Whenever I get together with my friend Lisa, we spend much of our time hanging out in the kitchen, cooking, eating and laughing.

Lisa is an adventurous eater and enthusiastic cook.  She’s the one who introduced me to Ethiopian food and soft shell crabs.  We’ve shared summer pudding in East Berlin, lobster straight out of the steamer at a beach house in Delaware, and southwest paella cooked over a backpacking stove in Yosemite.

Ours is a bi-coastal friendship and we don’t see each other as much now that we no longer work in journalism.  But when I flew back to Maryland to visit her last month, we picked up right where we left off, drinking tea in the remodeled kitchen of her Victorian house and planning our meals for the week.

This pork roast came from a dinner party we threw for a few of Lisa’s close friends.  It started with a pair of tenderloins pulled from the freezer and a garlicky herb paste, originally devised for chicken, we adapted from an Italian cookbook.  It was such a hit, I knew right away that I would post it here.

Tenderloin is a juicy—and yes, tender—cut that cooks quickly and pairs well with many flavors.  Because it’s so lean, though, you have to be careful not to overcook it.  The internal temperature will continue to rise while it rests after roasting, so pull it out of the oven when it reaches 140 to 145 degrees.

A thick blanket of minced herbs, garlic and lemon zest, inspired by “Big Night In” by Domenica Marchetti (Chronicle, 2008), keeps this roast moist even if you do cook it a tad too long.  We introduced fennel fronds to the mix for a lingering note of anise, which goes so well with pork.  The proportions aren’t that important.  Just hold back a little on pungent herbs like rosemary.

The recipe is simplicity itself.  Mince up a couple of handfuls of mixed herbs with garlic, spices and olive oil.  Slather the mixture over the tenderloins and let them marinate 4-6 hours, or overnight if possible.   Slide them into the oven and bake for 15-25 minutes.  Let them rest while you set the table and toss the salad.  Then serve.

Party fare doesn’t get any easier than this.

Real barbecue is the antithesis of grilling.  There’s nothing quick and easy about it.  To properly cook a pork shoulder over smoldering coals for hours until its tender, moist and humming with smoky flavor takes patience and attention to detail.

So it’s no wonder we only pull out the smoker now and then.  Every time, we bite into pulled pork straight out of the smoker, though, we regret that we don’t do it more often.

It’s hard to beat the taste of well-marbled pork cooked until the outer layer becomes deep brown and crusty.  Pile it on a bun with tangy, crunchy cole slaw and life doesn’t get much better.

This is a can’t-miss dish for a party.  And just the thing for the waning days of the summer vacation season.

The recipe is an adaption of  The Renowned Mr. Brown from Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s “Smoke & Spice” (Harvard Common Press, 2003).   We use a Weber Smoky Mountain vertical water smoker, known affectionately by its fans as the Bullet. It’s solidly built, and the heavy metal body holds heat well.

However, it’s also possible to smoke the pork on an ordinary charcoal grill using the indirect method. Barbecue guru Steven Raichlen explains the technique here.  The critical elements are low, even temperatures and time — 6-10 hours of time.

And of course, there’s the all-important question of sauce and cole slaw.  I prefer the South Carolina mustard sauce I found in ”Steven Raichlen’s BBQ USA” (Workman, 2003) and the creamy, vinegar-laced slaw from ”Thrill of the Grill” by Chris Schlesinger & John Willoughby (Morrow, 1990)  Put them all together and you have a sandwich you’ll never forget.

Sure, real barbecue takes time and effort. But it’s worth it.

As much as I’d love to, I’ve never been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  The memory of  the great food I ate on my one trip to the Big Easy still lingers, though.

About this time of year, I always start thinking about celebrating Mardi Gras at home with some of those unforgettable flavors. There’s no way I can hope to recreate the fabulous Gulf Coast seafood where I live, of course.  But it’s not that difficult to approximate  the savory satisfaction of the muffuletta sandwiches made legendary by Central Grocery in the French quarter near the turn of the last century.

The sandwich takes its name from a large, rather soft loaf of Sicilian bread dusted with sesame seeds. Afficionados insist you can’t make a muffuletta without it.

The bread is not widely available, however, and I’m not that fond of squishy bread anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, the irresistible element of a muffuletta is the briny olive salad tucked inside with good salumi and cheese. The salad is simple to make with olives, capers and the pickled mix of vegetables Italians call giardiniera.

