Asian

Here’s my take on Pad Thai. There are a lot of ingredients here, but most of them keep well in your pantry, and substituting is easy—you could use finely chopped cabbage in place of the bean sprouts or substitute soy or hoisin sauce for the nam pla.

You can substitute italian linguine or spaghetti for the rice noodles in this dish. Although the texture will not be the same, the dish will still be good. Boil the noodles nearly to doneness in the normal fashion, then rinse before proceeding

You can find fresh Chinese-style (and Japanese-style) wheat noodles at most supermarkets these days. They’re a great convenience food and, for some reason, seem to me more successful than prepackaged “fresh” Italian noodles. Here they’re briefly cooked and then combined with a stir-fried mixture of pork, vegetables, and Chinese sauces; it’s very much a Chinese restaurant dish. Both ground bean sauce and hoisin sauce can be found at supermarkets (if you can’t find ground bean sauce, just use a little more hoisin), but you can usually find a better selection (and higher-quality versions) at Chinese markets. Usually, the fewer ingredients they contain, the better they are.

These are simpler than traditional scallion pancakes, which are made from a breadlike dough, and they taste more like scallions, because the “liquid” is scallion puree. The flavor is great, the preparation time is cut to about twenty minutes, and the texture is that of a vegetable fritter.

This is not a stir-fry but a simmered dish, easy and fast. The cooking time totals about ten minutes, and the preparation time is about the same, so be sure to start the rice first.

A big deal is often made of washing leeks—they can be very sandy but since you’re going to be chopping these, it’s easy.

When you’re making a pot roast, the vegetables you add at the beginning contribute to the development of the sauce, but those at the end draw on the sauce for flavor (like the turnip or rutabaga in this dish), often making them the best part. You can skip browning the meat to save time (and mess) if necessary. Yes, browning creates complexity, but there is so much flavor in this particular pot roast that subtle complexity is overwhelmed.

Wrapping one food with another is familiar, especially if meat, cheese, or vegetables make up the filling—think of ravioli, stuffed cabbage, or egg rolls. Making meat the wrapping is a nice role reversal, a neat twist that is extraordinary enough to allow a simple preparation to wow a crowd. Such is the case with the Japanese negima, in which beef is wrapped around chives or scallions, then brushed with soy sauce and grilled.

For years, I thought the in-table-grill was such an important part of cooking bul kalbi that I never even tried to make it at home. I realized, however, that the time the meat spends over the coals—certainly less than five minutes—might be long enough to add the mental image of wood flavor, but certainly not the reality. So, with what might be described as typical American arrogance, I set about reinventing this traditional Korean dish, and I’m happy with the results. Grilling remains the best cooking technique—a couple of minutes over a very hot fire is ideal—but a stovetop grill or a very hot skillet works nearly as well, as long as you have a powerful exhaust fan to suck out the smoke. Alternatively, a good broiler will do the trick; just turn the slices once. Finally, if you set an iron skillet or a heavy roasting pan in an oven heated to its maximum, then throw the meat onto that, it will sear the meat and cook it through in a couple of minutes. No matter how you cook the meat, do not sacrifice internal juices for external browning; that is, it’s better to serve lightly browned but moist meat than tough, overcooked meat with a lovely crust.

This traditional Chinese dish is simple to make: You boil the soy and wine along with some water, ginger, and crushed sugar and add star anise and scallion for flavor. The chicken is boiled too—not simmered, really boiled—but only for ten minutes; it finishes cooking in the liquid with the heat turned off. There are unusual but inexpensive ingredients that make this dish slightly better: mushroom-flavored soy sauce, which is dark and heavy; yellow rock sugar, a not-especially-sweet, lumpy sugar that must be broken up with a hammer before use; and mei kuei lu chiew, or “rose wine,” a floral wine that smells like rose water and costs two bucks a bottle. But don’t knock yourself out looking for any of these—I give substitutions in the recipe. But if you can easily acquire them, do, because this sauce can be used time and again, as long as you freeze it between uses (or refrigerate it and bring it to a rolling boil every few days) and top up the liquids now and then.

Stir-frying—the fastest cooking method there is—can change your life. You can use it for almost anything, and it can be so fast that the first thing you need to do is start a batch of white rice. In the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes for that to cook, you can not only prepare the stir-fry but set the table and have a drink. For many stir-fries made at home, it’s necessary to parboil—essentially precook—“hard” vegetables like broccoli or asparagus. So in this fastest possible stir-fry, I use red bell peppers, onions, or both; they need no parboiling and become tender and sweet in three or four minutes. If you cut the meat into small cubes or thin slices, the cooking time is even shorter. I include nuts here for three reasons: I love their flavor, their chunkiness adds great texture (I don’t chop them at all), and the preparation time is zero.

