Oven Bake

Marinated button mushrooms are typically included in an antipasto platter, but they make a great solo starter too. Use your favorite combination of wild or domestic mushrooms and, for a heartier dish, try swapping the white wine for red. These mushrooms will last for up to a week in the refrigerator.

Shepherd’s pie is a signature dish in the pubs of England and Ireland, sometimes made with lamb, as here, and sometimes with beef, in which case it is called cottage pie. The idea is the same: a simple meat pie made with a mirepoix—onion, carrot, celery—under a top crust of mashed potatoes. There’s no cheese in the mashed potatoes, but when the pie is baked, the crust is somehow enriched through the alchemy of cooking and tastes as though there were. Shepherd’s pie is usually made with leftover cooked lamb. Swapping that for quick and easy homemade lamb sausage is my revisionism, to give the humble pie a fresh and lively taste. Also, to gussy it up, I use tiny pearl onions so the onion element has a more defined presence in the pie. The horseradish is also my whim, to give the dish an acrid lilt that helps lift it above what might otherwise be humdrum fare. Fresh horseradish root is often available in produce stores and supermarkets around Passover for Jewish customers; wasabi root, though not exactly the same botanically, is similar and it is available around the New Year for Japanese customers. Like fresh ginger, horseradish root can be stored in the refrigerator almost indefinitely, as long as it is kept dry.

Nowadays, dolmas are standard fare throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus. But it is interesting to ponder how they became so in ancient lands that never had New World ingredients until seafarers carried them to the Old World on their return journeys. To complicate the story, they put ashore in Atlantic ports, so it was still a long trek to get to the eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, they did, once again demonstrating the scope and power of food as a pathway of global interconnections. Adding a bed of potatoes as infrastructure in this dolma is a particularly Greek touch, and a good one. The potatoes soak up the juices rendered as the vegetables cook and collapse into them, making a crude sauce on the bottom of the dish. I prefer green bell peppers, but it seems these days red bells are equally, if not more, favored, so I make a mix of them, including some yellow and orange ones that add sunny color to the array.

Faced with a surplus of leftover bread—enough crumbs stockpiled and nothing requiring croutons at the moment—I turn to a savory bread pudding. Since bread puddings remind me of British cooking, I whip up a sausage with typical English aromatics, add dried pear for tasty curiosity, and ecco!—a pudding-pie for dinner. The dried pears should be unsulfured, rather than sulfured, because they are less sweet, making them more suitable for this dish.

There’s a certain romance associated with skillet cooking in American cuisine. It conjures campfires or rustic wood-fired ovens, where the cooking vessel must be sturdy enough to withstand the heat. Cast-iron pans fit that bill and more. I routinely use three cast-iron skillets of different sizes to accommodate different types of dishes: a small one for cooking up sausage samples for tasting or for frying up a couple of burgers; a medium size for cooking plate-size pancakes or a fat, juicy steak for two; and a large one for searing meats or fish fillets before finishing them in the oven or for making this skillet tamale pie. Cast-iron skillets offer two more advantages: they are widely available anywhere that carries kitchen equipment, from hardware stores to gourmet cookware shops, and they are modestly priced. The drawback to cast iron is that it is not serviceable for dishes that include tomatoes, wine, spinach, eggplant, or the like, because it turns the ingredient unpleasantly bitter. Romance aside, cooking the tamale pie in a cast-iron skillet offers one more advantage. It saves on pots and dishes: brown the sausage in the skillet on the stove top, spread the corn bread topping over the sausage, pop the skillet in the oven to bake, and then serve directly from the skillet. The quick, few-ingredient sausage is also good for tacos, topping pizza, Mexican-style spaghetti and meatballs, or in place of chorizo for egg preparations. The corn bread batter can be cooked into a tender, light bread without the sausage; use an 8-inch skillet in this case.

In a cross-continental sausage loaf reminiscent of French pâtés, beef, pork, and veal are combined in equal amounts with bread crumbs to make a more pillowy loaf. The California twist is replacing the traditional ketchup “icing” with pavers of sun-dried tomato across the top. You can serve it warm for dinner, American style, with a side of mashed potatoes, or French style, chilled until firm enough to slice thin for an hors d’oeuvre plate. The cooking vessel can be as ordinary as a standard aluminum loaf pan or, if you are serving it warm, a more table-worthy clay pot or round soufflé dish.

