- Sometimes, all you need is a pan and a plan.

So easy to make, so easy to clean up.

So today, all of the recipes are going to be made in just one pot.

First, my friend Ming Tsai stops by to make his easy coconut lemon chicken soup.

It is unbelievably delicious and so fast.

Then, on our Ask Sara segment, I'll answer a viewer's question about one of the first vessels for a one pot meal, the wok.

And then, a young friend is going to join me for one of my favorite one pan wonders.

Greek shrimp farro and greens.

Feta cheese makes it creamy and salty.

And once you taste the farro, you will be hooked on that grain.

One pot wonders are the name of the game.

That's today, on Sara's Weeknight Meals.

(upbeat piano music) Funding provided by.

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A recipe made for whatever the day brings.

Subaru, a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

- [Voiceover] Family owned and Indiana grown.

Maple Leaf Farms is a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals, providing a variety of duck products for home kitchens.

Maple Leaf Farms duck helps inspire culinary adventures everywhere.

Maple Leaf Farms.

- [Voiceover] And thanks to the generous support of.

(upbeat music) - [Sara] Hello!

- [Ming] Hello.

(laughs) - [Sara] How are you?

- [Ming] Hey Sara.

Nice place.

- Nice to see you.

- Look at you watering your flowers.

- I know, I'm so domestic, aren't I, yeah.

Those are beautiful, aren't they?

My color too.

- Well, I'm here to cook!

- Well, I'm excited, I've got some homemade chicken stock for you and everything.

- Oh nice, awesome.

- Hi I'm Sara Moulton.

Welcome to Sara's Weeknight Meals Soup for supper is one of my favorite weeknight meal strategies, so when one of my favorite colleagues.

- Hi Sarah, how are you?

- Ming Tsai, yeah, I can't keep a straight face when you look at me like that.

From Blue Ginger Restaurant in the Boston area.

Mentioned that he was going to make this lemon grass chicken soup, I really got happy.

- This I love because it's one pot, but it uses this fantastic lemon grass.

What we're going to use is usually just the base that you use.

I'm not going to mince this because I'm going to put it in the soup like the Thai soup, and then at the end, it'll had fragrance to the soup, but then we'll pull it out.

But the only thing you want to do is you want to cut off the end because the ends are a little bit tough, and then I actually use the back of a knife and kind of just bang it up because when you bang it up it's kind of releasing the oil a little bit, right.

So then this is the part we use.

And this is great, you can use this, and if you're going to plate and we have these, we'll plate it up later, you can use it as part of the plating.

You're cutting up some mere parts and carrots soy onions because you're going to need that for a new soup.

You're going to go ahead and put those onions in here.

- Okay, I'm doing two onions roughly.

- [Ming] Yeah, this is a tablespoon of grape seed oil.

- And why grapeseed oil?

- Grape seed oil, as you know, has a high smoking temperature, so it won't smoke up like olive oil, and I like the nutty flavor of it, and it's also incredibly healthy for you, which we all know.

So here's two different chiles.

We have serrano chiles, which are awesome.

You know this trick to play on your friend?

Your turn.

- Ah no, not going for that one.

- First bite, no heat, right, there's no seeds.

Second bite, it'll kill you, all right, so, Sara's smarter than me.

So this is the serrano chili, which I love.

Jalapenos work as well.

I like to cut it with the seed because the seed has all the heat.

- [Sara] And I like it hot, you can make it as hot as you want.

- [Ming] Since we have both chiles, and these are called Thai bird's.

Thai bird's are crazy hot.

I would not do that trick with the Thai bird because if you miss, you could kill yourself.

And people always think the red's hotter than green because of the color.

Not necessarily the case.

Sometimes the green is even hotter.

It's when they're picked.

- Do you want three carrots?

- Three carrots would be great.

So I'm adding a good amount of heat because Sara mentioned she likes heat.

So we have that going.

I'm going to grab the chicken because this is a chicken coconut soup.

- Oh you know what, I'm going to give you my cutting board then, so that you can just contaminate one cutting board, there you go.

