Welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, where I pass on the recipes we’re currently most excited about after work at NYT Cooking HQ. We have people who grew up on frozen chicken fingers and people who grew up on roasted tempeh and brussels sprouts, but somehow we all came around to the idea that Dinner Matters…
Do you have a desert island bean? Joe Yonan does, and it’s the chickpea. Mr. Yonan, the food editor of The Washington Post, adores all beans, so much so that he wrote an entire cookbook starring them, “Cool Beans” (Ten Speed Press, 2020). But he does play favorites, and the chickpea, with an earthy yet…
I don’t think of myself as a contrarian, but I am fascinated with wines that seem to have gone out of style. Our last subject, Rioja Gran Reserva, was one such wine, and so is our next, Valpolicella. Light, crisp, refreshing Valpolicella used to be a famous name among Italian reds, but it has been…
It’s been widely accepted in the wine world for years that people can no longer be expected to age wines as they might have half a century ago. For one thing, the wine-drinking public has changed enormously. Where once the market for wines that aged along glorious arcs was small, wealthy and dynastic, interest in…
Julie Wong, born in Queens, tasted her first banh mi under the Manhattan Bridge when she was 16. Incredulous that she’d never tried one before, her boyfriend, Chris Hui, dragged her to a tiny stall in Chinatown with no seats and a kitchen equipped with little more than a toaster oven. It was a meeting…
THE CARROTS, KNOWN as jazar ahmar, are stocky and rugged, as dark as wine, shading from red into purple. This may be the closest they get to the color of their ancestors, the primeval carrots that were first cultivated about a thousand years ago in what is today Afghanistan and later sown throughout Arab lands.…
But I hope as well that you’ll develop the confidence, through reading all these instructions and cooking some of them, to cook without a recipe, using only the muse and what’s in the refrigerator to guide your way. So, for instance: Spicy sausage pasta with lemony provolone sauce and wilted greens. Seriously! I roasted some…
For a number of years, I cooked dinners to serve a small church congregation after a short Sunday service of evening prayers. This was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, my home borough, on a street that runs wide under towering plane trees, with a view of the East River to the west. We ate in the moldering…
Four years after Chile embraced the world’s most sweeping measures to combat mounting obesity, a partial verdict on their effectiveness is in: Chileans are drinking a lot fewer sugar-laden beverages, according to study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine. Consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks dropped nearly 25 percent in the 18 months after Chile adopted…
This is by no means a complete roster of all the excellent, ethically produced chocolates on the market. It’s a short list of the bars that I buy and eat regularly. All, except Valrhona, are American-made, because that’s what I find most easily available. Use it as a starting point to choose your own favorites.…