Mapo tofu is a spicy, salty, intensely flavorful Szechuan dish. I think that it is the best tofu dish I’ve ever made, and furthermore, that it offers one of the best deliciousness-per-dollar ratios out there. And no, we’re not talking crunchy-granola tofu here — mapo tofu also brings ground pork and chicken broth to the party. The tofu, nonetheless, is a key component — it acts a beautiful, silky vehicle for the unctiousness of pork, the numbing spiciness of Szechuan peppercorns, and the intense flavor of fermented black beans mixed with chili paste.

Ma po tofu!

Most of the ingredients are easy to find, but there are two that are a bit trickier to find in your local grocery store. Those are Szechuan peppercorns and fermented black beans. You can generally find chili bean paste around, but in case you can’t, Amazon comes through on that too.

Ingredients ready to go

The amounts of seasonings given will make a potent batch, but once you get a feel for how the affect the final taste, you’ll discover that you can pretty much go nuts with them and get an even more intense, delicious dish.

The ingredients below will feed about 6 people — and excepting the seasonings, you’ll note they are all truly inexpensive.

Ingredients to fry:

• 2 blocks of silken tofu, cut into ~1″ cubes
• 1 lb ground pork
• 4 tablespoons minced ginger
• 6 cloves garlic
• 4 scallions, divided into minced white parts and sliced green parts
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 2 tablespoons fermented black beans, chopped
• 1 tablespoon Szechuan peppercorns, freshly ground
• 1 tablespoon chili bean paste

Ingredients for sauce:

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 2 teaspoons corn starch

Let’s Do It!

Combine the sauce ingredients and set them aside.

Heat up a wok or large sauté pan and add the sesame oil. Sauté the garlic, ginger, scallions, and peppercorns until they’ve softened a bit, about 2 minutes. Add in the fermented black beans and cook for about two more minutes.

Now, add in the ground pork, split it apart with the spatula into tiny chunks, and cook until it’s mostly done. At this point, add in the chili bean paste and stir to combine. Add the tofu in, and toss instead of stir so you don’t break it up too much.

Add the sauce and simmer while gently tossing ingredients until thickened, about 2-3 minutes.

Serve with chopped scallions for garnish on top of or aside white rice.

You know when you buy olives from the store in little deli containers? They’re usually lemon/garlic or chili pepper something, and you leave Whole Foods or wherever with a huge grin, knowing you’ll pop them into your mouth one by one, grinning ear to ear at the salty, savory goodness of the olives. Then you get down to the last few, the ones bathing in the vinegar and oil at the bottom of the container, and you pause. They’re kind of greasy, and you think “maybe  I can do something with this oily goodness?”

This is a recipe borne from that very situation. This recipe gets all fancy and uses fiddleheads since they’re in season in New England late spring, but it’d be almost as delicious if you used small bits of broccoli.

Ingredients:

• 1 box of pasta (I prefer penne or gemelli)
• 1/2 lb fiddleheads (or sub finely chopped broccoli)
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 2 vine tomatoes
• 1/2 lb fresh mozzarella cheese
• the last bit of a container of olives packed in oil and spices
• black pepper
• kosher salt

Dice the tomatoes and cheese into small cubes.

Steam the fiddleheads by placing them in a pot (ideally in a steaming basket, but I don’t have one..) with ~1/2″ of boiling water for 2 minutes.

Boil the pasta according to the package directions. Once it’s done, strain the water out in a colander and rinse the pasta in cold water to stop it from cooking further. Toss the pasta in the oil and stuff from the olive container, then add the rest of the ingredients. Add a couple good punches of salt and pepper to taste. Stir everything to combine and enjoy on a porch with some rose or vinho verde. Happy summer!

Mussels are one of those foods that has a really excellent effort to impressiveness ratio. They take less time and care to prepare than, say, a decent bowl of pasta, but they imply a luxuriousness on par with a well-executed roast or something. Even better, they cost not much more than a decent bowl of pasta to make.

I’d picked up a few mussels from a store a few weeks ago, only to arrive home to find I was out of white wine, which is what I’d need to make the canonical Moules Marinare recipe. I poked around the kitchen and picked up the next best thing — a bottle of Narrangansett beer. Since the beer wasn’t going to contribute quite as much flavor to the recipe as wine would, I figured I should amp up the rest of the ingredients to keep the whole thing punchy. Enter ginger and bacon. Let’s roll!

Ingredients:

• 1.5 to 2 lbs mussels, cleaned and debearded
• 4 strips of bacon
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3-5 tablespoons ginger, minced
• 1 tomato, coarsely cubed
• 2 bottles Narragansett beer (you could also fancy it up with a Belgian ale or a lighter brown ale, if you like) – that’s one for the mussels, one for you!

First, put the bacon in the bottom of a stock pot on very low heat. You want to extract the maximum fat possible from the bacon without burning it, as it’ll provide the goodness foundation for the rest of the recipe. Allow it to cook for a few minutes until browned on the bottom, then flip it. Let it cook until it’s browned on both sides, then remove the bacon from the pot and reserve.

