Side

I don’t know any chef who travels with his own grits except Scott Peacock. And you can understand why. Once you have tasted those Southern stone-ground grits, it is hard to settle for less. But I hope he will forgive me for offering here a recipe for ordinary supermarket grits. They cook in 20 minutes, and I have borrowed Scott’s method of cooking them partially in milk, which makes them so much creamier. This way, at least you may get so hooked on grits that you’ll send away for the grittier stone- ground variety and give over part of a Sunday afternoon to stirring them as they cook slowly for a long time, the longer the better. Either way, grits are good with so many things—shrimp, chicken, game, pork, ham. I always make extra so that I can have some fried grits for breakfast the next day. Avoid instant grits and look for the old-fashioned ones.

Preparing a fine dish of Moroccan couscous used to be a labor of love—steaming, sifting , and fluffing up the little pearl granules made from semolina durum wheat all required quite a lot of time. But now we get a precooked couscous that takes minutes to prepare. It may not have quite the light finish of the old way, but it is a boon to a cook coming home at the end of a day and wanting to put an easy, well-balanced meal together. I remember Claudia Roden, years ago, introducing me to this North African grain product. We were cooking for a dinner party she was giving , working together in her comfortable kitchen, decorated with Middle Eastern tiles, at Wild Hatch, on the edge of Hampstead Heath in London. She had me fluffing the couscous, teaching me all the steps, as we gossiped and got to know each other better. It reminded me of her description—in her first, ground-breaking book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food—of the women in her extended family in Cairo, where she grew up, who would spend afternoons shaping and stuffing tempting mezze pastries and enjoying every moment. I’m afraid we’ve forgotten how cooking together gives that kind of pleasure. But here’s the easy formula for one serving of couscous.

Wild rice isn’t really a rice—it’s a grain—and the best of it comes from Native Americans in the upper Midwest who harvest it in the traditional way, beating the ripened grains into their canoes at harvest time. The cultivated variety is all right and takes a little less time to cook, but it doesn’t have the texture of the wild variety. Evan, being a loyal Minnesotan, always sent for wild rice from Blackduck, Minnesota, and I have kept up the tradition, ordering Slindee wild rice, as the producers are now known. It takes about an hour for wild rice to cook, so it’s not for a quick dinner. But it reheats perfectly, and I always make extra and enjoy it in a number of ways.

This is a recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, written when none of us knew the spices and hot peppers that she introduced us to. It’s a simple dish that makes your leftover rice come alive in surprising ways. You can eat it just as is for a light lunch or supper, or as an accompaniment to a Western meat course. I like it alone with some Cucumber Raita (page 163) alongside.

Here’s a simple Japanese way with cooked rice that Hiroko Shimbo showed me when I asked her one day what she would do with leftover rice. It’s called sushi salad because it’s made with sushi rice. As Hiroko points out so persuasively in her book The Sushi Experience, it’s the rice that makes it sushi, not all the various garnishes or tasty bits that are wrapped—or, in this case, tossed—in the seasoned rice. This is one of those dishes that are subject to variations depending on the season, but it’s hard to improve on the following intoxicatingly delicious summer version.

“Tian” is a Provençal word for a shallow pottery dish, and there are almost as many tians as there are vegetables. The common ingredient is usually cooked rice enlivened with a green vegetable, aromatic seasonings, and cheese. To make it for one, use a shallow, single portion baking dish.

This is an Indian sauce introduced to me by Madhur Jaffrey years ago, and I have been making it steadily ever since. It is, of course, good with almost any Indian curry dish, and I find that it is also delicious with cold chicken, lamb, salmon, or shrimp—in other words, an excellent way of dressing up leftovers.

This nourishing bulgur-wheat salad provides a satisfying way of using up some of the huge bunch of parsley that the supermarket foisted on you. If it’s wintertime and you don’t have access to fresh mint, use 1/2 teaspoon dried mint and stir it into the still-warm bulgur after you’ve drained it, so the mint will have a chance to expand and release its flavor.

I prefer this sauce to any other for cold meats, fish, and poultry, or those innards that I like so much.

One of my favorite suppers is a good sausage with warm potato salad. I love the way the sausage juices mingle with the tender new potatoes bathed in a mustardy vinaigrette—a very French taste that makes me nostalgic.

Here’s a sparkling salad that makes superb use of that one-third or so of a plump fennel bulb that you couldn’t consume in one sitting.