One-Pot Meals

This dish sparks a vision of an ice fisher on a frozen Eastern European lake, bringing home a fresh carp, combining it with two of that region’s winter staples—bacon and sauerkraut—and roasting it over a hot fire. What a treat that must have been and what a relief from what might have been months without any fresh meat or fish at all. It’s a great dish in a warm winter kitchen in the twenty-first century, too. Use sauerkraut that is fresh or packed in plastic (never canned), which contains no more than cabbage and salt; real sauerkraut needs no preservatives. Serve the dish with mashed or boiled potatoes.

A lovely, flavorful, and colorful sauce with an elusive perfume that is the result of the saffron-vinegar combination. This is suitable for any firm-fleshed fish fillet. If you make the variation with the potato salad, you’d pretty much have a one-dish meal here; bread and salad would be nice additions.

I ate this by the Gulf of Mexico, in a place with pink and avocado-green walls, a mariachi, and an outside shower. It tasted just as good last winter in Connecticut. Serve this, if you like, with Cebollas Curtidas (page 615) or any other relish or salad. Rice is also good, as are French fries.

Along with Cochinita Pibil (page 351), this is among the best uses for the annatto-based Recado Rojo, one of the most beautiful and flavorful sauces in the world. Serve with loads of plain white rice.

The sweetness of coconut milk tames the heat of this quick stew somewhat, but it remains a dish for fans of fiery food. If you cut the number of chiles to one, however, that will change. In any case, you will want a fair amount of plain white rice with this one.

A quick little stir-fry, great for a weekday dinner, and especially good if you can get a chunk of country ham, like prosciutto, Serrano, or Smithfield. Great, too, with sautéed Chinese sausages (sold at every Chinese supermarket) in place of ham. With white rice, this makes a nice little meal.

This wrapped dish, best assembled at the table, is great fun, either as a starter or as part of your main meal, and as fitting for a weeknight as tacos. It has a wonderful combination of contrasting flavors and textures: the spicy filling is offset by the sweetness of hoisin sauce and the cool crunch of lettuce.

More than anywhere else, cooks in Portugal combine seafood and meat with abandon, and it usually works. This dish cries out for crusty bread. If you want a milder garlic flavor, add it along with the tomatoes so it cooks a little longer.

Every winemaking culture in the world cooks with its local product, but only Spain has sherry. And while sherry is not quite all-purpose, as simple white wine is, it is manifestly more powerful and incomparably more complex; in fact it rivals stock in the character it adds to many dishes. (When Spanish food comes with a good-tasting but anonymous “brown sauce,” you can bet it contains a hefty dose of sherry.) Sherry combined with seafood, olive oil, and garlic, as in this recipe, produces a magically Spanish dish, one that is not only classic but awesome and one you can consider a template for many others. You can spend a fortune on sherry, but since each bottle is the product of several different vintages it is consistent from year to year, and the fact that it is stabilized by alcohol enhances its shelf life (refrigerated, an opened bottle retains flavor good enough to drink for several days, and sometimes even longer if used for cooking). In short, all real sherry is good, and bottles costing ten bucks are more than acceptable. Fino is probably best for drinking, but the slightly sweeter, nuttier Amontillado and Oloroso are perhaps a little better for cooking. As is almost always the case in cooking, the clams you use here should be as small as you can find. Tiny ones the size of a quarter are fun, but the slightly larger cockles or West Coast “butter” clams are equally tender and easier to eat. Mahogany clams or good littlenecks are also fine; do not use “steamers,” whose sand will spoil the dish. In any case, buy only live clams; their shells should be undamaged and nearly impossible to pry open. Rinse them, scrubbing their shells if necessary, to rid them of all sand. Those that do not open during the cooking are fine; just pry them open at the table with a dull knife. Serve this as an appetizer or a main course, with good bread for sopping up the sauce.

