To my mind, it’s the ultimate French toast replacement — no more batter, no more soggy messes, no more slices burning, eggy and gross, as you try to sauté enough at one time to feed an entire tableful of breakfasters. Baking them on trays means you’re freed from that desperate push on the pans. And while this is, honestly, best with brioche, really any stale bread will work. Emily even suggests replacing the frangipane with jam and turning the oven down to 325. 

Dad’s apprenticeship at the hands of a gifted chef father and savvy manager mother gave him a lifelong love and appreciation of good food and restaurants — and drove him to stay as far away from the culinary biz as possible.

By the time my sisters and I appeared on the scene, Dad generally stayed out of the kitchen. His culinary responsibilities were limited to standard dad stuff — grilling burgers and steaks in the backyard — and a single indoors task: folding wontons.

Wontons — square pasta wrappers folded into elegant little pods around a savory mixture of ground pork, vegetables and sometimes seafood — are dead easy to make, but there’s a catch: there are no shortcuts for folding them the right way. Our hungry family of six could go through a boatload of them in a single meal, but there was no way Mom could fill and fold all of these herself, not with so much housework to deal with and so much childhood misbehavior to monitor.

So the folding fell to Dad, who brought to the enterprise serious mass wonton-folding chops, courtesy of the Golden Dragon.

I can still see the setup: It’s Saturday (or Sunday) afternoon, and Dad is at the kitchen table. Mom’s filling, smelling tantalizingly of scallions and sesame oil, sits in a glistening pink mound in a mixing bowl in front of him. Next to the mixing bowl is an open packet of wonton skins, which Dad keeps covered with a towel so they won’t dry out and crack when folded. At his side is a small bowl filled with beaten egg and a kitchen knife (the egg is the glue that holds the wontons together), and somewhere nearby on the table is a baking sheet soon to be filled with perfectly folded wontons.

By time I got to grade school, I wanted to fold wontons too. I was a bit of a tomboy and seriously into origami, and folding wontons fed both these impulses: Because Dad was the chief wonton folder in the household, I somehow got it into my head that wonton-making was one of those noble masculine arts, like bug-collecting and compass navigation, that would be worth aspiring to. And properly folded wontons are a thing of geometric beauty. By the time I was 8 or so, I’d be sitting beside him, folding away. It made me feel powerful and useful.

For whatever reason, none of my sisters ever took an interest in wonton folding, so I got to see something they didn’t. My parents were masters at keeping up a unified front before us kids, but when it came to wonton folding, this seemingly impenetrable facade ever so slightly cracked. Dad often warned me not to overfill the skins, lest they burst wastefully when boiled in soup or deep fried. Meanwhile, Mom, who grew up on decadent meals Dad could only dream of in his youth, always scolded him for the stingy amount of filling he used.

“Fred! This isn’t the Golden Dragon!”

It took me a while to figure out how to fill and fold wontons in a way that kept both Mom and Dad happy. The optimal amount of filling had to be small enough not to cause the wrapper to tear or the seams to come loose when folded, but big enough to offer diners a generous meaty bite or two. In wonton folding, as in a functional family life, patience and little compromises are the boring but sure secrets to success.

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Lee Family weekend wontons

Mom always made ginormous batches of wontons so she could keep some in the freezer for later. To freeze uncooked wontons, lay them on a baking sheet so they don’t touch and put the sheet in the freezer until the wontons are frozen solid. Once frozen, the wontons can be transferred to a freezer bag for storage. On a cold weeknight when you don’t feel like cooking, take some out of the bag, allow them to thaw, and throw them into a pot of simmering broth for a comforting dinner.

I’ve adjusted the recipe to make a more modest number of wontons — only about 100. I’ve also included instructions for the two most common ways of serving them, cooked in soup and fried. The soup recipe serves 2-4; the fried wonton recipe makes as many or as few as you need. Unless you’re serving dozens of people, you’ll still have some wontons left over for the freezer. Folding all of these will entail about an hour of meditative handiwork for one person, or a pleasant bonding experience for two.

