Peanut Butter

You won’t believe how good this easy cookie is. For a change, press a Hershey’s Kiss down into the center of each ball of dough. Omit the crisscross design.

GINA Can you imagine life without these two amazing ingredients? Who would want that? It would be like having fabulous shoes without a great handbag. Having chocolate and peanut butter is heaven on earth. If you think I talk a lot, give me chocolate and peanut butter and you won’t hear another word out of me!

This pie is a peanut butter cup aficionado’s dream. It was the creation of my friend Jen, who was one of the bakers at Foster’s, and it has since become a Market staple—one of our most popular pies. With layers of crispy chocolate crust, smooth dark chocolate ganache, creamy peanut butter filling, and cool whipped cream, it is a true indulgence.

I developed this recipe—in very small increments—for a newspaper article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven. My first impulse was to create something very sophisticated, but then I thought I’d appeal to the kid in everyone with bananas, chocolate, and peanut butter. I have since used this cake recipe with a strawberry-cream cheese icing, with great success. And yes, I did have an Easy-Bake Oven when I was a kid!

This recipe came about much like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial—“You got chocolate on my peanut butter,” etc. One day a long time ago, I had some peanut sauce left over from making pork satés, and I was in the process of putting together a cream of celery soup. I started thinking about how people have been known to eat celery sticks with peanut butter, so I swirled the rich sauce into the delicate soup. With a little extra garlic, chile paste, and soy sauce, the result was pretty darn tasty—and I’ve been making it ever since.

My mother learned this dish when we lived in Holland in the late ’50s. It was part of the rijstafel—an Indonesian take-out feast of many dishes—that my parents used to have delivered to the house. We used to watch wide-eyed as a flurry of delivery guys carried in dish after dish stacked in round metal containers. When we gather as a family on Christmas and other special days, we rarely have turkey or ham, but more often rice and curry or bami goreng, a noodle dish, with these satés as an appetizer. It is still the favorite family snack. The pork marinade is effortless to put together. While the meat absorbs the flavors, you can stir together the spicy peanut sauce. I tend to grill the satés, but my mother actually cooks these on an old waffle iron that has a smooth side, not unlike a panini grill.

Satay is an Indonesian dish where, typically, foods are skewered and then grilled or broiled. But to me satay is all about the peanut sauce that’s served alongside the skewers. I love peanut sauce! I made a stovetop version with just broccoli and cauliflower accompanied with that amazing peanut dipping sauce, so it would be a really easy meal for one. The sauce would also be great with some baked tofu.

This is one of my favorite salads in the whole book, despite what anyone says about the color. Soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat, are a kind of gray-brown color, so everyone thinks the salad looks a little bizarre or even unappetizing—until they try it and realize that it’s a delicious twist on pasta salad. The lime juice and fresh veggies make it refreshing and light.

This cake is a riff on my great-aunt Lorena’s 1-2-3-4 cake, a classic confection dating back to at least the mid-1800s, made with one cup butter, two cups sugar, three cups flour, and four eggs. It’s a simple cake, perfect for the likes of Aunt Lorena, who was better known for her prowess as a drama teacher than for her ability in the kitchen. (The auditorium in the Grapeland, Texas, high school where she taught for many years is named after her.) My favorite story about Aunt Lorena comes from Uncle Jack, Lorena’s middle son, who says he was in high school history class before he discovered the South did not win the Civil War. As he tells it, his mom was so proud of her grandfather, William Burroughs Wright, who fought in the war alongside his brother and his brother-in-law, that she managed to brush over the fact that the North won.

During many a week, candy bars make up 50 percent (or more) of my diet. As a teen, I already showed a predilection for staying hip to the culinary scene at the grocery store, trolling the aisles to check out interesting frozen items, new cereals, perhaps a vamped-up cookie section, and, of course, the impulse-buy area—one of my favorites—with its multitude of candy bars trying to break into the market. Which is why I was hooked on Take 5 candy bars long before I ever thought about making a pie inspired by them. I was blown away by my first bite of one, in the passenger seat of the family van in the Giant parking lot of NoVa. My sister had one cluster, and the other was all mine. It is the epitome of perfectly layered chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter, and pretzels. Hershey’s describes it as “a unique taste experience combining five favorite ingredients in one candy bar. The result is a delicious salty sweet snack unlike anything else.” Amazing. For my birthday a couple of years ago, Dave bought me two cases, that’s 480 clusters, of Take 5 candy bars and dared me to eat them all in a month. With a little help from my friends, I did it in twenty-eight days. On my birthday, that first day, I ate seven—and then puked the next morning (bad idea). Marian Mar made a big push to get this pie on the opening menu of Milk Bar, because, as she once put it, we are candy bars, and candy bars are us. So we need a candy bar pie on the menu. It’s a little bit of a bitch to make, which was my main argument for wanting to leave it off the menu. But working in this industry is a labor of love, after all, and Marian was right all along. This pie is one of our top sellers even today. We lovingly refer to it at Milk Bar as the T-5 pie.

Peanuts reached the American South through a rather circuitous route: Although they were first brought to the United States from Africa in the 1700s, they appear to have originated in South America. The Incas used peanuts in trade, and jars filled with them have been found in ancient Inca graves. This recipe, which may have first come from George Washington Carver’s pot, makes an unusual but surprisingly tasty soup.