Brunch

Min’s Cranberry Fruit Salad is the result of her crusade to bring vibrant colors and crisp textures to those brown winter meals—including plenty of the cheater pulled and chopped meats. Bright cranberries and fall fruits make a drop-dead gorgeous salad with body, color, and crunch. Smoked turkey, chicken, pork loin, and brisket are always better with a bright accessory. Freeze extra cranberries in the fall to whip this up throughout the winter.

A traditional low-country boil is a whole lot easier in a kitchen than on a deck with all that huge pot, outdoor burner, and propane tank business. Usually, the corn on the cob and the new potatoes are cooked right in the boil with everything else, but in a regular kitchen stockpot, we think it’s easier to cook the vegetables separately. We like the extra depth that a little bottled smoke adds to the shrimp boil.

One of the cool things about cooking cheater barbecue is the thought that something is going on inside that slow cooker or behind the oven door while you’re off doing something else. The same is true with making lox in the fridge. Our method is just a simple take on classic cold smoking with a little bottled smoke. The fish “cooks” in sugar and salt and cold-smokes in the fridge. Three days later, like magic, you’re in lox. Serve with toasted bagels and cream cheese or dark rye bread with chopped hard-cooked egg, capers, and red onion.

Fresh briny oysters out of a jar satisfy our periodic oyster craving without the hassle of shucking. To cheat, swap the half shell for a casserole dish and dress the oysters with smoky shallots, butter, and lemon. A few minutes under the broiler and you’ve got a seaside party anywhere, anytime. Slurp them up with saltines. Cold beer, sparkling wine, and dry white wine are what we’re drinking.

We had never considered grilling monster kebabs of unidentifiable cuts of meat until we spotted those churrascaria ads in airline magazines. The Brazilian barbecue called churrasco (pronounced shoo-RAS-koo) prepared on oversized spits looks especially good when you’re strapped in a seat at 35,000 feet with only a tiny bag of peanuts. At home, a family-size sirloin, some rib eyes, or beef tenderloin steaks taste just as Brazilian with a side of chimichurri, the traditional spicy mix of fresh cilantro and parsley, onions, garlic, vinegar, and olive oil. We oil up and simply season the steaks with nothing more than salt and pepper before searing under a hot broiler. Instead of bothering with cutting the meat into chunks for skewers, cook the steaks whole and carve them into thick slices before serving. Everyone at the table can see the doneness of the pieces and can choose how much and what they want. Complete the meal with Cuban Black Beans (page 149), rice, and some kind of salad with hearts of palm thrown in. R. B. recommends a spoonful or two of chimichurri in scrambled eggs with cold steak for brunch.

Cinco de Mayo actually marks the 1862 Mexican victory over the French, not Mexican Independence Day, as some believe. Thanks to Madison Avenue, it’s a holiday more enthusiastically embraced north of the border than south. To celebrate this semicorporate affair, grilled Burgos de Mayo combine all our favorite Mexican flavors (including the tequila) on one bun. Top them off with Mayo de Mayo, our Cinco “special sauce.”

This indoor burger recipe make six burgers (too many for one pan), so use the broiler or finish the pan-seared burgers all at once in the oven. Ground beef is available in plenty of designer styles and fat-to-lean ratios. Use what you like. Remember that the higher fat content varieties like chuck have a rich, juicy taste and a smoother texture than the leaner ones, which tend to be dry and grainy. Chuck will also spatter up your stovetop and broiler a bit more. Either way, good ventilation is important. Burger doneness is an individual right that the government recommends you exercise at 160°F for proper food safety. Whatever temperature you pick, remove the burgers from heat when they are about 5 degrees below that target as the temperature will continue to rise while the meat rests. R. B. himself goes into fits above 130°F. He’s still with us, knock on wood, despite rare burgers and the raw oysters he downs with abandon.

While at first blush it may appear that this cheater pitcher was inspired by Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival, the credit belongs entirely to bottled smoke. Rim the glasses with Cheater Basic Smoked Salt with celery seed (page 48) if you like.

Cava is cheap but good Spanish sparkling wine. It makes a festive version of sangria.

Lemonade and champagne are among our top choices to serve with barbecue, so we mixed them together for an unusual shandy.

These days quality hardwood-smoked salmon and trout in convenient Cryovac packages are easy to find. What we never expected was that even canned tuna, a product that has required little contemplation beyond water- versus oil-packed, would go through a major transformation with the new retort vacuum-packed foil pouch. No can opener, no draining, and new flavors to play with. A pouch or two of hickory-smoked tuna works for this spread. When we say any fish, we mean any fish or any shellfish, like smoked oysters or clams. We usually use a frozen pack of R. B.’s patio-smoked, fresh-caught Rhode Island bluefish courtesy of his friend and neighbor Chappy Pierce. Vary the ratio of seafood to cream cheese to your liking. If things taste fishy, add lemon juice. Serve the spread mounded in a bowl garnished with capers and lemon slices. We prefer plain water crackers for serving.

