Vegan

One of the mistakes I see many cooks making is automatically reaching for a can of chicken broth whenever a recipe calls for a bit of stock or a sauce needs an additional 1/3 cup of liquid. But the strong flavors of a broth—and the saltiness of canned broth in particular—can often change the flavor direction from where you want to go. And it’s an unnecessarily expensive and sometimes wasteful habit, if you only use a bit of the can and discard the rest. Instead, I encourage you to adopt one of my favorite thrifty kitchen practices: making your own simple vegetable broth when you are cooking, using it as a multi-purpose “moistening agent” for a host of dishes.

Golden-brown bread crumbs make a nice finishing touch for pasta dishes like this one—a light counterpoint of texture, taste, and color. Start with ordinary dried crumbs (see page 19) that have some larger bits in them, rather than crumbs that have been ground and sieved into a fine powder.

When garlic cloves are poached in water, the enzymes responsible for their harsh bite are neutralized, leaving them soft and mildly flavored. As a purée, they melt into a hot soup, lending it a lovely undertone of garlic and a velvet texture. Add this purée to any soup you like; I suggest the Cauliflower (page 66), the Parsnip (page 72), and the Frantoiana (page 62) in particular. And if you, or someone you cook for, find sautéed garlic too strong, use this poached purée to flavor sauces, dressings, roasts, and braises too.

A Family Custom: Roasted Chestnuts to Finish the Feast: I love to prepare hot roasted chestnuts for the family after a big autumn meal, as a special treat of the season. While everyone’s talking and drinking coffee at the table, the chestnuts “roast” in a big skillet right on the stovetop. When they’re done—it takes bout 20 minutes—I pile the chestnuts on a big platter and serve them with grappa we make at our Bastianich vineyard in Friuli.

This soft dough is a pleasure to knead on the table. You could mix it in a food processor, but since it only requires 3 or 4 minutes of kneading, and feels so good, I prefer to do it by hand.

This simple quince preserve is a specialty in many Italian regions. It seems to have its origins in the fourteenth century, when some of the most noted were from Reggio Emilia and Genova. The translucent, pastel fruit in a jellied syrup is a delightful accompaniment to all sorts of sweet and savory dishes. If you have a large batch of fresh quince, just multiply this recipe and make a big pan of cotognata. It will keep for a month refrigerated. Pack it in little jelly jars and give as a gift: cotognata is a colorful and delicious way to introduce others to the pleasures of quince!

Salmoriglio, a traditional sauce for seafood, is nothing more than a dressing of olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, salt, peperoncino, and fresh parsley. There’s nothing to it—except remembering to make it ahead, so the garlic and pepper infuse the oil.

This is a great sauce for poached or grilled fish or poultry. It is customary in Italy to serve a poached or boiled meat with two or more sauces. Salsa Verde (page 362) and this sauce make a delightful pair. And it’s a snap to make right out of the pantry. It’s got a brilliant color and surprisingly complex flavor for such a simple preparation: sweet, mildly acidic, and piquant—or as hot as you want, if you add more peperoncino or Tabasco. Fresh eggplant, poached with the onions, gives the sauce even more depth (see box that follows).

You have certainly played around with fresh basil, particularly with pesto. Here the flavor is more subtle in its cooked form.

Sweet corn and fresh lima beans are natural garden partners and one of my favorite vegetable combinations. I like traditional American succotash (originally a Native American dish, in fact), in which the vegetables are cooked together in water, milk, or cream. But limas and corn are especially delicious when prepared by my covered-skillet method, with olive oil and garlic (and a bit of peperoncino). You must use fresh-cut corn kernels and lima beans right out of the shell for this dish—frozen corn and limas will get mushy and just don’t have the flavor. Cutting corn kernels off the cob is easy. For a fast method, see below. And shucking lima beans is a pleasant task that I enjoy. Though I admit that Gianni, my mother’s boyfriend, is always happy to help me when I’ve got pounds of beans to shell.

Lemon is such an everyday flavoring that we forget how unique it can make a dish.

Brussels sprouts are a love/hate vegetable. Let this recipe surprise you—even the dubious will fall in love with sprouts. But it’s the experience of tasting the vegetable in an unexpected form—all the leaves separated, tossed in the skillet until tender and sweet—that really makes the difference. They are wonderful as is, but the Lemon Sauce that follows provides a tangy counterpoint to the delicately caramelized green-gold leaves.

