As January ends and those “cook more” resolutions start to waver, I’ve been thinking about my own roadblocks to cooking. Besides the obvious ones — I’m tired, I need to get groceries, I’m tired — one barrier is setting the bar too high. My dinner, I’ll tell myself, must be resourceful and clever, perfectly cooked and photogenic, healthful, colorful, flavorful, wonderful. And it must tick all these boxes or it doesn’t count; don’t even try otherwise. This is an impossibly completionist tack for a single meal.
So I’m thinking instead that just making yourself dinner is goal achieved, level cleared. Anything extra you’ve done is a cool bonus. Did you use up that last bit of yogurt? Here’s a handful of gold coins. Did you work in some good-for-you something? That’s a smiley flower! And if you made dinner and your loved ones loved it and want to eat it again, cue up this music.
That being said — and keeping with this retro video game metaphor — it is useful to have some cheat codes. My current favorite is beans + greens + pasta, and I’ve been riffing on Lidey Heuck’s five-star recipe for pasta with spicy sausage, broccoli rabe and chickpeas a lot lately. If I don’t have sausage I’ll just leave it out (maybe adding a bit more oil to account for the sausage’s rendered fat), and I’ve been using kale instead of broccoli rabe because that’s what my grocery store has. Sometimes I’ll add a little harissa or the rest of that can of tomato paste in Step 3. That’s a nice thing about Making Dinner: There’s no one way to win the game.
Featured Recipe
Pasta With Spicy Sausage, Broccoli Rabe and Chickpeas
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s Dumpling Week, and today’s magnificent morsel is brought to you by Kay Chun. Her beef dumplings with zucchini, tofu and chives are tender, juicy and contain a little surprise: pine nuts, which add a hit of buttery flavor and a soft crunch. These dumplings are, as the voice-over in Street Fighter might declare, a total K.O. You can watch Kay make her dumplings here.
A silly distinction, but I prefer “leaning into leftovers” over “meal planning”; the latter implies a certain amount of organization and foresight that I simply don’t have. We have a handful of new recipes that lend themselves well to batch cooking: Lidey Heuck’s baked cod and baked chicken meatballs and Sarah DiGregorio’s slow cooker chicken breasts. They’re all flavorful, but in a way that makes leftovers amenable to any additional flavor profiles you’d like to add. To wit: You could flake leftover cod into Kay’s miso fish chowder, the meatballs could go into an Italian wedding soup and the chicken breasts could be made into coronation chicken salad.
And for dessert: Dubai chocolate. Korsha Wilson wrote a delightful article for The Times about how Dubai chocolate — more specifically, the gooey, crunchy “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” chocolate bar — has taken over the world, and I can’t get this treat out of my head. Tempering chocolate must be some sort of final boss in the cooking game, but I’m going to play anyway; the combination of pistachio cream, delicate shredded phyllo and chocolate sounds too good not to try. Will I end up with perfect chocolate bars? Probably not. Will I still feel like I won? Absolutely.
The post A Pasta Cheat Code for Speed-Run Dinners appeared first on New York Times.
