Peanut Butter

You won’t believe how good this easy cookie is. For a change, press a Hershey’s Kiss down into the center of each ball of dough. Omit the crisscross design.

GINA Can you imagine life without these two amazing ingredients? Who would want that? It would be like having fabulous shoes without a great handbag. Having chocolate and peanut butter is heaven on earth. If you think I talk a lot, give me chocolate and peanut butter and you won’t hear another word out of me!

This pie is a peanut butter cup aficionado’s dream. It was the creation of my friend Jen, who was one of the bakers at Foster’s, and it has since become a Market staple—one of our most popular pies. With layers of crispy chocolate crust, smooth dark chocolate ganache, creamy peanut butter filling, and cool whipped cream, it is a true indulgence.

I developed this recipe—in very small increments—for a newspaper article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven. My first impulse was to create something very sophisticated, but then I thought I’d appeal to the kid in everyone with bananas, chocolate, and peanut butter. I have since used this cake recipe with a strawberry-cream cheese icing, with great success. And yes, I did have an Easy-Bake Oven when I was a kid!

This recipe came about much like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial—“You got chocolate on my peanut butter,” etc. One day a long time ago, I had some peanut sauce left over from making pork satés, and I was in the process of putting together a cream of celery soup. I started thinking about how people have been known to eat celery sticks with peanut butter, so I swirled the rich sauce into the delicate soup. With a little extra garlic, chile paste, and soy sauce, the result was pretty darn tasty—and I’ve been making it ever since.

My mother learned this dish when we lived in Holland in the late ’50s. It was part of the rijstafel—an Indonesian take-out feast of many dishes—that my parents used to have delivered to the house. We used to watch wide-eyed as a flurry of delivery guys carried in dish after dish stacked in round metal containers. When we gather as a family on Christmas and other special days, we rarely have turkey or ham, but more often rice and curry or bami goreng, a noodle dish, with these satés as an appetizer. It is still the favorite family snack. The pork marinade is effortless to put together. While the meat absorbs the flavors, you can stir together the spicy peanut sauce. I tend to grill the satés, but my mother actually cooks these on an old waffle iron that has a smooth side, not unlike a panini grill.

Satay is an Indonesian dish where, typically, foods are skewered and then grilled or broiled. But to me satay is all about the peanut sauce that’s served alongside the skewers. I love peanut sauce! I made a stovetop version with just broccoli and cauliflower accompanied with that amazing peanut dipping sauce, so it would be a really easy meal for one. The sauce would also be great with some baked tofu.

This is one of my favorite salads in the whole book, despite what anyone says about the color. Soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat, are a kind of gray-brown color, so everyone thinks the salad looks a little bizarre or even unappetizing—until they try it and realize that it’s a delicious twist on pasta salad. The lime juice and fresh veggies make it refreshing and light.

This cake is a riff on my great-aunt Lorena’s 1-2-3-4 cake, a classic confection dating back to at least the mid-1800s, made with one cup butter, two cups sugar, three cups flour, and four eggs. It’s a simple cake, perfect for the likes of Aunt Lorena, who was better known for her prowess as a drama teacher than for her ability in the kitchen. (The auditorium in the Grapeland, Texas, high school where she taught for many years is named after her.) My favorite story about Aunt Lorena comes from Uncle Jack, Lorena’s middle son, who says he was in high school history class before he discovered the South did not win the Civil War. As he tells it, his mom was so proud of her grandfather, William Burroughs Wright, who fought in the war alongside his brother and his brother-in-law, that she managed to brush over the fact that the North won.

In the fall of 2008, Ssäm Bar needed a seasonal dessert, and Concord grapes were on the brain. Best man I know suggested I do a take on a pb & j, but my way, using techniques and perhaps a flavor that made sense but was unexpected. I chose the path of a panna cotta, made with milk steeped with the flavor of a saltine cracker: salty and soda-y—a poor man’s pb & j. People were going to love it or hate it. And that was perfectly fine with me, because I loved it, though the saltine milk is not for wussies.

This recipe involves heating two separate amounts of sugar, each one to a different temperature. Why do we do it that way? Because that’s the correct way to make a nougat. If there were a way around it, I’m pretty sure we would have found it by now and dear diaried you about it in the technique portion of this lovely book. We use peanut butter nougat in several of our pies, the most popular being the candy bar pie.