a recipe archive
I have lived my adult life mostly alone; my approach to cooking for one is to cook as if I am permanently a new parent, i.e. large batch recipes that store well. Conveniently, I have a skillset for this as I enjoy spending a day or more of effort on a big hearty main, and I grew up cooking and eating large family style meals.
I also grew up eating practically no fish and have a shellfish allergy, so I have little seafood knowledge. There is a strong Italian culinary tradition in my family, so Italian is my expertise. I am young and blessed with a strong constitution, which is to say I am conscious that I cook with too much salt and fat but do not (yet) have to care.
I have a high spice tolerance and a limited sweet tooth. I don't care for savory coconut or savory peanut, nor for cilantro or cumin as anything beyond accents. I'm not as competent a baker as I am a cook.
If some ingredients seem surprisingly pricey, it's because I often justify a premium ingredient or two by telling myself the math works out since one meal feeds me for several days. The math almost certainly doesn't work out, but this approach has worked at times when my SNAP allowance and the local food pantries were my entire grocery budget.
Tweaks to a recipe by Deb Perelman for Smitten Kitchen.
Simple as a murder, and twice as satisfying. I make this every time an updated COVID vaccine comes out and I'm anticipating being laid up for a day.
Preheat the oven to 300℉ and get out a dutch oven or other heavy, oven-safe pot that can fit the roast. Put the beef in it. You want to position the beef so it has some verticality - part of it should be exposed after you add the tomatoes in a second. Don't stress about this too much, I usually just sort of prop it against the side of the pot, or fold/scrunch it a bit if it's the right shape; you can also truss it if you have that skillset (I don't) and want to go to the trouble.
Open the can of tomatoes. Stick a pair of kitchen shears in and hack at them until you've gotten all of them somewhat broken up. Add the tomato paste to the can and stir with a fork to break it up into the tomato juice.
If you're using an intact garlic head, pull the cloves apart and slough away any loose peels, but don't bother peeling them completely. Pour the tomato mixture over the beef, then add the garlic around the sides of the beef, then season everything generously with salt and pepper. Use a fork to get any tomato pieces off the exposed part of the roast and enrobe the garlic in the liquid.
Cover and put in the oven for four hours. The beef won't quite shred but two forks should be able to pull it into serving-appropriate chunks, or you could pull the beef out and slice it. Serve (garlic included, it will have mellowed a lot) on roasted potatoes or egg noodles; when you're throwing leftovers together later I've also put this on rice or frozen fries.
Editorializing on a recipe by Deb Perelman for Smitten Kitchen.
Necessary Soup Ingredients:
Optional Soup Ingredients: I like chopped potatoes and sliced mushrooms; you could also do orzo, greens, diced tomatoes, whatever.
Necessary garnish: freshly ground black pepper
Optional garnish: grated romano
Put the short ribs at the bottom of a large pot or a slow-cooker. Pile all other soup ingredients on top, then fill the pot with water. (You can also use all or part beef stock/broth if you happen to have some.) Don't worry if such a mountain of leeks heaps out of the pot a bit at first, they will shrink some. Add salt at this stage but be conservative - best practice is to undersalt now and add more to taste once it's cooked.
If on the stove, simmer for at least three hours; if in the slow cooker, put it on low for 8+ hours or high for 4+. But really, in all cases you should start this as early as you can manage and let it go for as long as you can stand. Before serving, get in there with a fork or spoon and prod at the ribs - the meat should collapse right off the bone into bite sized pieces.
Reiterating for emphasis, black pepper is a NECESSARY garnish, and you should add a lot of it: grind until you hesitate to grind more twice.
This is filling enough to serve alone; when entertaining I like to serve with crusty bread and spreadable goat cheese
Tweaks and editorializing on a knockout take on an often-disappointing dish by the one and only J. Kenji López-Alt for Serious Eats.
WORK IN PROGRESS: I've gotten a handle on the recipe as written, but I have a LOT of things that I want to try to make it more my own: homemaking the chicken broth (using my go-to, Deb Perelman's Perfect Chicken Stock, and using that meat in addition to the breast meat); using chicken thigh rather than breast; toasting the dried chiles; charring the onion that steeps in the stock.
Pour all the broth into your soup pot. (Use a heavy-bottom one that you can also saute vegetables in later.) Seed the chiles and hand-tear them into a few pieces per pepper, peel and halve one of the onions, and cut the kernels off the corncobs. Add the chiles, onion halves, and corncobs without kernels to the pot, along with the chicken breast and two whole garlic cloves. Bring the pot to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Keep it simmering for thirty minutes; turn over the chicken at least once so the whole surface gets time in the water.
