Hello! Julia again, filling in for Sam.
At the midpoint of these winter holidays, everyone needs some simple, savory food to recover from the delightful excesses of salt and sweet in cookies, bacalao, lasagna, mole, jelly doughnuts, and on and on. New Year’s Eve blowout dinners are in the works — I’m making Vivian Chan-Tam’s hot and sour soup — but at the moment I am strangely drawn to cumin-lime shrimp with ginger, lemon pesto pasta and white bean dip with chile-cumin oil. They’re all big-flavored, quick and built on pantry and freezer staples.
The easiest main I know is a skillet full of Nancy Silverton’s slow-roasted chicken thighs, which you put in a heavy pan over low heat with lemon slices, and then get the rest of the meal together while the fat renders and the skin crisps. It goes with virtually anything you can think up, but pairs especially well with a grain salad.
Featured Recipe
Flattened Chicken Thighs With Roasted Lemon Slices
But we’re not done with sweets just yet. I grew up in thrall to the After Eight mint and the folds of its darkly elegant wrapper — so different from boringly nut-colored Snickers and Milky Ways and the crackly cellophane of Jolly Ranchers. With no idea what “After Eight” might connote, I still understood that the combo of dark chocolate and strong mint was a more provocative version of my favorite mint chocolate chip ice cream. Caroline Schiff’s new layered chocolate mint bars play into those nostalgic peppermint flavors of winter.
The post Bright Flavors, Easy Dinners appeared first on New York Times.
