Easy

When our late summer/fall cheater barbecue party guests deserve something fancier than sliced watermelon, we serve Swanky Figs. Like a good barbecue sauce, this dessert demonstrates the appeal of yin/yang balance—salty sharp blue cheese, creamy rich mascarpone, sweet honey, and tannic toasty walnuts. Go ahead and broil the figs early in the day. After dinner, discreetly step into the kitchen and reappear minutes later with a drop-dead platter of edible jewels.

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.

Charred with butter and sugar, Broiled Peaches are a summertime romantic dinner-for-two essential in R. B.’s little black cookbook. Guys who lack strong dessert skills can relax. Broil the peaches early, set them aside at room temp, and assemble the dessert when ready to serve. R. B. likes his peaches with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a splash of Amaretto, Smoky Caramel Sauce (page 198), and toasted sliced almonds on top. Substitute fruits abound for this dish—you can butter, sugar, and broil banana halves, fresh pineapple spears, seeded melon wedges, and pitted and halved plums. We use whatever is in season. They all taste great with any of our cheater 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.

Muffin-cup shortcakes made with self-rising flour turn shortcake biscuits into fast stir-up muffins. The muffins retain the biscuit qualities essential for shortcake—a crisp outer crust and a soft pillowy center that can hold up to a drenching of sweet fruit. Min sprinkles the muffin tops with fancy coarse sugar before baking because it looks pastry chef cool and has a nice crunch. Strawberries are traditional and terrific, of course, but not the only fruit to use. We spoon on any fruit that’s affordable, looks great, and is in season. Any berries or mix of berries and peaches are our summer favorites. In the winter we’ve made shortcake with sliced bananas, Smoky Caramel Sauce (page 198), and whipped cream.

Surprise, a touch of bottled smoke is the easy route to burnt sugar flavor in caramel sauce. This melt-and-stir cheater sauce eliminates the intimidating and time-consuming step of caramelizing sugar—cooking white sugar slowly in a skillet until it turns toasty brown.

Other than a soft bun or white bread, cornbread is the choice for barbecue. Min has been making it so long she only uses the recipe in her head. After years of working with the test kitchen staff of Martha White, the historic Nashville flour and cornmeal company, and writing the live radio commercials for Martha White’s Friday night segment of the Grand Ole Opry, who needs a recipe? The key, of course, is self-rising cornmeal mix. Southerners prefer white cornmeal (made with white corn) to yellow. So do Rhode Islanders, as R. B. likes to point out, where the native white corn johnnycakes are as ancient as their close cousins, Southern hot water hoecakes. Either way, white and yellow are interchangeable and basically a regional preference, like white and brown eggs. Don’t get hung up on color. For cornbread, it’s all about crust and batter. First, the best crust comes only from a well-seasoned black iron skillet preheated with bacon drippings or oil. When the batter hits the pan, POW! It sizzles. Second, the batter must be creamy and pourable. If your batter is thick and dense, add more liquid, because you want the batter to slide to the edges of the pan with ease. Cornmeal absorbs quite a lot of liquid, and even a shot of water can loosen things up. Get the feel of good cornbread batter, and crumbly, dry cornbread will be a thing of the past. Now, about the balance of outside crust to inside moisture. For Min, the finest cornbread is an inch thick and a mile wide. Most 2-cup recipes baked in an 8- or 10-inch skillet are just too tall, denying the cornbread its rightful ratio of crust. Min uses about 1 1/2 cups of cornmeal mix for a 12-inch skillet and only about a cup for a 10-inch. Sugar is also an issue that divides cornbread camps. The most common cornbread recipes and mixes are often half flour and half cornmeal, with a heavy dose of sweetness. We’re in the other camp, using very little sugar (or none at all) in skillet cornbread. It’s just a matter of taste. If you live in the land of self-rising cornmeal mix, get acquainted with it and use it to replace the plain cornmeal, flour, leavening, and salt. It’s the best way to go. If not, and you don’t have a relative to send you some, give this a try. Always serve cornbread flipped out of the pan with the beautiful browned crust faceup. Whatever you do, invest in a good cast-iron skillet. It will bring your family generations of top-notch cornbread.