In ancient times, an elixir was thought to cure anything, make one immortal, or turn metal into gold. And this elixir, a seasoned purée of really ripe raw homegrown tomato, certainly can turn ordinary vegetables into something delectable. I’ve paired it here with caramelized cauliflower, but it will make even a boiled potato an exciting dish. This is a great way to use very ripe homegrown or farm-stand tomatoes that are almost too juicy to cut up—and are often a bargain at the farm stand. If you have a lot of tomatoes, you can easily multiply this formula for larger quantities. Store elixir in the refrigerator for a week and enjoy it as a beverage as well as a vegetable sauce. I’ve been told it makes a great Bloody Mary. But my favorite is a small glass of chilled tomato elixir in the morning. Try it—it will change your day!

I cook cauliflower many ways and my family loves them all (certainly I do). But if some in your family don’t like the distinctive, “sulfur” quality in cooked cauliflower, try this skillet method. It eliminates the sulfur taste and produces a cauliflower floret that’s entirely different from a boiled one—crispy on the edges, and almost coated with a sweet caramelization. It’s delicious by itself but even better with the lively contrast of Garden Tomato Elixir.

This is the pasta “sauce” I make in August, when just-picked tomatoes in all shapes and colors are piled on our kitchen windowsills—and it is too hot to hang around the stove. It’s a fast no-cooking preparation, but it requires ripe and juicy tomatoes, preferably homegrown or heirloom tomatoes from the farmers’ market. Be sure to have them at room temperature. The sauce actually develops in the hour or two when it marinates: salt draws the juices from the tomatoes, and they become infused with the flavors of basil and garlic. Then all you do is toss piping-hot pasta with the tomatoes and enjoy one of the rare treats of the whole year.

Here you prepare the tomatoes and sauté the base of onions and garlic in the exact same way as in the previous recipe, but the final sauce is unique. First you soften the eggplant chunks in the pan before adding the tomatoes. Then you cook the vegetables covered for a long time, so the chunks break down even more. The aim is to soften the eggplant so much that it almost melts into the tomatoes—which explains the traditional name for this sauce, melanzana affogata: literally, “suffocated eggplant.” The eggplant does not disappear, though, either in flavor or texture, I assure you. If you love eggplant as much as I do, you will want to make this sauce—and plenty of it.

About half the tomato plants I put in our garden beds each summer are plum tomatoes, mainly Italian varieties but also some of the old-fashioned American “heirlooms” that are being revived. Of course, New York is not Naples, and our San Marzano and Roma tomatoes don’t absorb the intense sunlight that they would in Italy, but with my mother’s careful tending (and the kids’ attention too), the plants are prolific and the tomatoes big and sweet. When they ripen—by the bushel, it seems—we make these sauces, one with just tomatoes and the other with tomatoes and eggplant. They are simple sauces, mostly the primary vegetables and big “bouquets” of fresh-cut basil branches (and olive oil, onion, garlic, and peperoncino, naturally). Yet they have a freshness and intensity that are distinct from any sauce made with canned tomatoes, even the finest San Marzano tomatoes. We make both of these in large quantities, in part because the plants are so productive (and Grandma won’t let anything go to waste), but mostly because they are so delicious and versatile. I put them on pasta, eggs, meats, and other vegetables. They are key components in some of my favorite summer creations, including the vegetable lasagna and skillet gratinate that you will find elsewhere in this chapter. And I freeze as much of both sauces as I can—they keep for months and retain their fresh, summery flavor. It’s a joy to cook with them in December or January!

Many people love eggplant but dread the frying of it and don’t like all the oil the eggplant absorbs. I am a lifelong eggplant lover, but I do like to eat—and cook for my family—in a healthy way. So I like this preparation, which gives you all the good flavor of eggplant without the frying: you poach small eggplant wedges in water and red wine vinegar, then season and marinate them in fresh mint, garlic, and drizzles of olive oil. After an hour, the layers of bright flavor in each slice are developed and you have a delicious and versatile dish. The wedges are a treat by themselves and a fine complement to many other dishes; see below.