- So I'm going to add this chicken.

What I'm going to do is called julienne, so this is almost like a turkey breast.

So I'm going to kind of flatten it out by cutting it half way, making it flat like that, so then you have, because what you want is uniform thickness when you're cooking chicken, and I'm just going to stack these up, and just make kind of - [Sara] strips.

Do you cook at home?

- [Ming] I cook all the time at home.

- You've got two boys, right?

- Two boys, yeah, David and Henry who love to eat, and I'm very proud of their palate.

They certainly eat chicken fingers and french fries like every other kid in this country.

- Are they eating sea urchin?

- They've eaten oysters, they've eaten clams.

They enjoy all that.

- How old are they now?

- 11 and nine.

- And they're taller than me.

- Sara, that's not that hard.

(laughter) - [Sara] Okay, be nice.

How many?

- About two-thirds of that.

Now here's basic cooking.

All we're doing is building up the base flavors.

So we're going to add up, I'm going to add a little bit of salt and pepper.

Will you do the pepper since I have chicken on my hands?

- Yes.

- [Ming] So we have the chicken, and that's good to go.

That's good, I'm going to wash my hands.

- [Sara] And tell me, what would be a typical meal in the Ming Tsai household?

- I think every chef cooks so simply at home.

We don't do lots of foie gras.

And see again, a little color on the onions?

As you know, color's flavor, right?

But get some color.

I can go ahead and put the chicken in that.

All right, so we're going to mix this chicken around.

Going to add your celery.

And we're basically done.

- [Sara] What?

- [Ming] Yeah, I mean, it's got to cook through, but we're done.

- [Sara] We've got all the main ingredients in there.

How many chilis did you end up adding?

- I added one of each of the Thai bird and about half a serrano, so we got some heat.

And the reason I'm saying we're almost done, we've just got to add the liquids now.

- And you didn't put a lot of oil in there.

- [Ming] Not even, about a tablespoon.

So fish sauce first.

So again, this is, believe it or not, anchovies with salt, dried in the sun until a nasty brown liquid comes off of it.

They bottle it and sell it to us.

- Sounds yummy.

- [Ming] Sounds good, huh.

- [Sara] But it's really is great stuff.

- It's fantastic.

- I swear, those chiles are getting to me.

I love them, but I have to stand over here.

- And what you're coughing, and I do it all the time, it's the capsicums coming off because of the oil, and once you add this stock, it's going to die out.

- Yeah, I'm just going to stand over here.

- Okay Sara.

(laughs) I did take a shower today.

All right, so it's going to take about four or five minutes to come to simmer.

Then we can finish the soup.

All right, Sara, so it's come to a simmer, and the great thing about this, this chicken was cut so small, it's fully cooked.

Once it comes to a simmer, fully cooked.

All right, so we add three more things.

I'm going to grab this basil.

If you could just pick the leaves off.

At the very end, we'll just add it.

I'm going to add coconut milk.

- [Sara] And that's full fat, we decided.

- This is full fat, and add this towards the end of the soup because it can break if you add it in the beginning.

And the last thing is lemon juice.

Now, let me show you this trick.

Jasper White, the great chef in front of all of us.

His prep cook showed me this trick.

We all have lemon squeezers, lemon juicers.

We also have a pair of tongs.

Look at this.

It is the best lemon squeezer, lime squeezer, in the world.

You have such leverage with a pair of tongs.

Isn't that great.

- Let me try, let me try.

Oh my God.

Wow, even a weakling like me can do this.

- You're not weak, Sara.

You're Sara Moulton.

- I'm know, I'm big and strong.

We didn't talk about this basil.

- Thai basil.

- Okay, tell me about Thai basil.

Mm, like that.

Thai basil is like Italian sweet basil except it has that anise quality to it.

- A little licoricey.

- Right, it's got that licorice quality, which I love.

- You want more?

- [Ming] Just a little bit more, this is home cooking.

- Just shred it in?

- [Ming] Just whole leaves, and our soup is done.

