- It's quick, it's simple, it's delicious.

- It all comes together in one skillet.

- I love a really good mac and cheese, but sometimes it takes me a while to put it together.

That's why this recipe makes it super easy and in one skillet.

- The first word out of everyone's mouth is "wow."

- Ooh, beautiful, look at this.

- If you are used to dry, tasteless pork chops, this is not that.

These are so amazing.

- Oh, look at this-- see, I just love the color of it already.

Now, from here on out, everything stays in the skillet.

Nothing else comes out.

- This might be my happiest moment on Milk Street.

I get to eat mac and cheese.

- There are so many strong flavors in this, but they all go together so beautifully.

- Goes right on the center of the table.

- It's gooey, it is just the perfect comfort food, and it came together in less than half an hour.

- I do hope you try this.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on "Milk Street," we're sticking to the skillet to make supper.

We start with Spanish baked rice with chickpeas, potatoes, and chorizo.

Then it's a salt and pepper pork chop dish with just a hint of vinegar and ginger.

And finally, a three-cheese pasta with fontina, parmesan, and gorgonzola.

Please stay tuned as we rethink one-pot dinners.

♪ ♪ - In the Spanish language, arroz means rice, horno means oven.

So arroz al horno means "rice cooked in the oven."

Now, generally, this dish is all about the rice.

It's baked in a cazuela, which is a terracotta dish, like a casserole dish, made out of clay.

So it holds in the heat and bakes nice, low and slow.

And being all about the rice, generally, what goes with it is just a little bit of mishmash of what might be left over from the weekend.

A little bit of meat, a little bit of vegetable, whatever you have on hand.

Our version uses chorizo, chickpeas, potatoes, and tomatoes, and, of course, Spanish-style seasonings.

So, first things first, the garlic.

We have chopped garlic in the rice, but we're also going to roast an entire head of garlic so it gets nice and soft.

Then we nestle that inside the rice while it finishes baking in the oven.

And then those garlic cloves are soft and mushy and we can mix them in with the rice.

So, to roast a whole head of garlic, it's very easy.

The oven is preset for 400.

You just want to cut the top quarter of the cloves off so that you still have the entire meat of the clove there, but the tops are exposed.

Put that on a sheet of foil, drizzle with a little olive oil.

Salt, little bit of pepper, and then we're going to fold this up airtight.

Goes into the oven for about 30 minutes, just the right amount of time to prep all the other ingredients.

Okay, done.

Now, the oven being preheated to 400 for the garlic is perfect, because we'll be putting the rice into the same oven.

Now we are going to move to the skillet.

We have adapted this to work beautifully in a 12-inch skillet, no cazuela required.

But if you have one, by all means use that.

Going to get this preheated.

Okay, add a little olive oil.

The skillet is where we start building the layers of flavor for our baked rice.

We are using a dried Spanish chorizo.

Now, Spanish-style chorizo is dried.

You can see here, it's hard, it's firm, it's ready to eat.

Let me show you these, because we have an assortment of chorizos here to talk about.

This is a Spanish-style chorizo, similar to salami, that's how it comes-- dried.

You can slice it, it has a little bit of a skin on it, which you peel off, and then slice it into small half-moons like this.

Other types of chorizo on the market are-- this is a Salvadorian chorizo.

It looks raw, but it's actually precooked links.

Now, generally, this would be sliced and sautéed or used in a dish like the baked rice.

Then we have a style of chorizo that's generally a Mexican chorizo, and this is 100 percent raw.

This comes in bulk, or you can find it in links as well.

Now, this Spanish-style chorizo being dried, generally, you're not gonna find it in the meat section.

Because it comes in a package dried, it's also shelf stable.

So generally, you'll find it near the cheeses in that kind of section, or maybe around the perimeter of the deli.

So we'll start cooking that.

Now, this is fully cooked.

We're sautéing it to give it a little bit of brown color.

And that caramelization adds a lot of flavor, as does the fat that renders out of it.

