Dairy

My friends Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle, owners of Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, sell the most fabulous smoked tomatoes. I’ve used them to enhance meat dishes and salads. But I’d never tried them in a bread or scone, so I came up with this recipe to showcase them. As soon as the first fragrant scone came out of the oven, I knew I’d be delighted with the result. I even devised a way to use the day-old scones to stuff my Three Pigs pork tenderloin (page 33). As much as I love Larry’s smoked tomatoes, I must admit the scones are delicious made with any high-quality sun dried tomatoes.

Here’s a great party dish that feeds a horde and can be made a day ahead and baked at the last minute. It can handle an endless amount of fiddling—from adding more vegetables (I’ve tucked in layers of sautéed sliced yellow and green zucchini, eggplant, red and green peppers, and mushrooms, to name a few) to tweaks like eliminating all cheese (including in the pesto) for a vegan version created for my lactose-intolerant daughter (see Variation). Buy prepared pesto if you want less prep work.

This cold soup is yet another use for the exploding basil in my garden. I created it for a backyard party that Country Living photographed for a summertime issue. There’s something special and a little bit elegant about starting an alfresco party meal with soup. Texas summers are so hot that I always like to offer something refreshing right off the bat. The gorgeous green color of this soup is set off beautifully by stark white serving bowls.

Josh Raymer, the creative young chef behind Fredericksburg’s Navajo Grill, enjoys a little low-key partying at home on his days off. He and his wife, Julie, often invite friends in for a relaxed evening with simple food, a few good wines or a cooler full of beer, and some good conversation. Josh describes Hill Country parties as generally laid-back—dressing up means stepping into your “nicer” boots. But even the most casual affair on his stone patio includes music—Willy Nelson and the Texas Tornados are favorites. Decoration often consists of little more than bunches of herbs clipped from his carefully tended herb garden and plunked in jars. “We don’t do much.” Josh and Julie came to my garden party with their two-year-old son Hank and this equally irresistible salad. Don’t let the semi-boneless instructions frighten you. You can order neatly packaged, semi-boned quail from just about any commercial outlet, including Josh’s Bandera, Texas, supplier, Diamond H Ranch (www.texasgourmetquail.com). Semi-boned quail means the back, breast, and thigh bones have been removed, leaving the bird’s skin and its tiny leg bones intact. This allows the birds to be laid out flat for easy grilling.

This elegant appetizer or starter salad for a dinner party celebrates two loves: goat cheese and roasted beets. It takes more time than a simple tossed salad, but all can be done in advance for entertaining. Mixing red beets with golden and candy-striped varieties makes an especially gorgeous presentation. The CKC chèvre that I use is from Chrissy Omo, a local cheesemaking prodigy. (For more about Chrissy, see opposite page.) Although I highly recommend it, CKC cheese is hard to get outside of the Austin–Hill Country area. Support your local cheesemaker by checking out neighborhood farmers’ markets.

Every summer I have out-of-control basil growing in my garden, and it’s a serious challenge to come up with ways to use it all. It sometimes seems to grow faster than I can pick it. Then there is my garden arugula and several bountiful bushes of candy-sweet cherry tomatoes of varying colors. This salad guarantees that no cherry tomato or basil leaf goes to waste. For parties, I take a huge platter-size version of the salad, drizzle the pesto vinaigrette over the fresh mozzarella, and leave a small pitcher of the vinaigrette on the side for those who can never get enough of the deliciously pungent stuff.

After handing guests a drink, I often like to offer them a special morsel of food to perk up their taste buds and to make everyone feel at home. My friend and Austin farmer extraordinaire Carol Anne Sayle shared this recipe, and it warmed my southern gal’s heart. (For skeptics, these little pancakes do not suffer from the slime factor some associate with okra.) I served these at my annual garden party for chefs and friends, and people couldn’t get enough. The trick is to serve them hot off the griddle, so make sure you have someone to fry them in a skillet, and someone else to pass them around while they’re still hot. For this kind of job, I often enlist a shy guest or two. It keeps them busy, and frees them from the stress of having to make small talk. I’ve found that people will eat as many of these as they can get, but one or two per person is plenty and when they’re gone, they’re gone. (The recipe doubles easily if you’re serving a crowd, though.) I have added a little touch of my own to Carol Anne’s recipe. My garden was producing way more jalapeños than I could manage, so I decided to pickle them. I tossed a few chopped, pickled chiles into Carol Anne’s pancakes and loved the result. You can leave them out if you like.