To mix things up a little, I’ve turned the muffuletta into a miniature sandwich perfect for a picnic or a party platter at any time of the year.  I took some along on a hike recently and my friends were as enthusiastic as I am.

These little sandwiches can be made on ordinary sourdough dinner rolls.  Just be sure the crust is not too hard to bite through easily.  Use the best meat and cheese you can find and make the olive salad a day ahead to allow the flavors to meld.

If you can’t make it to New Orleans either this year,  mini muffulettas will take you there in spirit.

Of course you can grill hot dogs and hamburgers at the Fourth of July barbecue. That’s what most people will expect.

There’s a whole world of great grilling traditions to explore, though, if you’d like to try something new.  One of the best is Korean-style barbecue with its sweet and spicy rendition of beef short ribs known as kalbi.

These are the same tasty, tender ribs you may have cooked over a tabletop grill in a Korean restaurant.   They’re almost as easy to make at home and they’re guaranteed to wake up the palates of guests expecting the old standards at the annual Independence Day festivities.  We’re such a diverse nation, who’s to say what’s American food now?

Korean-influenced fare is one of the hottest trends in American cooking.  Celebrated chef David Chang has made his name at his string of Momofuku restaurants in New York City with food influenced by his Korean-American upbringing.   In Los Angeles, crowds follow Roy Choi’s Kogi taco trucks on Twitter for the opportunity to stand in long lines for short rib tacos and burritos.

Making your own is as simple as marinating the meat in soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger, and sesame overnight, then quickly cooking the ribs on a hot grill.  They’re cut so thinly  there’s little worrying about when they’re done.

The trickiest part may be finding the right cut of ribs.  The beef chuck short ribs should be cut across the bone about a quarter to a half inch thick, leaving three or four flat bones at the top of a long strip of meat.  Some Asian markets carry this cut but you may have to go to a butcher shop and ask for them to be cut for you.  My butcher calls them English style short ribs, but many cookbooks refer to them as flanken-style ribs.

Lacking a helpful butcher, barbecue guru Steven Raichlen suggests butterflying individual ribs in his latest cookbook, “Planet Barbecue” (Workman, 2010).  That takes kalbi out of the easy category, however, and I’m glad I haven’t had to do it.

Every Korean family has its own recipe.  I’ve adapted one from Sang Jung Choi in “The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook” by Patricia Tanumihardja (Sasquatch Books, 2009).  She uses kiwi puree to tenderize the meat then adds a big bottle of lemon-lime soda to the marinade for good measure.  Since I just can’t bring myself to endorse soda in anything, I’ve increased the honey in the recipe to make up for the omission.  I’ve also substituted cayenne for the Korean red pepper powder that I couldn’t find locally.

Traditionally, the meat is cut into strips after it’s grilled.  Diners wrap the strips in lettuce leaves with a bit of white rice, a little kimchi — the pickled and fermented vegetables at the heart of Korean cuisine — and perhaps a dab of hot sauce for the brave.   I made the quick cucumber kimchi from Chang’s cookbook, “Momofuku” (Clarkson Potter, 2009), to go with my last batch of kalbi and it delivered quite a kick.

You also could take the fusion route and turn your kalbi into tacos or burritos like the Korean taco trucks in LA. do.  They layer strips of short ribs in a fresh tortilla with  salsa, cilantro and onion relish, and a slaw tossed in a chile-soy vinaigrette.  I like the rib meat in a taco with salsa and the smoked jalapeno sauerkraut from Farmhouse Culture.

Feel free to make it up as you go along. It is Independence Day, after all.

It’s not a celebration in Mexico without pozole. The spicy, porky soup, laden with tender hominy corn and a fiery chile paste, is perfect for a crowd and just the ticket for a Cinco de Mayo party.

The trouble is it’s hard to find a really good recipe that you can make with readily available ingredients. I mean, who can find pork trotters without an exhaustive search?  Even the Mexican markets in my town don’t carry them.

Then there are the secrets that you’re not likely to know unless you grew up in the culture, cooking at your mother’s elbow. I struggled with the dried corn for which the dish is named through a couple of batches of soup before I understood that even the bags of corn in the Mexican market had to be boiled with slaked lime before washing and cooking.  The pozole tasted good but it was so rubbery and tough it was almost inedible. Cans of white hominy — many cooks’ standby — just didn’t appeal.

