Oat

Now, here’s an old faithful; every Thanksgiving spread requires a great apple pie. Not a whole lot to say about it—it’s tasty, of course—but the crumb topping takes this pie up a notch. It’s as though you added a leopard-skin belt to your little black dress. The brown sugar, cinnamon, and allspice don’t hurt, either

Filled with the energy of oats and the antioxidants of blueberries, this is the mix for a kick-ass day. Keep it on hand and nothing can stop you. What’s nice is, it’s not too sweet, not too fatty, and really flavorful. It’s just right; and when you’re away from your family or what’s familiar to you, this kind of homemade love will soften the blow.

Rhubarb is a vegetable, although it is typically used in jams and desserts; its tart flavor makes it the perfect companion for fresh strawberries, or in this case, strawberry ice cream.

Everyone who has ever tried this says it’s spectacular. Even my mom, who doesn’t like cheese, likes this soup, which is saying a lot. The soup itself is an awesome combination of cheese and onions. And the soda bread is so nice and crunchy on the outside and squishy on the inside. It’s quite perfect. The only proper way to eat this is to dip the bread in the soup, which means it’s an excuse to eat a lot of bread. This is a great cold weather food, although sometimes in summer I suffer through eating it with the air-conditioning turned way up.

Bland and mushy are forever banished; this is oatmeal for grown-ups. Steel-cut oatmeal (also referred to as Irish oatmeal) has a wonderfully nutty taste and a texture that is at once creamy and chewy. As a kid I always loaded my oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar; now I cook tart apple slices with the same ingredients for an unexpected yet familiar treat to layer with the oatmeal. A sprinkling of turbinado sugar and a quick hit from the broiler create a sweet brûléed crust and an extra touch of decadence. Crack the crust with your spoon and pour in the cinnamon-scented cream . . . oh yeah, you’ll be in love with oatmeal after this.

I first tasted Ralph Watterson’s Six Rivers Tuna last year when he and his group of bicycling buddies passed through Frederickburgs on a four-day cycling trip. His tuna provides hearty lunches for the group as they cover 300 miles and cross six rivers on their annual spring cycling trip. I asked for the recipe, which he described as his mother’s version, plus a few embellishments of his own. I made it, tried it out at the bakery, and our tuna sandwich sales skyrocketed. Ralph’s Six Rivers Tuna is now a part of our regular menu. Given its proven track record as a recipe that travels, I figured it would be great for an outdoor picnic or a potluck. On bike trips, Ralph says he often serves it with crackers. I wanted something more substantial and created a soft, honey-kissed roll that when split and filled with tuna makes a memorable and satisfying sandwich that travels with ease.

In the physical universe, there is precious little closer to perfection than an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. Unlike standard cookies, they are never cakey or disappointingly hard, not too sweet, with the butter and oats finding common cause in each other’s virtues. So how do you improve upon perfection? Topping these cookies with a beautiful flaky salt brings out the cow in the butter, the hills in the oats, and the jungle in the chocolate. Topping them with the salt rather than just adding it to the batter sets the salt free to work its mojo with each of the ingredients as they combine in your mouth. For these cookies, I prefer Bali Rama Pyramid sea salt, which has really cool hollow pyramidal crystals and a great, snappy impact. The advantage of using a flake salt here is that it remains delicate even after baking. The Bali Rama Pyramid salt does a spectacular job of bringing just enough drama to the cookies to make them sparkle while keeping everything mellow enough to assure they remain a comfort food. Other good choices are Cyprus flake or Halen Môn, or, in a pinch, any good fleur de sel.

One of the earliest descriptions we got from our crack pie addicts was, “It’s like a pecan pie, without the pecans”—which I secretly hated. It’s so much more, and so much less. But one day we finally read between the lines and sarcastically, we thought, made a crack pie with pecans in the pie. It blew my mind a little. There aren’t too many boundaries in terms of the variations. So get crazy.

When we first opened Milk Bar, at 4 or 5 o’clock every morning we would make fresh cinnamon buns with liquid cheesecake rolled up into the dough instead of applying cream cheese frosting on top. Cinnamon buns are something I feel very strongly about, since my mother started a tradition of making (not-so-great) ones for breakfast on every holiday. (Sorry, Mom, but you can’t give a kid a Cinnabon and then expect her to be OK with cinnamon buns made with margarine and skim milk!) We’d make them before the crack of dawn so they’d be ready for breakfast . . . and then we’d sell most of them to people on their way home at night, ready to tuck in with dessert and some TV. So we decided to get smart and create something that was delicious, available, and fresh at any hour, and didn’t have to be made to order every morning: the cinnamon bun pie.

When I was a baker at a conference center on Star Island, twelve miles off the coast of New Hampshire, I learned to make this kind of cookie from one of the best bakers I know, Mandy Lamb. She would put different ingredients in the cookie each day or each week and have people try and guess what the random secret ingredients were. Because we were on an island in New England, when storms blew in, we were trapped. No one traveled to the island, and, more important, no boats with food on them came our way, either. We had to get creative and use what we had on hand. We might not have had enough chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies, but if we threw in other mix-ins as well, the seven hundred some guests would never notice the shortage of one ingredient—and the cookies would always feel brand new, because they were different every time. I found after many batches that my favorite compost cookies had my favorite snacks in them: chocolate and butterscotch chips, potato chips, pretzels, graham crackers, and coffee (grounds). Compost cookies always turn out great in my mother’s kitchen because she infamously has a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own. My brother-in-law calls them “garbage cookies”; others call them “kitchen sink cookies.” Call them what you want, and make them as we make them at Milk Bar, or add your own favorite snacks to the cookie base in place of ours.

Steel-cut oats go through a machine that cuts the whole kernels into tiny bits. Sometimes called Scotch or Irish oatmeal, steel-cut oats are chewier and have more texture and flavor than regular rolled oatmeal. They take more time to cook, but steel-cut oatmeal is well worth the wait. McCann’s makes the best steel-cut oats that I know. They’re available in specialty shops and some supermarkets, as well as at www.mccanns.com. To sweeten the steel-cut oats, add brown sugar, sautéed bananas, raisins, applesauce, berries, or whatever other fruit you like.