Maya

Lots of people who like to cook find inspiration in dishes their parents make, or their grandparents. But what about their kids?

Maya is a baker. She is a dessert queen. She went into the kitchen by herself when she was about 11, picked up a spatula, and never looked back. Blondies, brownies, lemon squares, chocolate chip cookies—the girl has not yet met a stick of butter she could not bend to her sweet-toothed will. “Baking is very satisfying,” she says. “It’s fun to make something and have it come out really delicious and have people like it.”

Now, three years later, Maya dabbles in non-dessert foods—oven carrot fries, for example, and homemade pasta—but those dabblings, while quite successful, do not give her quite the same satisfaction as the sweets. Can’t say that I blame her; snagging a carrot stick from a roasting pan just isn’t the same as sticking your finger in a bowl of cookie batter.

But perhaps it is the reliability of baking that appeals to her, the formulas, the chemistry between the ingredients that all but promises success. “I like to follow a recipe and know it will come out right,” Maya says. So far, so good. Maya started making chocolate birthday cakes a couple years ago, from a recipe she found on a plain old tin of Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa. Unbelievably good. Her next holy grails are a coconut cake and a “death-by-chocolate” torte. Both “seem like real projects,” she says happily. “Sometimes I’m in the mood for something easy, but sometimes I’m in the mood for a challenge.”

It is springtime, and I suppose we should be talking about rhubarb, or fiddleheads, or ramps, etc., etc. All those ingredients are fresh and wonderful (except for fiddleheads—eh), but Maya would compost them in a flash if she had butter, chocolate, and peppermint extract at the ready.

Yes, peppermint extract—or creme de menthe—destined for a batch of brownies that may change the way you think about brownies. These are rich and fudgy, but also fresh and cool, with the tiniest sharp edge from the peppermint. Brownies for springtime.

Mint Brownies

(adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

1 stick butter

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup flour

1 large pinch salt

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. peppermint extract or 1/4 cup creme de menthe (if using the latter, add an extra tablespoon of flour)

1/2 to 3/4 cup white chocolate chips (the mint mitigates the heavy sweetness, promise!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch square pan, or line it with aluminum foil and grease the foil (easier cleanup and extraction of brownies!).

Melt chocolate and butter together over low heat. Transfer to a bowl, and mix in the sugar and the eggs. Stir in the flour, then the extracts, then the white chocolate chips. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool, then pop the brownies in the fridge and chill until cold before cutting into squares.

Jiwon

"I love tofu so much." Now that is a declaration you do not hear every day.

But tofu is one of the foods that Jiwon always has in her refrigerator, along with mushrooms (any kind) and kimchee (home-made). Growing up in Seoul, she remembers waiting for the tofu-maker to come around in the late afternoon. He would announce his approach by ringing a little bell, "like an ice-cream truck," she says. The tofu would still be warm.

Jiwon works long hours and forages leftovers on weekday evenings, but on weekends she often hosts friends, neighbors, or coworkers for dinner. She cooks everything from basic dishes like Chap Chae (stir-fried noodles) —"what every Korean housewife should know," she says—to specialties from her mother's repertoire, such as a pine-nut sauce with soy and garlic served over cucumbers, Asian pears, or cold meat.

When Jiwon was a girl, her mother would send her off in the morning with homemade snacks like sushi, and bread filled with red bean paste, and she DELIVERED a hot lunch to her daughter at school every day. A little extreme, Jiwon says, but not unheard of. Nor did it go unnoticed by Jiwon's classmates. "My mother always gave me more than I could eat myself, so I could use nice food in making friends," she says. "I always had a little entourage around me when it was time to eat snacks." Yet at home Jiwon was not allowed in the kitchen. She was "the clumsy one," according to her mother.

As a result, when Jiwon arrived in California for graduate school at the age of 24, she did not even know how to cook rice. Her roommate, from Chicago's south side, introduced her to that culinary building block called Hamburger Helper, which, Jiwon says, "was okay for a while." Eventually realizing she had to feed herself in a more satisfying way, Jiwon found a Korean cookbook and began making rustic, simple meals. Then she began throwing dinner parties. Then she got interested in deep-frying. "My friends would be sitting around, starving, for five hours, and finally I would serve them this very greasy, clumsy food," she says.