Luckily, I found the already treated — nixtamalized — corn at Steve Sando’s great online store, Rancho Gordo. Sando uses small Southwestern corn kernels for his posole (it can be spelled with and “s” or a “z”).  The treated kernels cook up tender and fluffy,  providing the perfect canvas for rich pork, lively chiles and the panoply of toppings that give pozole it’s festive character.

For my recipe, I started with Rick Bayless’ “Mexico One Plate at a Time.” No one does a better job translating Mexican food for American cooks than Bayless.  His recipes are authentic but approachable for anyone with a modicum of patience.

It can be difficult to find the appropriate ingredients, however.  Bayless calls for pork shanks, trotters and bone-in shoulder for his recipe.   I followed the advice of a sympathetic butcher and used country-style pork ribs instead.  The results were exceptionally good.

It takes more time than skill to make this dish and much of the time can be spent doing something else while the pozole bubbles away on the stove.  You can even make it ahead and rewarm it the next day.  The flavors will be richer after they’ve had some time to meld.

In the last hour, while the corn, pork and chile are simmering together, prepare the toppings that diners will add to the soup to their own taste.  Don’t skimp here. The mild, fresh flavors and varied textures of crisp radish, crunchy cabbage and silky avocado are a perfect counterpoint to the spicy soup.

I can’t think of a better party dish.  Viva Mexico!

Every year I’m a sucker for those gorgeous days in mid-February filled with the promise of an early spring.  Then the sun goes back behind the clouds and it starts to rain again.  I have to remind myself that it’s still winter.

This is the perfect season for stracotto, an Italian take on a slow-cooked pot roast, steeped in red wine, mushrooms and aromatic vegetables.

My introduction to this gutsy and soul-warming dish came in the beautiful cookbook, “Organic Marin,” by Tim Porter and Farina Wong Kingsley (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 20080).  A fund-raiser for Marin Organic’s school lunch program, it’s filled with mouth-watering photographs and appealing recipes from some of Marin County’s best restaurants. The braised chuck roast was the contribution of Piatti Ristorante & Bar in Mill Valley.

I was so smitten that I made stracotto several times in the oven before I began experimenting with a slow cooker variation for one of my favorite cooks, who had just acquired her first Crock Pot.  Along the way, it picked up porcini mushrooms, bacon, and a generous portion of red wine to pump up the already vivid flavors.

The secret to this recipe is browning the meat, sauteing the vegetables and reducing the wine before placing them in the slow cooker.  Those steps — which many recipes skip in the name of convenience — help develop and concentrate the flavors.

So then, you ask, what’s the advantage of using a slow cooker instead of  just shoving the roast into the oven for three or four hours?  For one thing, it gives you flexibility.  Prep this dish in the morning before you go out for the day and you won’t have to worry about getting back in time to put it in the oven.

You could even get it ready the night before and stash the cooker’s ceramic insert in the refrigerator.  Take it out when you get up in the morning, let it come to room temperature while you’re getting ready to leave, then put it in the cooker and let it simmer all day.

When you come home, you’ll have a dinner fit for company.  Serve it over soft polenta with good bread and a simple salad.  Winter suppers don’t get much better.

Before we left on our recent trip to Alaska, I compiled a collection of recipes that I thought might work for car camping.  They had to be simple — based on ingredients we could find at most any grocery store —and require a minimum of pots and pans.  One skillet would be ideal.

At the same time, I wanted fresh flavors and appealing textures.  Canned goods and pantry items soon lose their charm when you’re traveling for six weeks.

Our favorite quick and easy meal turned out to be an updated version of Joe’s Special, the venerable San Francisco dish made with spinach, eggs, onions and ground meat.  Think of it as a deconstructed fritatta.  It takes a bit of chopping but it comes together fairly quickly and tastes terrific.

I’ve substituted ground turkey for the original hamburger and thrown in sliced mushrooms for meaty flavor.  What makes this dish so easy and fresh tasting is the baby spinach now available washed and bagged at all but the smallest supermarkets.  Bagged spinach holds up nicely in an ice chest for several days.

Throw in some good Parmesan, chopped pimentos and dried oregano and you have a very tasty one-dish meal.  Just be sure not to cook the spinach and eggs too long.  The dish should be moist and each ingredient identifiable when it’s served.