This is a Southeast Asian–style preparation, mildly sweet and mouth-puckeringly sour. It’s also ridiculously fast; if you start some rice before tackling the shrimp, they will both be done at about the same time, twenty minutes later. (This assumes your shrimp are already peeled, a task that will take you about ten minutes and one that should be undertaken before cooking the rice.) For best flavor, see if you can find head-on shrimp; they make for a more impressive presentation, and it’s fun to suck the juices out of the heads themselves (which, I realize, is not something that everyone enjoys). But none of these assets is worth making head-on shrimp a sticking point. Note that this technique will work with scallops or cut-up squid; each will take slightly less time to cook than the shrimp.

Dealing with the lemongrass is the sole challenge of this dish, and only if you’ve never done it before. Maximum flavor is released from whole lemongrass stalks when they are beaten up a bit; bruising the length of each stalk with the blunt edge of a knife takes care of this in seconds. But to include lemongrass in a sauce you must first remove the tough outer layers—this is not unlike peeling a woody scallion—and then carefully and finely mince the inner core.

Thai Dishes called curries contain curry powder and a combination of herbs and aromatic vegetables. A typical dish might feature a mixture of garlic, shallots, chiles, lime leaf, sugar, and galangal or ginger. This curry, which features coconut milk, is just such a dish. Serve it with white or sticky rice.

Sometimes a simple salad features such powerful flavors that by adding a couple of straightforward ingredients a whole meal appears as if by magic. Here the starting place is a Southeast Asian–style cucumber salad, with a dressing made from lime juice, lemongrass, fish sauce (called nam pla in Thailand and nuoc mam in Vietnam), and a few other strong seasonings. This dressing commingles perfectly with the natural juices of the cucumbers to moisten the greens. Top all with grilled scallops—or other fish or meat—and you create an easy one-dish meal whose flavor really jumps off the plate. It looks lovely, too, especially if your cucumbers are good enough to leave unpeeled. And (although not by design, I assure you), this salad is extremely low in fat.

This is a nearly traditional salad in which the grapefruit plays a leading role, complementing mild shrimp and allowing you to make an almost ridiculously easy dressing, made up of nothing more than fish sauce (called nam pla in Thailand and nuoc mam in Vietnam), or soy, lime, a bit of sugar, and some water. Use good shrimp—Pacific or Gulf whites are the best, though the less expensive and widely available tiger shrimp are acceptable—and buy them big, because you’ll have fewer to peel.

A frequently seen snack in Bangkok and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

This is simply a kind of sea-based mesclun with a distinctively sesame-flavored dressing. The only challenge in making it lies in the shopping. Few supermarkets carry any seaweed at all, so you need to hit an Asian or health food market for any kind of selection. At most Japanese markets and some health food stores, you can find what amounts to a prepackaged assortment of seaweed salad greens; these are a little more expensive than buying individual seaweeds but will give you a good variety without a big investment.

Fresh asian-style noodles are everywhere these days—even supermarkets—and they’re ideal for soups, because you can cook them right in the broth. It takes only a few minutes, and, unlike dried noodles, they won’t make the broth too starchy. Do not overcook the noodles; if you use thin ones, they’ll be ready almost immediately after you add them to the simmering stock. Start with canned chicken stock if you must, but don’t skip the step of simmering it briefly with the garlic and ginger, which will give it a decidedly Asian flavor.

This Thai soup, like most European soups, begins with chicken stock. You can use canned stock if you like, because the added ingredients here are so strong that all you really need from the base is a bit of body. (Good homemade stock has better body than canned stock, of course; use it if you have it.) You can find all of these ingredients at almost any supermarket, and if you don’t have luck at yours, try an Asian market, where they are as common as carrots, celery, and onions. (And if you do go to an Asian market, pick up some rice or bean thread noodles, which require almost no cooking time and turn this dish into a meal.) You don’t need oyster mushrooms, by the way—fresh shiitakes or even white button mushrooms are just as good. All you really need to know is that lemongrass must be trimmed of its outer layers before being minced and nam pla (fish sauce) keeps forever in your pantry (and tastes much better than it smells).