It’s Dutch nieuwe haring season, raw fillets of herring from the first catches of the season. I guess you’re supposed to drag it through the raw onions and then dip it into your mouth holding it by the tail, but I preferred it the way I got it at various shacks around Amsterdam: on bread and butter with the raw onions on top. It’s meltingly delicious, and does not shy away from being raw fish. This is not sushi. It’s very robust. Fantastic with beer, probably even better with vodka or champagne. For those of you in New York, Russ & Daughters still has it, flown in fresh from Holland. Get it now – it won’t last long.

Nils informed me, several years ago, that it was incredibly easy to make homemade ricotta. I filed that information away and did nothing with it until, after a visit to Buon Italia in Chelsea Market, I ended up with a bag of Setaro lumaconi, the large snail-shell pasta that is meant to be stuffed. With ricotta.

I found the recipe on eggs on sunday. I already had the ingredients, as you probably do: whole milk, heavy cream, coarse salt and lemon juice. You may or may not have cheesecloth – I had tons left over from my ventures into Thai food. The whole thing takes 15 minutes max, and voila, you have made cheese! I felt incredibly competent afterwards.

We stuffed the ricotta into lumaconi with chopped ham and baked it.

This recipe is from Marcella Hazan, who in turn got it from a celebrated 1970s Bologna restaurant with the unlikely name of Al Cantunzein. The classic recipe uses homemade pappardelle. I used factory-made rigatoni. It’s lovely, a perfect summer pasta, with the often elusive flavors of the bell peppers, sweet and bitter, laced through the dish.

Stir and fry two tablespoons of chopped onions in 4 tablespoons of olive oil at medium-high heat. When the onions turn a pale gold, add 4 sweet Italian pork sausage (no fennel or other spices mixed in, please), chopped into half-inch rounds. Cook for another 2 minutes, stirring, then add 1 red and 2 yellow bell peppers, seeded, peeled and chopped into 1-inch squares, and saute for another 7-8 minutes. Add sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, stir well, and then pour in one can of drained, chopped San Marzano tomatoes (no basil or other spices added), and cook at a lively simmer for 15-20 minutes or until the tomatoes float free of the oil. Combine with pasta, toss thoroughly, add 2 tablespoons of butter and 2/3 cup of grated reggiano, and toss thoroughly again. Serve immediately with plenty more reggiano to grate on top.

Easy recipe – the only pain is peeling the damn peppers! I hate that.

Wine was a lively 2007 Saint-Véran from Jean Manciat

Sometimes after a multi-course decadent Asian feast you want something simple. This ribeye came from Baczynski Brothers Meat Market in the East Village. Better known for their hams and sausages, they are also a full-service butcher. The first ribeye I got from there made me think I’d found an East Side competitor to Ottomanelli. This is the third and now I think that first one might have been flukily excellent. It had a perfect, Lugerish musty, nutty quality. This one was just very good, well marbled and about 2 inches thick, salted and seared to a caramelized crisp on the outside, rosy rare in the center, served with white rice and lemon and baby peas. And yes Fiona, the wine was a 2002 Givry from Choffelet-Valdenaire. Meals like this put the wine front and center, in this case deservedly so. $28, seek it out.

Another recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation To Indian Cooking, and a daunting one with a huge list of ingredients. However, it’s really no more complicated than making a chicken dish and one of her stepped-up rice dishes. It’s incredibly delicious, on the sweeter, more aromatic Mughal/northern/Afghani/Persian tip.

The chicken is marinated for at least two hours in a mixture of about 10 spices blended with onions, garlic, ginger and yogurt. Oh, and fried onions. They are extremely important in this dish. For some time now, I’ve noticed that Jaffrey and her main competition, Julie Sahni, estimate different lengths of time for “brown-frying” onions (something you frequently need to do in Northern Indian cuisine). Jaffrey tends to think you need 10 minutes; Sahni thinks 35. Sahni is correct. You get your ghee very hot, then add the sliced onions, and then stir, constantly for the next half-hour plus. You cannot allow them to stick or burn. Sahni describes several “states” the onions pass through during this time. It’s fascinating from a molecular point of view, and you will need something to occupy your brain. First they sizzle, then they eject their water, then get shrink rapidly, and finally, at the very end, they brown.