- Done?

- Done.

- Wow.

- Because the basil doesn't need to cook.

- [Sara] Now this is really my kind of weeknight meal, I have to say.

- Basically, start to finish, start to finish is what, 12 minutes.

- Well, there was two of us chopping, so let's say we took a normal home cook who can't chop real fast.

I think maybe 15, 20?

- [Ming] Max.

- Okay, that is so beautiful too.

All right, I've got to taste.

- [Ming] Give it a try, see what you think.

- Mm!

Wow.

This is like, Asian Jewish chicken soup.

- Asian Jewish, you mean chew?

No that's Chinese Jew.

- No.

- Asian Jewish.

I'm trying to think of a word for that.

- Never mind.

- J-Jasian, this is a J-Jasian.

- All right, enough already.

Okay, so, perfect, this is your lemon grass, what's the whole title?

- It's lemon grass coconut chicken soup, or chicken lemon grass coconut soup.

- Home run, thank you.

- Thanks, Sara.

- [Sara] I couldn't let Ming go without catching up over tea in the garden.

- This is so civilized, just a spot of tea, thank you.

- [Sara] I love tea.

- Let me do the Japanese thing, you can't serve yourself.

You know, if it was sake, right, you never serve yourself with sake.

And tea should always be served for you.

- I didn't know that, wow.

I love tea, but I never.

I just make it and forget.

- Although, the first cup in the morning, it can't be tea.

It's got to be coffee, I need that.

- Oh really, so you're both and, yes.

- I go both ways, that's delicious, love it.

- Really good, really good.

- [Ming] This has been fun.

- [Sara] This is so much fun.

It's reunion week.

- I'm glad you can still cook, Sara, that's good to see.

- (laughs) Oh boy.

- Are you happy that I can still cook too?

- [Sara] Yeah, you can, you're only getting better actually.

- (laughs) Oh I don't know about that.

- Yeah, you're getting all the time.

(pleasant guitar strumming) On our Ask Sara segment today, we got a good question from a viewer on my website, saramoulton.com.

It's about Asian cooking, and I've got my viewer right here.

Hi, Allie, from Baltimore, Maryland, huh?

- Yeah, yes, I am.

- You have good crab in Baltimore.

- Always, yeah.

- I'm sure you have a few other great things too.

So, I understand you're heading to college in the Fall.

The School of Public Health, that's very interesting.

What are you going to major in?

- I'm specifically interested in nutrition, and that comes from my own personal interest in baking and cooking.

- Okay, so I understand you have a question for me today.

- I do.

A couple months ago, for my birthday, I received a wok, a great gift, but I've never actually used one before, so I haven't been able to use it yet, so I was just wondering if you could give me a few tricks of the trade, so I could make some good wok recipes.

- Okay, I'm glad you haven't used it yet because you have to go through this whole process to begin with, and it's not the process that I could tell you, but I had an expert on my show, Grace Young, and we've got a little tape to show you where she'll take you through the whole thing of how to season a wok.

Take a look at this.

- Great, thank you.

- This is a brand new carbon steel wok, and you must scrub this thing with a stainless steel scrubber and liquid dish washing soap for a good ten or fifteen minutes.

There's a factor coating that has to be removed, and if it isn't, it's not good for cooking.

So just season the wok, what we're going to do is add two tablespoons of oil, swirl it in, and then you can add your scallions, and the ginger, and you want that sizzle sound.

Now, whenever you stir fry, you always be stir frying on high heat.

But for this, we want medium heat.

- Okay, in the beginning.

- And we're just going to stir fry this mixture for 20 minutes.

This is called wok bonding, and as the mixture starts to soften, then we'll gradually smear it, along the edge of the wok, so that the entire inside surface is completely coated by this oily scallion ginger mixture.

And each time you cook, the fat will infuse in the metal, and then with time this actually becomes natural nonstick.

- After 20 minutes, what happens, you take it off.

- You cool it, yes, you remove all the scallions and ginger, and then you'll wash it.