Add the ginger and onion to the stock pot with the bacon grease, and cook it over low heat for about 5-7 minutes, enough time for them to get soft. Add garlic and cook for another 1-2 minutes.

Add the tomato and beer to the pot and raise the heat to high, allowing it to come to a boil. Once boiling, dump the mussels on top, cover the pot, and allow to steam for 5-6 minutes. Dump the mussels and liquid into another pot or container, then back into the pot to coat them with the gingery goodness. Just before serving, dice the bacon you’d reserved earlier and sprinkle on top.

After chowing down on the mussels, use some crusty bread to sop up the ginger/beer/bacon liquid, which will exhibit nearly illegal levels of goodness. Cheers!

This summer, my roommates and I have been doing a produce CSA, which has meant we’ve had a ton of veggies around that we might not otherwise have.

My favorite discovery amongst those abundant and diverse vegetables has been beets. I’d never really paid all that much attention to beets before this year — I’d have the occasionally, but never looked to them for a delicious meal. Meaty, sweet, and colorful, beets make for a solid backbone of a meal.

I invented this cole slaw-ish recipe while trying to come up with a savory, spicy take on the ordinary beet salad, and I’d say it worked out pretty well. The vinegary, smoky spiciness of Mexican Valentina hot sauce is the defining note, backed up by the savory sweetness of honey, the depth of ginger, and the tang of mustard and vinegar.

If you’re looking for an alternative to the same old leafy salad, please to give it a try — you won’t be disappointed.

Ingredients:

• 4 large (~3.5″ diameter) beets, quartered
• 1/2 head of cabbage
• 1/4 cup Valentina hot sauce (acceptable substitution: Chipotle Tabasco sauce)
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• one large piece of ginger, diced
• 2 tbsp whole grain mustard
• 3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 3 tbsp honey
• salt and pepper

Place the beets in a large saucepan and fill with enough water to submerge. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer and allow the beets to cook for about 20 minutes, or until they’re tender. Remove the beets from the water and wait for them to cool.

Mix hot sauce, ginger, olive oil, mustard, honey, and vinegar and whisk to combine.

Cut the cabbage into thin strips and place in a bowl. Add a few pinches of salt for flavor and to draw out the moisture a bit. Peel and cut the beets, which have hopefully cooled to a temperature that won’t terribly burn you at this point, and add those to the bowl. Add pepper to taste (be generous — this makes it extra tasty!), then pour the dressing mixture over the salad and toss thoroughly.

Allow it to sit for a bit in the fridge to cool down and to let the flavors (and colors!) combine. That’s a damn tasty salad.

I’m not sure how the temperature is where you are right now, but in my apartment it’s brutally hot. One of my favorite dishes for hot days is gazpacho, the cold, zesty Spanish tomato soup. It’s beautifully refreshing, doesn’t heat up your kitchen, and can easily be made in advance — in fact, a day or two in the fridge tends to improve it.

There are a couple conflicting theories about the proper way to make gazpacho — the first (and more traditional way) is to finely blend all the contents, resulting in a sort of V8-esque soup, and the second is to coarsely chop all the vegetables, ending up with sort of crispy vegetable salad drowning in tomato juice. I’m a fan of both approaches, but I always prefer a hybrid approach. We’re going to dice all the veggies as if we were going to make a coarse gazpacho, but then blend only half of them. Sneaky!

Also, rather than starting with a tomato juice style approach, I like to take a Bloody Mary-ish approach to the liquid portion, giving the whole thing a bit more of a substantial backbone and complementing the tomato flavor with the acidity of lime juice and savoriness of Worcestershire. Mmm!

Bear in mind that gazpacho is also pretty freeform — the combo of vegetables I’m about to describe makes a tasty dish, but experimenting with different flavors can yield equally tasty or tastier results!

Without further ado, let’s get down to it:

Ingredients:

• One 48oz bottle tomato juice (I use Whole Foods 365)
• 6 tomatoes
• 2 cucumbers (peeled or unpeeled, your choice)
• 1 medium-sized red onion
• 1 green bell pepper
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 0-4 jalapeños, depending on your spice tolerance
• one small bunch cilantro
• 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup lime juice — either pre-made or the juice of two limes
• 3 tablespoons hot sauce
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

Chop the tomatoes, pepper, and cucumbers into about 1/2″ cubes. Coarsely chop the red onion. Cut the cilantro leaves and upper portion of the stalks into small pieces (cuts about 1/2″ apart) and discard the bottom portion.

Finely chop the jalapeños, if you decided to use them, and mince the garlic cloves.

Reserve half of the vegetables in a container, and place the remainder in the bowl you plan to use to hold the gazpacho in.

Add the red wine vinegar, olive oil, lime juice, hot sauce, and Worcestershire sauce to the bowl. Add in half the tomato juice from the bottle, and blend with an immersion blender until large chunks of vegetables are no longer visible. (If you don’t have an immersion blender, you can also place everything in the first part here into a blender or food processor, then put it in the serving bowl afterward.)

