Weeknight Meals

This casserole is a lot like the man who invented it—larger than life, over the top, and guaranteed to make you happy. Bud’s the name behind Royers Round Top Café, a “contemporary comfort food” oasis in, no surprise—Round Top, a 1 1/2-hour drive from Austin—that serves up heaping portions and Bud’s famous pies. Bud’s casserole is a side dish that’s hearty enough to qualify as a main course, and a great option if you have vegetarian guests coming for dinner.

Bob and Nancy Green live on the land Bob’s pioneer father settled in 1881 and Bob has been a rancher for most of his life. Now in her eighties, Nancy continues to indulge her lifelong passion for entertaining. She favors groups up to sixteen, because she can seat them all “gracefully” at her table without having to round up chairs from other parts of the house. Nancy keeps her guests happy with a good supply of cornbread, baked in a Texas-shaped skillet.

For Southerners like me, there’s not a better meal on the planet than cornbread, beans, and greens cooked with lots of bacon. I know a lot of good old ranch cooks who feel the same. There wasn’t much green to eat for cowboys on the range, but beans cooked with salt pork were common. So common, in fact, that cowboy nicknames for beans were many: Mexican strawberries, prairie strawberries, and whistle berries. But the funniest of all, recorded in Ramon F. Adams’s book Come an’ Get It, was “deceitful beans ’cause they talk behind yore back.”

Lou Lambert, another one of my chef friends who grew up on a ranch, now owns two Texas restaurants—Lamberts Downtown Barbecue in Austin, and Lambert’s steak house in Fort Worth. Lou got the idea for his seared chickpeas when he was a kid growing up on the family ranch near Odessa. “We had a camp cook who would make hominy loaded with chili powder and garlic. I adapted his dish with chickpeas. I originally put this on the menu at the first Lambert’s on South Congress, and it has been a mainstay at all the restaurants since.” I’ve been coveting this recipe ever since I first tasted it at Lou’s first restaurant. Now that I have it, I know it will become a mainstay for me, too, especially when I have some entertaining to do.

Cowboy nicknames for their cattle-drive cooks—biscuit shooter, dough puncher, and dough belly—suggest how important sourdough biscuits were to hungry, range-riding wranglers. No self-respecting chuck wagon cook traveled without a dough keg for his prized sourdough starter, the fermented yeast needed to make sourdough biscuits. I covered this macaroni and cheese with a generous blanket of buttered sourdough breadcrumbs in honor of chuck wagon cooks of the past. The rest has little to do with old-time chuck wagon cooking, but I don’t know a modern cowboy or anyone else who would turn down a bubbling pan of freshly baked mac and cheese.

Tom Perini started as a chuck wagon cook. Ten years later, in 1983, he opened The Perini Ranch Steakhouse on the family spread in Buffalo Gap, not too far from Abilene. After twenty-five years, his business is still going strong. Tom has cooked all over the country, including the White House, and he still takes his 1850svintage chuck wagon to rodeos and other events throughout Texas. Chicken-fried steak is one of my all-time favorites, and I knew exactly where to go for a genuine rendition. Tom gave me permission to adapt this recipe from his book Texas Cowboy Cooking. He says, “Cream gravy is a must with chicken-fried steak.” No argument there, so I’ve included his gravy recipe too.

I fancy myself to be part Cajun, not surprising since I grew up on the Texas-Louisiana border. When entertaining, I often include a little something with Cajun flair. My Shreveport-born friend Mary Cunningham feels the same way. She served these at a recent dinner party in her home and happily shared her recipe (once she figured out what she did and wrote it down, that is). Like many accomplished home cooks I know, Mary rarely measures, cooking by taste and feel. I’ve adapted her recipe and created a cornbread crust to go with it. Depending on where you live, it may be tough to find crayfish. It can be ordered online, but if necessary, substitute an equal amount of chopped, fresh shrimp.

Beans and rice create an unassuming but essential backdrop for the quintessential Tex-Mex meal—leave them out and you’ll probably hear about it. Rosa Albiter Espinoza, who has worked for more than seven years in the Rather Sweet kitchen, makes her Mexican rice regularly for our lunch specials. She prefers Adolphus rice, a long-grain variety native to Texas. When I’m preparing a Tex-Mex spread for a party, I make sure to serve a pot of rice and plenty of refried black beans.