And that's the beginning of how we build flavor in this dish.

All right, so I'm going to let that sit for a second, get nice and browned on one side, then I'll transfer it to the bowl.

This is a hallmark of this dish, by the way, generally, a lot of things are sautéed and removed from the pan before the rice goes in.

Oh, that looks great.

This does not take long to sauté and brown.

Even in Spain, this is like a tapas.

They serve this in bars, just plain sautéed chorizo.

Brown, sizzling, coming to you while you have your drink.

Okay, this did sauté quickly.

Now, I'm going to just lift it up out of the fat, because I want to leave some of that fat in the pan, transfer it to the bowl.

Now, you see this beautiful red fat left over from the chorizo?

That is because the chorizo is heavily seasoned with Spanish paprika-- also garlic and other things.

But it's that paprika that gives it the color and a lot of the flavor.

To this pan, we'll add a little more olive oil and the potatoes.

(potatoes sizzle) Perfect.

Now, you might notice I'm not salting the potatoes.

The fat from the chorizo has a lot of salt from the chorizo in it.

Now, I've stirred those, got them nicely coated.

We're going to let those cook for about three or four minutes just to get nice and brown on one side.

We might turn them once during that time.

They're not going to fully cook during that time.

They're just going to get some crustiness on them and begin cooking.

Ooh, beautiful, look at this.

So we got one or two sides brown here, and that's all we need.

Now we'll transfer this to the same bowl with the chorizo, again, leaving that fat in the pan.

That's beautiful, there we go.

Okay, little more olive oil.

Notice we're adding a little bit as we go every time.

And now we'll start with the onions, and we're building the flavor, now, for the rice.

And the garlic.

This is the chopped garlic, which will be in addition to the roasted head of garlic.

Now, that roasted head of garlic is going to get nicely, deeply sweetened from the slow roasting, whereas this garlic has a brighter, punchier flavor from a brief sauté.

All right, so now, once these are nicely coated with the oil now, we'll add a little bit of salt.

Stir that in.

This needs only about three to four minutes to let the onions just start getting brown.

Oh, these onions look great.

Nice, light brown color on them.

Now, from here on out, everything stays in the skillet.

Nothing else comes out; here's our Spanish paprika, We're going to put this in and let it bloom only for 30 seconds.

Paprika is pretty delicate, actually, and you don't want to fry it or try and brown it, just bloom it.

This will maintain its best flavor.

So, basically, we're just going to stir it in until the onions are coated.

Now we will add the remaining ingredients-- the rice.

The tomatoes.

That's going to give some nice liquid.

These are canned chickpeas.

They've been drained and rinsed.

Now add a little bit of salt and pepper to this.

Little pepper.

Little salt.

Okay, stir that in.

And, of course, those beautifully browned potatoes and chorizo.

All the liquid goes in with it; fat, liquid, let's get it all.

Oh, look at this.

See, I just love the color of it already.

Meanwhile, that rice is absorbing all that flavorful fat.

It's getting a head start on the cooking.

Now we're going to even that out here and add the liquid.

We're using chicken broth here.

Okay.

If you find yourself making this, and don't have chicken broth on hand, by all means, just use water.

There's a lot of flavor in this.

The chicken broth just gives it a little more body and flavor.

We're good, now we're going to let that come back up to a full simmer, and then we will put in that head of garlic we roasted.

So this has been simmering about five minutes.

It needs that little bit of advance time before the oven in order to get everything up to temperature and get the rice started cooking, too.

As a matter of fact, a cue that when it's ready for the oven is that if you can look up close here, you see some of the rice starting to float to the top.

In the beginning when we did this, all the rice was sunk down at the bottom.

Now some of it is light enough to start floating to the top.

This is good, okay, so turn that off.

And now we're going to take that head of garlic that we roasted.

We'll take it, see how it's kind of squishy.

It'll finish baking with the rice, put it right in the middle.

This, of course, looks gorgeous as well.

There we go.

