Good morning! Today we have for you:
-
A sugo recipe to anchor a dinner with friends
-
Flexible and fun noodle okonomiyaki
It’s a funny thing for a cookbook writer to say, but according to Samin Nosrat, the most important thing when you have people over for dinner is not the dinner.
Samin and a tight-knit group of her friends have been hosting Monday night dinners, which over the past four years have transformed from casual meals into a kind of ritual. Her takeaway? What stays with everyone is not the dishes served but the people who brought them, drawn together week after week to share food, conversation and comfort.
She writes about this in her brilliant new cookbook, “Good Things,” which was recently excerpted in The New York Times. There’s something wonderfully radical about a cook as passionate and precise as Samin telling us to focus less on the dinner and more on the party.
Some weeks that could mean you order pizza and toss a simple salad. Other times it might mean splurging on the season’s last strawberries or opening that special bottle you’ve been saving — which, when you’re with your best friends, seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do on a Monday.
And sometimes it means making what she calls lazy sugo, which isn’t lazy at all, but is generous and unhurried. The most important element in her recipe is time — time to let the tomatoes, wine and bone-in chunks of pork and beef slowly simmer together, merging into a glossy, robust sauce to toss with pasta or spoon over polenta. And, perhaps, time to chat with your friends while an amazing meal practically cooks itself.
In her book, Samin gives us permission to stop stressing about making the perfect meal when we have friends over. Start with the people and a good meal will follow.
Featured Recipe
Lazy Sugo
More food for thought
Chicken, cucumber and nectarine salad: This vibrant, multitextured salad from Lidey Heuck transforms late-season fruits and vegetables into a fresh, satisfying meal. It’s wonderfully adaptable — swap the feta for mozzarella or goat cheese, trade mint for basil or use whatever toasted nuts you prefer. No nectarines? Try peaches, plums or berries instead. This lovely salad is open to suggestion.
Eggplant, chicken and tomato curry: Eggplant, with its mild, porous flesh that readily absorbs complex flavors, loves a good curry sauce. Ashley Lonsdale proves the point by simmering eggplant planks, along with potatoes and tomatoes, in a sauce rich with coconut milk and spices, letting everything cook until silky and fragrant. Caribbean curry powder works especially well here, with its warm mix of allspice, cloves and ginger creating the perfect seasoning for this cozy dish.
Honey-garlic chicken: With a sweet and savory glaze made from honey and soy sauce punched up by garlic, Yasmine Fahr’s glazed chicken breasts are burnished, savory and perfectly juicy. The key is starting with a hot pan to sear the chicken properly, and then removing the cooked chicken while you build the sauce. This keeps the delicate white meat from overcooking while the honey-garlic sauce reduces into something satiny and rich.
Noodle okonomiyaki: Inspired by traditional Japanese cabbage pancakes, Hetty Lui McKinnon combines vegetables, ramen noodles and eggs into a hearty vegetarian skillet dinner packed with umami flavors. It’s perfect for using up that wedge of cabbage in your fridge, though you can substitute whatever vegetables you have on hand. Customize the soy-sauce-scallion-sesame-oil base to taste with miso, chile crisp or gochujang. This flexible meal is easy to make your own.
Banana cream pie no-churn ice cream: Erin Jeanne McDowell’s homemade ice cream is silky, fruity and astoundingly simple — just whipped cream, mashed bananas and crushed vanilla wafers swirled together and frozen in a brownie pan. For the deepest flavor, use brown-speckled, soft bananas, which have the natural sweetness to make this dessert truly shine.
That’s all for now, except to remind you that if you hit any technical snafus, you can send an email to [email protected]. And as always, I’m at [email protected] if you want to say hello.
I’ll see you on Monday.
Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
The post Samin Nosrat’s Lazy Sugo appeared first on New York Times.