This simple, delicious side dish was inspired by a meal at one of my favorite Gulf Coast outposts, Stingaree Restaurant. This casual Bolivar Peninsula eatery (there’s a bait shop on the ground floor) serves all-you-can-eat Gulf blue crab, oysters on the half shell, shrimp in many guises, and a seeming barge-load of other fresh seafood dishes. Stingaree is proof that you can’t keep a good thing down—it was among the first to reopen following hurricane Ike, the ferocious September 2008 storm that leveled much of the peninsula. The building was damaged, but unlike many of the peninsula’s structures, it wasn’t swept away, and the owners managed to reopen just five months post-Ike. I like to serve this with any simple fish or shellfish preparation. Try it with Big Easy Whole Flounder, page 73, or Champagne-marinated Shrimp Boil, page 67.

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.

When my Catalan friend Pep made me fideos, the Spanish dish that’s much like a paella but with pasta instead of rice, the first thing I thought was: delicious. The second: What a great thing to make for one. You don’t have to boil the pasta, the whole dish can be made in a single skillet, and you can scale it down easily. I like to make it with sardines because they last so long in my cupboard or refrigerator, they’re considered one of the more eco-friendly fish in the world, and they give the pasta a salty, funky taste I love. This makes a hearty meal for one, but you can easily stretch it to serve two with a salad or another vegetable and bread on the side.

My friend Domenica Marchetti knows her pasta. She’s the author of several fantastic books on Italian cooking, but the latest, The Glorious Pastas of Italy, is probably the closest to her heart, so I had to ask her what kind of dish this mother and wife might make for herself on a night she’s alone. She picked something that she grew up with, that her family made just once a year as part of the traditional Italian “feast of the seven fishes” on Christmas Eve. It dawned on her that she didn’t need to wait for the holidays to make it, and now, neither do I. It’s right up my alley. In fact, the day she sent me the recipe, I looked in my fridge and pantry to confirm I had every single ingredient on hand. I couldn’t help but smile; dinner was sealed, deliciously.

This is one of my go-to vegetarian meals, probably because the almonds and almond butter (one of my addictions) helps me forget the dish is meatless. The combination of textures also helps make this dish satisfying, and the salad keeps well at room temperature, making it perfect for brown-bagging. The recipe scales up easily, and any leftovers can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 3 days. Almond butter is available at natural foods stores, many supermarkets, Whole Foods Market, and Trader Joe’s.

The thought of this dish came to me when I saw new varieties of individually sized cantaloupes, about the size of grapefruits, at my local farmers’ markets. As a single cook, I’m drawn to anything with that single-serving thing going for it. But if you can’t find any of these little ones, use 1 cup of the flesh from a larger cantaloupe and save the rest for breakfast or a snack the next day. Now, I can imagine what you’re thinking: pasta with cantaloupe? Seriously? I first read about it in Giuliano Hazan’s Thirty-Minute Pasta and knew I had to downscale it—and add prosciutto, such a natural thing to pair with cantaloupe.

My introduction to the joys of room-temperature farro salad came years ago in Boston, when I wrote an article about two chef-couples’ different approaches to an outdoor dinner party. Gabriel Frasca and Amanda Lydon, who have since taken over the storied Straight Wharf restaurant on Nantucket to much acclaim, cooked the farro in the oven, then combined it with, among other things, fresh cherries, blanched and sautéed broccoli rabe, and pecans. Besides scaling it down to single-serving size, I stripped down their method considerably, standing in fresh arugula for the broccoli rabe so I don’t have to cook it, adding protein in the form of chickpeas, and using dried cherries instead of fresh because I can get them year-round.

The best thing about kimchi is this: It packs so much flavor and complexity, you can use it to make lightning-quick meals that taste as if they took hours to prepare. This fried rice, for instance, comes together in mere minutes. Cutting up the cauliflower might be the most time-consuming part. And yet this dish is downright addictive. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a large nonstick skillet for this fried rice, but it will take a little longer to cook.

I’m a longtime fan of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, cookbook authors who produce glorious books with a journalistic approach to food writing. Their stories and stunning photographs illuminate the culture behind the food of such places as Southeast Asia and lesser-known parts of China. They’re also great fun to talk to, and when I interviewed them about their ways with fried rice (which they often make for themselves at home when one or the other is traveling), they insisted that for my own eating pleasure I make sure to always have nam pla prik in my refrigerator. This Thai condiment is simply fish sauce and chiles, which sounds like an almost lethally pungent combination, but when you make it, something magical happens. Each ingredient tames the other one, an effect that increases the longer the sauce sits in the refrigerator. This recipe is designed to use leftover rice, such as the stuff that comes in spades with Chinese takeout orders. Fresh rice doesn’t work as well because it sticks. If you don’t have a wok, you can use a nonstick skillet for this recipe, but it will take longer and won’t be as much fun.

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