5 Ingredients or Fewer

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.

Few ingredients awaken the taste buds the way fresh lemon does. This dressing has a clean, pure flavor perfectly suited to a light salad of tossed greens. It may also have some magical qualities—it’s the one dressing that gets my nieces to eat salad! It can also be used as a marinade for grilled chicken, shrimp, or pork.

An electric stand mixer makes mashed potatoes dangerously easy to prepare. You may find yourself eating them every night! Just be sure to leave them a little chunky: If you overmix them, they’ll become gluey. I love to eat these as a side with just about anything, especially Chicken Fried Steak with White Gravy (page 106). They’re so good that sometimes I even serve them as an appetizer, spooned into cocktail glasses and topped with a sprinkling of chopped fresh chives.

This vinaigrette is excellent on just about any green salad. I especially like it on butterhead lettuce, oak leaf, and other delicate greens. Sweet-and-tangy balsamic vinegar is the star here, so choose one that is good quality.

Portobello mushrooms are so meaty and flavorful that many of my vegetarian friends prepare and eat them the way I do steak—throwing them on the grill and making a main course of them. For my part, I’ll take the steak and the portobellos, ideally prepared the way they are here: cooked simply so that their natural qualities can shine.

Broiled asparagus is the vegetable side dish I prepare most often when I’m throwing a big dinner party because it’s sophisticated but quick and easy to make. Actually, I prepare it as often as I can, whether I’m having a dinner party or not, because it is my absolute favorite vegetable. I’d eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I could. The timing here depends on how thick the asparagus are—they can be pencil thin or super thick. Just pierce them with a knife; when it goes in easily, they’re ready to be broiled to get some nice, brown color.

I think leeks are underappreciated by most and even intimidating to some people. They are featured in many recipes and restaurant dishes as an aromatic base flavor, but until my Brazilian friend Paolo served them to me this way, I’d never seen them as a proper side dish standing all on their own. They are part of the onion family and, as with onions, slow cooking will bring out their natural sugars. Patience is a real virtue here. Cook them too fast, over heat that’s too high, and they will burn. Slow, gentle heat will produce meltingly soft and sweet leeks that can be twirled on a fork like spaghetti. I love these with beef dishes such as Filets Mignons with Sweet Balsamic Reduction (page 108) or Flank Steak with Lime Marinade (page 105).

One of my chores when I was a kid was to “top and tail” and remove the strings from the green beans we’d harvested from the garden. The baskets of fresh-picked green beans sometimes seemed endlessly high and I often questioned why I had to go to all that trouble to remove something as harmless as tops and tails. Today I appreciate the simplicity of the task. I love fresh green beans so much that I miss them terribly when they’re out of season. You can cook the beans as long as you like; the longer they cook, the sweeter they get.

My family knows that roasting is my favorite way to prepare Brussels sprouts (it’s one of my Thanksgiving specialties), so when my sister Emily found a version with kimchi in a magazine, she sent it straight to me. Kimchi, a staple in the Korean diet, is a delicious, tangy, fermented cabbage. It can be found in well-stocked grocery stores and in Korean markets. The flavor of the finished dish really depends on the kimchi, so find one you like. If you don’t like a lot of spice, just roast the Brussels sprouts as directed here and leave out the kimchi. Roasted Brussels sprouts on their own are both sweet and savory.

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.

The most important thing about preparing filets mignons is to use a light hand with the steaks themselves. To bring out their melting tenderness, absolutely all they need is a little salt and pepper and to be sautéed in some butter or olive oil. Here, they are drizzled with an elegant reduced balsamic sauce with deep, almost molasses flavor and a welcome bite at the finish. Try this dish with Brazilian Leeks (page 142). The filets are also wonderful with the heartier Shiitake-Wine Sauce (page 167).

Ever since I discovered panko (see note), I make this easy dish all the time. The trick is to work fast once the chicken is cooked and add the salt and lemon as soon as you get the chicken out of the pan. Don’t worry if it looks like too much lemon juice—when the chicken is hot, the juice soaks through the crispy coating and adds fabulous flavor to the chicken.

As useful as the paper package method is to cook thicker cuts of rich fish (see Honey-Glazed Salmon, page 73) it is also great for delicate, flaky white fish that can be difficult to handle during cooking and dries out easily.

While in the port town of Fécamp in Normandy, France, I stopped for lunch at a tiny hotel-restaurant that had no more than four tables and was run by a husband-and-wife team who apparently did everything from the cooking to serving to making the beds themselves. The catch of the day was Dover sole and the chef served it lightly pan-fried and practically swimming in a bath of the most wonderful lemon-butter sauce I’d ever tasted. The Dover sole sold in Europe is a delicate flat fish native to European waters, including the English Channel on which the town of Fécamp sits. When I’m in the United States, I use Pacific Dover sole or another delicately flavored, fresh, flat fish from waters closer to home. This dish is excellent served with Broiled Asparagus (page 145).

My version of the classic Insalata Caprese—an Italian salad of mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil—uses green avocados in place of the basil for a Mexican twist. I like to say that the red, white, and green represent the Mexican flag! I arrange this on a big serving platter and place it right in the middle of the dinner table or a buffet—it’s visually arresting and really makes the table pop beautifully.

One of my closest girlfriends is from the Caribbean. Every time I go to her house, whether just to gossip over a glass of wine or for a formal sit-down dinner, she puts out a big platter of warm, salty tostones. For an authentic Caribbean meal, serve these salty, crisp plantains as an appetizer before Crock-Pot Cuban Ropa Vieja (page 113). Be sure that the plantains don’t brown the first time you fry them; the goal is just to soften them so they can more easily be flattened into a thinner pancake for the second frying. For more on plantains, see page 153.

When I first tasted goat cheese, it was definitely not love at first bite. However, when I combined it with two of my favorite ingredients—lemon and Japanese bread crumbs called panko (page 80)—these addictive little morsels were born! These are especially good in place of the crumbled goat cheese on the Baby Spinach with Beets and Goat Cheese (page 55). The balls are surprisingly easy to make, but they are extremely delicate, so handle them with care. Don’t skip the freezer step, which firms them up so they can more easily be breaded and fried, and don’t try to handle them with tongs as you might usually do when deep frying. Use a thin, long-handled tool such as a spider (a stainless steel handheld strainer) or slotted spoon. Read about deep-frying on page 37.

The key to this recipe is to use butter from the northern French region of Normandy, or at the very least a European butter, either of which can be found in grocery stores or specialty food shops. Normandy butter contains more fat than American butter and tastes out of this world, especially in a recipe like this one that has just two main ingredients: succulent shrimp and rich butter.