Yet it was the social aspect of cooking and eating that Jiwon valued, and still does. She likes to feed people. It makes her—and her guests—happy. In a couple of hours one afternoon, she creates scallion pancakes called Pajeon; also, Chap Chae with sweet potato noodles, beef, and vegetables; sliced beef in cucumber cups, and stir-fried French horn mushrooms. The evening's guests will be a couple from work and their young daughter. Jiwon has her sights set on the little girl. "I want her to like eating my food," she says. "Then she will want to come back again and again."

Pajeon

1 ½ cups flour

1 to 2 cups water

1 egg

½ pound scallops

1 can crabmeat

2 bunches scallions, chopped into 2-inch pieces

salt and pepper to taste

oil for frying

Dipping sauce: Mix together a few tablespoons soy sauce, a few drops of rice vinegar, and toasted sesame seeds

Mix flour, water, and egg to make a smooth, thin batter (like crepe batter). Stir in scallops, crabmeat, and scallions. Season with salt and pepper. Coat the bottom of a skillet with a film of neutral-flavored oil. Ladle batter into the pan to form cakes approximately 3 inches in diameter, and fry until golden brown. Flip and fry until second side is golden brown. Serve hot or warm with dipping sauce.

Robert

When I call Robert to schedule an interview, he says, "I cook on rocks, I cook underground, I cook in trash cans, that sort of thing." Okay, so he's an extreme-sport kind of cook, a manly-man cook. He probably doesn't do everyday stuff, like dinner.

Wrong. Robert is a former boy scout who cooks for his wife most evenings—nice, normal things like pasta and salmon and potato pancakes.






















Here is Robert with two pasties (pronounced PAST-eez, not to be confused with a certain fringe-y accessory). These meat and vegetable pies are a family tradition that comes from Michigan, where Robert grew up. It's a dish with history, too; it arrived in Michigan with the Cornish miners who emigrated there in the early 1800s to work in the iron and copper mines. Robert's father's father, a sheet metal worker, was the family pasty maker. As a child, Robert found that peeling potatoes for a batch of his grandfather's pasties was a pretty good gig.

His mother, with five kids to feed, found little joy in cooking ("Her idea of a perfectly cooked vegetable was one you could drink through a straw," Robert says), and she gave her son free rein in the kitchen as long as he cleaned up after himself. So he baked. He experimented. He cooked over fires with fellow boy scouts. To earn a merit badge, he made pot roast and cherry pie in an underground, rock-lined fire pit.


Decades later, Robert still goes for the occasional over-the-top (i.e. INSANE) project. With his partner in culinary INSANITY, Mike C., he recently took on a Turducken, a boned chicken inside a boned duck inside a boned turkey, stuffed with sausage and cornbread. Then there was a Timpani, the giant Italian concoction featured in the movie "Big Night" that consists of layers of sausage, cheese, vegetables, and pasta, all wrapped in bread dough and baked. And every Easter, Robert and his wife, brother, and sister-in-law feed sticky buns and eggs cooked to order to dozens of guests who take turns at the table; the record is 121. On camping trips, Robert roasts turkey in a trash can.

Whew. Back to the pasties.

There are different camps when it comes constructing this meal-in-a-crust. Robert's family always makes it with sliced vegetables and diced meat instead of the more typical ground meat. And some people try to get all fancy with additions like, gulp, nutmeg. Robert shakes his head. "People made pasties to use up meat scraps and other leftover bits," he says. "It's miners' food, workers' food, something you could wrap in a towel and eat with dirty hands." These days Robert slices his pasties into wedges and eats them with a fork. But nutmeg? Never.


Pasties

This makes one very large pasty. Robert used to eat a whole one himself, back in the day, but now he says it can serve at least two. He always doubles the recipe and bakes two pasties together in one pie plate.

