Fall

Every late July, I look up the solar calendar dates of Tet Trung Thu (Autumn Moon Festival), which is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month and usually falls mid-to late September. An ancient Chinese harvest festival akin to Thanksgiving, it is a time for family and togetherness. The culinary focus of the celebration is the moon cake, a small baked pastry shaped in a hand-carved wooden mold. Thin, pliable dough encases a dense, sweet filling, at the center of which sits a salted egg yolk, symbolizing the moon. In between nibbling thin wedges of cake and sipping fragrant tea, you gaze at the largest and brightest moon of the year and reflect on your good fortune. Making moon cakes requires lots of ingredients and time, so most people buy them from bakeries and markets. But the culinary process is remarkable, requiring both precision and artistry, and the results are splendidly beautiful and delicious, making store-bought cakes pale imitations of homemade. Moon cakes are often filled with a paste of red beans or lotus seeds, but my family prefers an aromatic mixture of nuts and sweetmeats. My mother used this recipe in Vietnam, where she and her friend Mrs. Ly mastered the techniques. Some minor changes were made over time. For example, Mom substituted canned cooked chicken to mimic the luxurious texture of shark fin, and I added corn syrup to prevent the filling from drying and hardening. For decades, I watched and assisted my mother with the annual ritual. A few years ago, she handed me the molds, asking me to carry on the tradition. You must plan well in advance to make these cakes. The eggs need to stand in brine for four weeks, which is why I check the dates in July and work backward. While the eggs are curing, you can roast and freeze the pork at any point, and you can prepare the sugar syrup up to a few days in advance. The night before making the cakes, chop all the filling ingredients. The next day, forming and baking the cakes will be a pleasure. Moon cakes keep well in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks and will keep in the freezer for months, which means that you may make them way ahead of the celebration date or even enjoy them on other special occasions. Before embarking on this recipe, read it carefully from beginning to end, including the Note, which provides information on where to find the molds and any unusual ingredients. Also, make sure you have all the special equipment you will need: one or two wooden molds, a scale, toothpicks (preferably flat ones), and a water spray bottle.

Despite the fun and convenience of eating pho at a local noodle soup spot, nothing beats a homemade bowl. What inevitably makes the homemade version đac biet (special) is the care that goes into making the broth, the cornerstone of pho. One of the keys to a great broth is good leg bones, which are often sold at supermarkets as beef soup bones. Avoid neck bones; instead, look for soup bones made up of knuckle and leg bones that contain marrow. At Asian markets, beef leg bones are precut and bagged in the meat department. Vietnamese markets will sometimes have whole leg bones at the butcher counter, and you can specify how you want them cut. A butcher who divides large sections of beef carcasses into small retail cuts is likely to have good bones. For the most fragrant and flavorful broth, I recommend the bones of grass-fed or natural beef.

Brussels sprouts used to be up there with lima beans on the list of vegetables people claimed to hate, but I think they’re having an overdue resurgence in popularity. These roasted Brussels sprouts are tender yet firm and have a wonderful nutty, earthy flavor. Rich hazelnuts add texture, as does the tart pop of garnet-colored pomegranate seeds. This is a beautiful fall side dish.

All of the best flavors of an American Thanksgiving are featured in this fall soup. The benefit of using vegetable stock is twofold: most important to me is taste—vegetable stock, as opposed to rich chicken stock, melds seamlessly with the pumpkin, thinning its body without competing with the flavor. It also means that this soup is a perfect option for vegetarian guests. Trust me; everyone at the table with be happy with this tasty offering.

Everyone makes zucchini bread, but somehow it feels so blah to bring another loaf of this admittedly delicious stuff to a potluck. Here’s a new take on the old theme, using butternut squash, which lends a golden hue and a delicate flavor to the bread. Large loaves, which can be sliced on-site, work beautifully as potluck fare. Wrapped mini loaves tied with ribbons and adorned with handwritten tags make memorable party favors. For family reunions, spell out the family name, the date, and the reunion site, such as “Wright Family Reunion, May 2009, Elderville Churchyard.” Just about any event, from wedding showers and baptisms to graduations and birthday parties, can be commemorated this way, leaving guests with a nonperishable memento that can be saved in scrapbooks long after the last scrap of bread disappears.

My backyard fig tree is not always the most reliable producer, but when I have figs I make this dessert. It pairs an old-fashioned pound cake (recipe courtesy of my great-aunt Emma) with a chunky sauce made with my homegrown Brown Turkey figs. I love this dessert’s down-home elegance—a figgy topping poured over individual pound cakes baked in cupcake pans. You can use any fresh fig that’s available—light green, brown, or purple. In Texas you’ll most likely find Brown Turkeys, which I’ve been told were planted throughout the state by early homesteaders. If fresh figs are not available, use Bosc pears or tart apples. If you want a large, belt-busting dessert, use Texas-size cupcake pans. Standard-size cupcake pans will give you double the servings.

This recipe was inspired by my discovery of single-serving-size butternut squash the size of hand weights at my local farmers’ markets. Roasted butternut squash is a great thing to have on hand for use in various other dishes, though, so feel free to roast a larger one and use 1/2 cup of the flesh here, refrigerating the rest for up to a week or freezing for several months in an airtight container.