Having squeezed them dry, decant two-thirds of the browned onions into the marinade. The other third goes on paper towels. You reserve the onion-flavored oil.

Now the rice. The recipe specifies “long grain,” but having been burned once by a rice recipe in this book, I knew that it probably required basmati. The basmati needs to be washed and soaked as usual, and then cooked for only 5 minutes so that it is not cooked through.

Once the marinated chicken comes out of the fridge, you boil the mixture, simmer for 15 minutes, remove the chicken pieces, and reduce the marinade to paste. Chicken goes into the pot (I used a heavy enamel Le Creuset) with the reduced marinade on top, and the parboiled rice on top of that. You decorate the rice with stripes of saffron that has been soaking in warm milk for an hour, producing lovely orangey-red striations. On top of this, you pour the reserved onion oil, and the whole spices that flavored that oil – bay leaves and black cardamom. This is covered and baked for an hour at 300 degrees.

When it comes out, you decorate with garnishes: the remainder of the fried onions, hard-boiled egg slices, golden raisins (sultanas) that have been fried in oil, and blanched slivered almonds. It is divine.

I accompanied this dish with masoor dal prepared to the recipe I used for moong dal. I don’t know much about dals, but moong is yellow and masoor is orange-red, and my masoor had more flavor. It might be because the pulses were fresher.

In addition, I prepared an aloo chat from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking. Sahni is nice to have as a counterpart to Jaffrey, and not just because she admits how long it takes to brown-fry onions. She is altogether more sober, if more boring, and gives more reasons why you should do the things you do. Some of her recipes are just not that exciting compared to Jaffrey’s, but this is still an essential reference work.

Aloo chat is potato salad – this one uses fresh mint. I was able to grab some from the garden as a final garnish to supplement the thick bunch I bought at the supermarket. My main interest in making this dish was because it uses BLACK SALT. I bought some a year ago, and have been looking for a way to use it. Be warned: it is extremely sulfurous! I didn’t read the package thoroughly and was amazed when I broke it open. I didn’t quite add the full half-teaspoonful. Fortunately, when combined with the other spices in the dish (roasted cumin seeds, chili pepper, black pepper, salt, mint, lemon juice, not to mention cucumber) and after marinating in the fridge, the sulfurousness had diminished to a slight, unidentifiable tang that definitely adds to the dish. This compares well to the aloo chat at my local taxicab favorite Curry & Curry, if not quite scaling the heights of the one at Lahore Deli near the old office in SoHo.

Finally, I whipped up a yogurt with peas as a cooling refreshment to all the spiciness. Not that this lacks spice – it’s an adaptation of yogurt with spinach from the Jaffrey book. The key is good yogurt. The presence of Arabic, Greek or Turkish on the label, or the words “home style” or “from the home country” is a good start. This one was Turkish. You mix in roasted ground cumin seeds, cayenne and black pepper, and then about a half-cup of cooked green peas per 8 oz of yogurt. The sourness of the yogurt is offset nicely by the sweetness of the peas.

I also served Jaffrey’s excellent tomato chutney.

… otherwise known as ketchup. OK, not quite, but I didn’t put two and two together and realize that this is where ketchup comes from.

This is another recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation To Indian Cooking, and is extremely easy and delicious. Just don’t lose faith while making it, since the aromas are extremely strong.

