Leafy Greens

Every chef has a love-hate dish, the dish that made it into the first review, the one that customers call ahead for, the dish, therefore, the chef will never be able to take off the menu. Short ribs are mine. I used to be tortured by them, but I’ve come to accept them as a permanent member of the Lucques family. The short-rib saga began one cool and rainy weekend when, inspired by the weather, I made them for a Sunday supper. The response was so overwhelming that I added them to our daily menu. When spring arrived and the city began to warm up, I replaced the short ribs with something lighter. That week, I went out to the dining room to say hello to a friend and was assaulted by diners at three different tables, who waved me over to find out (you guessed it) where the short ribs had gone. At first I was stubborn and refused to serve them in 90-degree weather. But I had a change of heart when I realized how much people loved them and how easily I could satisfy their craving. The short ribs went back on the menu and will probably remain there for all eternity.

My mother’s version of this juicy pan-fried steak came from her grease-marked kitchen bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child. The classic bistro sauce is made by sautéing minced shallots in the same pan as the steak, adding a generous amount of red wine, and finishing it with butter and parsley. Although I love the smoky flavor of the grill, nothing gives the meat a better crust than a very hot cast-iron pan. And if you’re planning on making a pan sauce, those crispy bits left behind by the steak will give it a deep, meaty flavor. But remember to get the pan super-hot and smoking before cooking the steaks. You might have to disconnect your smoke alarm temporarily, but it’s worth it.

Rainbow trout is a delicious option for fish-loving home cooks. It’s available year-round and won’t break the bank even when you want to feed a crowd. Have your fishmonger bone and butterfly the trout for you, leaving the tail intact and keeping the two fillets attached on the fin side. This preparation is a study in contrasts, a three-way complement to the flaky flesh of the trout. The blushing sweet-tart sauce is made with both crushed grapes and verjus, the juice of unripe wine grapes. (The French used verjus in medieval and Renaissance times in much the same way we use vinegar or lemon juice today.) Less acidic and more complex than most vinegar, the verjus’s refreshing fruitiness plays counterpoint to the salty cured Italian bacon wrapped around the trout. And finally, hidden within this lively package: rich, herbaceous sorrel cream, bringing us back to earth.

Chanterelles, porcini, mousserons, and white and black trumpets are some of my favorite mushrooms for this pasta. If you can’t find any of those, use shiitake or oyster instead. When you sauté the mushrooms, don’t crowd too many in one pan. If your pan isn’t large enough, cook them in batches. I love the brightness of fresh shell beans, but in winter, you can make this dish with dried beans, such as cannellini or flageolets, which will be a little more hearty but equally delicious.

In this indulgent salad, wild mushrooms are sautéed until tender and crisp, then tossed in a warm sherry vinaigrette with bitter greens and herbs. There are so many different herbs in this salad that each forkful tastes different, depending on which herb you bite into. Chervil contributes a mild anise nuance, while chives add a peppery, oniony note. Tarragon has a pungent licorice bite, and parsley a bright grassiness. Ribbons of pecorino and a sprinkling of toasted hazelnuts are the final layer of luxury in this delicious warm salad. All Italian sheep’s milk cheeses are called pecorino. They are usually named after their place of origin, as in Pecorino Romano or Pecorino Toscano. However, my favorite pecorino, Pecorino di Grotta, for this salad is from the Emilia-Romagna region. The story goes that the local housewives would hide a wheel or two of this aged cheese in the basement (grotta), storing it for later, when they would sneak out of the house and sell it for pocket money. Let’s hope that times have changed for the ladies in Emilia-Romagna!

When I was growing up, apples seemed so bland and boring—I could never get excited about a mushy Red Delicious the way I could a summer peach. But today, thanks to small farmers around the country like Barbara and Bill Spencer of Windrose Farms, we have a lot more choices where apples are concerned, and a lot more to get excited about. Determined to revive the disappearing heirlooms, the Spencers painstakingly planted more than forty varieties of apple trees on their farm in Paso Robles, California. It took 6 years for the trees to produce, and that glorious fall, when Barbara turned up at the back door of Lucques with boxes and boxes of their impressive crop, I was blown away. The apples looked dazzlingly beautiful and tasted even better. From russeted emerald greens to mottled pinks to deep burgundy-blacks, we sampled our way through them all, picking our favorites and taking note of which were better raw and which were better cooked. Some of our favorites for eating out of hand were Braeburn, Arkansas Black, and Gernes Red Acre. Crisp, sweet, and tart, these revelatory fruits were the inspiration for this fall salad. And if it’s not enough that they’re growing all these beautiful heirloom apples, Barbara and Bill also grow some of the best Asian pears I’ve ever tasted. Juicy and delicately perfumed, they’re a fun surprise, sliced and tossed with the apples, buttermilk, mint, and radicchio in this thirst-quenching salad.

