Good morning. I’ve been writing no-recipe recipes for a long time now — narrative prompts for freestyle cooking, encouragements to engage creatively with ingredients. I used to do it weekly. But now a no-recipe recipe is, like, every recipe we have. With everyone out of this pantry item or that one, recipes have become mere suggestions of where you might start. They’re like assembly charts from Ikea when you have only 60 percent of the fasteners. “I have tons of overripe bananas and no baking powder. And store is out,” a pal texted me over the weekend. “What can I substitute for baking powder in banana bread? You know it’s dark times when I’m baking, so help a girl out.”
A half-cup of yogurt and a teaspoon of baking soda, I told her, and reduce the liquid ingredients by ½ cup to keep everything proportional. An hour later: “Came out delish!!!!!!!!!”
I’ve made Trini channa and aloo with, basically, none of the proper ingredients, substituting frozen cilantro and fridge-dried parsley for the culantro, random potatoes for the russet, hot sauce for the habanero, canned chickpeas for the dry ones called for, and omitting the turmeric because I haven’t had any for months. I’ve made baked tofu and green beans with chile crisp with brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes instead of the beans, and pickled peppers and doubanjiang instead of the chile crisp. Came out delish. I might try it again with cabbage and Sriracha and oyster sauce.
So maybe, this weekend, you could make Samin Nosrat’s lasagna (above)? Or a facsimile thereof? Samin wrote about it for our pages today, in advance of what we around the Slack channels and Google Hangouts that now make up our office are referring to as “The Big Lasagna.” And with it she offers three recipes, for the lasagna, obvs., along with homemade pasta and a tomato sauce. (Samin made it all for us on our YouTube channel.) It’s the lasagna, she says, that she’d love to serve you if you were coming over to her house, rich and hugely adaptable. (See that string cheese for mozzarella swap? Nice!)
Make the whole thing from scratch, use no-boiled noodles and jarred sauce, or don’t make it all! The hope is that, regardless, you’ll join us on 7 p.m. Sunday, May 3, on Instagram Live for a virtual dinner party.
You can find us on Instagram as well, and on Facebook as I mentioned. We’re on YouTube, too. We post what news we learn on Twitter. And you can write us directly for help if you need it, with your cooking or with our site and apps. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.