1 c. flour
1 pinch salt
6 Tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
6-8 Tbsp. ice water
1 small onion
1/2 lb. beef chuck, cut into strips 1/2 inch wide and 1 inch long
1 large russet potato, thinly sliced
salt and pepper to taste

Crust: Make a volcano with the flour, sprinkle it with two tablespoons of the water and stir briefly to moisten. Chop the butter into the flour until it resembles coarse meal, then add water gradually and mix with your hands until the dough can be gathered into a ball. Using the heel of your hand, press down hard on the dough and twist your hand three times. Wrap the dough in plastic, chill for at least 30-45 minutes, and then roll out to fit a 9-inch pie plate.
Assembly: layer the meat and veggies on one half of the crust, potatoes first, then onions, then meat, then salt and pepper. Repeat, and end with a layer of potatoes. Fold the rest of the crust over the filling, pinch the edges closed, and poke lots of vents in the top crust with a thin skewer or pointy knife to allow steam to escape. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown.

Orly

Here in Brattleboro, it is neither weird nor rare for people to raise chickens in their backyards. I’m not talking about farmers—I mean regular people who just want really good eggs without shelling out $5 a dozen. Or people who fall in love with the cute, fuzzy chicks at Agway in the spring and soon end up with UNcute, UNfuzzy hens that can be a MAJOR pain in the ass to corral into their coop every night. (I have babysat chickens. Not a pretty sight.)

My neighbor, Orly, is one of these people. With six laying hens hanging out next to her garage, she (well, really her husband, Eric) collects a couple dozen eggs every week. It makes total sense that one of the go-to foods in their house is quiche. “I think the allure of it has to do with taking simple ingredients and making something really tasty with not too much effort,” Orly says. Plus it reminds her of a trip she and Eric took to Paris, where they ate little quiches at sidewalk cafés to fortify themselves for miles of walking around the city.

Orly’s father was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, so she grew up eating middle eastern dishes like me’oday, a veal and potato stew that provoked fights among Orly and her brothers and sisters over who would get the bone marrow. Their Israeli grandmother visited every year and always made kibbeh, a dish of beef, allspice, and pine nuts in a bulghur wheat crust. Orly liked the delicate work of shaping the kibbeh, which “had to be perfect,” she recalls, or her grandmother would take them apart and fix them. Orly’s mom was considerably more laid-back in the kitchen. She was an eyeballer and, for the most part, so is Orly. “I’d make a lousy cookbook writer,” Orly says. The more measuring you do, she reasons, the more dishes there are to wash.

This is not to say Orly lacks ambition: she is a baker who will grind her own pistachio paste for a cake project, and makes pies because she’s a pie purist and finds most specimens lacking. (“Apples with cranberries? I don’t do that,” she says firmly.) With two full-time jobs, though, and two young children, she and Eric often find themselves beyond the kind of meals that require measuring.

But EGGS. Fried, scrambled, baked in a buttery crust. Eggs are perfect.

Onion-broccoli quiche

Orly likes onion, her kids eat broccoli, so this pie-chart of a quiche satisfies everyone. Orly often mixes and rolls out the crust the night before and stores it in the fridge, wrapped up.

1 stick butter, plus 1-1/2 Tbsp.

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp. salt

2-3 Tbsp. water

3 medium onions, sliced thin

1 c. steamed broccoli (optional)

1 c. shredded cheddar or gruyere cheese

7 backyard eggs (these are smaller than store-bought eggs; Orly suggests 5 or 6 of those)

1 cup milk

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Crust: Combine the stick of butter, the flour, and the salt with a pastry cutter, making sure to leave little pea-sized clumps of butter. Stir in water to form dough. Roll out 1/4-inch thick and place in a 9-inch pie plate.

Filling: Melt remaining 1-1/2 Tbsp. butter in a skillet. Sauté the onions over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until they soften, about 10 minutes, or longer if you want them more caramelized. Sprinkle the cheese into the crust, and layer the onions on top, along with the broccoli if you are using it. Beat eggs with the milk and salt and pepper and pour over the vegetables and cheese. Bake for about one hour. When the quiche is golden brown and “puffy like a soufflé,” Orly says, it’s done.

[Theo]

Imagine that it’s late afternoon on the weekend. Your thoughts turn to dinner. “Don’t sweat it,” says your 11-year-old kid. “I’ll just whip up some fresh pasta. Ravioli sound good?”

Okay, it’s not quite that smooth and effortless, but here it is, a Saturday afternoon, and Theo is making pasta. Smoked gouda ravioli, to be exact. And he’s got the cooking-demo routine down: he points out the pasta dough he already made and set aside to rest, then starts a fresh batch, cracking a couple eggs into a bowl of flour.