A variety of cheeses work in this salad, but I particularly love St. Agur, a triple-crème French cow’s milk blue cheese. Its pungent and intense blue flavor is balanced by an unusually creamy and sensuous texture. When shaved into long thin ribbons, the cheese is elegant on the plate and delicate on the palate. To make thin ribbons, I use an old-fashioned cheese pull, a wide metal spatula-shaped utensil with a slotted blade in the center. Pears and cheese are always happy companions, so if you can’t find St. Agur choose another blue, or seek out a good sheep’s milk cheese, such as a Roncal, Manchego, or pecorino. We’ve had more than one customer order this salad as dessert, so you decide where it falls in the meal.

Local farmer Bill Coleman specializes in all sorts of exotic herbs and greens, such as curry leaf, epazote, purslane, and fenugreek. When he can, Bill travels to faraway places to source unusual herbs and spices and little-known fruits and vegetables. He carries home the precious seeds and plants them at his farm near Santa Barbara, providing a wonderful source of inspiration for us lucky local chefs. It’s always exciting to see what he will, literally, unearth next. A few years back, Treviso, a beautiful elongated relative of radicchio from the north of Italy, was his plant of the moment. Bill Coleman’s Treviso practically dared me to come up with a dish that would show off its striking magenta leaves and complex, slightly bitter flavor. I paired the Treviso with pungent Gorgonzola and drizzled both with sweet saba, a syrup made by reducing grape must with sugar. This salad-meets-cheese course is the perfect beginning (or ending) to an autumn meal.

Shell beans are a big part of late summer and early fall in our kitchen. If you happen to come by Lucques on a slow night when they’re in season, you’ll see runners, cooks, and dishwashers gathered around huge piles of shell beans, shucking, shucking, shucking. For me, shucking provides a much-needed period when my hands can do the work and my brain takes a little time off. Don’t worry, shell beans for six won’t require a crew of shuckers.

This warm salad came about, like many of my dishes, as a way to show off one of my favorite ingredients—in this case, the lovely Kabocha squash. I roast the wedges of squash until they’re practically caramelized and then weave them into a salad of dandelion greens with a tart sherry vinaigrette. Tucked into the greens and squash you’ll find bacon lardons. Not to be confused with bacon bits, lardons are oversized rectangles of chewy, slightly crisped bacon, meaty and satisfying to bite into. Also hiding in the mix are salty toasted pecans and elegant shards of Roncal, an earthy sheep’s milk cheese from Spain.

This dish was inspired by one of my favorite Italian meals, bistecca fiorentina, a huge, rare grilled steak dressed simply with salt and lemon juice. Instead of the traditional T-bone steak served in a Tuscan ristorante, I opted for tri-tip, a less expensive but super-flavorful cut from the triangular end of the sirloin, popular in the central coast region of California.

This grilled pork confit evolved one night when I was making a staff meal at Lucques. I salvaged the leftover ends and trimmings from the day’s pork confit, crisped them in my favorite cast-iron pan, and ran to the walk-in to see what produce I could find to add to the dish. When I got back to the stove, I noticed half the meat was missing. Looking around, I saw that all the cooks had their heads down, suspiciously quiet. Half of my staff meal had disappeared, but I couldn’t be angry. Who can resist succulent pork, hot and crispy, out of the pan? Something so irresistible deserved to be shared with the outside world, so I put this staff meal on the menu!