Blend an entire head of garlic (peeled and coarsely chopped), a fresh piece of ginger (2 inches long, 1 inch by inch wide, peeled and coarsely chopped) and 1/2 cup of red wine vinegar in a blender until smooth. In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, bring to a boil the entire contents of a 12-ounce can of tomatoes, 1 cup of red wine vinegar, 1 1/2 cups white sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon hot chili powder (cayenne pepper). Add the puree from the blender. Lower heat and simmer gently for 1 1/2 – 2 hours or until the chutney becomes thick. Stir occasionally during this time. Finally, add two tablespoons golden raisins and two tablespoons blanched, slivered almonds. Simmer, stirring, for 5 more minutes. Allow to cool, decant into glass jars, and refrigerate. Once chilled, the chutney should have the consistency of honey. It will keep for months.

This chutney goes with almost anything. It’s delicious just with plain basmati rice. I’ve served it with kheema, and more recently with Jaffrey’s recipe for chicken in light sauce (from the book above). Excellent, toothsome chicken, but even after reducing the sauce by half, it was still thin. I have a suspicion that it’s supposed to be thick like the khorma you get in a UK restaurant. However, decanted into a bowl and sipped with a spoon, it was really good – reminiscent of the curry chicken noodle soup at Bo Ky.

I also served moong dal. I had never made dal successfully before (aside from a terrible recipe from the absolutely to be avoided Lord Krishna’s Cuisine, a cult-y Vedic book by an American ashram transplant)… as always, Jaffrey’s recipe was eye-opening. “Since people like to squeeze lime or lemon wedges on their dal, serve some wedges separately.” Who knew? Not me, going to Indian restaurants all my life and not knowing what the point of the dal was. It also seems unlikely that those restaurants rapidly fried asafoetida and cumin seeds in ghee and poured them over the dal just prior to serving, but who knows.

For Indian cooking, my main source has always been Madhur Jaffrey’s rather esoteric, regional book A Taste Of India. However Nils recently gifted me with An Invitation To Indian Cooking, noting that no recipe he’s ever tried from it has ever been less than stellar (epic?) so I decided to give it a try. The book is devoted to the sophisticated Delhi cooking with which Jaffrey grew up.

My dad used to make a Middle Eastern kheema, and ground meat always appeals, so I decided to try that. I didn’t have enough onions, so the fried onions of the title ended up being shallots. The standard onions-ginger-garlic mix gets fried in oil that’s been infused by a quick saute of cinnamon stick, bay leaves and cloves. When the onions are done, you add freshly ground coriander, cumin and turmeric, then yogurt and finally a small amount of tomato sauce. You fry the meat in this soffrito, add nutmeg, mace and salt, bring to a boil with some water and then simmer for AN HOUR. At the end you stir in the fried onions (shallots in my case). It’s divine. And it goes divinely with…

… rice with spinach. Like many Indian dishes, the name implies something simple, but the actual recipe is hard work. I think in this early book Jaffrey was trying to get Americans to make the leap so she recommends Carolina rice, which is what I used, but basmati would definitely have been better. Apparently basmati was hard to find and expensive back then, in the years of the license raj. Anyway, you clean the spinach, have a big pot of boiling water, and wilt the leaves quickly in small batches, remove them to a colander with a stream of cold water, then press the spinach between your hands to remove the moisture. Then chop it very fine. Chop an onion and saute it in oil for 5 minutes, then add the spinach and some garam masala, and saute for 30 minutes. This produces an intoxicating mix reminiscent of those sag dishes in restaurants that you always thought were drenched in butter. Wrong. Now you add the rice (which has been washed and soaking for two hours in salted water), mix it together, and put it all in a casserole with tin foil that has a half-inch hole cut in the top for steam to escape, which goes in an 300 degree F oven for 30 minutes. The combination of the fresh-smelling spinached rice with the rich, aromatic kheema is just right.

Jeez, not another Ruth Rogers pasta recipe. This one is absurdly simple and relies on the quality of the ingredients and your instincts in combining them at the right time and at the right temperature.