Haaq is actually the name of a bitter green from Kashmir, not unlike spinach but perhaps a little more strongly flavored. In any case, spinach is used as a substitute throughout India, and this simple preparation is widespread. Neither mustard oil nor the amount of chile (I use only one) is key; but asafetida—also known as hing—the odd yellow powder (it’s made from a resin that is exuded by the roots of the plant) with the off putting aroma, most definitely is. In fact, this is the place to use it and learn to love it, as I believe you will. You can serve this as a side dish (in which case halve the quantities) or as a main course,with rice. It’s also often served with fried fish on top of it.

It’s no secret that people eat leftover pasta, but this is a time-honored way to turn it into something else. It’s so good that you might find yourself cooking extra pasta just so you have an excuse to make this. As with any other frittata, you can add what you like here. It might be a bit of pancetta or bacon, but it can also be a bit of cooked vegetable or something as simple as minced scallion or parsley.

There is something about the sprightliness, the lightly assaultive, somehow-sweet nature of mint that is unlike any other herb. Here, softened by butter and cheese, to which it in turn lends spark, it converts a simple and basic but undeniably heavy combination into an easy but complex pasta dish that can best be described as refreshing.

Udon noodles are generally made with softer wheat than Italian pasta, giving them a more tender texture. You can find them at Japanese markets and many supermarkets. Like Chinese noodles, they’re great stir-fried. And, as in any stir-fry, you can substitute for the pork, shrimp, or vegetables if you like.

Where the sesame sauce in the recipe on page 532 makes for a rich, hearty dish, this one is elegant and light. In Japan—where it gets plenty hot in the summer—cold soba noodles, served with a dipping sauce, are a common snack or light meal. Soba are brown noodles, made from wheat and buckwheat, and the sauce is based on dashi, the omnipresent Japanese stock. (You can also serve somen, thin wheat noodles, cold; cook them for a little less time, but also until tender.) Dashi is close to essential here, though you can use chicken stock in a pinch. But dashi is so easy to make (and so good) that if you try it once you’ll become devoted to it.

Posole is dried corn treated with limestone, a traditional American food that predates the arrival of Europeans by some thousands of years. In its ground form it is the main ingredient in tortillas, but for some reason the whole kernels are largely ignored in this country outside of the Southwest. (Hominy, which is essentially the same thing, has a bit of a following in the South, but again mostly in its ground form: grits.) Posole is also the name of a soupy stew containing, well, posole. It can be varied in many ways, but it is always delicious and distinctive. If you have time, soak and cook the dried kernels yourself: Rinse the posole, then soak it in water to cover if time allows, for up to 12 hours; cook in boiling water to cover, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour and probably longer. Season with salt and drain. Canned posole (or hominy) is almost as good, and reduces the time it takes to make this soup to about an hour.

If you like seaweed salad, try this. Traditionally offered to nursing mothers, it’s soothing in the winter and cooling in the summer (see variation). To slice the beef thinly, freeze it until it is just beginning to harden, 30 to 60 minutes. Miyuk is the Korean word known to the Japanese as wakame and elsewhere as alaria (see page 484); you should be able to find it at Asian markets.

Mandoo are Korean dumplings almost identical to gyoza, though they are more often steamed than panfried. If you don’t feel like making dumplings, you can use this broth to make soup with duk, Korean rice cakes; these are sold fresh or frozen at most Korean markets. Sometimes noodles are added to this soup as well, a nice but unnecessary touch.

In the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and partake of a hearty meal after sunset. This often includes harira, a filling, flavorful, and easily varied soup. If your cilantro comes with roots, wash them well, tie them in a bundle, and add them to the stew for extra flavor; remove before serving.

Start with stock, use just about the same seasoning asin regular pho (preceding recipe), and substitute quick-cooking meatballs for chuck. The result is a relatively fast pho with all the flavor of its slow-cooked big brother. See page 500 for information on nam pla, Thai fish sauce.

A somewhat more elaborate procedure than the preceding recipe, to be sure, but super in flavor. See the excellent variation as well. This is practically a main course, good with a vegetable dish and a salad.