And we have some of the tomato that we sliced, and we'll just shingle those right around the head of garlic.

As long as you're going to have these ingredients, you may as well make them look pretty, right?

This is something that you would take directly from the oven and put on the centerpiece of your table.

So we left our oven on when the garlic came out, and now we're going to transfer this to the oven to finish baking.

All it needs is another ten or 12 minutes.

The potatoes are half-cooked, the rice is half-cooked.

Everything is going to finish cooking together.

Then when it comes out of the oven, it has a brief period of sitting with the lid on it, and we'll show you that then.

♪ ♪ This is the little tip I told you about.

Once this came out of the oven, we covered it with the clean kitchen towel and then put the lid on it.

What that does is the towel absorbs the excess steam as the rice continues to finish cooking.

So it prevents the top of the rice from getting soggy, absorbs the excess steam, and keeps the whole thing moist at the same time.

So we'll take this off now, it's been sitting about ten minutes.

Pull that back, ha-ha.

And you can see why this is beautiful enough to go right onto the table, just like it is.

The garlic is nice and soft.

People can choose how many cloves they'd like to squeeze out and stir into their own dish.

So this will go onto the table just like this.

Nice little finish of chopped parsley.

Not only is it beautiful, parsley adds a lot of flavor to dishes.

And this is a nice, bright, herbal element to add at the very end.

It is optional, but look at how gorgeous it is.

And then we'll serve up.

This is beautiful, this is what you want to see.

You want to see that there is no liquid remaining in the bottom of the dish.

But the rice is soft and fluffy and loose.

It's not thick and gloppy by any means.

This is a beautiful baked rice dish.

And then what's fantastic on this, serve some lemon wedges on the side and just give a little squeeze of lemon at the table.

This brightens up the whole entire dish.

Lemon has a beautiful, fruity acidity that increases the flavor of just about anything you put it on.

Mm.

This dish, every time it surprises me because everything comes out perfectly cooked.

The potatoes have barely enough firmness, but they're soft and they give a lot.

The rice is cooked perfectly, very comforting and each grain stays separate.

So our Spanish baked rice with chickpeas, potatoes, and chorizo.

It all comes together in one skillet, goes right on the center of the table.

I do hope you try this.

♪ ♪ - The Cantonese salt and pepper treatment is something that's usually used on meat, seafood, or even tofu, but typically it's deep fried.

We're doing a version of that where we're using thin-cut pork loin, and we're not going to deep fry it, we're going to pan fry it.

And typically, salt and pepper proteins are also served with deep fried chilies and garlic that are mixed in, it's really delicious.

But we're doing something different with that.

We're going to serve it with a really fresh scallion, cilantro, ginger topping.

So I'm going to make that right now.

So I have a bunch of scallions, an entire bunch of scallions, and I'm going to thinly slice those.

And I have an entire bunch of cilantro.

So I'm going to just roughly chop that.

I'm going to use fresh ginger also.

And when we use fresh ginger, we like to grate it over a bowl so you're getting all that ginger juice inside of the dressing and not all over your cutting board.

So I need about a tablespoon here, so I'm going to grate that right over my bowl.

It smells so good.

I love ginger.

So it looks like we have about a tablespoon of ginger.

To that, I'm going to add my scallions and my cilantro.

There are so many strong flavors in this, but they all go together so beautifully.

Then I'm also adding minced Fresno chili, You can use jalapeño, too, if you can't find Fresno.

I'm adding a little bit of rice vinegar and some salt.

I'm going to mix this together and let all the flavors meld while I make the dredge for our pork chops.

So I'm going to make a cornstarch dredge for our pork cutlets.

And one of the secret ingredients I'm using in this are Szechuan peppercorns.

And this is what they look like; I don't know if you've ever had Chinese food and you get a little bit of that tingly, spicy flavor, that's what it is, it's these Szechuan peppercorns.

This is what they look like when they're whole.

You can buy them almost at any supermarket now.

And the best way to grind them up is with a mortar and pestle or an electric spice grinder.