For wonton soup: Heat one quart of chicken broth in a pot until it starts to boil. Carefully place about 12 wontons in the pot along with any meat and/or vegetables you’d like to add. (Mom used wonton soup as a convenient repository for leftovers.) When the wontons float to the top of the broth and look wrinkly and translucent, they’re done. Toss two thinly sliced scallions over the soup as a garnish. This amount will serve two people as a lunch, or four people as an opener to a larger meal.

For fried wontons: Heat about 2 inches of neutral cooking oil (such as canola) in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. When it’s hot enough to make a drop of water sizzle on impact, add wontons, one at a time. The number that you can add will depend on the size of your pan, but you don’t want them close enough to touch each other. Fry until the undersides are golden brown; flip and fry until the second side is also golden brown. Immediately remove from the oil, drain well on paper towels, and serve hot with sweet and sour or hoisin sauce. 

My family was so appreciative that suddenly all that work didn’t seem so strenuous. As a result, every other year I make tamales. And I do it all by myself. At some point it became a burden I was happy to take on. I’ve learned a few things that have helped me streamline the labor and making them all by myself isn’t such a big thing. I even render my own lard (because it’s as healthy as shortening and tastes better than either shortening or store-bought lard). I do it ALL. I sometimes miss my cousins and my extended family being around, but we’ve all gotten older, our lives have become more far-flung and most of us have kids of our own. I miss the tamaladas I used to attend (but didn’t know I was attending), but I adore the new tradition of being able to show my family how much they mean to me and I love the feeling of completing all that work.

Last year was an “on” year for me to make tamales. The way I usually work is to set up a card table in front of the television for the actual assembly phase. While there is a lot of kitchen time in the preparation of the filling and the masa, when you’re putting them together, you can do it from your club chair while you watch college football on your big-screen television. That was what I was doing last year when my 5-year-old daughter wandered into the family room and said, “Can I help you, Daddy?” I knew I’d have to change channels from my football game to Wonderpets (Theme song: What’s Gonna Work? TEAMwork!) I handed her a butter knife, showed her how to spread the masa and smiled as my blue-eyed, fair-skinned, one-quarter Mexican daughter unknowingly wandered into her first tamalada.

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Chile-Pork Tamales

This recipe makes about 18 tamales but I usually triple or quadruple it for a family as large as mine, and here, to start, are a few tips to help you out:

Start with a pork stock: Start by buying about two pounds of bone-in “country-style” spare ribs and cut out the bones. You can either roast the bones until they’re brown and then drop them in a stockpot or just put them in the stockpot. Chop up an onion and put it in with some smashed garlic cloves and maybe a chopped carrot and a stalk of chopped celery. Cover with cold water and simmer gently until you have a flavorful stock. Strain and let it cool. (This can be done in advance and even frozen well ahead of time as long as you thaw it before use.)

To set up the steamer: Steaming 20 tamales can be done in batches in a collapsible vegetable steamer set into a large, deep saucepan (if you stack the tamales more than two high they will steam unevenly) but it’s a balky process. To steam the whole recipe at once, I recommend something like the kettle-size tamale steamers used in Mexico (available inexpensively at Latino markets) or you can improvise by setting a wire rack on 4 coffee or custard cups in a large kettle with plenty of water underneath.

It is best to line the rack or upper part of the steamer with leftover scraps of corn husks to protect the tamales from direct contact with the steam and to add more flavor. Make sure to leave tiny spaces between leaves so condensing steam can drain off.

To do this in stages:

Both filling and batter can be made several days ahead, as can the finished tamales; refrigerate, well covered. Resteam (or even microwave) tamales before serving. For even more flexibility, batter, filling or finished tamales can be frozen. Defrost finished tamales in the refrigerator overnight before re-steaming.

I wish I could say that I learned to make pasta from a nonna, one of the Italian grandmothers that Carol Field writes about in “In Nonna’s Kitchen.” My Alabama grandmother was a society lady who wore Italian leather pumps and could make a mean tomato aspic from Campbell’s soup. For my own kitchen education, I turn to books, like those of Carol Field and Marcella Hazan. When I first started making pasta, I used the detailed instructions in Marcella’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” I recommend it as the premier primer on homemade egg pasta.