You'll wash it in hot water, rinse it with just a sponge, and then heat it on the stove again because you never want to dry it with a towel.

- Dry it with a towel, I'm going to keep remembering that because it will rust.

So what do you think, Allie, is that helpful?

- Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to watch that again and write down some of those tips.

And the ginger and scallions, I never would have thought those two flavors would go well together, so I'll have to try that.

- Okay, thanks Allie.

- [Allie] Thank you, have a good one.

- You too.

(pleasant guitar music) We're making one pot wonders today, and my next dish is fantastic, is Greek.

It's farro, which is ancient wheat, with greens and shrimp and feta, and oregano, and it all goes in one pot.

And I brought in some troops today.

A big troop, this is Maron.

She is the daughter of my producer, Natalie, and I understand you're engaged to be married.

- I am, I am.

- [Sara] In a couple months?

- Next year.

- Next year, oh good, well you've got plenty of time to practice this dish.

- Yes.

- That's why we're making it because I think this is a good dish, both for the hubby, although he should cook for you too, start early, and also for entertaining.

All right, so continue with the tomatoes, and I'm going to get the shrimp going, we're going to start by cooking the shrimp a little bit, and we're going to start a little bit of oil, about a tablespoon and a half, so we're going to be using farro, which is an ancient form of wheat, but you could use even leftover Chinese takeout rice.

You could use bulgur, you could use brown rice, you could use anything you want in here, but if you were going to use farro, and we'll talk about it in a minute, and we're going to use it today, it's something you can make on weekends, and then you can freeze it in one cup, two cup or three cup, the amounts you would use later on in the week, and then you can just defrost it, and add it to recipes.

So we already cooked some farro, and we're going to add that today.

How are you at mincing garlic?

- [Maron] I can do it.

- Okay, I bet you can, move the group down, yup.

Okay, so what you're going is mash this, and peel off the garlic, and then give it your best bet.

- [Maron] Okay.

- There we go, oh, very good!

That's impressive already.

- A little pound.

- Yes.

Okay, and I'm just getting a little sear on these, not much, of course I should have had my onions chopped already, but that's all right, I'm going to do that.

I'm going to get started and yeah.

We're using shrimp, but this is sort of a forgiving dish, you could use other protein, you could use leftover protein, leftover chicken or anything.

And we're going to build flavor, so this is a good recipe to learn about building flavor.

Everything that I'm sauteing now, I'm going to add to this strainer here.

And while the juice is from everything I cook, it's going to go down into the strainer.

Now if we just left everything in this pan, as we added it, it would be very watery, and we don't want a watery sauce, we want a concentrated, flavored dish.

So you're going to see what we're going to do.

And that's just one little trick.

- The shrimp smell really good.

- Don't they?

- Is it okay to buy frozen shrimp, is that okay?

- I really recommend it, as a matter of fact.

Buying a whole big package of frozen shrimp, you can sometimes buy them individually frozen.

I really recommend that, in a bag, and then you can take out only as much shrimp as you want, and then grab it as you go.

Okay so while that cooks, I'm going to start crumbling the feta, because we're going to need about half of this.

We need a total of four ounces, this is eight ounces.

I hope you like feta cheese.

- Love feta cheese, any kind of cheese really.

- And you can just keep an eyeball and give it a little stir.

Could you put a pinch of salt in there too?

When you are cooking, it's important to season as you go because if you wait until the end, then it tastes like food with a salt hat.

There's no combination.

And if you add it as you go, it just points up the flavor of everything.

All right, so were going to put half of this in, and half of it goes on top.

So there's that, let me just get that a little browner, and then we'll add the garlic.

You know, sometimes people tell you to brown garlic, and that's just wrong because it just gets bitter.

- See, I think that's a mistake I always make.

I put the garlic in first, and that's.

- Oh no, no, garlic one minute.

One minute in there, now I've got some oregano from your mom's garden.

When you're chopping big leafy herbs like this, I pretend that they're a solid thing.