Another parfait idea, using the same principle and base (Greek-style yogurt) but different accompanying layers. Feel free to use higher-fat yogurt if desired. I like to use Cara Cara oranges, those vibrant pink-fleshed ones, but blood oranges are deliciously striking here, and regular navel oranges or ruby red grapefruit are no slouches, either.

This is an easy, off-the-cuff dessert with plenty of options and jumping-off points. If you want something richer, feel free to use higher-fat yogurt. I pair the rhubarb with strawberries because the two have overlapping seasons and are such stunning partners, but if you’ve got access to other good fruit, this parfait also works beautifully with blackberries, raspberries, blueberries—even winter citrus, such as neat slices of Cara Cara or blood oranges, clementines, or tangerines.

Miso is a common ingredient in vegan versions of cheesey recipes, because it helps make up for the sharp complexity that’s missing without any dairy products. I love cheese too much to ever leave it out, so why choose? Combining the two together, and adding mushrooms, makes for a powerfully flavored dish that packs a punch of umami. This is a light dinner for one that you can bulk up with a salad.

Some of my favorite sandwiches need very little prep work, just the right combination of top-notch ingredients. This is one of them. Dark bread, smoky fish, tart apple, and complex Gouda make magic together. All you have to do is slice, spread, cut, eat, and smile.

One of my go-to sandwiches in Washington, D.C., is the chicken cutlet at Taylor Gourmet, where the owners hail from Philadelphia and the sandwiches are all homages to the way things are done in the City of Brotherly Love. Their sandwiches are studies in simplicity: not too many ingredients, but they’re high-quality ones, treated well. I love their combination of crunchy chicken, bitter and spicy broccoli rabe, and slightly melting provolone. But at home I like to jazz things up by adding a mayonnaise spiked with peppadews, those miniature red peppers from South Africa that are pickled to sweet-and-sour perfection. If you can’t find them, substitute your favorite bread-and-butter pickle

This is a pie that you can put together in a flash, because it depends on the idea that you’ve got some great condiments and accompaniments already made and just waiting for such a use as this. Like all my favorite pizzas, it depends on relatively spare but high-quality toppings.

When I asked friends for their favorite pizza-combination ideas, this one, from former Boston Globe Living Arts editor Fiona Lewis, jumped to the front of the line. First, I’m a freak for figs: fresh when they’re in season, of course, but dried at other times of the year. Second, when Fiona mentioned it, I had just started yielding to an addiction to Taleggio, the pungent, slightly bitter Italian cheese that tastes of mushrooms. I immediately thought walnuts would be a perfect crunchy addition to this party, and I invited along my old friend radicchio to add even more bitterness. Once I got the layering order right (walnuts need to go on the bottom, under the nest of radicchio, to avoid burning under the broiler), this was a keeper. Obviously, if you want to make this when fresh figs are in season, by all means do so; skip the soaking-in-wine step and you’ll be good to go.

I came up with this pizza idea when sampling the beautifully made charcuterie of Nathan Anda, who sells at farmers’ markets in the Washington, D.C., area. When he pulled out a package of fatty German-style speck and suggested that it would melt on top of pizza, I had to try it with a bagful of mushrooms I bought from a nearby vendor. He was right: The fat from the speck basted the mushrooms in richness. If you can’t find German-style speck, substitute Italian lardo raw, thinly sliced bacon.

The only liberties I’ve taken with the classic margherita is to let one of my favorite pizza cheeses, smoked mozzarella, provide that extra, haunting flavor, to echo the smoke from a wood-burning pizza oven. And, of course, there are the 12-Hour Tomatoes (page 2) that I hope you have in your fridge just waiting for this moment to shine. (If you don’t, substitute 1/3 cup canned diced tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, drained, plus a little salt and pepper to taste.)

Shrimp and citrus make such a natural match, I often combine them in tacos, but they call out for something with a little heft, such as black beans. Depending on the size grapefruit you use, you’ll probably have more than you need for this recipe, but that’s not a problem. Just eat the remaining sections for breakfast with a little yogurt, for dessert instead of the oranges in the Yogurt Parfait with Mulled Red Wine Syrup (page 161), or in a smoothie with banana and milk. I like to sometimes double up the salsa on this taco, drizzling on a little Salsa Verde (page 14) in addition to the on-the-fly grapefruit–black bean salsa, but these tacos are plenty flavorful without it.

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.

Carnivores need a veggie break now and then, and this taco satisfies. The moist mushrooms stand in for the meat, the onions pack a sweet-spicy punch, goat cheese adds a touch of tart richness, good old lettuce gives the crunch, and a final drizzle of Salsa Verde (page 14) reminds you that, well, every taco can benefit from a final drizzle of salsa.