We liked this dish so much, it’s going into our emergency dinner repertoire for those nights when we’re just too bushed to attempt anything more ambitious.  A food processor would cut the work to almost nothing.

Almost anything goes with chocolate, it seems.

Last weekend at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, I tasted delightful chocolates combined with Guinness, jackfruit, bacon and genmai tea — in separate confections, thank goodness. Even the Van Gogh vodka infused with dusky Dutch chocolate, which I sampled with some trepidation, was lovely.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that dark chocolate and peppery extra virgin olive oil make such a stunning marriage in the almost flourless cake from Fran Gage‘s just-released book, “The New American Olive Oil” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009). The single-layer cake is at once dense, moist and amazingly light, with the silky smooth texture of velvet. Just enough of the oil’s pungent bite hovers in the background to highlight the chocolate’s subtly fruity character. I may never go back to butter.

A respected baker who once owned a pastry shop in San Francisco, Gage knows chocolate. A few years ago, she wrote “Chocolate Obsession” ( Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2005 ) with Bay Area chocolatier Michael Ricchiuti. Her palate is so finely tuned that she was asked to join the taste panel of The California Olive Oil Council, the trade organization that determines which oils from the state’s three dozen mills qualifies to be labeled as extra virgin. She now judges olive oil competitions.

“The New American Olive Oil” tells the story of artisan oil in California and profiles producers large and small. It’s a good resource for people who want to delve deeply into the subject and is filled with advice on choosing, storing and cooking with oils that range from buttery and mild to peppery and assertive.

The 75 recipes, however, are the book’s real treasure. Gage uses extra virgin olive oil for everything, including frying eggs for a French-style salad of sauteed frisee. She braises pork shoulder in olive oil rather that the customary pork fat for rilletes, bakes oysters with lemon olive oil and anoints grilled steaks with robust oil.

Desserts may be the biggest stretch — extra virgin olive oil ice cream with vanilla bean, Meyer lemon olive oil madeleines and orange olive oil pound cake break all conventions. If they’re half as good as the almost flourless cake, though, they’re welcome on my table.

The cake is deceptively simple. You melt good dark bittersweet chocolate, whisk in oil , sugar, egg yolks and just two tablespoons of flour. Then you gently fold in beaten egg whites until no pale streaks are visible and pour the batter in the pan. It works well with a delicately buttery olive oil but I liked it better with a robust oil made from pungent Tuscan varieties of olives.

The only real trick is timing the baking. A few minutes too long in the oven and the top and sides get brittle and crumble when you remove the cake from the pan, which ruins the presentation. I know from experience.

I served it to my dinner guests anyway. I’d used Valrhona chocolate, after all. But I layered on enough whipped cream and berries to distract them from the mess on the plate. The next cake, I baked five minutes less, and it was perfect. The first strawberries of spring from Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport were a great accompaniment but I didn’t really need them this time around.

This cake is so good, it doesn’t require anything but a fork.

Chances are you’ve never heard of colcannon, much less ranked it high on your list of favorite Irish foods. It certainly wasn’t part of my repertoire until recently, when I began looking for new ways to cook the kale that floods local farmers markets during the winter months.

For the record, colcannon is a traditional Irish peasant dish dating back at least to the 18th century. It sounds a little odd: A concoction of mashed potatoes and cooked cabbage or kale with a little onion thrown in, and perhaps some bacon if you’re flush.

On the plate, however, it’s a revelation. The greens bring pleasing texture and a new layer of flavor to often stodgy mashed potatoes, while onions contribute sweet and savory notes. The bacon — well, what’s not to like about bacon? It’s the spark of salt and fat that brings the dish to life.

St. Patrick’s Day seems the perfect time to introduce this wonderfully thrifty, nutritious and tasty dish to a larger audience. Pair it with a pot roast braised in Guinness and you have an uncommonly good menu for a feast in honor of Ireland’s patron saint.

I’ve adapted this recipe from “Kitchen Seasons” by Ross Dobson (Ryland Peters & Small, 2007). He’s an Australian food writer with an eye for simple, flavorful food in rhythm with the seasons — a cook after my own heart. Although colcannon is more often made with green cabbage, he uses curly kale, which retains its bright green color and ruffled texture when cooked. I’ve swapped out most of the butter in his ingredient list for cream or milk to make the potatoes more silky.