And then you can really chop pretty fine, and the reason I want to get them like this is because if you just throw them on the board, and just hit them with a knife over and over and over again, they'll get wet and slimy, and we don't want that.

We're almost there, we're just trying to get a little color.

Sometimes with onions, you want it to be what's called translucent, and that's just they're softened, we got a good start on them, but sometimes you really want to bring out the natural sugars, which is what we're doing here.

Let me make room for my famous tomato trick.

I don't know if you find that when you're cooking you start with an expansive counter and by the time you're done, you're in a little tiny corner surrounded by junk.

- We don't have much counter space to begin with.

We live in a teeny apartment so.

- Yeah, all right, so you take two plates or two lids, and you line up, so we want about a cup, so we'll do this twice.

I'll do it the first time, you'll do it the second time.

And you know, the more cherry tomatoes, the better.

Okay, so you line them up, I just love things like this.

So then you put on your lid.

So you see I've got them smashed down there, and you take your knife.

This is a serrated knife, which is the knife you want to use for tomatoes.

And you have to get down to the level of the tomatoes or you won't be able to see what you're doing.

And then, ta-da, isn't that wonderful.

- I usually get lazy and put them all in whole.

- I know, well, and they don't pop the same.

Cherry tomatoes really don't give it up easily.

- Okay, so I'll do the rest of those?

- You'll do another one, yeah.

Here goes our garlic.

And remember, I said just a minute.

I'm going to quiz you after this.

- [Maron] Better pay attention.

- So now we're going to add some pepper flakes.

I like heat.

- I love spicy, extra spicy.

- That was the right answer.

- I put red pepper flakes on everything.

- Okay Maron, go for it.

- [Maron] Let's see if I can do this.

- Take your time.

- [Maron] And I don't worry about cutting myself this way either, this is great.

- [Sara] No, you're protected.

Okay, let's see.

- [Maron] How'd I do?

- Gorgeous, so look at this!

Now you even made up your own bench scraper.

- [Maron] Easy.

- [Sara] Oh A plus.

Okay, these just take a minute, and then I'm going to need your help.

We're going to dump, what I'm going to do is lift this up in a minute, and you're going to pour all this into there.

- [Maron] And what's the point of straining all the liquid into here?

- We're saving the liquid because when we combine it all later on, it's going to be very wet.

And if we just left all the green liquid and everything in there, it would be sort of a soupy mess.

So we're going to concentrate it.

So I'm going to ask you now to grab me the greens from behind you.

We've got a mix of spinach and kale.

You could use any greens you want.

And we're going to put half of that in here.

With more oil.

It's a total of quarter cup olive oil to all of it, so go ahead, put half of it in there.

- It doesn't matter what kind of greens you use?

- Well, it's what greens you like.

We've got baby kale, which is very tender, and it's a pinch of salt, we season as we go, mm-hmm, and just until, okay that's good.

And then we're going to do round two.

Now, in the meantime, boy I'm making you work, you want to grab, there's a container of what looks like rice of some kind in there.

- [Maron] Okay.

- That is farro.

And this is farro.

This is what it looks like in the package.

You can open it up, that's two cups.

And here's what happened, is that this is a whole grain farro, and a whole grain farro means that it takes a while to cook.

It has all the parts on it, so we soaked it overnight, and then we toasted it in a dry pan, and poured water on it, to soak it overnight.

And the toasting gives it flavor.

Look at how this is going down.

- [Maron] Should I put more in there?

- Yes, let's just do that, go ahead, dump the whole thing in.

And if you get the quick cooking farro, and how you know is, you read the back of the package.

So this said it cooks 50 minutes, five-O minutes, and I know that's the whole farro.

So by soaking it, it only took us 20 minutes to boiling it like pasta because we soaked it overnight.

Okay, a little more oil, you want to stir this?

- Sure.

- You want to just barely wilt it.

- [Maron] Okay.

- Oh, you know what, I was supposed to add oregano.

One really good rule, is to read the whole recipe before you start, so you don't get to that point in the recipe where it says to chill it overnight, and your guests are waiting anxiously at the dinner table.