Of all the recipes in the cookbook I cowrote with Boston chef Andy Husbands, The Fearless Chef, the one for slow-roasted pork is the one I’m asked for the most. A new round of requests came after my friend Josh and I made it for my own birthday party a few years ago in Washington. We served it simply, with salsa, sour cream, and tortillas on the side, but trust me, this meat can go into all sorts of recipes, such as in Cochinita Pibil Tacos (page 95), Faux-lognese with Pappardelle (page 140), and Pulled Pork Sandwich with Green Mango Slaw (page 121). I’ve simplified this recipe a little from Andy’s original version, cutting out a 24-hour marinating step, replacing the traditional banana leaves with good old aluminum foil, and using one of my favorite smoke stand-ins, Spanish pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika), instead of oregano. The pork is spicy and deeply flavored and colored, thanks in no small part to the large quantity of annatto seeds (also called achiote) that goes into the paste. These little brick-colored pebbles are worth seeking out at good Latin markets or online through such sources as Penzeys.com.

This is a recipe payoff from having made the Stewed Cauliflower, Butternut Squash, and Tomatoes (page 55), beefed up with the addition of white beans, crunchy croutons, fresh thyme, and cheese. The soup is a beautiful orange color and tastes of cream, even though it has no such thing in it.

One of the smartest things you can do when cooking for one is make large quantities of pasta sauce to freeze and then defrost and adapt into quick weeknight meals. Such sauces can go well beyond a simple marinara. When I asked the queen of Italian cooking in America, Lidia Bastianich, for her favorite approaches to such a thing, she quickly came to me with this hearty vegetable stew that can do triple, quadruple, even quintuple duty: Use a cup of it to dress pasta, of course, but also spoon it onto charred bread for bruschetta, use it as a base on which to nestle grilled fish or chicken, or try one of the companion recipes: Baked Egg in Fall Vegetables (page 33) or Fall Vegetable Soup with White Beans (page 58). I couldn’t resist putting my stamp on this recipe: I did what I do with many tomato sauces and splashed in some fish sauce to deepen the flavor.

This elegant soup has a depth of flavor, brightened by orange and layered with smoked paprika, that would make it right at home as a dinner party starter. For yourself, pair it with a side salad and a big piece of crusty bread, and it’s dinner tonight, while you plan the party for another day.

Turn the Sweet Potato Soup Base into a meal with spicy chorizo, hearty chickpeas, and vibrant green kale. This makes a truly beautiful bowl of soup. If you’d rather keep this soup vegetarian, try the grain-based chorizo substitute from Field Roast, one of the first meat substitutes I’ve actually liked. It’s available in natural food stores in almost every state and through www.fieldroast.com.

I got the idea from Lidia Bastianich to make soup bases that pack a lot of flavor on the weekend, then freeze them and thaw them as needed, adding various ingredients on the fly to take them in different directions. I like to concentrate the base, which saves freezer space, and then thin it out when I make a finished soup. Before you thin it out (and jazz it up) for the final soup, this base may remind you of a certain fluffy Thanksgiving side dish (minus the mini-marshmallows, thankfully), but there are some key differences. Besides the lack of cream or sugar, the most important one is the cooking method: Rather than boiling peeled cubes of sweet potato, I like to roast them, concentrating the complex flavor, which is highlighted by subtle hints of thyme and curry. This makes an especially vibrant backdrop to such treatments as Sweet Potato Soup with Chorizo, Chickpeas, and Kale (page 43). There are many other possibilities. You can sprinkle ground chipotle or pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika) for heat and/or smoke, or add toasted pecans, yogurt (or sour cream or crème fraîche), and other sausages or cured meats.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t leave the bacon out of this omelet. Obviously, nothing goes better with eggs. But beyond that, bacon gives the slightly bitter chard an addictive smoky and, well, meaty flavor, while the goat cheese offsets it all with a tart creaminess. The result: a hearty, one-dish meal.

The payoff for having made the Stewed Cauliflower, Butternut Squash, and Tomatoes (page 55), beyond that first bowl of pasta I hope you had with it, is that you can use it for quick treatments such as this one. With its runny yolk enriching the vegetables, it’s a satisfying breakfast dish on its own, or it can morph into a brunch or breakfast-for-dinner dish with the addition of crusty bread and a side salad.

Don your chain mail and broadsword. Ancient food, harbinger of tragedy and regret, roast partridges spur thoughts of delicious violence, provoking a savage appetite spurred by rich flavors and primal aromas. Daedalus, who built the labyrinth that held the Minotaur, flung his brilliant disciple Perdrix off a roof, only to have him transformed into a partridge by the goddess Athena, who has a thing for geniuses. One of the oldest partridge recipes comes from the French, who would encrust foods in salt to protect them from the scorching heat of the oven. The guards of the Aigues-Mortes salt fields, had they survived being massacred by invading Burgundians, would surely have appreciated this dish. The Burgundians were eventually massacred as well, and their bodies buried in a tower filled with salt. Athena would have approved of their ingenuity, and of salt crusting in general, though it is doubtful that she would have approved of this choice of bird for the roasting.