Bacon

Eat this meal in front of the TV. Invite Clint Eastwood and the cast of your favorite spaghetti western (mine’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Recently I went with some close girlfriends to Nova Scotia. There’s a lot more than lox going on up there! At the Normaway Inn on Cape Breton Island our favorite meal was brunch; this is my version of their Eggs Benedict. It’s good for B, L, or D—breakfast, lunch, or dinner!

Serve with steamed broccoli or asparagus.

This meal is another B, L, D: good for Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner.

Serve with veggie sticks or oil-and-vinegar–dressed slaw.

This is a B-L-D meal: good for Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner.

In this dish, the hot pasta is served atop a mound of lemon-flavored ricotta cheese. The heat from the pasta will warm the cheese and send the lemony scent straight to your nose.

Serve as is or with a simple green salad.

Serve with a green tossed salad.

This is a fun spin on traditional roasted turkey. It cooks evenly, slices beautifully, and cooks much more quickly than the whole bird. We’ve even used it on Turkey Day with great success. The Jaccard is a spring-loaded meat tenderizer that has fifteen, sixteen, or forty-eight blades, depending on the model you purchase. It creates tiny, evenly spaced holes throughout the flesh, shortening the muscle fibers. This allows seasonings to penetrate to the interior of the meat, speeds the cooking time, and helps it cook more evenly. It may seem counterintuitive, but it actually works very well. You can skip this step if you don’t have a Jaccard, but we really recommend keeping one in your kitchen. It’s a very handy tool to have around.

Chefs have chased the perfect consommé for as long as there has been cuisine. Traditionally clarified using a raft of egg whites, meat, and aromatics, it was inevitable that chefs would start looking for modern alternatives. The first solution was introduced by Professor Gerd Klöck in 2004 and popularized by Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck. Ice clarification is a method of freezing gelatin-rich stocks and then slowly defrosting them through layers of cheesecloth and a fine sieve to create a perfectly clear liquid. As the gel is frozen, the water trapped in the gelatin crystallizes. This causes the sharp edges to damage the cell walls. As the frozen gel warms up, the water and all of the water-soluble components melt before the gelatin or the fats and leak out of the damaged cell structure, leaving everything else behind. The next innovation was using agar instead of gelatin to speed up the freeze-thaw process. Agar works more quickly because it has a much higher melting point. If there is no fat in the preparation, it can actually be defrosted into a filter at room temperature, which greatly reduces the filtration time. From there we made the leap of eliminating the time spent in the freezer when using agar. Syneresis is the process by which the liquid leaks out of the gel structure. Agar naturally creates a hard, brittle gel that is prone to syneresis. It seemed reasonable to us that we could easily make an agar gel and break it up in the vacuum sealer, causing the clear liquids to leak out while the impurities were trapped in the gel. Once we poured the broken gel into a cheesecloth-lined filter, we would have a clear liquid almost immediately. It worked beautifully and was a huge breakthrough for us. As we worked through the process, we realized that brisk stirring of the agar-thickened liquid was enough to break it apart and create syneresis, effectively giving us a low-tech clarification process that could be easily accomplished at home. We use a ratio of 0.25 percent agar to clarify most of our liquids. Occasionally in liquids with more dissolved impurities we increase this to 0.3 percent.

This is comfort food at its finest. It blends Italian risotto with the idea of American macaroni and cheese to create a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. And because we love the crisp juicy flavor of apples with our Cheddar cheese, we decided to take things a little further and use cider to deepen the flavors of our risotto. That hint of tartness balances out the richness of the dish. If you happen to have them around, fresh chives are a wonderful finishing garnish.