Recipes That Break the Rules

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Last night, dinner included a tomato and cucumber salad, a dish I learned in Georgia (the country, not the state). In Tblisi, these salads are dressed with crushed walnuts and garlic, with delicious results. But I decided to season mine with crumbled Mexican cotija cheese. Then I added some Cambodian black pepper and Hungarian smoked paprika. For the final flourish—a drizzle of Turkish pomegranate molasses. It was amazing. Cotija and pomegranate definitely love one another.

Which is my way of saying, I hate food rules. Getting all didactic about which ingredients or cuisines can—and cannot—be freely mixed for me is a losing proposition. I find cooking far more fun—and way more delicious—when I mix and match flavors and ingredients as they inspire me. After all, the melding of ingredients from multiple cultures is how many of the “traditional” dishes we know and love were born.

It’s also one of the reasons I love our new book, Milk Street Shorts: Recipes that Pack a Punch. It comes out October 14 and can be pre-ordered now. This book is built around breaking rules and challenging conventional wisdom in ways that will make your cooking more delicious and more exciting. Every recipe features a twist or tweak that surprises.

For example, I love how the Cheater Wonton Noodle Beef and Tomato Soup is built around the simple hack of using wonton wrappers in place of hard-to-find Asian noodles. The toughest part of making this soup is finding the “proper” noodles. This version solves for that with an inexpensive and widely available solution.

Or there is Pasta with “Fake” Sauce — a real Italian dish born from cucina povera that uses finely chopped vegetables to create a robust ragù-like pasta sauce without meat (and you won’t miss it at all).

And this is the perfect season to try our Sweet Corn-Infused Pasta with Tomatoes and Basil. The recipe uses corn three ways to pack this dish with flavor. First, corn kernels are grated from the cobs, creating a coarse puree of kernels and starchy corn “milk” with which to sauce the pasta. Next, the cobs are simmered to create a corn-flavored broth that’s added to the sauce. Finally, that same broth also is used to cook the pasta, ensuring deep, sweet corn flavor.

Or check out the Deconstructed Falafel Salad, a recipe that takes all the wonderful components of falafel—chickpeas, tahini, pita bread and all the fixings—and combines them into a low-effort salad that is as robustly filling as it is flavorful.

And my favorite —Tikka Masala Cauliflower. This is based on a recipe I learned in Mumbai, which replaces the dairy with pureed cashews. The combination of spices and that creamy base turn this into an exceptionally rich dish that nonetheless is light and bright.

I hope you’ll check out the book. It’s one of our most creative—and problem solving—collections of recipes yet! As for dinner tonight? That’s going to be an Italian pesto spiked with Japanese white miso. You won’t believe how good that is!

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