Theo has been hanging around the kitchen since he was three and was able to pull a chair up to the counter to stand on. When he was four, his mom handed him a knife so he could cut up an apple. His dad walked into the kitchen. “Uh, Theo has a sharp knife!” he said with alarm. “He’s fine with it,” his mom replied.

And he was. With a bit of prodding, Theo recalls past culinary feats: real macaroni and cheese; waffles from scratch; a tour-de-force sandwich he created with a friend out of peanut butter, whipped cream, chocolate and caramel sauces, and sliced bread, of course. “It was messy,” he says. “But good.”

Theo cooks regularly at home, where he and his younger brother are each expected to help prepare one dinner a week. Through the gardening and cooking program at his school, he has helped make dilly beans, potato leek soup, and cornbread. Theo even made culinary concerns the center of his campaign for student council: he promised that not only would he try to get more vegetarian meals on the school lunch menu, he would try to bring back chocolate milk. He won.

At some point Theo discovered the hand-crank pasta machine his parents got fifteen years ago as a wedding present. “Rolling out pasta is fun,” he says. “It’s like holding a snake.” Equally appealing is the machine itself. It requires assembly, hand-eye coordination, and, when making filled pasta such as ravioli, a willingness to collaborate. Theo works with his mom or dad to turn the crank, insert the already-rolled stretches of dough, and spoon or sprinkle in the filling. He does NOT cook with his younger brother. There would be too much yelling, he says.

Theo celebrated his birthday in the fall, and among his presents were a whisk and a hatchet. He is working on his scrambled-egg technique, his mom reports; hence, the whisk. But what’s the hatchet for? “Chopping stuff down outside,” he says with a shrug. Duh.

Fresh Egg Pasta (from The Joy of Cooking)

Theo’s family usually makes a half-recipe. They filled the ravioli with either grated smoked gouda cheese, mashed sweet potato, or a sauteed mushroom-spinach mixture. Theo prefers the straight cheese version.

3 1/2 c. flour

5 large eggs or 7 egg whites

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. oil

Place the flour in a bowl, making a well in the center. Beat the eggs lightly with a fork, drawing in flour as you go, until the eggs are mixed in and slightly thickened. Knead into a cohesive dough. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes before using it with a pasta-maker, following whatever directions come with the machine.

Let the ravioli sit for 10 minutes. Cook them in boiling water until they float to the surface, about 3 minutes. Drain and toss with a little butter or olive oil or tomato sauce, and top with grated cheese.

[Dar]

I first heard about Dar because she made a mutual friend some chocolate truffles that looked something like this.

Incredible, right? When Dar agreed to be interviewed, however, she offered to cook one of her vegetarian interpretations of a classic French stew. Thank goodness she changed her mind. I mean, I’ve got nothing against meatless cassoulet, but chocolate truffles? NO CONTEST.

And these truffles are, in a word, sensuous. They are beautiful—not surprisingly, because Dar is a graphic designer—but their taste! Intense and smooth, layered with one flavor after another. Bite into one truffle and taste the richness of caramel, then a touch of crunchy salt; another gives you first a wave of coffee, then a hit of cinnamon, then a flush of cayenne heat. And who knew white chocolate, usually just painfully sweet, could taste this complex, infused with saffron and honey? Sigh.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Dar. The woman behind these truffles grew up in northern New York state, about an hour south of Montreal, in a family of food-lovers. Case in point: her French-Canadian grandmother, who frequently set aside her meat, potatoes, and cornichons to travel and send postcards home that were “pithy,” Dar says, and indicative of her priorities. “Didn’t care for Hunan cuisine. Enjoyed Szechuan.”

So it’s not weird at all that cooking and baking were the extracurricular activities of choice for Dar and her brother and sister as they were growing up—“how we amused ourselves after school,” she says. They helped get dinner on the table, too, and we’re not talking cube steaks or Tater Tots. Dar liked to make chicken piccata and lasagne. Her brother tackled a bûche de noël when he was 12 or 13.

Dar cooked her way through Italian dishes; Indian; her Polish grandmother’s repertoire of pierogi, latkes, and cheesecake (“Try as I might,” Dar says, “it’s just not same when I make it.”). Along the way, she became a vegetarian, and spent a couple years in Eastern Europe, cooking lots and lots of root vegetables.