Slowly stir the zest and juice of two lemons into 1/2 lb freshly grated reggiano until you have a thick sauce. Add enough olive oil to make a thick, creamy consistency. Add salt and pepper and keep tasting, adding more oil if the sauce is too astringent. Cook 2/3 lb spaghetti in salted boiling water until al dente, and then drain, reserving 2 tbs of the cooking water (very important). Return to the warm pan, stir in the sauce making sure to coat every strand, and then add the reserved cooking water, loosening the mixture and completing the marriage of sauce and pasta. Add 4 tbs roughly chopped basil, and serve immediately with extra reggiano.

Good, real reggiano and excellent, completely fresh olive oil and basil are essential.

Admittedly not a great photo. But it was quite tasty.

I love risotto and have been meaning to make it for years, but had somehow never gotten around to it. This past weekend I made risotto with portobello mushrooms (John Thorne) and then risotto alla milanese (Marcella Hazan). The Thorne recipe turned out too mushroomy for my taste… I like my risotto to be about the rice. So I turned to the milanese, which doesn’t have much added besides butter, saffron, onion, reggiano and broth.

I used lamb broth because that’s what I had that was homemade and unadulterated. The rice was carnaroli, which is a hybrid of arborio with a Japanese breed and dates only from 1975. It is considered the finest risotto rice, known for a slightly chewy texture. It comes vacuum packed so seems disconcertingly hard until you cut open the bag, at which point air comes out in a puff and the grains become free and loose.

The milanese was great… but there was something missing. Of course I usually have it at restaurants with osso buco, so that unctuous marrow-infused veal sauce was missing. But Hazan also recommended putting in some pancetta or prosciutto. I had neither, but I did have city ham. Even though it had been thoroughly rubbed in very non-Italian maple syrup and brown sugar, and was smoked to boot, I decided to add it. It worked! Unlike the portobellos in the Thorne recipe, the chunks of salty, smokey, partly sweetened city ham blended perfectly with the unctuous saffrony-ness of the risotto. I recommend this combination.

The third main food group, after chocolate-covered raisins, and chicken pot pie, as many of you will remember. This ham came from Baczynsky Brothers Meat Market on Second Avenue in the East Village. It’s called a “city ham” and is boneless and sold whole, for about $20. This place is well worth visiting even if you’re not planning to buy ham – it was packed on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. There was an entertaining colloquy going on between some old duffer who had been sent to pick up his half leg of lamb and the butcher who claimed to have no record of it. We got a long long skinny sausage to nibble on, as well as an extremely, extremely tasty ribeye… worldbeating, if not as mustily aged as some.

But back to the ham. We covered it with a mix of melted brown sugar and maple syrup and put in the oven for an hour at 350 degrees. It came out meltingly (duh) delicious, but still a bit too salty-hammy for my taste. So the next day (today) we melted more brown sugar into maple syrup and did a second glaze. Victory. Absolutely kingly, served with Mestermacher rye bread and butter, plus brussels sprouts and a bottle of Morgon which valiantly held the course against all this ridiculousness.

And there’s still plenty of the ham in the fridge for snacking.

(Thanks to southerner Reuben Cox for the recommendation: “what do y’all need a country ham for, when you can get a city ham?”)

Last weekend in a fit of madness I decided to attempt a “simple autumn menu” from Richard Olney’s French Menu Cookbook. This being Olney the meal was not simple, though it looked it at first. I suppose if you’re familiar with French cooking then much of this would be second nature, but the logic of the recipe is not obvious the novice. It came out just right – possibly out of luck, and possibly from following the recipe to the letter.

The other dishes were relatively simple – a salad of grilled, peeled and cooled green, yellow and red peppers (”the taste of raw peppers contains no hint of the subtle flavor brought out through grilling”) and a method of pilaffing rice that effectively transforms it from a healthy and necessary grain into a potent and lip-smacking carrier for huge amounts of butter.