And here they are, all ground up.

So, for this dredge, we're going to add cornstarch.

Cornstarch really helps to keep the pork from drying out.

And it gets a nice little crust, too, when you're frying them up.

We have our Szechuan peppercorns that have been all ground up.

There's a lot of pepper things in here, but it's amazing how well they all work together.

This is actually cayenne pepper, which is spicier than the Szechuan peppercorn.

And then we have some black pepper and some salt.

And another secret ingredient is Chinese five spice powder, which has some really nice warm spices in it, like clove and star anise.

So when that's all whisked together, I'm going to take my pork chops.

The pork loin cutlets we have today are about a half-an-inch thick, but you could use something even that's a quarter-inch thick if that's what you can find.

So I'm going to put some of this cornstarch on each side and I'm actually going to press it down to make sure that it adheres really well.

And I'm going to dredge all of these and put them aside on a plate.

It's okay if you shingle them a little if you have to.

They're not going to stick together once they have the cornstarch on them.

Now that I've made sure all my cutlets are nicely coated, we're going to fry them up.

We have about a third a cup of neutral oil in a nonstick, 12-inch skillet.

You want to make sure your skillet is big enough to accommodate half of the pork chops.

If you put too many in one pan at a time, they're not going to fry, they're going to steam.

And you want to get a little bit of a crust on those.

So I'm going to wait until this starts to smoke.

You want it to be really hot, so you're going to get a really nice sear on those.

Okay, so now that our oil is smoking, we're going to pick up our pork cutlets.

And when you're putting something in oil like this, you want to put it away from you so it doesn't splash on you.

This is pretty hot oil.

So we're going to drop the first four and let them get nice and brown.

These are pretty thin, they're going to cook pretty fast, so it'll take about two minutes on one side and then we're going to flip them over and cook them for another minute on the other side.

Okay, so these are nice and brown on the bottom.

I'm going to flip them over and cook them for another minute on the other side.

So these look like they're done.

I'm going to take them off and put them on a plate and tent them with a little foil so they'll stay warm.

And then I'm going to cook the other four.

♪ ♪ So that's it, our pork chops are done.

We have our beautiful scallion relish, and I'm going to try these right now; I like to serve them with a little bit of steamed jasmine rice.

Always really nice with this.

So, pork chop.

Little bit of relish.

These are so fresh and amazing.

Every time we serve these here at Milk Street, the first word out of everyone's mouth is "wow."

If you are used to dry, tasteless pork chops, this is not that-- these are so amazing.

Salt and pepper pork chops with spicy scallions make a delicious weeknight meal.

♪ ♪ - I love a really good mac and cheese, but sometimes it takes me a while to put it together.

That's why this recipe makes it super easy and in one skillet.

I've got a 12-inch broiler-safe skillet heating up on my stove.

I've got my broiler heating up as well.

And to my skillet, I'm going to add my water.

My cream.

Some dry mustard.

Bit of salt.

And about a half-teaspoon of pepper.

Using a little less liquid means that I'm going to be able to use the starch that comes out of my pasta as it cooks to help me coat my noodles.

I'm using a cavatappi noodle here.

It's got some little ridges and a little bit of curl, so it should cling to my cheese sauce that's being made in the pan pretty easily-- but first, we wait for this to boil.

All right, my liquids are boiling, so I'm going to go ahead and add my pasta.

I want to give it a quick stir, make sure that all my pasta is getting a dose of this cooking liquid, and then I'm going to drop my heat down to medium and cover it.

I'm covering my pasta because I don't want too much of the liquid to evaporate, so my pasta cooks through fully.

It'll also help speed the cooking process just a little bit.

I'm going to let this boil for about seven to ten minutes, and in the meantime, I'm going to grate some cheese.

For this recipe, we are using a mixture of three different cheeses.

We've got fontina, gorgonzola, and some parmesan.

I'm going to start off by grating up my fontina.

