Recipes By Ligaya Mishan
60 recipes found
Wild Rice With Mushrooms
In Wisconsin, wild rice is truly wild, not cultivated as in other states, the tassels rising and swaying over rivers, lakes and floodplains come late August and September. Called manoomin by the local Chippewa, it is a protected crop that can be harvested only by state residents holding a valid license. And only by hand, as the Chippewa have always done, using wooden flails gently (the grains should fall from the stalk without great effort) from canoes propelled by paddles or push poles. Shellie Holmes of Rhinelander, Wis., who shares her recipe here, likes to cook wild rice just until it pops open. This is a break with her family’s tradition, which favored a chewier texture and did not allow popping. “Do not mix with other rice,” she urged, lest you lose the flavor of the wild.
Fish With Citrus-Chile Sauce
This light yet earthy sauce lends a generous, almost floral warmth to any white, sturdy fish. For heat, there are crushed Calabrian chiles, smoky and sunny; for a mellow sourness, Moscatel vinegar — feel free to substitute apple cider vinegar and a little sugar to approximate the same fruitiness; and for funk, fermented white pepper (although regular white pepper will work too). Other notes include delicate marjoram, cousin to oregano but less forward, with its comforting contour of balsam, and Timur pepper from Nepal, fragrant and bright, calling to mind a just-peeled tangerine. (If you use Sichuan pepper instead, give it a citrus boost with extra orange juice and a shower of orange zest.) The sauce comes out denser than a vinaigrette but still loose and the orange-red of a young sunset.
Mochi Rice Stuffing
Thanksgiving dinner in Hawaii may start with pineapple-Vienna-sausage skewers and litchis stuffed with cream cheese. Later there is turkey and ham, but also Spam fried rice and Filipino lumpia, maybe poke (sashimi salad), laulau (ti-leaf-wrapped meat or fish) and a Molokai sweet potato pie topped with haupia (coconut pudding). It is the crazy-quilt, all-embracing nature of the feast that makes it local-kine — that is, island-style. Lara Mui Cowell of Honolulu offers this recipe from her popo (maternal grandmother), Jannie Luke Thom, a second-generation Chinese-American who was born in Hawaii before it became a state. The dish is a Chinese take on Western-style sage stuffing, swapping out bread crumbs for mochi rice and adding lap cheong (Chinese sausage) and char siu (Chinese barbecue pork). But in true Hawaiian style, you may substitute Portuguese sausage — or even Spam.
Hmong Egg Roll Stuffing
One Thanksgiving, the pastry chef Diane Yang’s parents, Hmong refugees from Laos, found that they had filling left over from making egg rolls, and her mother came up with the idea of using it to stuff the turkey. It's lighter than traditional bread stuffing, and yields relatively small servings, but it's a delicious addition to the feast. It is not intended to be baked alongside the turkey. If you'd like, double this recipe and use the remainder to fill egg rolls. Purchase egg roll wrappers (often found in the freezer section at the market), thaw them, and roll them with stuffing. Deep fry in vegetable oil until golden brown, and serve hot.
Chocolate Chile Biscotti
The word “biscotti” comes from the Latin biscoctus, or twice cooked: The dough is rolled into logs and given a spell in the oven, then cooled, sliced and slotted back in to bake a little more. The second turn in the oven essentially sucks them dry and gives them that signature crunch. Too much crunch, however, and they can be a little flinty. The pastry chef Mark Sopchak makes biscotti that are shorter and narrower — “Biscottini!” an Italian passerby once said — and ever so slightly softer, with the addition of butter. These cookies are thin enough to snap smartly under the teeth and then obligingly crumble. Inspired in part by Mexican mole, they have a touch of creaminess from cashews and a wild streak of chile powder, just enough to make you hum.
Liège Waffles
These rich Belgian yeast waffles take a bit of planning (an overnight rise), but one bite and you'll forgive the extra time they take and the giant mess they leave on your waffle iron. With their buttery brioche consistency and pockets of sweet sticky sugar throughout, they're decidedly more dessert than breakfast. Don’t worry if you can’t find pearl sugar. Granulated sugar and water are all you need for a D.I.Y. version that yields excellent results.
Escovitch Fish
In Jamaica, escovitch is fish rubbed with garlic and allspice, shallow-fried until the skin crisps, then doused with hot vinegar, carrots, onions and wicked Scotch bonnets, all swirled together and bubbling. Leave the dish out at room temperature, the better for the vinegar to work its alchemy, creating not so much a sauce as sheer lushness. Francine Turone’s mother would make escovitch in the morning and let it sit all day on the counter, the flavors intensifying with each hour. Come dinnertime, little effort was required beyond putting out plates — which makes it ideal, Ms. Turone says, when cooking for friends: “You can make it and then go away.” Her version allows for boneless fillets instead of the traditional whole fish, and includes an unexpected ingredient, raisins, inspired by travels with her Italian husband and transposed from a Venetian snack of deep-fried sardines in vinegar.
Watercress, Pistachio and Orange-Blossom Salad
Tarragon, basil, dill and cilantro are elevated from garnish to the centerpiece of this dish from Yotam Ottolenghi.
Persimmon Pudding
Wild persimmons start to blush along the country roads of Indiana in late September, stealing the colors of sunset and weighing down their trees like Christmas balls. They are native to the landscape, unlike the Chinese and Japanese varieties cultivated in California and found in grocery stores. Foraging carries on through November, when the fruit claims a place at the Hoosier Thanksgiving table in the form of a dark gold pudding, distant kin to the sweet persimmon bread offered to early colonials by the Cherokee. This recipe comes from Alverta S. Hart of Mitchell, Ind. This fall, the town hosted its annual Persimmon Festival and as always, the most suspenseful event was the persimmon pudding contest. Ms. Hart submitted her first pudding in 1962 as an 18-year-old bride, and re-entered every year for nearly four decades until she became a judge, then chairwoman of the event, winning on and off and collecting every color of ribbon along the way.
Chiffon Cake
In 1927, a former insurance agent in Los Angeles was fiddling obsessively with ingredients in his home kitchen when he came up with a cake that was weightless yet rich — angel and devil at once — which we know today as chiffon. His secret: Instead of butter, he used vegetable oil in a batter thick with yolks, folded together with glossy peaks of whipped egg whites. The cake’s kinship to clouds makes it an ideal dessert for Christopher Tan, who lives in Singapore, where the temperature and humidity are enemies of more traditional, butter-based cakes. Here, he uses mandarin oranges, packing in as much juice and zest as possible. The most difficult part is beating the egg whites properly. Tan has a baking secret of his own: He mixes a little potato starch (which absorbs more liquid than other starches) into the meringue, to guard against deflating.
Chard Cakes With Sorrel Sauce
Russian Salmon Pie
The Russians call it kulebyaka, but in Alaska it is pirok, perok or peroche — all amendments of pirog, the more general Russian word for pie. Inside the flaky crust, wild salmon from Alaskan waters is layered with rice and cabbage, crops introduced to the 18th-century natives of Kodiak Island by fur traders from across the strait. Long after the Russians gave up the hunt for sea otter pelts and sold their claim to the territory to the United States, the frontier fish-camp dish remained a staple of the Alaskan table. Kirsten Dixon, the chef and an owner of Winterlake Lodge, along the Iditarod Trail, and Tutka Bay Lodge, near Homer, likes to make salmon pie at Thanksgiving, when the Alaskan back country is already muffled in snow and guests arrive by ski plane, landing on a frozen lake.