In the meantime, set a rack as high as you can in the oven and set the broiler to high. Halve the tomatos, then place them cut-side-up on a foil-lined baking sheet. Broil for 15 minutes - you want softened all the way through and charring on top. If you want you could even dab the top sides of the tomato halves so they're that much drier for extra char.
In the meantime of the meantime, rinse and drain the canned beans, pick the cilantro, and chop the rest of the garlic, the remaining onion, and the poblano. When the chicken's cooled, shred it and discard the bones.
When the broth and the tomatoes are done with their cook time, get out your biggest blender. Take the chicken out of the pot and set it aside in a bowl to cool. Discard the corn cobs, onion halves, and garlic cloves from the pot. Put the remaining contents of the pot in the blender with the tomatoes and blend until smooth.
Wipe out the pot. Get it back on the stove and sauté the aromatics and the corn kernels in a neutral oil. Season with salt, pepper, cumin, and oregano, and sauté for another thirty seconds. Add the beans and half the cilantro leaves (set out the other half as a garnish) and stir to combine. Pour the contents of the blender into the soup pot through a mesh strainer (or even just a colander with particularly small holes). Stir in the shredded chicken and corn starch and simmer the soup for at least ten minutes more, tasting to adjust seasoning. It's just about the perfect amount of time to prep your chosen garnishes and set the table.
To serve, add a scant handful of tortilla strip at the bottom of the bowl for ladling, then garnish with a second scant handful.
Tweaks to a recipe by Beth Moncel for Budget Bytes.
A bean salad to be scooped with tortilla or pita chips. An ideal food for shoveling without thinking about it because it's reasonably healthy even with the chips and because the beans are so filling it stops you from over-shoveling on its own.
Salad:
Dressing:
Rinse and drain the beans in a colander, pick the cilantro leaves from the stems and chop the leaves along with the vegetables, whisk the dressing ingredients together, and combine everything in a large bowl, stirring thoroughly to distribute the dressing. Let stand for a bit to let the acids break down the vegetables a little.
Based off a recipe by Danny Newburg for Bon Appetit, with my expansions revealing just how often I make it. I first encountered this recipe during a failed attempt to go vegan, and I remember finding it really refreshing in the sea of vegan cooking blogs focused on 15 minute, one pot, so easy!, barely seasoned, quixotic attempts to recreate dairy and meat as if plants aren't substantive enough on their own merit.
So named because there's a set of components you need but they leave a lot of room to use different varieties that can create surprisingly different dishes.
This takes "three days" in the sense that there are light tasks you need to do on the two nights before serving; the labor is mostly scheduling.
Set the beans to soak. Dissolve 4 tbsp kosher salt (or 6 if using Diamond brand kosher salt) in the soaking liquid - this is effectively brining the beans, infusing the salt but more importantly changing their post-soak texture.
Line a cast iron with aluminum foil and hose the foil down with cooking spray. Make sure your cooking spray consists of neutral oils that can withstand high heat without smoking, because you're going to heat this on high until it's extremely hot. Peel and halve the onion, then lay the halves face down in the skillet. Leave them there without moving for several minutes. You are looking to char the surfaces contacting the pan.
Pour the beans and their soaking liquid into a large pot (this will be your final stewpot). Add the charred onion and simmer for a couple hours until the beans are tender. In the meantime, cook the grains - this is most easily done in a rice cooker, I find a 3:1 ratio of water to grains generally does the trick, but you might find an appropriate ratio on the package. Both the beans and grains will get plenty more time to hydrate so don't fret if they're not quite done.
Add the cooked grains to the pot with the beans and stir to combine. Cover, off heat, and leave this on the stovetop overnight - yes, at room temp - if that makes you squeamish you can also let cool and then store in the fridge.
If you're a superhero, you can do the pickled peppers and croutons ahead of time. (I'm not a superhero.) At the latest you should get the peppers pickling in the afternoon before night three. It's a good idea to get the croutons done before starting on the rest of the finishing process.
Heat the oven to 300℉. Hand-tear your bread into spoonful-appropriate pieces. Lay on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Douse liberally with olive oil, salt, and fresh-cracked pepper; toss to coat and bake for the better part of an hour until they're crisp and dry all the way through.
Fish the onion out of the stewpot and discard. Set the pot to simmer and keep an eye on it throughout the rest of this process, stirring occasionally and adding water if it's more viscous than you'd like.