Corn Light Bread, a favorite barbecue side in middle Tennessee, breaks all the Southern cornbread rules. It’s loaded with flour and sugar and it’s baked in a loaf pan. Why sweet cornbread with barbecue? Our guess is that sweet-sauced barbecue calls for a sweeter bread, just like the customary pairing of a sweet wine with a sweet dessert. Anything not sweet enough just tastes sour. Judging how most of the country prefers sweet cornbread, this may be the one that tastes the most like home.

Loaded Cornbread is the cornbread for a crowd and essential for a big barbecue. Dense and moist with Cheddar cheese, cream-style corn, and buttermilk, it can be baked in advance and cut into neat squares. Unlike traditional skillet cornbread that’s best eaten hot out of the oven, Loaded Cornbread travels well and tastes fine at room temperature. The jalapeños are up to you. Substitute a chopped fresh mild green chile or even a can of them. The other substitution is yogurt for buttermilk. Again, if the batter seems too thick, add a little water.

These just might be the first s’mores you’ll ever eat that don’t come dipped in ashes. And it takes only eight marshmallows to make eight s’mores because none are sacrificed in the fire. A quick dip in bottled smoke and a sprinkling of Cheater Smoked Sweet Salt are the other secrets to bringing adult sophistication to this kiddie camp classic. Mix and match cookies and graham crackers with different chocolates and candy bars. The marshmallows will burn in the oven, so watch them carefully and don’t leave your post. Cookie Sheet S’mores don’t need to be served hot. We were surprised at a winter birthday barbecue for Min’s daughter, Elsa, when we laid out a platter and guests of all ages kept sneaking just one more s’more until they were gone. Use a variety of smallish store-bought cookies so everyone can try different combinations.

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.

Ranch Style® Beans are Min’s number one foolproof side dish for instant satisfaction every time. She says that if Andy Warhol had been a Texan, the Ranch Style® Beans can would hang in museums throughout the world. The chili pintos’ unmistakable label dressed in basic black with bright white Western lettering and yellow and red accents is as common a sight in Southwestern pantries as Campbell’s tomato soup ever was. These well-seasoned beans make an “appetite pleasin’” homey cornbread casserole with any leftover cheater meat.

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.

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.

Part of the fun of Nashville is the occasional encounter with the music community—Martina at the supermarket, Keith at the sushi bar, Kenny at the gym, Wynonna doing lunch, or Mr. Prine waiting in the school car line. Nashville is good about giving Grammy winners, hit songwriters, and all who keep the music playing plenty of space for living their regular lives. Over at Min’s, we enjoy the occasional drop-in visit by the Malo posse, the charming sons of velvet-voiced Raul Malo. We shoot the breeze about Dad’s latest album, fast cars, and food. No luck getting any Cuban secret family recipes, but the boys have kindly offered Dad’s autograph on our Mavericks and Raul Malo CDs. Listening to Raul gets us hungry for Cuban Fingers, Miami’s favorite crusty pressed sandwiches. We fill them with Ultimate Cheater Pork Loin, or sometimes leftover cheater brisket or beef round roast. Cuban bread is extra crisp on the outside and very tender on the inside, so it’s easy to flatten. Cut the sandwiches into neat fingers for parties.

We’re sweet onion junkies and whenever beef is on the grill, so are a pile of onion slices. At first, we just served them with Mexican fajita feasts, but then quickly found that their sweet, salty, smoky, soft, and crisp qualities turned plain old burgers into chopped steak and added richness and depth to all kinds of meats. Now that we’ve become cheaters, so have the onions. Charred in the oven, these smoky sweet onions are just what cheater brisket needs on the side. Days later diced leftover onions end up in all kinds of meals like a weekend fridge scramble, hash browns, baked beans, and green beans. Georgia’s Vidalia onions are a big thing in Tennessee, and we’re seeing more and more varieties of sweet onions from Texas and Washington. Take your pick, but any yellow or white onion will do the job.

Posole (pronounced poh-SO-lay), a Mexican soup adopted by northern New Mexico, is all about the hominy—bloated corn kernels softened with an alkali. Purists will cook their own from dried corn, but canned hominy is a terrific pantry staple for making a quick soup. Pork is the traditional meat for posole, but we like it with cheater chicken and beef as well. Serve posole in big bowls with a side of thinly shredded cabbage, diced onions, chopped tomato, a crisp tostado to crumble in the soup, and a lime wedge. Punch it up with a little hot sauce. Every time we make a batch, Min always says we should make this more often.

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.