The lamb is shoulder, boned and trimmed, and then browned in the oil in which onions have cooked, in a pan “precisely the right size to hold the pieces of meat placed side by side but barely touching; if it is too large, its surfaces not contacted by the meat will burn while the meat browns; if it is so small that thepieces of meat have to be packed in, they will boil in their juices rather than brown.” So much attention to a very basic process. In any event, you brown the salted meat, caramelize sugar in it, pour off the fat, sprinkle with flour, brown the flour, return the onions to the pan, add herbs, garlic and bay leaf and cook some more. You then turn the heat up, pour in a cup of white wine, and deglaze scraping up all the bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Tomatoes are then added, and continuing rounds of heating, skimming, skinning (two different processes, as Olney carefully explains), removing bits, returning bits – the artichokes go in only at the end.

After cooking Indian and Thai dishes with their focus on many different ingredients and pungency of flavor, or Italian dishes where the key is combining ingredients in a certain way at a certain time, I have to say that the list of ingredients looked boring and the complexity of the recipe appeared ridiculous. How could it make much difference in the taste of the lamb what size the pan was, or exactly when I skimmed or skinned?

Predictably, the answer is: a huge difference. Partly because, this being Olney, I hadn’t been keeping in mind a crucial component of the meal: the wine. His meals never stand apart from wine. We drank two wines from Maison Champy in the Côte-Chalonnaise: a white 1997 Rully “Les St.-Jacques” (the wine in the ragout) and a red 1998 Volnay “Fremiets,” both obtained cheaply as bin-ends at Burgundy Wine Company. The lamb was comforting, rich and tender on its own, but when the wine came into the equation, especially the Volnay, both took on an added dimension of voluptuousness and layered flavor.

I’ll be making this one again, when I have a lot of time to spare.

A bit belated, but here is the goose I ate for Christmas. This is the James Beard recipe. The stuffing is hand-torn bread, two sweet Italian sausages, and Granny Smith apples.

The sausage meat is decanted from its casing, broken up, fried in butter until it’s dark brown and crispy. Finely chopped onions and apples are added, along with fresh thyme and nutmeg. Stuff the bird, cut its wingtips off, close the openings with toothpicks (as shown above) and roast on a rack in a deep pan at 400 degrees F for 1 hours, then down to 350 for 1 hours, and then at 325 for a final hour or whatever – details are in Beard On Food. That works for a 12-pound goose anyway.

Goose might be one of the most delicious things there is. It’s impossible to find fresh without preordering from a butcher. This one came from Ottomanelli on Bleecker Street. It delivers an enormous quantity of fat which can then be used to make incredible french fries or just about anything else. It stores well in the fridge for months. The final roast is not fatty in the slightest (unlike duck), if you care about such things.

Click on the image for a more detailed view.

This is a hearty, homey chicken stew. Like many Keralan dishes, it uses spices like black peppercorns, cloves and nutmeg and thus feels strangely Western… because we imported those spices from Kerala, from the sixteenth century onward. The main non-Western ingredient is coconut milk – I used canned, because I wasn’t up to hammering open the 16-20 dessicated supermarket coconuts it would have taken to yield that much milk. Doesn’t it look delicious? But that isn’t actually it – all the pictures of the stew turned out murky, so I put in the Keralan okra salad that I served with it – the creaminess there comes from yogurt.

I really enjoyed this dish – another winner from Madhur Jaffrey’s sadly out of print A Taste Of India. But it didn’t come close to her recipe for lamb in pickling spices, which I made the following day. It turned out much better than it did last year – I’m much more comfortable with the whole process of cooking Indian than I was then.

One thing I’ve noticed in Indian food, and especially Keralan dishes is that you often start by cooking something with a main ingredient, setting aside that first part, and then re-adding a different version of the main ingredient again at the end. In the okra recipe, you fry the okra in seasoned oil, remove it with a slotted spoon (reserving the oil), and mix it with yogurt that has ground black mustard seeds in it. Then you take the reserved oil and fry whole black mustard seeds in it (with asafetida and dried red chilis) and add this to the yogurt-okra mixture. The black mustard returns, in a different form, with the okra-infused oil, at the end of the preparation.