The fontina is going to end up nice and gooey in my sauce, so it's going to be a great foundational cheese for my whole dish.

So I've grated up my fontina.

I did pop my lid open just to give my noodles a quick stir to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan.

So now let's talk gorgonzola.

A lot of folks are intimidated by blue cheese, but it's a really great way to add some pungent, punchy flavor to your mac and cheese.

It's actually one of my absolute favorite additions for a mac and cheese.

So if you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can crumble some gorgonzola with two forks.

Now, if you're intimidated by blue cheese altogether and don't want to give it a shot, this recipe is not off-limits for you.

You can actually sub in a bit of mascarpone cheese just to make sure that you have some flavor and some creaminess in your mixture.

All righty, my gorgonzola is just about crumbled up.

We're looking pretty good here.

Now I'm just waiting for these noodles to be a bit more tender.

All righty, it's been about eight minutes, and my pasta is bubbling away.

Check it out.

We don't have a ton of liquid left.

Most of it is absorbed into my pasta, so I'm going to give it a quick stir, and then pull it off the heat.

Now that we've got it off of our heat, it's time to add the cheese to the party.

I'm just going to sprinkle my fontina in.

It's already kind of melting down, nice and gooey.

Give this a quick stir.

And then pull my gorgonzola in.

All right.

Since I pulled my skillet off the heat, the cheese should not be scorching or sticking to my pan.

However, I'm going to give it a little bit of help in melting and cover it for about two minutes, just so the cheeses can kind of melt into the pasta liquid.

All righty, it's been about two minutes, and my cheeses have started to soften up, so I'm going to give this a quick stir.

Look at that gooeyness.

The starch and the pasta water combined with the fattiness of the cream has really made this a beautiful, creamy sauce that's clinging really nicely to my noodles.

All right, I think we are just about ready to go into the oven, but first we got to add a little bit more cheese.

Have you all noticed that I get really excited about the cheese recipes?

Just a little bit?

All righty, now this is in a good spot.

All right, before it goes into my broiler, I want to add another layer of cheese.

I'm using parmesan.

You can use Asiago or something similar.

It has a rich, nutty flavor, and as it browns, it'll taste really, really nice in combination with my fontina and gorgonzola.

So I'm just going to sprinkle this on top.

All right, we've got our nice layer of Parmesan going here.

Now I'm going to add some panko breadcrumbs, and I want them to brown just so I have a crisp, nice crust.

You can find panko in your grocery store sometimes in the international aisle.

All right, we're looking pretty good.

So now I'm going to take it over to my broiler, and toss it in for just a few minutes to get some color on these breadcrumbs and get the Parmesan nice and melted.

♪ ♪ All righty, look at that.

So it only takes about one or two minutes for these panko crumbs to brown up.

Hang out by your oven, make sure you don't walk away from it, because otherwise you could end up with a burned final product.

Nobody wants that.

But check it out.

It looks browned, beautiful.

My cheeses are nice and melty inside.

I'm going to go ahead and give this a little bit of chive garnish.

Don't forget to keep a towel on your skillet handle.

When it comes out of the oven, it's going to be hot, and it's going to stay hot for a while, so you don't want your hands to get burned.

All right, we're looking pretty good.

Time to serve it up.

And get in the corner here and get some of these crispy bits.

Look at that.

This might be my happiest moment on Milk Street.

I get to eat mac and cheese, quite possibly my favorite food group at this point in life.

All right, whoo, look at that cheese pull.

Mm, mm.

This is so good.

The crispness of the panko is so nice, and you can actually get a lot of different flavors from the three cheeses that we used.

It's gooey.

It is just the perfect comfort food, and it came together in less than half an hour.

It's quick, it's simple, it's delicious.

This is our three-cheese pasta in a skillet.

And for this recipe, and all the other recipes from this season of Milk Street, you can head to MilkStreetTV.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From pad Thai with shrimp and no-fry eggplant parmesan to Korean fried chicken and salty honey browned butter bars, the Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, easier recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $27, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

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