Add in your reserved veggies and place the whole bowl in the fridge for some time between two hours and two days — the longer it sits, the more the flavors will meld, resulting in a more flavorful gazpacho.

Serve with toasted bread (I did it with some grilled brioche and it ruled!), alongside a main course, or just slurp it out of tupperware in the fridge for a midnight cooldown. Yum!

A few weeks ago, my friend Andrew tipped me off about a Lamb meat CSA affiliated with Barbara Lynch’s The Butcher Shop in Boston’s South End. This past weekend, we picked up our first share and had the awesome experience of watching one of their chefs butcher a lamb, taking it from a huge, daunting carcass down to easily manageable cuts you’d recognize from the meat case in a grocery store.

When it was all over, we took home a double rack chop and a leg roast. We decided to cook the rack chop that night, aiming to feed three people. To stretch the ~ 3/4 lb of meat out and make maximum use of all the bone, fat, and connective tissue, we decided on a two-part approach. We would braise the rack chop in delicious spices, reserve the meat, and use the braising liquid to make a risotto.

And it was delicious.

Ingredients:

• double rack chop of lamb, about .75 lb
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 tablespoons rosemary, dried (but you could use fresh for extra credit!)
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• olive oil
• kosher salt
• 1 cup chicken or beef stock
• 2 leeks, chopped into half medallions
• .75 lb mushrooms, chopped into thin slices
• 1.5 cups dry white wine, we used Alandra box wine, which is delicious and cheap
• at least 2 cups of water, maybe more
• 1.5 cups arborio rice
• .25 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Take your rack chop, drizzle on the olive oil, and rub it with black pepper, salt, and rosemary.

Start a small dutch oven or stock pot heating up on medium heat. (If you’re using a dutch oven, also heat up your oven to 300 degrees.) Once it’s warm, add the butter to the pan and stir as it melts. Once it’s just beginning to smoke, turn up the heat to high and sear the rack chop for about 2 minutes a side.

Once it’s nicely browned, add the chicken stock, 3/4 cup of white wine, and 3/4 cup water to the pot. It will be noisy and there will be steam. Once the liquid is boiling, bring heat down to a simmer and cover the pan. (If you’re using a dutch oven, cover it and pop it in the oven.) Let the meet braise for two and a half hours — after an hour or so, flip the rack of lamb to submerge the other side.

After the lamb flakes apart with a fork, sample a little bit because your kitchen will smell so damn good that you’ll have been thinking about doing just that for the last hour. Take the lamb out of the pot, pull the meat off the bones, and reserve the meat.

Also reserve the braising liquid, which will now contain a bunch of delicious lamb juices and fat — we’ll be needing it shortly. Add a bit of olive oil to the pan and cook the mushrooms over low heat for about 5 minutes or until soft. Deglaze the pan with 1/4 cup of white wine and scrape everything into the braising liquid.

Heat up a separate pot (we used a wok, but any large saucepan will do) and add in the remaining butter. Once melted, add in the leeks and cook over low heat until they start to get soft. Add in your arborio rice and a dash more olive oil and stir over medium heat for a few minutes to coat the rice with oil and butter.

Add in the remaining wine to the pan and stir until it is absorbed by the rice.

Slowly add the braising liquid to the pan about 1/4 cup at a time, stirring until it is absorbed. Continue to add liquid, stirring to absorb, until the rice is soft but not mushy… okay, al dente. I wasn’t going to say it, but you made me. Add in the lamb meat, mushrooms, and cheese and stir for another minute to combine.

Serve with a crispy cucumbery salad and a glass of rosé.

I do love a good elaborate meal prep, but a lot of the time practical concerns get in the way and you just need to get something on the table in ~10 minutes that doesn’t suck. I was faced with a similar dilemma last week — coming home from work around 6:50, we were having guests over at 7:15 and I’d committed to cooking something meaty. The whole way home I was thinking about what to buy and how to cook it — I settled on seared chicken thighs: basically, cook them the way you’d cook a steak. Simple, high heat, fast and delicious.

Ingredients:

• 4-5 boneless skinless chicken thighs
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon dried rosemary
• salt and pepper to taste – but don’t be stingy!

What made this so fast was parallel prep. There’s also some spare time in there while the chicken is cooking so you can double up with a quick sauteed spinach or other veggie side to make a complete meal.

First off, start a cast iron pan heating up over medium heat and set your oven to 400 (we may or may not need the over, but best to be safe!).

As the pan is heating, trim the chicken thighs of any excess fat (not too much now, we still want that extra goodness). Rub thighs with the vegetable oil, then apply salt, pepper, and rosemary.  When you’re done, put them in your (now really hot) cast iron. Lay them out flat, make sure none of them are doubled up – the thinner the better.

Cook for about 4 minutes on one side, resisting the urge to mess with them while they’re in then pan, and flip and cook for another 3-4 minutes. If they’re not done at this point, as measured by thermometer or a quick cut to test for chicken sushi, either lower the heat and continue to cook in the pan, or throw the whole pan in the oven.

I like the oven option since then you can set up your sides or table while you wait for the chicken to finish.

Serve with rice or couscous. Sweet! That was fast!