Food Processor

Cauliflower is one of my favorite vegetables. I love to jack it up with some bread crumbs and Parm and deep-fry it till it’s nice and brown. These are little bites of crunchy, cheesy, salty, heavenly loveliness. Add some garlicky goodness in the form of a dipping sauce and you have a showstopper!

Cipolline are flat, sweet Italian onions that look like little flying saucers. I love these guys because they’re like onion rings with no holes. Perfectly fried baby onions and garlic mayonnaise to dip them in—they’re out of this world!

I learned how to make this recipe in Tuscany, and who knew all these funky ingredients put together could taste SOOOOO delightful? Chicken livers? Anchovies? Capers? Believe it or not, all these super-strong personalities come together to make one really delicious pâté—and it’s so easy. Top this combo with some onions braised in balsamic vinegar and you’ve got yourself a super Tuscan!

Mortadella is a super-high-quality baloney. In fact, it’s probably the most delicious baloney you’ve ever had. At one of my dinner parties I was serving mortadella and one of my guests said, “Hey, this baloney has nuts in it!” And it does: Mortadella is full of pistachios and chunky bits of fat, both of which make it super-flavorful. My mortadella pâté is puréed, mixed with whipped cream, and topped with pistachios—think of it as baloney mousse.

Donuts are still new enough to me that I see ideas for toppings in just about everything. Fleshing out odd pairings is one of my favorite pastimes. It’s that type of excitement you can pursue for days and weeks and months and then, right when you think you’re out of ideas, something genius comes along that makes all the effort entirely worth it. Here are several of BabyCakes NYC’s most popular donut toppings. Some require Vanilla Icing to get them to adhere to the donut. In every case, I find it is easiest to put the mixture in a wide bowl so that dunking the cakes isn’t too much of a fuss.

Creamy, light, and sweet—you’ll want to smother this all over pretty much everything. Way overeager one ambitious morning, I even tried it in a cup of coffee. Please do not do that. It is, however, perfect on just about anything else.

For those of us who prefer to sweeten with agave, this glaze, which can also moonlight as a dipping sauce, is a godsend. You’ll need to store it at room temperature to prevent it from getting too thick.

Making your own tomato-based sauce to dip your cheese straws into or to spread on your pizza is super-easy. At the bakery, we usually toss something together with whatever spare veggies and tidbits we have lying around. The foundation, however, goes a little something like this.

Sauternes and melon fluff spooned over ripe cubes of cantaloupe make a fabulously mature dessert for a late-afternoon luncheon. When the fruits are at their aromatic best and you want a dessert that is not overly sweet or directed at the kiddies, this comes together with remarkable sophistication.

Miss Ethel Smith was a dedicated member of the Mississippi Daylily Society. Her home was No Mistake Plantation and it was a gathering spot for daylily people. In 1983 Miss Ethel developed the ‘Yazoo Soufflé’ daylily, a ruffle-edged, double, apricot cream flower. Organic daylilies are edible and make a beautiful addition to desserts, like this one, in which cream and apricots are fluffed up. Even though this dessert is really a mousse I call it a soufflé in honor of Miss Ethel’s lilies.

The Florida Sport Lobster Season is always the last consecutive Wednesday and Thursday in July. All one needs to join this sporting scene is a bully net—a regular net with the handle bent to form a ninety-degree angle. Just trap the lobster beneath the ring of the net, and when he kicks his tail up into the net, sweep him up and swoop him into the boat! If you keep some of this butter concoction on hand you can be ready to grill just about any seafood with a slather of citrus butter. (It’s handy to pack some in the cooler for grilling out because it does not leak like marinades and sauces might.)

Cooking spaghetti squash in the microwave steams the squash and the strands come out nicely—unlike cooking it in a conventional oven, which can cause the strands to bake to the skin. A simple quick fresh pesto is a snappy sauce for the steamed squash.