In spite of his Irish tendencies to worry and brood, R. B. pretends to think of himself as an upbeat guy who genuinely wants to like things. Even so, he’s given up on grilled shrimp-stuffed jalapeño peppers. It’s hard to cook a raw shrimp tucked inside a pepper unless the pepper is roasted to bitter death. Cheesy alligator snouts—broiled and blistered jalapeños with melted cheese—never disappoint. Broil or toaster-oven these treats and all they need as garnish is plenty of cold beer. Serve the broiled snouts as a conversation-starting appetizer, whole and hot from the oven, or sliced and set in little tortilla scoops. Serve them as a side to a Mexican feast paired with Cheater Carne Adovada Alinstante (page 56). Jalapeños are usually tolerably hot, although it’s impossible to know until you take a bite. Satisfy all your guests with a combination of hot green jalapeños and the mild mini red and yellow sweet bell peppers.

Any appetizer spread, even this one of conventional cheese ball ingredients smashed into a spread, becomes much more glamorous when paired with all things pale green—celery sticks, thin green apple wedges, or Belgian endive. Don’t underestimate the allure of a generous pile of green grapes, either.

Deviled eggs can create a fair amount of anxiety. It’s the peeling that’s the problem. Experts say older eggs with more of an air pocket peel more easily, some say leave the cooked eggs in the fridge a couple of days before peeling, some say add a little vinegar to the boiling water. All we know is that when it counts, they don’t peel. Deviled Egg Spread with Smoked Paprika is the happy outcome after a fit of frustration with a bowl of broken hard-cooked eggs. Hey, you’re thinking, that’s just egg salad. So what! The smoked paprika adds the devil and makes a perfectly lovely spread for party rye or crackers.

Before he discovered cheater BBQ, the only indoor kitchen appliance R. B. had a serious relationship with was the toaster oven. He fancies himself the master of all things topped with melted cheese. Predictably, leftovers of this smoky cheese spread went right into the toaster oven on slices of thick rustic bread. Smoky Pimiento Cheese Bruschetta! Min took it to the next level with sliced fresh tomato, a few green onion bits, and a basil leaf for a “New South” Italian appetizer. Of course, the pimiento cheese is fantastic on a big juicy Cheater Kitchen Burger (page 119). We also serve our pimiento cheese along with Cheater Foie Gras (page 21), each spread on tart Granny Smith apple slices.

In the Sard dialect, the town of Villagrande is called Biddamanna. There, a vast parcel of Sard earth is su cumonale—owned by everyone of the community. Shepherds can pasture their sheep, townsfolk can collect wood for their fires, a family can cultivate a small orchard, a garden of vegetables. The Biddamannesi can walk kilometer after kilometer through forests, into the mountains, onto the moors, hunting, foraging, gathering, as they have done forever in this town with no walls, no fences. And, too, they cook for each other over great fires laid in the piazza near the village hall on feast days. Cauldrons of thick soups, mutton poached with wild grasses, and beautiful handmade pastas are offered with baskets of pane carasau and barrels of rough, purply cannonau. Though all Sards seem passionate about making packets of their food, these Biddamannesi seem more devoted, even, to the pursuit. They urge rough doughs into pouches and pillows plumped with all manner of savories and sweets, the bundles tumbled into gurgling oil or baked over wood embers or gently poached. Culingionis are raviolo-like pasta typically stuffed with bitter greens and an acidy, fresh ewe’s milk cheese or a paste of potatoes, nutmeg, cloves, wild mint, and pecorino. Though these are luscious, it is a half day’s ceremony to make them. Hence, I sometimes wrap the good potato paste in a crisp quilting of cheese pastry, a quickly done deed that gives up all the savor of the culingionis plus the prize of a gorgeous scent as the crostata bakes to crispness.

Foggia is the city studding the largest wheat fields of Italy’s south—the tavoliere—it being the ancient, present, and endless granary of the peninsula. Too, are potatoes cultivated there, soothing the Pugliese penchant for them in breads, tarts, stews. Our maîtresse d’hôtel in Foggia baked a reprise of this luscious tart evening after evening, sometimes filling it with minced lamb or thin slices of poached sausage or crumbles of smoked ricotta, and presented it barely warm as our first course.