Peel and roughly chop the entire garlic head. Put the garlic and 1/2 cup olive oil in a saucepan and place that cold on a low flame. The garlic will slowly start to sizzle and then brown - watch this very carefully, you want the gold side of golden-brown. Strain to separate the garlic chips from the garlic-infused oil; add the oil directly to the stewpot and set the chips aside as a condiment.
Hand-tear your greens and mushrooms into large pieces; if the greens are on stems, separate and discard the stems. Sear the mushrooms with oil in a large skillet on high-ish heat, trying to move them as little as possible so they develop a strong color. Once they're cooked, lower the heat and add the greens on top. You're not looking to completely break down the greens, just take the raw off them, but they will shrink quite a lot. Once they're done add the contents of the skillet to the stewpot.
Finish the stew with salt, pepper, and a couple splashes of red wine vinegar, all to taste. When serving, garnish with croutons, pickled peppers, garlic chips, and more vinegar.
Some adjustments and editorializing to a recipe by Molly Baz for Bon Appetit. If you're nostalgic for the pre-cancellation heyday of BA's video content, there's a great video of her making it too.
If at all possible, dry-brine your chicken the night before cooking: pat the chicken dry with paper towels, season all over and inside the cavity with salt and pepper, and leave uncovered overnight in the fridge.
Whisk together the gochujang with the oil. You'll have to work harder than you expect to get them to emulsify properly. Once combined, grate in the ginger along with two cloves of garlic, along with some salt, and whisk to combine again.
Chop the potatoes to your preferred fork-sized piece. Chop both the remaining garlic heads in half. Slough away the loose peels that fall off in the chopping but don't worry too much about peeling - in the long roast the peels will mostly dissolve and/or at fall away by themselves - prioritize keeping the halves intact.
If unbrined, dry and season the chicken as described above now. Brush the gochujang mixture all over the outside and cavity of the chicken. Stuff two of the garlic halves into the cavity. If you want to truss your chicken, you can do that now - I never bother.
In a roasting pan or a large cast-iron skillet, place the other two garlic halves cut-side-down in the center. Perch the chicken atop them. Toss the potatoes in the remains of the gochujang mixture and nestle them in the bottom of the pan around (notably not under) the chicken.
Roast at 300℉ for 2.5-3.5 hours. Turn the potatoes once or twice if you can remember to - the schmaltz will render out of the chicken into them and you want to get all the parts of them saturated with it. The roast is done when the potatoes are tender and the thickest part of the chicken breast temps at 165.
Take the chicken out of the roasting vessel and let it rest for 10 minutes before carving. In the meantime, add the honey and the juice of half of one of the limes to the pan with the potatoes and confit'd garlic. Stir this up (let the potatoes smash a little bit if they want to) until the liquids combine with the schmaltz into a slightly thicker sauce. Chop up some of the scallions and top the potatoes with them.
I'm not skilled at carving a chicken and I often make this for dates so I usually like to make my lover feel involved by asking him to carve. (If nobody at your table can carve, the meat shreds or picks off the bone pretty easily too - not as visually impressive but at this point the smell will be too intoxicating to care.) Serve chicken and potatoes with lime wedges for squeezing.
Meatballs mine; sauce from Deb Perelman's Spaghetti and Meatballs recipe for Smitten Kitchen.
I scale this at one pound of the base meat per one pound of spaghetti.
Base meat: ground and lean, I use a mix of beef and pork but you could use poultry, veal, sausage, etc.
Per each pound of meat, add:
Combine the meatball ingredients by hand. These will never not be shaggy but if you chill the mixture for a while in the fridge they will hold their shape as they cook better.
Line a baking sheet with foil and heavily grease, these can be surprisingly sticky. Form meatballs to preferred size by hand and bake at 425℉ for around 15 minutes until they're cooked through when you cut one.
For the sauce: My opinion is the sauce for spaghetti and meatballs should be extremely minimal because the meatballs are the star of the show. Even when I'm using packaged meatballs I make a very very simple tomato sauce: saute several cloves of minced garlic until they're just browning, adding a few handfuls of red pepper flakes in the final minute of the saute; then lower the heat add canned whole tomatoes or quartered roma tomatoes and simmer several minutes, stirring to break the tomatoes down.
Time the sauce and the pasta such that the tomatoes have broken down and the pasta has hit the water right when the meatballs come out of the oven. Transfer the meatballs to the pot and stir to enrobe them in the sauce, then cover and reduce heat to very low until the spaghetti's cooked and ready to add to the sauce.
