Frywall Recipes

In the garden here at Frywall HQ, the kale is verdant and hearty. We're enjoying the prime days of summer both by eating what's fresh and making good use of pantry ingredients. This salad is tossed with an authentic Caesar dressing and topped with crunchy fried chickpeas. If you've ever tried frying chickpeas, a.k.a. garbanzo beans, you know that they can create quite a mess when they sizzle and pop in the hot oil. Never to fear – Frywall is here.

We like this salad served in generous portions as a complete light lunch, but it could work just as well as a course in a more elaborate meal.

Frywall Fridays has returned! After a brief hiatus to spruce up our test kitchen (can you believe the reno ran late?! Who ever heard of contractors missing a deadline?!), we're back with a bang. Or rather a pao.

Kung Pao Chicken is a staple of Chinese restaurants in America, but don't be fooled. It's the real deal that traces back to China. The heat in the dish comes from fiery dried red chiles and the singular, mentholated bite of Sichuan peppercorns. Throw in some soy sauce for saltiness, a hint of honey for sweetness, and black vinegar and rice wine for sourness, and you have a balanced and aromatic dish that's done in under 30 minutes. But how spicy is it? Well, you decide. Use five chiles for relatively mild, ten chiles for relatively painful, fifteen chiles for call the relatives, I'm dying.

Wiener schnitzel – thin cutlets of breaded and fried veal – is a classic Austrian dish that has made its way to restaurants all over Europe and around the world. But it's a breeze to make at home, taking all of 15 minutes and requiring ingredients, apart from the veal, that are probably already in your kitchen.

If you prefer not to use veal, the same preparation can be made with thinly sliced and pounded chicken breast, pork, or another cut of beef. In the German-speaking world, this is called Schnitzel Wiener Art, or Viennese-style cutlets. But any way you cook it, it's a hearty and delicious main course to make at home.

Common wisdom dictates that if you want to create complex flavors, you need to put in the work and combine lots of ingredients. Well, common wisdom needs to step off his high-horse and taste these eggs. They include just one other ingredient (apart from oil and garnishings) and have more uncommon flavor than common wisdom would know what to do with.

The secret is the secret ingredient: kimchi, the fermented preparation of cabbage, scallions, radishes, and spicy chili powder that is the pride of any self-respecting Korean cook. The fermentation process builds deep, complex flavors as well as probiotics that are great for human digestion. We get our kimchi from J&H Farm in Brooklyn, a local bodega that sells a variety of home-made kimchi prepared by either grandma, ma, and son – and labeled accordingly. (If you're ever in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, get some of their kimchi).

Once you have the kimchi, this recipe takes about as much time and work as frying up an ordinary egg. But, oh the flavor! If your mom is the adventurous type and likes things a bit spicy, make it for her this Sunday. It'll be a brunch she won't soon forget.

As a lifelong latke zealot this is a hard for me to admit: pakoras are possibly the best veggie fritters ever. They hail from the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, and much like latkes usually include potatoes and onions. But the similarity ends there.

Where the latke layers on more neutral ingredients like egg and corn starch, this pakora recipe hits the pedal with chilies, cilantro, ginger, a half dozen spices, and eggplant and then binds them all together with earthy chickpea flour. That might sound a little complicated but unlike latkes, pakoras don't require you to squeeze out excess water from the vegetables, which significantly reduced the overall prep-time and mess. The first pakoras will start emerging from the oil 15-20 minutes after you begin. And the result: a herbaceous, spicy wonder of a mouthful that will make you feel very accomplished without much effort. If Indian cooking has a gateway drug this, my friends, is it.

Marcella Hazan, our North Star for all foods Italian, gave us this simple and inspired recipe for pasta, herbs, and tomatoes. Herbaceous and aromatic, it makes for a great light dinner, especially as the weather heats up and the thought of a lush but heavy tomato sauce begins to lose some appeal. Save some leftovers for lunch the next day, served warmed or at room temperature. And feel free to play around with the combination of herbs; just make sure to use the most flavorful tomatoes around, be they big beefsteaks or little cherries. Buon appetito.

Sometimes comfort food is what we need and for that traditional egg salad –rich, creamy and always polite – can't be beat. Other times, we hanker after something badass, pungent, fiery, crispy, in-your-face. That's where this egg salad comes in. Think of it as discomfort food but the kind you can enjoy, like sweating in the sun after a long cold winter. And sweat you will from the chilis in this salad, though you'll keep fighting it to get at the sweet, garlicky, lime-infused dressing underneath. Along the way, you may fall in love with the salad's crisply fried egg, which is subjected to oil so hot it puffs up like a pastry. Try it the next time you're in the mood for a light meal with a heavy-duty experience.

We love polenta as a base for tomato sauce or a sidekick to a hearty stew. But when it's time for making cornmeal fritters, we prefer the American cousin: grits. They hold together a little better than polenta, have a slightly deeper corn flavor, and sound pleasantly contrarian. For an appetizer this week, we married our grits frites with a robust sauce of tomato and capers that, we hope you'll agree, is both right and novel.

Think steak and you probably think potato. Think steak and potato and your probably think of bliss, and also of being comatose on the couch. Here's a way to enjoy a delectable cut of beef without toppling over.

A well made taco delivers the perfect balance of meaty umami, corny starchiness, limey acidity, and oniony bite. The centerpiece of our taco is without question the skirt steak, a cut that's immensely flavor but, untreated, a bit tough. These qualities make it a perfect fit for a marinade of lime juice, garlic, cilantro and cumin, which tenderizes the meat and lends it brightness without overwhelm its essential steakiness.

Try it on a night when you want to enjoy a delicious steak and still stay responsive. You won't regret it.

In the beauty pageant of food names, "chraimeh" competes hard for last place. The "chr" is like a prelude to a spit, the "ai" a stubbing of the toe, and the "meh" a resignation without protest.

But don't let the name fool you. Chraimeh is one of the most boldly flavorful fish preparations you'll ever encounter. A North African dish that traces its origins to Sephardic Jewish cuisine in Libya, it combines the pungency of caraway and cumin, the heat of chiles, the sweetness of paprika and tomato paste, and the bite of lemon juice and garlic. The name is an agony, the flavor a revelation.

We cooked it here with swordfish steaks but other fish steaks, like salmon or halibut, will work just as well. Unlike most fish dishes, it's also easy to make ahead, and can be served either hot or just warm. Couple it with bread for a hearty appetizer or with rice for a main course.

In much of the Middle East, nothing says breakfast like shakshuka, the richly flavored and colorful egg dish on this week's menu. There's no single way to make shakshuka, though as with Texas chili, many folks feel passionately otherwise. Still, if there's one thing that makes shakshuka shakshuka it's the poaching of eggs in a hearty sauce of tomatoes and peppers – that and the shear pleasure of saying that goofy word. Shakshuka. Shakshuka. Shakshuka.

While generally served for breakfast, shakshuka also makes a great light dinner and a knockout brunch when guests are coming. Make the sauce a day ahead, and 15 minutes before the brunch bell, just turn up the heat and crack in the eggs.

Yair's mother came to visit and showed us how to make her original Hungarian-inspired chicken dish. Crispy, browned chicken thighssimmer and stew with fresh cabbage and pungent sauerkraut. Dinner is served.