Here is how I make pasta and a tasty clam sauce to accompany. To quell the anti-authentic hue and cry in the comment section, I will state first off that this is how a Scotch-Irish-German girl from Georgia makes pasta. I use a food processor to mix and knead it and I use salt and olive oil in the pasta dough. Marcella doesn’t do this, but my pasta turns out fine, so that’s all I can say. I’ve watched many times while TV chefs make a crater out of flour, crack eggs into it and mix all together with a fork. My experience with this method is a gunky countertop. The processor is super-fast and the cleanup is easy.

Homemade egg pasta for linguine

This is a double recipe of pasta, yielding about 1 ¼ pounds. It’s too much for the accompanying clam sauce, unless you’re a serious carbo-phile. Toss remaining noodles lightly in flour and arrange in nests on baking sheet. Let dry for an hour or so, place in plastic container and freeze. When it’s time to cook, frozen pasta can go directly into the boiling pot of pasta water.

Clam Sauce

In my house this dish is simply called “clams.” If I use dried pasta, it’s a pantry meal that can be put together in about 30 minutes, while the water is boiling for the pasta. With homemade fresh pasta, it’s worthy of company.

Those are scalding words for one of the best coffee shops in a city percolating with so many new ones that in March The New York Times decided to list the 40 “best.” The irony is that until a few years ago New York couldn’t compare to the Pacific Northwest — where the specialty-coffee trade was born in the ’60s — or cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. In New York, drinking diner coffee was almost a badge of distinction. But now the market here for specialty espresso has grown so frenetic that even Portland’s groudbreaking Stumptown and San Francisco’s Blue Bottle entered the East Coast fray, suddenly turning the city into an all-star showcase of American coffee.

So the darkly suave Milos is visiting from the birthplace of espresso for a year to gauge the state of coffee in the United States, illy’s largest customer outside Italy, and he has quickly learned how seriously Americans take their coffee. Call it a storm in a demitasse: He elicited a frothy response when, while blogging for theatlantic.com in May, he commented that American baristas not only need more training but are using so many different, unorthodox methods to pull shots you’d wonder if they’d ever sipped the drink in its country of origin.

“What is called espresso here sometimes really isn’t espresso,” he wrote. (The response from readers made him qualify that, saying that any drink pulled on an espresso machine is ‘technically’ an espresso, but baristas shouldn’t be playing fast and loose with the traditional water-coffee-temperature-time formula.)

One barista from San Francisco huffed that Milos’ article was culturally irrelevant and “American baristas no longer look to Italy for context.” Americans, he said, are creating their own traditions, such as making espresso with single-origin beans – i.e. beans that come from one farm or estate, to highlight the characteristics of that place – while Italian espresso is made from blends that often include some lesser-quality – i.e. Robusta – beans. In illy’s blend there are no fewer than nine bean types.

“It’s not bad to do something a bit different,” Milos says of the concoctions coming out of coffee shops across the country. “But in order to create something new, you have to follow the baseline, to know how to do something the real way. Then try to do something different. In Italy we have a saying: Learn to walk before you run.”

Another respondent pointed out that Milos hardly has room to talk. The last time he competed in the World Barista Championships – which was won in June by American Michael Philips – he came in 27th.

“A competition is not real life,” Milos counters, although he admits he did not perform his best.

But at least one self-identified veteran of the coffee business was on Milos’s side, saying that “the ultra-ristretto, staggeringly bitter shots being pulled by the likes of Vivace and Vita [both in Seattle] have nothing to do with espresso other than being a fascinating misuse of the machine … It’s undrinkable swill fit only for burying under a half-liter of foamed milk and flavorings (and THAT, friends, is America’s unique contribution to coffee culture).”

Coffee is the second-biggest traded commodity after oil , and America buys 22 million of the 130 million bags of coffee beans produced worldwide annually. On paper at least – and according to the Specialty Coffee Association of America – the formula for making an espresso across the 50 states is meant to be exactly the same as in Italy. Water: 1 oz. Coffee: 7 to 8.5 g. Temperature: 200 degrees F. Time of extraction: No more than 30 seconds. But plenty of baristas from Brooklyn to San Francisco, from Chicago to Miami, are using as much as 20 grams of coffee in an ounce of water, which, says Milos, makes an espresso look syrupy and sexy but is too overpowering to taste.