Okay, let's come over here.

We're going to do the same thing we did before.

We're just about there to assemble the whole thing.

- [Maron] Now, if I'm not lucky enough to have a fresh herb garden like my mom, can I use dried oregano?

- I'm okay with it, I'll tell you the only herbs I don't like, let me just tell you I'm going to add half a cup of wine.

The dried herbs that I don't like are the ones that are the floppy herbs, like basil and dill and cilantro and parsley because they just, to me, taste like dried grass.

Not that I've ever eaten dried grass, so I wouldn't know what they taste like.

We're going to reduce this, watch out.

(sizzling) Whoo, drama.

But dried oregano is fine, and the general rule is for every tablespoon of fresh herb, you will need a teaspoon-and-a-half.

So we're going to just reduce this down.

- That smells amazing.

- And you want to press down on that to get our liquid.

We're going to add the liquid from that.

Yeah, it's accumulating.

And we're just about ready to go.

So look at all that liquid, we're just going to reduce it down.

It'll take two secs, and then everything else is going to go in.

Do you want to measure me a cup of chicken broth, there we go.

So we're concentrating flavor, that's the whole point of reducing this liquid here.

So you see how we've got just about a tablespoon, you see how syrupy that is.

It gets a little bit sweet from the everything that we had in here has natural sugar.

So I'm going to quick get the chicken broth in there.

Okay, in goes our farro.

- You can smell it, it smells much stronger now.

- It does, doesn't it?

There goes the farro, and you want to dump everything in there, being careful not to wear it, just dump it in.

There we go.

Stir it around.

And the liquid too.

Don't waste any precious liquid.

You know it's amazing what cooking gives to you.

There's gifts everywhere you look.

So half of the cheese goes in there.

And you can stir that up too.

And I know it's pretty well seasoned, so I'm not going to worry about it because we've been very diligent.

And then the other half is going to go on top.

- These colors are so pretty too.

It's like a very bright, summery.

- That is Mediterranean cooking in a nutshell.

So smoosh it down a little bit.

And then we top it off with more cheese because that's what the recipe said.

You know when you make a recipe for the first time, you should really follow it exactly the way the author wrote it because they might know something you don't.

Okay, you want to open the oven door, we're going to put it in a 375 degree oven for ten minutes until it's all melty.

And the farro will heat up, and the cheese will melt, Okay, I'm going to tidy up.

Do you mind setting the table?

- Absolutely.

(soft guitar music) - So you hungry?

- So hungry, this smells amazing.

- Even though we reduced all that liquid, see, it's still quite juicy.

Okay, there we go, second one.

And we're serving this with pita just some nice bread, but pita's very appropriate, and this wine, I'm sure you've never heard of or had, called Retsina, which is a bone dry Greek wine, and I have a particular fondness for because it's the first time I ever got drunk, it was on Retsina.

So, here's a question, do you think your husband-to-be, what's his name?

- [Maron] Will.

- Tell me if you think he might like it.

Mm, very good.

- Oh, that's amazing.

- Aren't those grains wonderful?

- Mm-hmm, a little crunchy almost.

- They are.

So, Maron, thank you so much for coming and cooking with me.

You're a great student.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for joining me today.

I'm Sara Moulton, I'll see you next time for some more of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

Oh, you have to try the wine.

And tell me what you think, it's very unique.

It's go the flavor of resin because it was stored in resin barrels.

(soft guitar music) Sara's Weeknight Meals continues online.

For recipes, helpful tips, messages, and lots more, visit us on the web at saramoulton.com/weeknightmeals and go to our YouTube channel, Sara's Weeknight Meals TV.

Funding provided by.

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A recipe made for whatever the day brings.

Subaru, a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

- [Voiceover] Family owned and Indiana grown.

Maple Leaf Farms is a proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals, providing a variety of duck products for home kitchens.

Maple Leaf Farms duck helps inspire culinary adventures everywhere.

Maple Leaf Farms.

- [Voiceover] And thanks to the generous support of.

(pleasant piano tune)