Herbs & Spices

There’s no easier way to toast a marshmallow than by cheating with bottled smoke. This recipe takes a jar of old-school marshmallow cream blended with heavy cream, real vanilla, and smoke to make a modern miracle. Use it as you would any vanilla sauce with fresh fruits or berries, over ice cream, or in tandem with our cheater chocolate and caramel smoked dessert sauces.

Homemade brownies are a good reminder that easy baking doesn’t always involve a packaged mix or an electric mixer. These brownies require only a saucepan for melting the butter and chocolate. Once that’s taken care of, stir in the rest of the ingredients and the batter is ready. That’s it. The texture of these falls in the middle between the dense fudgy style and taller, cakier brownies. Min always takes her mother’s advice and sprinkles the nuts on top so they’ll toast in the oven. A big pan of brownies can do anything. Pass a platter after a casual barbecue blow-out or dress them up with any or all three of the cheater smoked dessert sauces (pages 197 to 199) and ice cream.

Remember that chocolate is made by roasting, so why not combine a few drops of smoke with supermarket chocolate chips? That got us thinking about coffee, which also matches well with smoke and chocolate. Instant coffee is possibly the bottled smoke of coffee. Way before designer coffeehouses, instant coffee was the hot ticket. It’s just dehydrated coffee in a granulated form. It may not be your favorite for sipping, but it is a mighty useful pantry staple for adding undiluted coffee flavor to desserts.

Barbecue has lots of definitions, but what it really means to us is lots of leftover piles of meat for new and different dishes. Barbecue dishes can be as versatile as you want them to be—they don’t have to include slaw and beans. Pulled pork that’s been lightly seasoned and smoked can go in any direction. R. B. is adamant about crisping the cooked meat in a hot skillet first. The meat takes on a new texture that’s great for sandwiches, tacos, and brunch hash. Here, soft tacos made with any cheater meat take on Asian flavors with a simple sweet-hot peanut BBQ sauce and some fresh fixings.

Goulash may not sound flashy or stylish, but it offers lots of room for creative leftover cheating out of the vegetable crisper drawer or the freezer. Cheater beef chuck is the delicious traditional choice for goulash, but Ultimate Cheater Pulled Chicken (page 85) or Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork (page 54) make a respectable soup. The secret to goulash is the combination of sweet slow-cooked caramelized onions with traditional pungent Hungarian paprika or a little Spanish smoked paprika. Keep most of the paprika on the sweet side, or the soup will go from zero to sixty too fast for tender palates. Serve with a loaf of good crusty bread.

No matter how much you like to cook, everyone gets stuck in a rut. When you find yourself making the same old things, it’s time to cook out of your comfort zone. For us, this means a trip to any international market where one step inside we remember how much there still is to learn. The good news is that walking the aisles of the unfamiliar unlocks the secrets to many of the ingredients in our favorite restaurant dishes. The greens in the produce section alone will keep us busy for a year. We can’t shop when we’re hungry, so first we eat. Thankfully, the Vietnamese noodle bowls right next door energize and inspire our international shopping trips. Vietnamese noodle bowls are filled with contradictions in complete agreement—hot and cold, crunchy and soft, sweet and sour, rich and light. The bowls of warm thin noodles, cool leafy lettuce, bean sprouts, and herbs topped with any meat or seafood you like are perfect for leftover cheater meat. The sweet/salty/spicy dressing may appear way too complex for home cooking. It’s not. The international market has everything you need. Cooking out of your comfort zone will help you dissect the components and flavors of unfamiliar foods. Even if cooking Vietnamese at home sounds daunting, give this a try with leftover cheater meat just for the fun of better understanding how opposites get along.

Lots of barbecue joints in Tennessee do country-style vegetables other than coleslaw, barbecued beans, and potato salad. One of our favorites is a big pile of turnip greens doused with hot pepper vinegar to go with a side of pork ribs. We think vegetables are a critical counterbalance to rich smoky barbecued meats. Same goes with Asian barbecue. Swap the collards and turnip greens for bok choy or Napa cabbage flavored with garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. Serve this with Filipino Adobo-Q Chicken (page 94) and a big pile of fluffy jasmine rice.

R. B.’s childhood campout hobo packet memories have inspired many of our favorite side dishes. He’s put just about every vegetable combo imaginable in a foil packet on the grill. Without added water, vegetables steam in their own juices and roast beautifully over the direct high heat of the grill. Even better and easier than the grill is the even heat of a hot oven. If there were a hobo packet merit badge, R. B. would have definitely earned it.

This salad uses Oven Potatoes rather than fluffy, starchy boiled potatoes. The difference is that the potatoes, browned with the help of a little oil and cooked without water, are crusty, giving the salad a new texture. Dress the salad with either mayonnaise or vinaigrette. A little dry rub on the potatoes will add robust flavor and rusty color to the dressing, a perfect side for lightly seasoned meats and fish. If you’re serving potato salad with peppery rubbed cheater BBQ, season the potatoes only with salt and skip the dry rub. One dry-rubbed menu item per meal is usually plenty.

The dusky flavor of smoked paprika makes quite an impact on the usual creamy ranch. We either make this from scratch or just sprinkle the paprika into bottled ranch. A little smoked paprika is also a nice addition to any basic vinaigrette.

Min’s Cranberry Fruit Salad is the result of her crusade to bring vibrant colors and crisp textures to those brown winter meals—including plenty of the cheater pulled and chopped meats. Bright cranberries and fall fruits make a drop-dead gorgeous salad with body, color, and crunch. Smoked turkey, chicken, pork loin, and brisket are always better with a bright accessory. Freeze extra cranberries in the fall to whip this up throughout the winter.

Min was first encouraged to make this dish when her fridge was jammed with leftover grilled corn on the cob. We liked this salad so much that now she doesn’t wait for a summer corn surplus—she cheats with a bag of niblets from the freezer. Frozen white shoepeg corn and frozen baby peas are two of Min’s constant freezer staples for ultraquick sides.

Since R. B. has expanded his blade assortment beyond an ax, a maul, and a cleaver to include a few kitchen knives, he’s more than happy to wield the Santoku for diced salad vegetables. This kitchen task is best suited for the detail oriented. Around here, that would be R. B., whose T-shirt collection is always impeccably folded, stacked, and arranged by hobby. Instead of limp baby weeds, we vote for a crisp head of chilled iceberg lettuce that cuts beautifully into bite-size pieces for serving with barbecue.