My cousin Daniel Foose fell in love with a girl he met in music school. Sueyoung Yoo and Daniel married out at our family farm, Pluto, on what might have been the hottest day that year, Saturday, June 30. Friends and family began to arrive the Wednesday before. As the bride and groom are both accomplished jazz musicians, she a pianist and he a bassist, most of the bridal party came with instruments in tow, and late-night jams filled the evenings. Sueyoung made kimchi, massaging each leaf of cabbage with rich chile paste and placing it in her groom’s great-grandmother’s soup tureen. Her soon-to-be in-laws, Uncle Jon and Aunt Caroline, had driven from Austin with a plug-in home-size chest freezer in the back of their Suburban rigged to a battery and filled with all sorts of slow-cooked Creole and Tex-Mex food for the reception. The reception came together in an eccentric perfection combining cooking from New Orleans, Korea, Mississippi, and Texas; and the band played well into the night. It is a joy to have Sueyoung in the family. Now out at Pluto we have kimchi buried in the yard and Korean barbecue is served on Christmas night.

Thanksgiving Thursday starts off before dawn with Donald tiptoeing out of the house dressed in camouflage and with me making Aunt Mary’s congealed salad of ground cranberries, apples, and navel oranges that I should have done the day before. (It’s the recipe from the Tchula Garden Club Cookbook—except you would have to go across the road and get Mary’s penciled-in revisions.) Instead, I sat by the fire drinking wine, catching up with extended family, and watched the kids pick up pecans. Now I’m hoping this sets before two o’clock dinnertime, which, thankfully, it does real nice.

What does this look like, chopped liver? Actually it looks like a mosaic. Like great Southern folk art, this recipe takes something humble and puts it on a pedestal so it can be admired. Chicken livers are so inexpensive and can be transformed into a luxury with the addition of a poultry seasoning blend, onions, butter, and bacon. Lining the bowl with plastic wrap and taking some artistic license with bread and butter pickles and pimientos means that this spread, when inverted for serving, becomes something to behold.

I found this recipe in one of my aunt’s cookbooks that is old enough to have seemed old when my aunt herself was a child. It’s a great way to celebrate any event in autumn—or to celebrate autumn itself! Layers of spice-infused, walnut-studded apple cake hide an orange-flavored cream cheese filling and are covered with silky orange buttercream.

Chipotles in adobo are smoked jalapeños in seasoned tomato sauce sold in cans available at most grocery stores. When you make this, it looks like it won’t work with such a small amount in the food processor, but once the oil is added it will come together. Most important is that you add the oil very slowly, just a few drops at first. If too much goes in at once, the sauce will separate into a gloppy mess and you’ll have to start all over again. This smoky aïoli is well worth the effort: The heavenly VeraCruz Corn (page 151) depends on it. And drizzle it over the Flautas (page 93) in place of the tomatillo-avocado sauce.

I am lucky to live near the Grey Moss Inn, one of the most beautiful restaurants in San Antonio, which also has the most amazing wine list in the area. I love to eat there whenever I can, and this dressing is one of the reasons. After tasting it the first time, I once again found myself in a restaurant kitchen asking for the recipe. The chef graciously agreed. Try it tossed with tender romaine hearts, or spoon over asparagus (page 145), tomatoes, or steamed green beans.

In terms of its role in my life, this may well be the most important recipe in this chapter. It is without exaggeration that I say that there were always borracho or refried beans in our house. Barely a day goes by that I don’t have beans; my favorite breakfast is refried beans and egg whites. They can replace or be added along with any meat in tacos (page 102), chalupas (page 87), or enchiladas (page 94). These should be stiff, not runny. Authentic refried beans are made with bacon grease, but vegetable oil is an excellent alternative.

I ran track in high school, and one day my coach told me to eat more pasta to increase my energy. So I went straight home and told my mom that I needed her to pick up a bunch of spaghetti sauce at the store. My mother pointed out that the jars were too expensive—about $2 a jar back then, generally a lot more nowadays—for the amount I was likely to eat (I could eat pasta morning, noon, and night). She wisely suggested I pick up a case of tomato sauce (6 cans for $1!) and get to work. Believe me, a lot of trial and error happened between my first pot and the recipe you see here. It took years to get the right mix of spices. But to this day, I would always rather start a pot with a can of tomato sauce than open any jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce. This bolognese stores beautifully for several months in the freezer, so sometimes I just mix up a batch to store and pull out in a pinch!