“Here in the U.S. the coffee they use is good, but the way they prepare it is bad,” he says. “Fifty percent of the result of a good espresso is in the hands of the barista. And if consumers can’t recognize that, we lose.”

The former No. 27 international barista is spending 2010 in America to train not only baristas at illy’s Universitá del Caffé (New York’s UDC is one of 10 around the world) but also consumers. Even though Starbucks might have taught Americans to buy cappuccinos and lattes – and pay more than three bucks a pop – Milos believes consumers have never learned what those drinks should actually taste like. It’s one thing ordering an espresso or a macchiato, another thing altogether being able to tell whether you got a good one.

A good espresso, he says, will depend on what coffee beans you use. But the final product should be judged on five qualities. There should be bitterness (but not too much), sourness (in balance with the bitterness), a bit of sweetness (which usually comes from some Central American bean), good body (which will depends on the preparation and the coffee used), and an aroma.

“I can’t say what kind of aroma,” he adds, “but it has to be aromatic. And that aroma will depend on the coffee that was used.”

Following Milos’ mantra to walk and not run, we do exactly that: We walk to four coffee shops that make up part of New York’s burgeoning West Coastlike, post-Starbucks generation. Added flavors like hazelnut creamers are anathema and there are a limited number of espresso-based beverages that all get pulled individually. “Regular” coffee, when served, often comes brewed to order, from a super-high-tech Clover machine or an elegantly simple Chemex drip. Milos judges the shops on one drink alone: espresso.

At Abraço, a hole-in-the-wall on East 7th Street, Milos smiles the moment he walks in. This is his idea of what a coffeeshop should look like: small, brisk service, no delay in getting the espresso to you once it’s been made. He looks at his demitasse like a wine connoisseur might a vintage, then takes his first sip. “Better than some, a bit too concentrated. Very pronounced acidity. Not the best I’ve had but it left a good aftertaste.”

Mutters one of Milos’ friends, “For him that’s a rave.” Milos admits that he does not hand out praise a lot, but he is not a regular consumer and, as a coffee taster, it is his job to be critical. (Several places in the U.S. that he has a good word for are RBC in New York, Intelligentsia‘s outpost in Los Angeles, and Caffé Greco (which serves illy) in San Francisco.)

At Ninth Street Espresso’s store on East 10th Street, the black dribbles down the side of Milos’s demitasse aren’t a good omen. Presentation is part of the experience. Milos sips, then says, “The real tasting is the second sip.” He sips again, and decries the brevity of the flavor experiece. “Nothing remains on my tongue,” he says. He swirls the remainder around in his cup like he’s looking for an answer, and analyzes the crema, the “cream” of slightly frothy coffee that must top a properly-made espresso. “It is good, not too dark brown, the bubbles very small, and it has those red stripes we call tigerskin. The barista was good, he tamped the right way. The volume seemed right.” But ultimately unsatisfied by the shot, Milos leaves the store unhappy.

The presentation at Café Grumpy’s Chelsea outlet is better, but once the crema has worn off his espresso Milos reckons there is only about half an ounce of water. It is barely enough for a second sip. “This is real double ristretto. Aggressive. It’s overextracted. You can taste bitterness at the end. Maybe the time of extraction is too long. It’s better than Ninth Street.”

Our last stop is Stumptown, the superstar Portland transplant in the Ace Hotel on 29th Street. It is the one place where Milos has been before, several times, because he likes the vibe, but each time he’s come away hoping for a better espresso the next visit. When he gets his espresso there is a white stripe across the crema instead of the tigerskin. “See that? It’s burnt. The machine is probably too hot.” A second espresso arrives. It’s also burnt. “This is less than one ounce. Very concentrated, very sour, very salty.”

We leave Stumptown, Milos giving it the worst rating of the places we have visited today. As we exit onto the street, however, we both notice the same thing. There is a line of Stumptown fans going out the door and onto the sidewalk. He might not like what he’s buying, but they keep coming back for more.