But chocolate was always the constant. Years ago, Dar and her mom had started a tradition of making candy during the winter holidays. Over time, Dar moved beyond nut clusters to truffles and mousse, experimenting with ideas she picked up from chocolate shops like the defunct Joseph Schmidt Confections in San Francisco, where she used to live, and our local mecca, Burdick’s in Walpole, New Hampshire. “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I probably eat chocolate every day,” Dar says. “It’s my comfort food. And I tell my mother it’s medicinal. She likes that.”

Dar hopes to someday open a little chocolate shop of her own, which is why, sadly, she is declining to share her truffle formula. But instead, behold: chocolate mousse!







Chocolate Mousse
(Adapted from Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey Remolif Shere)

3 oz. semisweet chocolate
3 oz. unsweetened chocolate
2 Tbsp. cognac or your liqueur of choice
2 Tbsp. brewed coffee
4 eggs
1 cup whipping cream

Separate the eggs and set aside. Chop the chocolate into small pieces. Melt chocolate with the brandy and coffee in a double boiler over low heat until it is smooth, glossy, and lump-free. Remove from heat and whisk the egg yolks into the chocolate. Whip the cream until it holds a soft shape. Heat the egg whites until they are barely warm by swirling the bowl above a burner/gas flame. Beat them until they hold soft peaks. Stir about a quarter of them into the chocolate mixture, then fold in the rest. Fold in the whipped cream. Pour into individual serving bowls, or into a large serving bowl. Chill and serve with fresh whipped cream and/or fruit.

[Bob]

This is Bob. Bob claims to have only one tastebud. Do not invite him to dinner and serve him a pork chop and a salad.

"There is nothing more boring," he says. "I like food that bites hard. I like a salsa or a peanut sauce or something that makes my mouth say, 'Wow, why didn't I think of that?' "

Bob is a biologist, a traveler, a hobo-at-heart who rides a motorcycle instead of the rails and stops wherever there is a decent Mexican restaurant. Earlier this year he mapped out a month-long cross-country ride and set his sights on Santa Fe because he knew of a place there that made really, really good Chile Rellenos. He made his way south to the Cumberland Gap of Kentucky, across Oklahoma, and as far north as the Dakotas, all the while noticing how many mom-and-pop restaurants had closed their doors. "The food in rural America is withering on the vine—at least where I was," he says.

Bob grew up in southern California, eating Tex-Mex border food and old-school square meals prepared by his mom, who considered cooking little more than an activity to be endured. Then, in the 1980s, Bob’s first wife showed him that cooking could be fun, and he grabbed the ball and ran. There were Chinese cooking classes, wine tastings, cannoli-making ventures that involved rolling pastry around a curtain rod, and, after numerous visits south of the border, authentic Mexican food. That is pretty much where Bob settled down. "I can't imagine too many meals without cilantro," he says.

Years, and many enchiladas, passed. Bob began to cook less frequently. He taught biology to college students, tended a greenhouse full of exotic plants, built a house, fell in love with motorcycles, and gradually replaced his Bon Appetit and Gourmet subscriptions with Roadrunner and Motorcycle Consumer News. "I continue to appreciate really good food, but the cooking thrill kind of petered out of me," he says.

Still, if called upon, Bob will pull out his old aluminum comal—a Mexican griddle—and make the tomatillo salsa he ate in large quantities when he lived in Guanajuato, in central Mexico. "There is nothing subtle about salsas down there," he says. They're either smoky from chipotle peppers, or earthy from pasillas, or fresh and sharp from jalapenos or serranos. "If you've got enough hair for a habanero, then more power to you," Bob says.

Making the salsa is hardly rocket science, he says; you soften and blacken the tomatillos, onions, and peppers on the comal, or in a frying pan, and then pop them in a blender. Done. Throw in a little pineapple, Bob suggests. "You can hybridize it any way you want to."


Tomatillo Salsa
15-20 tomatillos, husks removed
1 small onion, peeled and halved crosswise
1-2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 fresh chile pepper (Bob used a jalapeno)
1-2 tbsp. chopped cilantro
1/4-1/2 tsp. salt or to taste

Heat a cast iron skillet or griddle over medium heat. Blacken the tomatillos, onion, garlic, and chile, turning so they soften, cook through, and char all over, about 10-15 minutes. (You could also boil the vegetables until soft, but you'd miss out on a lot of flavor.) Seed the pepper when it is cool enough to handle. Place all the veggies in a blender or a food processor and puree. If necessary, add a tablespoon or two of water to help blend. Stir in cilantro and salt to taste.