To go with it, I’ve turned a classic Belgian stew recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (Knopf, 1967) into a pot roast braised in dark Irish beer. You might recognize it as Carbonnades a la Flammande. The ingredients are economical — chuck roast, onions and beer — and the preparation is easy, although it does take a few hours in the oven to develop the luscious, caramelized flavors.

I’ve simplified the recipe by omitting the last step of thickening the braising liquid with cornstarch, which tends to dull the flavors. Instead, I reduce the liquid into a sauce by boiling it for a few minutes after removing the meat.

Serve this with a glass of Guinness and you’re Irish for the evening. On the other hand, it also goes down nicely with a good cabernet.

Some people drool over Neiman-Marcus catalogs filled with designer clothes and $600 shoes. My guilty pleasure is cookware catalogs abrim with pricey pots and clever gadgets.

I always make time to thumb through the Williams-Sonoma catalog even though I rarely can afford anything on its glossy pages. That’s how I ran across Thomas Keller’s slow-cooker cassoulet, photographed temptingly in All-Clad’s shiny, deluxe slow cooker ($279.95, gasp, plus tax and shipping), last week.

Keller, of course, is All-Clad’s celebrity chef spokesman. He’s paid to tout their products, which always are top of the line with prices to match. On the other hand, he’s the man who turned The French Laundry into arguably the best restaurant in the country. His palate is pitch perfect.

If Keller was willing to put his name on a slow cooker cassoulet recipe, I felt compelled to try it.

First, a caveat: I’m not going to get into a debate about whether it’s possible to make a “real cassoulet” this way. People are passionate on the subject of this traditional French peasant dish of meats and beans. Some argue it can’t be made properly outside of Languedoc, where it originated.

Let’s just stipulate that this variation is a sincere tribute to that tradition — deeply flavorful and soul-satisfying in it’s own right.

For the record, too, I’m not a fan of slow cookers. I view them as convenient but very limited appliances, best suited to fairly simple foods. In my experience, flavors seem to leach out of many dishes after many hours of slow simmering. There’s no way I would spend $300 on one, no matter how shiny.

So the old 4-quart Rival with the ceramic crock insert that I keep around to make tomato sauce in the summer would have to do. That required some adjustment in the recipe, which is written for a 7-quart cooker with a non-stick aluminum insert.

Keller builds layers of flavor that slowly meld into an incredibly savory, rib-sticking dish by toasting panko crumbs, browning the pork shoulder, frying the bacon, sauteing the onions and reducing the wine in the insert on top of the stove. This initial preparation is what sets this dish apart from most slow cooker recipes. I employed a heavy 12-inch skillet for the critical steps.

Tradition calls for the meats and beans to be cooked separately, then combined in a clay casserole and baked uncovered until the top is brown and crusty. Instead, Keller slowly simmers the browned meat and white beans together until both are tender — about seven hours.

To compensate for my smaller cooker, I halved the recipe. I also introduced a couple of duck legs in confit that I had stashed in the freezer and a few sprigs of thyme in the last hour of cooking in hopes of picking up a little extra flavor.

Because there was so little liquid in the original recipe, I added an extra cup of chicken stock for good measure. That proved unnecessary in the end, but I’d still hold a cup of stock in reserve just in case the beans get too dry.

As a finishing touch, Keller layers baguette slices over the top of the cassoulet and pops the insert under the broiler for a few minutes to brown the bread. It’s an artful solution to the major shortcoming of this recipe — the lack of a wonderfully crusty, golden brown top. I toasted the bread separately and served it alongside the gutsy, garlicky stew. But then presentation is not really my forte.

Flavor was not the issue I had feared. Keller has a sure hand and this dish was so hearty, I didn’t miss the usual bouquet of herbs. The tomatoes added a welcome bit of acidity that cut through the fat rendered from the meat and crunchy panko crumbs lightly bound it all together.

It was just as good the next day, when I warmed the leftovers in the oven for half an hour in a casserole topped with more panko crumbs.

Even so, this will never be a recipe to impress foodie friends who wax philosophical about the necessity of French tarbais beans or the perfect saucisse de Toulouse for an authentic cassoulet. It’s just not exotic enough for bragging rights. Still it’s perfect for anyone craving true winter comfort food with an intoxicating aroma and rich flavors.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Thomas Keller knows what he’s doing.

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