Similarly, in the chicken stew, after preparing a soffrito of onions and whole spices, you essentially braise the chicken pieces in thin coconut milk and add lime juice. Then, in part two, you make a second soffrito of shallots in coconut oil, add curry leaves, and then thick coconut milk – which joins the thin coconut milk in the main stew for a second simmering.

I don’t know why cookbooks don’t tell you the reasons why you do things. You usually pick up on this stuff after preparing a number of dishes a number of times. This particular theme – adding a variant of an ingredient toward the end of a dish, in a different form – seems to me quite common in Indian cuisine.

I always want to cook from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. But I’ve done very little. My attention was drawn to this recipe by Edward Behr in the latest Art of Eating. He writes that he used to cook it a lot, but now “the combination no longer appeals much to me:” pork chops, apples, heavy cream and mustard. This is exactly the kind of combination that appeals to me, so I decided to make it.

Olney prefaces the section on pork by saying that its “somewhat flat, slightly sweetish, fatty and insidious” taste can pall after a while, and goes on to recommend various ways to complicate and cut it – fennel, sage, apples, mustard and other sharp flavors. I wonder if our pork chops in the the US today – even the heritage Berkshire black pig breed that I buy – have as much fat as the traditional French ones that Olney would have been buying in the ’60s and ’70s. Actually, if you click on that link, you’ll see a photo from last February of well marbled chops with thick layers of fat on the outside. More recently, the black pig chops I’ve been getting, even from Ottomanelli, lack the marbling and have only the layer of outside fat.

The recipe is easy. You peel, core and thinly slice apples and bake them for 15 minutes in a glass pan in a 400 degree oven. Meanwhile, brown the chops in butter for 7 or 8 minutes per side, remove them, and place them on top of the cooked apples. Deglaze the pan with 1/4 cup dry white wine, reducing by half, and dribble on top of the chops. Mix one cup of heavy cream with 1/3 cup Dijon mustard, whisking the mustard in bit by bit to taste (I like quite a bit of mustard), and pour on top of the chops, shaking the pan so that it gets down into the apples as well. Return the pan to the oven and bake 15 minutes longer at the same temperature.

The chops were too dry the first time, so I cooked them for slightly less than 15 minutes the second time. This is better, but requires hair trigger timing, since our too-lean pork chops go from too rare to overdone in about 45 seconds. I err on the rare side, though some people might be uncomfortable with that.

The real delight is the apples, soaked in pork juices and the creamy mustard mixture.

I can’t stop thinking about the goose daube I made last spring, especially ’cause I have several calves’ legs left in the freezer. Since Jonah from Fucked Up asked me to scan the “recipe” so he could use it to impress some girl, I decided I should let all of you have the benefit of the scan as well. It’s not so much a recipe as a way of life, like most of Richard Olney’s food writing. This is from the volume ‘Poultry’ in the Time/Life ‘The Good Cook’ series. Click on the images for readable versions.

This has got to be the easiest recipe ever – if you have a good Italian butcher nearby. Ottomanelli’s in the West Village sells braciole at $5.99 a pound. It’s flank steak (or other cheap cuts) pounded, stuffed, rolled and tied with string. The stuffing is up to you or your butcher. Ottomanelli uses tiny chunks of garlic, flat parsley, olive oil, salt and pepper. No breadcrumbs or cheese in this braciole! Brown it in a hot pan with olive oil, then braise it. We used San Marzano tomatoes, chopped up in their juice, and extended with water, plus some freshly grated nutmeg, and a mixture of freshly cracked black peppercorns and allspice berries, and some 2006 Rully. This particular mixture was maybe a bit too much on the sweet side – next time we will go heavier on the tomatoes.

