Easy

Sometimes a simple salad features such powerful flavors that by adding a couple of straightforward ingredients a whole meal appears as if by magic. Here the starting place is a Southeast Asian–style cucumber salad, with a dressing made from lime juice, lemongrass, fish sauce (called nam pla in Thailand and nuoc mam in Vietnam), and a few other strong seasonings. This dressing commingles perfectly with the natural juices of the cucumbers to moisten the greens. Top all with grilled scallops—or other fish or meat—and you create an easy one-dish meal whose flavor really jumps off the plate. It looks lovely, too, especially if your cucumbers are good enough to leave unpeeled. And (although not by design, I assure you), this salad is extremely low in fat.

So few ingredients and so much flavor—as long as the ingredients are of high quality! Omit the basil if you can’t find any, but where there are good tomatoes there is probably good basil. Add slices of mozzarella to make this more substantial.

A frequently seen snack in Bangkok and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Many cucumbers are best if they’re salted first. The process removes some of their bitterness and makes them extra-crisp—it takes some time but almost no effort. Start with one or two Kirby (pickling) cucumbers per person—or half of a medium cucumber or about a third of a long (“English”) cucumber. For a full-meal cucumber salad with a Southeast Asian flair, try Cucumber Salad with Scallops (page 54).

This is simply a kind of sea-based mesclun with a distinctively sesame-flavored dressing. The only challenge in making it lies in the shopping. Few supermarkets carry any seaweed at all, so you need to hit an Asian or health food market for any kind of selection. At most Japanese markets and some health food stores, you can find what amounts to a prepackaged assortment of seaweed salad greens; these are a little more expensive than buying individual seaweeds but will give you a good variety without a big investment.

This is a salad for a small crowd, though it can be made as big or as little as you like. But please, see this ingredients list as a series of suggestions rather than dogma—a chopped salad can contain any combination that appeals to you, including raw vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower or crunchy cabbages like bok choy, as well as nuts, seeds, and fruit.

As far a cry from iceberg lettuce and bottled dressing as you can imagine, this is a magical combination of powerful flavors made without cooking or any major challenges. Simple as this salad is, without top-quality ingredients it won’t amount to much. So use sherry or good balsamic vinegar to make the dressing, use pears that are tender and very juicy, not crunchy, mushy, or dry, and use real Italian Gorgonzola. It should be creamy; if you can taste it before buying, so much the better. This rich salad can serve as the centerpiece of a light lunch, accompanied by little more than bread. It makes an equally great starter for a grand dinner—followed by roasted meat or fish, for example—or a simple one, served with soup.

A load of herbs and a strongly flavored vinaigrette make this salad special. Choose either the soy or the nut vinaigrette depending on what appeals to you, what you’re serving the salad with, and what you’ve got on hand.

Many people are hooked on premade salad dressing because they believe that homemade dressing is a production, but it need not be. Try this. (And see Basic Vinaigrette, page 304, or Soy Vinaigrette or Nut Vinaigrette)

Fresh asian-style noodles are everywhere these days—even supermarkets—and they’re ideal for soups, because you can cook them right in the broth. It takes only a few minutes, and, unlike dried noodles, they won’t make the broth too starchy. Do not overcook the noodles; if you use thin ones, they’ll be ready almost immediately after you add them to the simmering stock. Start with canned chicken stock if you must, but don’t skip the step of simmering it briefly with the garlic and ginger, which will give it a decidedly Asian flavor.

A good mushroom barley soup needs no meat, because you can make it with dried porcini, which can be reconstituted in hot water in less than ten minutes, giving you not only the best-tasting mushrooms you can find outside of the woods but an intensely flavored broth that rivals beef stock. A touch of soy sauce is untraditional but really enhances the flavor.

Buy rice “Vermicelli,” the thinnest rice noodles sold. Substitute angel hair pasta (you’ll have to boil it separately) if you like.

Even as they become increasingly common, there remains something special, even exotic, about mushrooms. And combining their various forms allows you to make a splendid and impressive soup in less than half an hour. The best-tasting dried mushrooms are dried porcini (also called cèpes), which have come down about 50 percent in price over the last few years (do not buy less than an ounce or so at a time—you can buy them by the pound, too—or you’ll be paying way too much). Or you can start with inexpensive dried shiitakes, readily available in Asian markets (where they’re also called black mushrooms), or any other dried fungus, or an assortment. An assortment of fresh mushrooms is best, but you can simply rely on ordinary button (white) mushrooms or shiitakes (whose stems, by the way, are too tough to eat).

Anyone who’s ever had a garden or raided a corn field knows that when corn is young you can eat it cob and all and that the cob has as much flavor as the kernels. That flavor remains even when the cob has become inedibly tough, and you can take advantage of it by using it as the base of a corn chowder—a corn stock, if you will. Into that stock can go some starch for bulk, a variety of seasonings from colonial to contemporary, and, finally, the corn kernels. The entire process takes a half hour or a little bit longer, and the result is a thick, satisfying, late summer chowder.

In its traditional form, this cold potato-and-leek soup borders on boring: potatoes, leeks (or onions or a combination), water or stock, salt and pepper, butter, and cream. What little complexity the soup has comes from butter, lots of salt and pepper, good stock, and, of course, cream. But if you add other vegetables, like garlic and carrots, things become more interesting. And you can nudge the soup over into gazpacho territory by adding a tomato to the mix, along with basil. Some protein, like shrimp, can turn it into more of a whole-meal soup.

Egg Drop Soup, a cliché in American-Chinese restaurants for at least fifty years, has a less-well-known Italian counterpart called stracciatella. Both are based on the simple fact that eggs scramble or curdle in boiling water or stock, and each demonstrates the ease with which a basic dish can be transformed in spirit, moving from one cuisine to the other almost as quickly as you can change your mind about which you prefer.

I like gazpacho, but the ultimate minimalist version—take a few tomatoes, a red pepper, some onion, oil, and vinegar, and whiz it in a blender—doesn’t always cut it for me. When I confessed this to my friend and sometime co-author Jean-Georges Vongerichten, he suggested I abandon tradition entirely and combine tomatoes with another fruit of the season: cantaloupe. These, combined with basil and lemon—in place of vinegar—produce the mildest, most delicious, creamiest gazpacho I’ve ever tasted. Make sure to use ripe cantaloupe and tomato at the height of the summer for the best results.

Like Japan, Korea makes good use of fermented beans, in the form of soy sauce and the terrific chilibean paste known as go chu jang (page 591). If you cannot find that, use the Sesame-Chile Paste on page 591 or hoisin, spiked with a couple of pinches of cayenne or dried red chile flakes, but don’t make the dish too hot—it should be predominantly sweet, sticky, and spicy. Serve with white rice, preferably short grain (page 507), and a salad or vegetable.

This sauce is lovely layered with tomatoes or cucumbers. Thinned with more water, oil, or yogurt, it also makes a great salad dressing. You can buy canned or bottled tahini—ground sesame seed paste—at any Middle Eastern or health food store.

I like this one quite sweet, but you can eliminate the sugar entirely if you prefer. Add a little vodka if you’re in the mood.