This dish takes me back to Pantelleria, a tiny volcanic island in the Mediterranean, situated between North Africa and Sicily. Undeveloped and relatively untouched by the modern world, the island is famous for two things: the caper bushes that dominate the dry, brush-covered hillsides of the rocky coast, and resident Giorgio Armani. My husband and I spent a magical week in that salt-drenched haven, eating grilled, freshly caught tuna; bowls of couscous; and salads of tomatoes, potatoes, and capers. The grilled tuna and the combination of tomatoes and potatoes in this dish are a tribute to those leisurely days on Pantelleria. And though rouille isn’t part of their Moorish-meets-Italian culinary lexicon, I’m sure the Pantellerians would love this saffron-tinted, spicy pepper mayonnaise.

Although they might sound like an odd combination, hot crispy squid and spicy chorizo tossed together with spinach, cilantro, and olives make an irresistible warm salad. This salad is a salute to the Portuguese and the Spanish, who have been cooking seafood and meat together for centuries, long before the term “surf and turf” was coined.

This tart has all the boisterous Mediterranean flavors of pasta puttanesca: tomatoes, anchovies, capers, and olives layered on puff pastry and caramelized onions. Make a tapestry of red, yellow, and orange by layering different-colored heirloom tomato slices over the onions. Though I usually want to put cheese on everything, this tart doesn’t need it. The tomatoes are the stars, so let them shine.

These skewers of sea bass are seasoned with a North African condiment called charmoula and served over marinated eggplant and peppers. Charmoula, like so many Old World recipes, has as many versions as there are cooks. Although the proportions and some ingredients vary, everyone seems to agree that charmoula must have cilantro, garlic, cumin, and paprika and then be finished with olive oil and vinegar. One Sunday when we were working on this dish, Julie Robles, then sous-chef at Lucques, suggested adding rice wine vinegar to our charmoula experiment. It’s certainly not authentic, but we both liked the milder, sweeter nuance it gave the sauce. In fact, the charmoula was so good we decided to use it twice. First we marinated the fish in the spicy condiment (acid-free, so it wouldn’t “cook” the fish), and then, as we pulled the kabobs from the grill, we slathered them once again in charmoula.

Every year, we celebrate the heart of summer with a Sunday barbecue feast at Lucques. This annual tradition always includes at least four different barbecued meats, baked beans, long-cooked greens, grilled cornbread, and former Lucques chef Rob Chalmers’s infamous coleslaw. The first year he made it, he miscalculated “slightly” and made enough for about six hundred people! It became a running joke to tease Rob about his coleslaw, and for about a year after the barbecue, the servers and busboys used to greet every staff meal with the predictable, “What, no coleslaw?” Here is a manageable-sized recipe for Rob’s light, crunchy, and always satisfying slaw.

This recipe is a way to show off the best summer fruit you can find. If possible, use an assortment of fruits, such as plums, peaches, figs, and berries, but make sure that all the fruit is up to snuff. Rather than striving for variety and ending up with less-than-ideal examples of each fruit, you’re better off with a simpler salad composed of only the most perfect nectarines or gorgeous peaches all alone. The dressing is made by pounding some of the fruit into a juicy vinaigrette. Figs are my favorite for this purpose. They mellow the vinegar and give the dressing body and chunkiness. If you’ve never had a Marcona almond, you may not forgive me for introducing you to them. Rich and dense, this Spanish almond variety is outrageously addictive. If you can’t find Marcona almonds, use toasted regular almonds or pecans.

My cooks sometimes refer to Lucques as the “house of pork.” I use pork often and in every form I can think of—marinated, brined, grilled, sautéed, confited, braised, ground into sausage or forcemeat, wrapped around fish or poultry, as a seasoning or an appetizer or a complete main course. This recipe is proof: with three kinds of pork packed into one dish, it’s a regular porkapalooza. These burgers completely satisfy my frequent pork cravings, and I think they’ll take care of yours, too. After all, few cultures appreciate pork better than the Latin ones, and these burgers pay homage to that culinary love. And it’s some spicy, decadent homage, too: Mexican chorizo, Spanish romesco, and the coup de grâce, a slice of melted Manchego on top. Do not be afraid to cook these burgers only until pink in the middle, when they are still juicy and delicious. Not only are all dangerous pork parasites killed at 137°F (long before the last pink disappears), but those organisms have been nearly eliminated from modern pork farming, so the risk is extremely low even from completely raw pork.