Saute

This is one of the fastest, tastiest ways you can serve spinach. We probably make it a few times a month. Just start tossing a bag of spinach into the shopping cart every week and you’ll see what we mean. This side also goes great with Smothered Pork Chops and Rice Bake (page 22) and Pecan Catfish Fish Sticks (page 160).

So many kids only want to eat mac and cheese right from the box. We decided to come up with an alternative dish for Jack—one where Mom and Dad are in charge of quality control. Jack always cleans his plate, so we have to be quick if we want to sneak a few pieces for ourselves!

Mama is friends with a couple from Indiana named the Moyers, who we like to refer to as Yankees. They taught her how to turn a handful of affordable, simple ingredients into these fried-patty sandwiches that will rock your world.

Mama likes to serve peppered shrimp in their jackets, and we’ve been improvising on her recipe for years. But for simple weeknight meals, we like to buy shelled shrimp. They’re easier to eat that way, and faster to cook. Here, we sauté them with mushrooms, which Bobby is fond of, and bacon (you can guess who thought of adding that!).

Red snapper just about jump into your boat off the coast of Savannah, where there’s a fishing area near us known as the snapper bank. We like to sear the fillets and serve them with a delicious sauce of lemony butter with basil. In fact, we’d probably eat anything we put this butter sauce on.

Serve this lean, veggie-heavy stir-fry with white rice to sop up the delicious Tabasco-spiked soy sauce.

We can get behind any recipe with peanut butter in it! This savory dish, with just a hint of fiery red pepper flakes, is a nod to our favorite Thai take-out dish from Kao Thai in Savannah. Best of all, it’s based on ingredients you probably already have in the house.

We love how crisp and tasty the ingredients in this dish turn out when you stir-fry them. Stir-frying is a great way to make a healthy meal. And using fresh ginger adds an irresistible kick—as well as an aroma that will call everybody to the table. Put on a pot of white rice as you start cooking, and dinner will be as fast as it is flavorful.

As a child, and well into adulthood, I was allergic to scallops. But little by little I got over it. It can happen; the body does change. So I’ve been making up for my years of deprivation and quite often treat myself to a full plate of carefully cooked sea scallops. I remember Julia Child emphasizing how important it was to use a large pan, so the scallops would have plenty of space to brown. And because they needed to cook over high heat, clarified butter was essential. We were once having lunch at an elegant French restaurant in New York, which will be nameless, and Julia ordered scallops. After her first bite, she put down her fork and proclaimed that the chef hadn’t used clarified butter. As she tucked away most of the flawed dish, she emphasized again the importance of using clarified butter when browning over high heat, although she did admit that most Americans aren’t going to take the trouble to clarify their own butter, and that it was okay for the home cook to use half butter and half light vegetable oil, which would temper the burning. I am always careful to watch the pan, as if Julia is still looking over my shoulder, whenever I make this dish.

Soft-shell crabs are one of the great luxuries of spring. They may be expensive if you’re feeding them to a crowd. But just for one person, why not treat yourself ? If the soft-shell crabs are good-sized, I’ll eat only two, but I prefer the small ones and can devour three easily along with a spring vegetable. I usually buy them from a fishmonger at the end of the day. That way, he can do the killing and the cleaning, because they will be popped into the pan as soon as I get home.

I had never cooked with sorrel until I worked with André Soltner on his Lutèce cookbook. He was then the devoted chef-owner of the restaurant, on East Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, but he never forgot his roots in Alsace. There, leafy green sorrel is common, and its tart flavor accents any number of dishes. So it was not surprising that when André was developing a sauce for that quintessential American specialty, shad roe, his secret ingredient was sorrel. However, sorrel was not so easy to find in markets in those days, and André would have to bring an armful of handpicked sorrel from his own garden in the Catskills down to the Lutèce kitchen, so as not to disappoint his loyal customers. Later, when my husband and I bought our summer place in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, we discovered that wild sorrel grew abundantly in the surrounding woods and in the garden. I even planted a cultivated variety to make sure we had enough, and I soon dubbed sorrel, along with gooseberries, the lemons of the North. And now that Lutèce is no more, and I can’t enjoy a lunch there, I celebrate this spring delight by making myself André’s delectable shad roe with sorrel sauce.

This is apt to be a messy-looking pancake. But who cares? It’s just for you, and it’s delicious. I particularly like it with a slice or two of smoked salmon and a dollop of sour cream, or of the creamy top of good whole-milk yogurt. But the pancake goes with so many things.

Here’s a simple Japanese way with cooked rice that Hiroko Shimbo showed me when I asked her one day what she would do with leftover rice. It’s called sushi salad because it’s made with sushi rice. As Hiroko points out so persuasively in her book The Sushi Experience, it’s the rice that makes it sushi, not all the various garnishes or tasty bits that are wrapped—or, in this case, tossed—in the seasoned rice. This is one of those dishes that are subject to variations depending on the season, but it’s hard to improve on the following intoxicatingly delicious summer version.

Stir-frying a combination of vegetables quickly in a small wok gives them a more intense flavor and a pleasing texture, and they benefit from being cooked together. It’s a good way to use small amounts of vegetables you may have stored away. You can mix and match as you wish, aiming for good color and flavor complements. You can even poach an egg on top of your stir-fry (see page 105).

Recently this hard-to-pronounce French dish became a household word in America overnight, when the delightful movie Ratatouille swept the country and won our hearts. Not many Americans would begin to know how to make a ratatouille, but that such a dish had the power to evoke an overwhelming taste memory was something we could relate to. I fell in love with ratatouille when I was a jeune fille living in Paris, and I have been partial to it ever since. There is a classic way to make it—cooking each of the ingredients separately, then putting them all together—but that is time-consuming, and I’m not really sure that it produces such a superior dish. I feel that rules are made to be bent in cooking, and that there’s no harm in simplifying and putting your own imprint on a dish. So here is my version, subject to variations according to the season. I always make triple the amount I’m going to eat immediately, because I put it to so many good uses.

Anyone who has a garden knows about the pressure to eat up the zucchini you’ve planted. You hate to see it go to waste. But the advantage to growing your own is that you can harvest the zucchini while they are still very young and have a more intense flavor (and you can use the male blossoms, too). So here’s one more delicious way of appreciating this prolific vegetable. You can leave out the prosciutto and peppers if you like, but they do add considerable zest.

Make this simple shrimp dish often, but only recently did I discover how good it is served on a bed of farro (see page 190), which Lidia Bastianich introduced me to. It’s also delicious with rice, grits, or polenta. You’ll get a good two meals out of this amount.