Important – remove the braciole when they are done! You want them just moist in the center. Then cook down the tomato sauce, now flavored by the meat, to about half, and drizzle over the braciole. Chris Lombardi serves spaghetti as well. Fantastic with more of the Rully (’En Guesnes’ 2006 from Vincent Dureiul-Janthial).

(Note: this is an Italian-American dish, pronounced “brazh-ol” from Sicilian dialect. Singular is braciola. In Italy this would be called involtini and probably prepared differently.)

Lunch is the unjustly neglected meal. (Not so in Denmark.) It’s my favorite meal of the day, and here I am posting endlessly about dinners I’ve made.

The best lunches are simple and cold. This one is composed of Mestemacher whole rye bread, Boars Head swiss from the deli, and Irish mustard from our own Fiona. Other choice cold items could be added to it from the fridge: pickles, anchovies, salami etc. But basically it’s perfect, especially if washed down with beer or cider.

Entertained last night and made a whole leg of lamb, pretty much completely according to this recipe. I marinated in a tightly sealed plastic bag containing a mixture of orange juice, Riesling, rosemary from the garden, thyme from the supermarket, garlic, olive oil and black pepper. This sat in the fridge for 5 hours before slowly coming back to room temperature and getting rubbed all over with kosher salt and pepper. The cooking process departed from Simply Recipes’ recommendation, however – 20 minutes at 425 and an hour at 300 only got the thermometer to 105, even with the leg roasting directly on the oven rack. I raised the heat back to 425 and did another 30 minutes and only just got it out in time. Different parts of the leg measure quite differently on the instant-read thermometer. Most of the leg was on the verge of going from medium rare to medium. I’d have preferred some parts more rare, but it tasted exquisite, juicy and fully shot through with all the flavors of the marinade. My first leg of lamb, and a success.

The leg came from Ottomanelli. The butcher took out the front part of the bone to aid the carving, leaving the back part in, for the flavor. He also left a good amount of fat on top to melt into the meat. Below is a picture of marinated leg prior to going in the oven.

Annals of Ruth Rogers pasta recipes, part 8. I was looking for something to make with just stuff in the house or easily available… it turned out that all I needed for this one was heavy cream. This dish is extraordinarily delicious and piquant with intense depth of flavor, and I’m not sure why. It may have been the white wine I used, a 1999 Zind-Humbrecht riesling Clos Häuserer, but it was frankly past its prime for drinking and I worried that it would add a cloying note. It may be the cooking process… rather than fry the pancetta aggressively as in her excellent carbonara, you cook it at very low heat in an equal amount (!) of butter, so that the fat of the pancetta combines with the butter.

Long cooking time and patience is of the essence, I suspect. Melt 150g butter in a thick-bottomed pan, and add 150g pancetta cut into 2cm pieces and cook over very low heat until the pancetta becomes crisp – at least 20 minutes says the recipe, more like a half hour for me. Add 2 dried crumbled red chiles (I used Indian ones), 1/2 tbs freshly ground black pepper, and 120ml white wine. Cook for 5 minutes to reduce the wine, then add 6 real San Marzano canned plum tomatoes, roughly chopped in their juice, and some sea salt, and simmer for 15 minutes. Add 120ml heavy cream and cook for a further 15 minutes or until the sauce thickens. Cook the tagliatelle in boiling salted water until al dente. Drain and put it into the pot with the sauce (still warm but off the heat) and toss. Stir in 50g freshly grated reggiano parmegiano. Serve with the remaining reggiano on top, in heated bowls.

