto (a “tight” espresso), but I also crumble them up and use the bitter almond-scented crumbs in desserts. They make a perfect topping for Lemon Semifreddo (page 65) and give a decidedly Italian touch to Peach-Amaretti Crisp (page 102). True amaretti are made with sweet apricot kernels rather than almonds, but since apricot kernels can be difficult to find and not everyone’s keen on eating them (they contain cyanide), I call for almonds in this recipe.

It was as if someone hit the switch one day and all of a sudden, a flash of electric-green took Paris by storm. You couldn’t walk past a pâtisserie without seeing something sweet and shockingly green standing out among the more traditional-looking pastries in the lavish window displays. Although the deluge of green tea desserts spread far and wide throughout the city, the best can be found at the shop of Sadaharu Aoki, a Japanese pâtissier who wows normally blasé Parisians with his classic French desserts made with a twist. He incorporates ingredients like black sesame seeds and sweet red beans into his pastries, creating a marriage of flavors that would’ve stunned Escoffier. I came up with my own recipe for these flavor-packed almond teacakes flecked with a bit of salt and sesame seeds because I was certain that the staff at his shop was tired of wiping my nose prints off the windows.

My first experience making Swiss cookies was less than optimal. A friend had given me his mother’s recipe for Basler leckerle, a spiced almond cookie swathed with a kirsch glaze. They’re meant to be kept in a tin for 6 months before eating, during which time they supposedly soften up and become toothsome delights. To make a six-month story short, I was skeptical when I plucked one of the cookies out of the tin. Then I bit down and almost lost a tooth they were so hard. Since then, I’ve avoided Swiss cookies. But, some time later, at Stohrer bakery on the rue Montorgeuil in Paris, I tasted the lovely zimtsterne, star-shaped cinnamon-almond cookies of Swiss origin that are made only around the holidays, and fell in love. I was prompted to come up with a recipe that I could have year-round—as well as one that wouldn’t require a trip to the dentist. I couldn’t find a cookie cutter in the traditional zimtsterne shape of a six-point star in France where I live, so a friend brought me one from New York, which I guess makes this Swiss cookie a star of international proportions.

In the kitchen at Chez Panisse, we called these “chocolate crack cookies” because of the craggy fissures that formed on the surface of the cookies as they baked. But because the restaurant was (and still is) located in Berkeley, California, we were conscious of what that name suggested, so we came up with all sorts of less objectionable aliases: baked chocolate truffles and chocolate quake cookies, to name just a couple. Nowadays, “crack” is a term freely used to describe anything addictive. And I feel comfortable using it to describe these cookies, which are a perfectly legit way to get a chocolate fix.

If you’re having a party, this dessert is the most dramatic way I can think of to dazzle the crowd, no matter the setting. I made this towering version of the classic baked Alaska for the birthday of my friend Susan Loomis, who lives in the rural French countryside, and I don’t think the locals ever saw anything like it. Nor have they stopped talking about it, as I learned from subsequent visits. It left quite an impression! In spite of the fanciful name, baked Alaska is simply made of layers of ice cream or sorbet, a cakelike bed for them to rest on, and billows of meringue to cover it all. The recipes for the sorbets make 1 pint (500 ml) each. The recipe for the toasted coconut ice cream makes about 1 quart (1 liter), so there will be more than enough to fill up the bowl that the baked Alaska is built in.

Up until a few years ago, white peaches and nectarines were an oddity in America and finding them was nearly impossible. Happily, they’ve now become fairly common, and you can spot them in grocery stores and farmers’ markets across the land. Their flavor is not as intense as their yellow counterparts, but their delicacy is part of their appeal. Also appealing is how when white nectarines are cooked with their skins and then puréed, the finished mixture is an ivory hue with a faint touch of rosy pink. I came up with this dessert when I was the pastry chef at Monsoon, an Asian restaurant run by Bruce Cost, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life. Unlike American dinners, most Asian meals don’t end with a full-on dessert. So my challenge was to create desserts that customers would find appealing enough to order after sharing spicy, authentic, and sometimes challenging fare—like the turtle soup served with raw turtle eggs floating on the surface, or the sea slugs that tasted (slightly) better than they looked. I had to make sure the desserts would bring people back from whatever culinary precipice we took them to. This fruit sorbet, resting in a five-spice cookie cup and served with berries steeped in sweet plum wine, was the perfect landing pad.

One late summer weekend, I was visiting a friend who lives in the wilds of Northern California, and I noticed lots of wild blackberry bushes with berries that were so plump and ripe that they were practically falling off the branches. I can never resist free food, so I set out for an afternoon of heavy picking. When I came back, my basket loaded down with fresh berries, my friend casually asked, “Did you see the rattlesnakes?” “Um . . . no, I . . . I didn’t,” I replied. Actually, I was really glad to have missed them. That incident didn’t quite scare me away from picking other types of fruits and berries, but I’ll let others risk their lives for blackberries, which I’ve been happy to plunk down money for ever since that day.

I was asked to do a frozen dessert demonstration on the Today show and figured it was going to be my big breakthrough. In my imagination, I would dazzle the media and viewers with my ability to make sorbet without an ice cream machine, catapulting my career into the culinary stratosphere. However, as soon as I pitted the first cherry, the host, Katie Couric, became fixated on my spring-loaded cherry pitter and challenged me to a cherry-pitting duel (I should have realized those who get to the top have a competitive streak). She insisted on using a paperclip, which I knew would put her at a disadvantage. Her method was slower than mine, but being a good guest, I let her win (which explains why I’m not at the top). And because of the nature of live morning television, we barely had time to get to the sorbet. In the end, she went on to make millions of dollars as a celebrity and I went home with my cherry pitter in my suitcase. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether to use a cherry pitter or a paperclip to pit your cherries for this sorbet. But you definitely won’t need an ice cream machine—the food processor is the machine for this frozen dessert.

Sitting in the sun, overlooking the beach, I could drink margaritas all day. Unfortunately, or maybe I should say, fortunately, I don’t live in a warm climate or anywhere near a beach. If I did, I’d never get anything done. Whenever I’m looking for a taste of the tropics at home in Paris, I’ll start squeezing limes in my kitchen and I’m immediately transported to paradise (albeit with bills piled up on the counter and the dishes in the sink). Practically obligatory to serve alongside margarita sorbet are salted peanut cookies. They were inspired by the disks of solid peanut paste sold in Mexican markets called mazapan or dulce de cacahuate, which I’ve been known to nibble on with a margarita, or two, south of the border. And above it, as well.