Here’s the fun part about an eggplant Napoleon: it borrows its name from the French pastry — all those crisp, layered, perfectly stacked rectangles — and then swaps the puff pastry and cream for roasted eggplant, herbed ricotta, and tomato. What lands on the plate looks like something from a white-tablecloth restaurant: a tall, golden…
Every Thanksgiving table has two camps: the pie people and the stuffing people. This dish is the peace treaty. Underneath, a creamy, savory pot pie filling — lentils, mushrooms, sweet potato, green beans, and corn all swimming in a golden sage gravy. On top, instead of pastry, a full slab of herb stuffing that bakes…
Meatloaf night is a whole feeling: the loaf pan, the ketchup glaze going glossy in the oven, the promise of a proper dinner with leftovers for sandwiches. This lentil meatloaf delivers every bit of that feeling, built entirely from a bag of lentils and some pantry loyalists. The lentils stand in for ground meat with…
Some dinners are projects, and some dinners are hugs. Chili mac is a hug. It’s everything good about a simmering pot of chili — smoky cumin, tomatoes, beans, corn — and everything good about mac and cheese, fused into one dish that cooks in a single pot in about thirty minutes. The elbows simmer right…
Down on the Gulf Coast, satsuma season is basically a holiday. Those little easy-peel citrus fruits show up by the crateful every winter — sweet, seedless, and small enough to eat three before anyone notices — and every kitchen from Louisiana to Alabama has its own way of celebrating them. This recipe is my favorite:…
Here’s the morning math: pancakes plus sausage equals the breakfast everybody wants, and standing at the stove flipping cakes while syrup-hungry people circle behind you equals the breakfast nobody has time for. The pancake sausage casserole solves the equation. Brown the sausage, pour pancake batter right over it, slide the whole dish in the oven,…
You pour a thin, unassuming batter into a pie dish, scatter some bacon and cheese on top, and slide it into the oven looking like nothing special. Forty-five minutes later, the pie has quietly done the impossible: it has made its own crust on the bottom, set itself into a tender, cheesy custard in the…
If you’ve never had a warm black sesame glutinous rice cake, prepare to fall hard. Picture a plump little puck with a golden, sesame-crusted exterior and a chewy, bouncy bite — and then, right in the middle, a molten pocket of sweet, toasty, almost nutty black sesame that flows out like lava with excellent manners….
Take everything you love about potstickers — the crispy golden bottoms, the juicy pork filling, that dipping sauce you could drink with a straw — and imagine it deconstructed into a big, slurpy noodle bowl. Crispy pan-fried dumplings lounging on a tangle of chewy noodles, crisp-tender vegetables, and a sauce that hits sweet, savory, tangy,…
This is the chowder I make on days when dinner feels like a hostile negotiation. Five ingredients — frozen hash browns, a can of corn, a can of cream-style corn, broth, and a block of cream cheese — go into the slow cooker in about five minutes, and the machine quietly turns them into a…