Makes approximately 2 1/2 cups

[Seth]

Mmm . . . pie.

Invoking Homer Simpson is probably the wrong thing to do here, but come on! Isn’t it the first thing that comes to mind when you see this?
















Let’s get one thing straight, though. Seth, a college professor and the creator of this raspberry masterpiece, is the anti-Homer Simpson. He is organized, calm, diplomatic, and reasonable. We're digressing beyond the realm of food and cooking here, but just look at how the guy lays out his utensils before he gets to work.












That sense of orderliness and composure may come naturally to Seth, but it was enhanced by one of his formative food experiences: eating almost daily at the Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop in New Haven, Connecticut, when he was a student. The man who worked the grill was named Lew. “Lew was an artist of short order cooking,” Seth says. From him, Seth learned “to see the beauty in economy of motion,” he says. “Lew was extremely efficient and unflappable. He produced a lot of lunches under pressure.”

Seth has got the efficient and unflappable thing down pat, which is helpful when it comes to rolling out pie crust and weaving it into lattice. But he doesn’t do much short-order cooking under pressure—unless you count the meals he makes for his three-year-old and nine-month-old. That’s REAL pressure.

As a kid, Seth’s interest in food was typically perfunctory. His curiosity grew, and developed into an obsession, when he spent a summer working in Hong Kong. He didn’t cook much there, but oh, how he ate! Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian—“the food was so good, so varied,” Seth says. The theme stuck. A 20-year-old copy of Ken Hom’s Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking—Seth’s bible in graduate school—remains in play, and the one indispensable gadget in his kitchen is a rice cooker.

Yet in the summer and early fall, Seth is all about PIE. Fruit pies. Blueberry. Peach. And lovely raspberry, which turns out to be something of a political statement for Seth, a subtle eat-local call to arms. Because raspberries are so fragile, he says, they are difficult to produce and ship in large quantities—the opposite of wheat, say, or corn. “They lend themselves least well to commodification,” he says proudly. Such a rabble-rouser, that Seth.

Honestly, though, this pie isn't about politics; it's about love. When Seth made a raspberry pie for a potluck dinner earlier in the summer, his wife, Kate, failed to snag a piece. She was understandably bitter. So this one is for her.

Summer Raspberry Pie with Wine Pastry
(adapted from Great Pies & Tarts by Carole Walter)
Pastry
2 1/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 tbsp. sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
2/3 cup cold vegetable shortening, cut into small pieces
3 tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
5-6 tbsp. cold white wine
Filling
6 cups fresh raspberries
1 tbsp. instant tapioca
3/4 cup sugar or to taste
2-2 1/2 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. grated orange zest (Seth used a chopped dried apricot)
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 tbsp. unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Sift together dry pastry ingredients in a large bowl. Add shortening and butter, toss to coat with flour, and cut the fats into the flour with a pastry blender until mixture resembles course meal. Add the wine, one tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork to blend, until the dough holds together when you press it with your fingertips. Don't overmix! Form dough into two disks, cover in plastic wrap, and chill at least 30 minutes. Roll one disk into a 13-inch circle, place it in a 9-inch pie plate, and trim the edge, leaving a half-inch overhang.

Wash and dry the raspberries. Place them in a bowl and sprinkle with tapioca, shaking the bowl to distribute. Let stand 15 minutes.

Combine sugar, cornstarch, and orange zest/dried apricot in a small bowl. Sprinkle two tablespoons of this mixture over the pie crust. Place half the raspberries in the crust, sprinkle with half the sugar mixture, then repeat with the rest of the raspberries and the sugar mixture. Drizzle with lemon juice and dot with butter.