I added a decidedly non-Italian touch as you can see above: chopped curly parsley. Like most cooks reared in the ’80s and ’90s I learned always to use flat-leaf Italian parsley for everything and treated curly parsley as a relic from ’60s and ’70s cuisine, only useful as a visual garnish. In fact it has a bright, fresh flavor of its own, quite different from the humid grassiness of flat-leaf. It took Fergus Henderson and Jesper Eklow to bring me to my senses. This led me to my favorite new dish, so simple it’s almost not worth mentioning… white rice with chopped curly parsley. Make steamed white rice by your favorite method. Chop about 3 tablespoons of curley parsley medium (no stems, not coarse, not fine). As soon as the rice is ready, fluff the parsley well into the rice with a wooden fork or wooden spoon. Serve. I have no idea why this is so delicious. I could eat cups and cups of it. Freshly ground pepper and some lemon juice may be added if you like.

This dish from Kerala is a thoran, sort of a warm salad. It’s pleasingly bitter, sweet and fresh-vegetably all at once. I fried the beans in raw organic coconut oil from Bonobo’s. The oil is heated and quickly flavored with mustard seeds, fresh curry leaves, dried red chilis and a small amount of uncooked white rice — rice is used as a condiment in Southern Indian food. The beans saute in the oil for 2-3 minutes, and then you move them to the sides of the pan in a donut shape and put a mountain of chopped vegetables, herbs and spices in the hole in the center: shallots, garlic, ground cumin, turmeric, green chilis and grated fresh coconut. The beans are mounded over the ingredients, water is added, and the beans are then steamed through the pile as it were for 10 minutes or until done.

We served this Madhur Jaffrey dish with Julie Sahnee’s tandoori chicken. I broiled it rather than roasted it and it came out a bit dry and charred, but still flavorful. Last time I made it into chicken makhni and I think that’s what I’ll do next time. An assortment of pickles and chutneys, plus Jaffrey’s apple-cumin-ginger yoghurt, rounded out the meal.

It looks a lot like mac’n'cheese in the picture, and it actually tasted a bit like it too. This is Ruth Rogers’s carbonara recipe. You start by frying the pancetta in a bit of olive oil until it’s crispy, and that’s actually pretty much the sum total of actual cooking for the sauce. You then begin cooking the pasta, keeping the pancetta warm in its oil and fat, but off the heat. Meanwhile, 6 egg yolks get beaten into heavy cream… this gets seasoned and a good amount of grated parmesan stirred in. Then you dump the cooked pasta into the pancetta, coating it with the oil. You then immediately stir the cream-egg yolk mixture into the pasta and pancetta, letting the heat of the pasta cook the eggs. An equal amount of grated parmesan is added at the end. It was one of the lighter carbonaras I’ve had, but intensely flavorful, each strand of pasta perfectly coated with sauce.

This is the first recipe I’ve made from the River Cafe pasta cookbook that came out right the first time. I think it’s because I realized that in British cookbooks “sliced” means what Americans call “chopped.” The recipe calls for dried porcini mushrooms, which need to be reconstituted in hot water. The aroma and color startled me – very much like beef bouillon. The foundation is saute of garlic and chopped sage leaves with a crumbled red chili in a ton of melted butter. The porcinis then cook in this mixture for 15 minutes, the reserved soaking water being added as necessary to retain moistness. At the end you add heavy cream, the zest and the juice of one lemon, and a lot of freshly grated parmegiano reggiano. The pasta was egg tagliatelle. I’ve also come to realize that the secret to good pasta dishes is getting the pasta right, not the sauce. I know that cookbooks always say this, but it never really worked for me until I got a huge stockpot for the pasta. Now I boil enormous quantities of water, add salt and bring it to the boil again, add pasta and bring it to the boil again, cook stirring frequently, remove at al dente and combine the drained pasta instantly with the sauce – in a hot bowl, or preferably the pot in which the sauce cooked. Assuming the proportions are correct, tossing the pasta becomes childs play and the sauce really soaks in and adheres to the pasta. It’s a whole different ballgame.

Accompaniments were buttered baby brussels sprouts and a 2003 Marques de Riscal rioja riserva ($15).