There is nothing not to love about schnitzel: it's a gigantic piece of fried meat. Growing up, often when something particularly good or bad happened, my mom and I would celebrate or console ourselves with a schnitzel. Schnitzel was always there for us! On my honeymoon, my husband and I celebrated with many schnitzels and then I also cried into a schnitzel when I realized I sucked at skiing so badly that I was never going to be able to ski in the Alps.
This is Molly’s version of arayes, a Lebanese street food, that she describes as: the best, spiced, juiciest burger of your life, cooked inside of a fluffy pita, giving you crispy fried outer edges and tender juicy meat pocket innards. It’s a delicious texture and great flavor.
This is a pasta salad inspired by the flavors of my go-to falafel recipe. Falafel is a traditional Middle Eastern chickpea or fava bean fritter that I’ve loved since childhood. When I make mine, I load up on fresh mint, parsley and cilantro, as well as coriander and a little bit of cinnamon. So with this recipe, I took all of my favorite falafel ingredients and tossed them with pasta. And I had to use farfalle because…c’mon, Falafel-y Farfalle is so much fun to say!
Irrepressibly bubbly, funny and sweet, millennial food celebrity Yeh has never met a recipe that couldn’t be improved with sprinkles.
Matzo brei is one of my all-time favorite foods! It is typically eaten on Passover since it is customary to avoid leavened bread. Matzo, a cracker-like unleavened bread, gets soft and chewy when it's soaked and scrambled with eggs in this traditional dish. Some people like sweet matzo brei sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, but I am on Team Savory Brei 4ever!
How a Juilliard-trained percussionist from Brooklyn moved to East Grand Forks and became one of America's favorite celebrity chefs
Smashing cucumbers is a delicious and rustically beautiful preparation that is common across Asia. Smashing them creates a variety of different textures, and draining them concentrates the flavor. This is a simple-to-prepare dish but it packs personality!
When I was growing up, whenever my family would order from our favorite Chinese restaurant, we'd order the same things: many orders of pot stickers and kung pao chicken, hold the peanuts (because my mom is allergic!). Even as a picky eater, I loved how saucy and flavorful the kung pao chicken was. Every single time we ordered it, my older sister would pick out a dried chile with her fingers, hold it in my face, and try to convince me to eat this "dehydrated carrot." I never fell for it!
Congee is a porridge that's essentially just made of extremely saturated rice—it’s the ultimate form of comfort. It's often served with Chinese crullers, which aren't too sweet, and I love the texture that they add.
When Molly first experienced Korean corn dogs, she was floored and thought they were incredible. The skewered combination of a fried hot dog and string cheese felt like a mozzarella stick and a corn dog made a delicious baby. This is her take on recreating that recipe: deep-fried and crispy all-beef hot dogs and cheese, dusted in sugar to finish, with ketchup and mustard for dipping. They’re sure to send anyone to corn dog heaven.
continuing on with my list of foods that i plan to stock in our freezer for my maternity leave, i have to share this soup with you that is the best kept secret of the upper midwest. knoephla soup is right up with tater tot hotdish as my favorite new food that i’ve learned about since moving here. knoephla (neh-fla) are little chewy dumplings that made their way to this area with german immigrants and are most commonly enjoyed in creamy potato soup, but can also be sautéed with sauerkraut and sausage or put into hotdish. they are kind of like plumper smoother spaetzle and the frozen store-bought ones look a lot like mochi bits. knoephla soup is traditionally made without meat, just potatoes, vegetables, a bit of cream, and my favorite (from dakota harvest, r.i.p.) had the most warming hit of nutmeg. the texture of the dumplings and the pure comfort of it all makes this the kind of soup that i just shovel into my mouth with abandon. we had it at our wedding and for years now i’ve wondered why it hasn’t seemed to pick up that much popularity outside of the upper midwest.
when i think of snickers bars, i think of nougat and caramel and when i think of nougat and caramel i think of candy thermometers and time-sensitive things and too many pots and then having to scrub too many pots of sticky stuff and it strikes fear! but it turns out that there’s a perfect hack for the nougat, which is marshmallow fluff. marshmallow fluff + nut butter + sugar = snickers nougat but better because you can use any nut or seed butter you want and you just mix it up in one bowl, no thermometer needed. and with the caramel thing, i’ve decided i’m probably only using store bought caramel from now until bernie and any future younger siblings of hers go off to college. another thing that’s fun with these is that you can change up the nuts, as long as they are salted and roasted since they need to balance out the sweetness of the nougat and caramel.
These stuffed peppers are inspired by the flavors of one of my all-time favorite street foods, shawarma. Shawarma is a Middle Eastern dish consisting of seasoned meat cooked on a spit and then shaved thin. The spice combination typically found in shawarma is savory, warm and totally addictive!
This is another way Molly likes to sneak nutrients into her kids’ bellies. They’re savory, scrumptious, and cheesy veggie patties shaped like cookies. Obviously, these aren’t your typical sweet cookies, but when it comes to kids, it’s all about the marketing.
These are Molly’s orange twist on traditional lemon bars and also an ode to her admiration for all of the sesame found in Korean sweets. Bars are a Midwest dessert staple and Molly loves coming up with new recipes that are riffs on the originals. The orange in these is subtly sweet and the sesame crust makes them sing with nutty, buttery flavor.
This cookie is Santa’s summer look: crispy sesame cookies topped with mountains of fluffy meringue and dipped in pink ruby chocolate. Lumps of halva are sweet little surprises hidden in the meringue—there are no lumps of coal during Christmas in July.
Molly grew up in Chicago where there is a huge Polish population. She had tons of Polish friends and was always eating pierogi at food festivals and seeing them frozen in the grocery store, so Molly’s always been a fan of Polish culture and it was extra cool to learn that she is a little Polish!
No Hanukkah feast is complete without a platter filled with crisp latkes. In this recipe, cookbook author and blogger Molly Yeh sticks to tradition, preparing the pancakes with potatoes and onions and serving them with sour cream and applesauce, but feel free to get creative and add your own fun toppings. For the crispiest latkes, squeeze out as much liquid as you can from the shredded potatoes and onions. A twice-fried latke is extra nice, so if you’d like to make these ahead of time, store in the refrigerator and then reheat by frying them again.