Now we get fancy: roll the remaining dough disk into a 13-inch circle. Cut into 1-or 2-inch strips with a knife or a pastry wheel/pizza cutter. Lay one of the longer strips down the center of the pie. Place a shorter strip on either side, then rotate the pie 90 degrees. Center another longer strip on top of the pie, weaving it over and under the first three strips. Repeat the weaving with two more strips. Add additional shorter strips to the sides if you cut narrower strips, as Seth did. Or throw a little tantrum, shake your fist at the over-under weaving, and simply lay the strips down in a pretend woven pattern. Fold the bottom-crust edge over the ends of the lattice and crimp gently.

With a cookie sheet or a piece of aluminum foil on the rack below to catch drips, bake the pie for 55 minutes, until crust is golden brown and juices begin to bubble. Important: cover the edges of the crust with foil or a pie crust shield for the first 40 minutes to prevent burning. Remove from oven, cool on a rack, and torture yourself by letting the pie stand for at least three hours before serving.

[Dan]

The first thing to know about Dan is that he is nice to children.

He loves food and cooking, too, natch, but he is an elementary-school teacher with a compassionate, generous soul, and he came to my house to cook and ended up discussing books with my daughter.

Other interesting things to know about Dan: he built his own house; he’s a vegetarian who craves pastrami; and, get this, he says he never feels food guilt. What the hell? Is that a man thing? Barbecue chips, vegetarian Slim Jims, chocolate, LOTS of chocolate—Dan runs through a short list of foods he loves to eat even though he knows they’re not so good for him, but guilt? Not a shred.

He grew up watching his mom make chicken parmesan, baked beans, brisket, and hamentaschen (three-cornered, fruity pastries). Oh, and she worked full-time, too. “She was a good cook,” Dan says. “And it couldn’t have been easy.” He was the youngest of four boys—four constantly hungry boys. “There’s a reason I eat as fast as I do," he says. "If you didn’t get to seconds early, you didn’t get seconds.”

When Dan was in elementary school, he was the family’s go-to guy for making Passover charoset, the chopped-apple mixture that symbolizes mortar during the Seder meal. He didn’t really start cooking until college, though. He went through a Molly Katzen phase (one of the original Moosewood-ians), which manifested itself in many bowls of black bean soup. Gradually, Dan recognized that the process of cooking was, for him, a form of relaxation. “It totally de-stresses me," he says. "As long as there’s no one else in the kitchen. I don’t really like help.”

What he does like is cooking seasonally, which sounds all idyllic and Alice-Waters-y, but for Dan it means lots of fresh vegetables from his CSA in the summer and peanut butter cake in the winter. Right now the rain has eased up in southern Vermont and gardens have come alive, so Dan is sighing contentedly and envisioning dishes like roasted beets with a balsamic-molasses glaze and crumbled goat cheese, or a Thai noodle salad with carrots and snap peas. He likes a sweet-savory blend of flavors; “I think raisins taste good in a lot of things,” he says. He even claims hummus on banana bread is a worthy combo, but I'm afraid I may have to draw the line at that one.

Instead, try the noodle salad. It's inspired by the “Thai spaghetti” that Dan used to eat in a tiny Thai restaurant in Portland, Maine, nearly a decade ago. For those of us who are incapable of sticking to a recipe, it's a welcome model of flexibility: the herbs and veggies can be swapped around or increased, tofu or another chopped-up protein could be added, and any thoughts of precise measuring should be tossed out the window. “I cook, I taste, I cook, I taste,” Dan says. When the salad tastes like he remembers, it’s done.



[Rice noodle salad]

1/2 lb. quarter-inch-wide rice noodles
1 carrot, julienned
a really big handful peapods (a scant cup)
3 scallions, chopped
fresh herbs, approximately 5 Tbsp. (Dan used 3 Tbsp. chopped mint and a scant 2 Tbsp. chopped cilantro, but you could include some fresh basil in the mix as well)
1/2 cup lime juice
3/4 cup Mae Ploy sweet chili sauce

(Dan also likes to include thinly sliced cabbage, about 1/4 head. And add a little soy sauce if you like a saltier taste.)

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Cook the noodles according to the directions on the package. Drain and cool completely. (Here's my back-seat-driver suggestion: rinse the noodles in cold water once or twice while they're cooling so they don't clump together.) In a bowl, place the noodles, chopped veggies, and herbs. Combine the lime juice and sweet chili sauce in a separate bowl and then add to the noodles, tossing gently to mix. Adjust seasoning if necessary. Dan says, “It should taste really lime-y.”