When I was in Paris, I sent this recipe that I had developed to my parents, hoping they would try it for a more pâté-de-campagne-like version of our standard meatloaf that I had developed. Knowing my mother's aversion to garlic, I suggested that the two fat garlic cloves called for could be sliced and spread on the top and removed before serving, to get just a whiff of that garlic flavor, but it is really much better when they are mashed into the ground meats.
This new recipe includes a technique I've been using for years: roasting the turkey in two stages. I do this because of the Big Turkey Problem: while you're waiting for the turkey's dark meat to cook (which takes longer), the white breast meat dries out. My solution: cook the bird until the breast is still juicy, remove the bird from the oven, and carve off the two sides of the breast. Put the bird back in the oven -and while the dark meat's finishing, serve a white-meat first course. Twenty minutes later, you can serve a dark-meat second course. And you get to drink two wines with this main course: I always like to serve a white wine with the white-meat course and a red wine with the dark-meat course. By the way: the honey-pepper rub burnishes the big bird beautifully.
Sweet, tart and snappy with healthy shots of hot sauce, and grilled to near potato chip crispness, in our book the chicken wing approaches celestial perfection. Neither light meat nor dark, they are a coupling of both, and nothing pulls in flavor and crisps up in cooking quite like wings. It’s that wonderful proportion of luscious skin to meat and bone.
Lucy says, "I am a former vegetarian, but at my house we still enjoy meat-free cookouts. I find that some of the best tasting grill items are meat-free. Try this one that both meat eaters and vegetarians alike will devour."
Foodtalk contributor Miss Capri's Chef adapted this recipe from a dish his mother used to make. He says this version was invented "the day Tricky Dick went to the big Jell-O buffet in the sky."
A lovely thing about this dish is that it can be a meal for vegetarians or carnivores alike, and nothing says summer like eating with our fingers. Eating outside means we have permission to pick up all sorts of things — from chicken wings and hot dogs to these lamb–and vegetable–filled rollups. This is the way it works: Set out a pile of lettuce leaves, a pile of fresh herbs, some ground chile, a bowl of store-bought chickpea dip (hummus), and some instant chive-yogurt sauce. Heap the grilled vegetables on one platter, the cooked lamb on another.
Often improvisations are fueled by memories of dishes past; they're attempts to recreate a singular set of flavors or a dish's particular pleasure. When I found myself yearning for two classic fish dishes I used to eat in France years ago, I made an amalgam of the two, to capture the crispiness of goujonettes—fillets of sole cut into strips, dusted with flour, and deep-fried, and the comforting delicate butteriness of sole meuniére—whole or fillets, flour-dusted and panfried in butter.
Ingredients
The "3 and down" spareribs used in this recipe are my (Chris's) absolute favorite type of ribs. These beauties are small enough to be manageable, but they have plenty of fat and incredible pork flavor. It just doesn't get any better than this in the rib department.
This soup can also be served cold, with a few fresh chervil leaves rather than the Parmesan cream. And it makes a nice small appetizer if presented in espresso cups, in which case it will serve at least 12.