Oven Bake

This simple, delicious side dish was inspired by a meal at one of my favorite Gulf Coast outposts, Stingaree Restaurant. This casual Bolivar Peninsula eatery (there’s a bait shop on the ground floor) serves all-you-can-eat Gulf blue crab, oysters on the half shell, shrimp in many guises, and a seeming barge-load of other fresh seafood dishes. Stingaree is proof that you can’t keep a good thing down—it was among the first to reopen following hurricane Ike, the ferocious September 2008 storm that leveled much of the peninsula. The building was damaged, but unlike many of the peninsula’s structures, it wasn’t swept away, and the owners managed to reopen just five months post-Ike. I like to serve this with any simple fish or shellfish preparation. Try it with Big Easy Whole Flounder, page 73, or Champagne-marinated Shrimp Boil, page 67.

In my book, lump crabmeat spells luxury, and I can’t think of a better way to pamper my guests than starting off with a sumptuous serving. Offering my friends a mound of crab in crab or scallop shells makes me feel as if I’m bringing the sea to the table. Scallop shells are usually easier to find than crab shells, although I’ve seen both at kitchen supply stores. If you can’t find shells, use small ramekins. For a speedy main course, double the recipe and bake the crab in larger ramekins. Serve with a green salad and loaves of crusty bread.

My spicy, tangy catfish tacos are a great way to feed a hungry beach crowd without the hassle of frying or grilling. Load up a rimmed baking sheet with fish fillets, pour on the marinade, refrigerate overnight, and just before serving, bake for less than 30 minutes. Heat flour or corn tortillas in a tortilla warmer along with the fish, and set it all out on the table with a bowl of chipotle mayo and a platter of thin-sliced cabbage. Now everybody chow down! The fish is just the way I like it—juicy and flavorful thanks to long marination (at least 6 hours) and oven baking. I’ve allowed two tacos per person to ensure you’ll have enough even for man-size, sun-fueled appetites. (What is it about playing on the beach that makes men so hungry?) If you have a smaller crowd or guests with smaller stomachs, halve the recipe.

Here’s a great party dish that feeds a horde and can be made a day ahead and baked at the last minute. It can handle an endless amount of fiddling—from adding more vegetables (I’ve tucked in layers of sautéed sliced yellow and green zucchini, eggplant, red and green peppers, and mushrooms, to name a few) to tweaks like eliminating all cheese (including in the pesto) for a vegan version created for my lactose-intolerant daughter (see Variation). Buy prepared pesto if you want less prep work.

I loosely based this recipe on one in Lynn Alley’s The Gourmet Toaster Oven, and it works well in that device, something that single cooks should consider adding to their countertops to help save energy when making small quantities. But it also bakes just fine in a regular oven. This recipe makes four small meatloaves; the idea is that you freeze three of them and bake one at a time. But the meat can also be baked in a loaf pan and sliced into portions after baking. (You’ll have to bake it a bit longer to get the internal temperature up to 160°F.) The recipe is also flexible flavor-wise: If you don’t have some of the Blackened Salsa (page 16) in your fridge, just use a store-bought salsa, and choose mild to hot depending on your preference. Eat this with roasted, mashed, or scalloped potatoes (or root vegetables) and a crisp green salad.

One of Austin’s oldest restaurants is the venerable Texas Chili Parlor; its motto is “E Pluribus Chili,” and its signature dish comes in three levels of heat: X, XX, and XXX. The X is fantastic: plenty spicy, but you can still taste the other flavors. To my taste, XX is just slightly over the line between hot and too hot. And the XXX—well, let’s just say they make you sign a waiver before you can order it, and I never have. Besides the basic chili, my favorite item on the menu is the cheese enchiladas topped with the chili. They call them Frieda’s Enchiladas, and in all the years I went there, I never asked who Frieda was. I guess my mouth was always full, on fire, or both. This is my interpretation based on countless samplings. Now, this recipe may make enough for two servings, depending on your appetite and whether you eat beans and rice on the side, but I confess: I’m usually a four-enchilada man, meaning I have to commit to some extra time at the gym, but it’s worth it.

The payoff for having made the Stewed Cauliflower, Butternut Squash, and Tomatoes (page 55), beyond that first bowl of pasta I hope you had with it, is that you can use it for quick treatments such as this one. With its runny yolk enriching the vegetables, it’s a satisfying breakfast dish on its own, or it can morph into a brunch or breakfast-for-dinner dish with the addition of crusty bread and a side salad.

I have made these tomatoes for more than a decade now, but it wasn’t until my sister’s homegrown Maine wedding, where I made hundreds of them for the appetizer table, that I realized how perfect a technique this is for “putting up” local tomatoes in the peak season. The low heat of the oven turns the tomatoes almost jammy, concentrating the flavor beautifully, which makes them perfect as a topping for bruschetta, pasta, or pizza (see Smoky Pizza Margherita, page 106). They also can be served on an antipasti platter with mixed olives, cheese, pickles, and/or smoked fish. I call them 12-hour tomatoes, but the amount of time it takes depends greatly on the size and juiciness of the tomatoes. So for the least fuss, don’t mix varieties or sizes in one batch, but feel free to multiply this recipe as you wish. Left in the oven long enough, the tomatoes will start to become a little chewy around the edges, which make a nice counterpoint to the moisture inside. Try other spices instead of the cumin: regular paprika, smoked Spanish paprika (pimenton), and cinnamon also work well with the tomatoes, or you can stick with just salt and pepper for the purest tomato flavor.

This is the first croissant we ever made and sold at Milk Bar. Deeply stinky and pungent in all the right ways, it is not for the faint of heart. It is a true marriage of funky, barnyardy, stringent kimchi and blue cheese, of our Korean roots to our Italian ones. It is for our soul sisters and brothers. Making croissants is one of the coolest bread techniques around. You spend time making many layers of bread dough and butter, folding and turning the dough all along. When baked, the croissants get their flakiness and volume from the steam that the layers of butter give off as the dough heats. The steam separates each dough layer ever so slightly, resulting in this massively puffy, impossibly flaky creation. And when you make them with a flavored butter, they’re even cooler! Though we have simplified the technique somewhat at Milk Bar, in terms of speed and precision, this recipe is still not for softbodies. It takes more time with the dough, more flour, more time with the rolling pin. But it will make you feel like a true pro when the oven timer goes off and you pull these bad boys out.

This focaccia is a favorite of many early Milk Bar regulars. It is the brainchild of our beloved James Mark and will go down in our history as the most delicious focaccia man has ever made.

We’re awfully fond of celebrating the holidays with annoying decorative knickknacks. Or, rather, my mother loves to buy annoying decorative knickknacks and send them to us, and we love to make it look like a holiday just threw up in our kitchen. We like our cookies to celebrate the holidays too—that’s how we came up with our winter “holiday” cookie, a cornflake-marshmallow cookie with crushed candy canes in it.

This was by no means the first recipe that came out of our kitchens, but it is far and away the most popular and what we are known best for. Drink it straight, pour it over more cereal, add it to your coffee in the morning, or turn it into panna cotta or ice cream. Cereal milk. It’s a way of life.

The cart’s owner wants to keep his recipes under wraps, so the following is an approximation of one of his signature dishes.

Unless you want to be prepping all day, you should purchase prepared pizza crust. Boboli crusts work for this, as do Tiseo’s and Baker’s Quality frozen pizza dough.