On my brief sojourn in the Toulouse area, I traveled to many local villages and towns acclaimed for their charcuterie. Among them was Castelnaudary, a small village built of stone, close by the fairy-tale-like medieval castle of Carcassonne. The castle was a thrill; even more so was the cassoulet I enjoyed in Castelnaudary, known as the cradle of cassoulet. I mustered the nerve to ask the chef what his secret was. He graciously shared his version of “the cassoulet secret”: The kind of beans you use is crucial. They should be lingot beans, also called white kidney beans or cannellini beans, or coco beans, which resemble slightly elongated navy beans. Both are sweetly buttery and cook up soft and tender enough to soak up juices, but still hold their shape. Then, the beans must be allowed to cool completely in their cooking liquid before assembling the cassoulet. Overnight is best. Stuffed whole duck legs (drumstick and thigh combination) make a delectable sausage star for a faux cassoulet. To sidestep the lengthy process of curing the duck overnight then braising it in duck fat to make confit, the whole legs are sprinkled with a salt and herb seasoning and refrigerated for a few hours to allow the seasonings to imbue. The sausage is then stuffed under the thigh skin, making a single package of sausage and duck meat.

There are thousands of recipes for bread pudding because it’s a classic for usin’ up leftovers. I think some of the best recipes come from New Orleans, where home cooks and restaurant chefs alike treat this humble dish with great respect. That’s where I got the inspiration for ours, which is pillow soft when warm and burstin’ with plump raisins and chewy bits of coconut.

If you were wonderin’ what to do with all that leftover pulled pork or brisket you smoked, or if you have some nice roast turkey hangin’ around, give this a try. It’s our only breakfast item and it goes great with a couple of eggs on the side.

Because our weather in Central New York is less than tropical, we have to figure out ways of keepin’ those warm weather flavors coming even when poundin’ rain or three-foot drifts make it hard to get to your backyard grill. So here’s a way to make ribs in your oven and bring on all the flavors of places with better weather. Our method for makin’ ribs in the oven can also be applied to the recipe for Dinosaur-Style Ribs (page 93). All you’ll be missin’ is the taste of the smoke and the smell of the outdoors, but the ribs will still be fallin’-off-the-bone tender.

Here’s a twist on a classic British pub recipe. The beefy base of the pie gets flavored up Dino-style and topped off with savory mac ‘n’ cheese instead of the traditional mashed potatoes. It makes a hearty meal. Just add salad.

My mother is a great cook, but she never made meatloaf like this, and I bet yours never did either. It’s the spice that gives ours its touch of creepin’ heat. Way before meatloaf made a comeback on restaurant menus we were servin’ it at the Dinosaur. It was our very first special.

Cook ‘em low and slow. That’s the secret to tender short ribs. I like mine spicy, rich, and mahogany brown.

This is my version of a recipe that’s been bouncing around my family for years. It’s more Italian than barbecue, but who cares? It’s definitely a crowd pleaser. We get our fresh bread dough from the Columbus Bakery, a legendary family-run bakery in Syracuse.

There are as many versions of this casserole as there are southern cooks and church cookbooks. Beth’s is a compilation of several. I like the potatoes shredded instead of cubed and not as much butter as some recipes have (don’t worry, there’s still plenty!).

Cornbread dressing is my absolute favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal. In fact, I have been known to make this recipe in July because I just can’t bear the thought of eating it only once a year! The recipe was never written down until Beth and I demanded that Mama show us how to make it. She came up with the ingredient amounts and demonstrated the mixing technique. (Hint: You’ve gotta get your hands in it!)

This casserole belongs on a plate with roast beef, rice, and gravy for Sunday lunch. We probably didn’t have it every Sunday, but it was often part of the standard after-church meal. I’m a little surprised that as children we ate asparagus, but Daddy always said we’d eat anything with Mama’s cheese sauce on it!

I guess because most of my recipes are southern, we’ll just have to say this one is way south of the border! This is a hearty side dish that can be used any time you serve rice. We serve this rice on the Fourth of July with Barbecued Pork Ribs (page 84).