Regretfully, you really do need to julienne for this - the texture is crucial, as well as the fact that evenly-sized apple and fennel pieces are visually indistinguishable. A cheap mandolin with the relevant attachment is what I use; this salad is so good it literally was the impetus for me to buy one.
As written this serves 2-3 as a side salad.
Core the apple and chop the stems off the fennel bulb, then julienne them. Toss these with the other ingredients, tasting to get the right levels of cheese, pepper, and acid. If you're not the type to keep lemons on hand (I'm not) and you find your one lemon is scant on juice, you can supplement it with a splash of white or rice vinegar, but I wouldn't sub that for the lemon entirely.
This has been my Christmas tradition for my entire adult life, to be made for friends during the season and/or myself on Christmas day. The version here is working off of the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well as her very first television episode, with some minor tweaks to my more modern tastes (why would you not put color on the mushrooms??) and the addition of the roasted potatoes I serve it with. Addendums forthcoming to make this vegan with mushrooms (not a downgrade, the year I had a vegan at my table was maybe the best I ever made it) and with chicken (a.k.a. Coq au Vin, which fittingly I like to serve when I have a gentleman caller.)
Bring a pot of water to a simmer. Add the bacon and simmer for ten minutes, then drain and pat dry with paper towels. This is necessary: it gets the smoke out, and if you don't do it the whole dish will just taste like smoke.
While the bacon is blanching, preheat the oven to 450℉ and set racks on the two lowest rungs in your oven. (There should be room, if a little tightly, to put the dutch oven on the upper rack and slide the baking sheet you'll use to roast the potatoes onto the lower rack.) Then prepare the beef to sear: dry the pieces very thoroughly with paper towels and season on all sides with salt and pepper.
Heat a dutch oven over medium (this will be your final stewpot). Add a couple tablespoons of olive oil and the bacon. Cook for a several minutes until the bacon renders its fat; use a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon to a large plate or platter lined with paper towels. Turn up the flame and sear the beef pieces on all sides in the rendered bacon fat; work in batches so as not to crowd the pan. You want heavy color and a crust. As the beef finishes searing, add it to the draining plate with the bacon.
Now lower the heat and add the carrots and onions to the bacon/beef fat. Sauté for several minutes until they're softened - go by the carrots, which will cook slower. They should absorb the fat; there should be little to none left on the surface of the pot. When the vegetables are ready, add the meats back to the pot. Season with salt and pepper, then sprinkle the flour over everything, tossing constantly - make sure the flour is evenly distributed. Your oven should be preheated by now - stick it in there for eight minutes, pulling it out to toss once halfway through.
Turn the oven down to 325℉ and put the pot back on the stove on medium. Add the wine, scraping the bottom and sides of the pot to release any fond. Add enough beef stock to barely cover the contents of the pot. Add the tomato paste, garlic, thyme, and one bay leaf, and bring to a light simmer. Cover and place it back in the oven for four hours.
The first thing you should do once the pot is in the oven is whatever dishes you've accumulated to this point. The second thing you should do is pour yourself whatever's left in the wine bottle after three cups went into the stew; relax and savor it, you've earned it. The third thing you should do is something that takes you out of your kitchen, maybe even out of your home, so that when you come back to do the garnishes and finish you aren't acclimated to how divine the smell is.
In the last 90 minutes of the stew's oven time, line a baking sheet with parchment paper, toss the potatoes on it with lots of olive oil and some salt and pepper (you could also add dried herbs, garlic powder, and/or ground/flaked red pepper if you like) and place on the lower rack you set up earlier. These will cook through at the lower temp and then get some color at a higher temp while you're finishing the stew.
Bring a pot of water to a bare simmer and drop the unpeeled pearl onions in. Count to one minute, preparing a bowl of ice while you count, and then immediately scoop the onions out into the ice, tossing so they cool quickly and evenly. Using a small knife, cut off the root end and squeeze the sprout end and they should just pop out of the outer peels. Tie a few sprigs each of the parsley and thyme along with one bay leaf into a cheesecloth sachet.
Heat a skillet over medium and add a couple tbsp butter and a generous glug of olive oil. Once the butter is melted and foaming a bit, add the onions and toss for several minutes until they've browned around the outside. Turn the heat down to low and add the herb bouquet along with 1/2 cup of the remaining beef stock. Simmer this for about 40 minutes - the liquid should mostly evaporate.
Set the onions aside, discard the herb bouquet, add more butter and oil to the skillet, and turn up to high-ish, watching and lowering if it smokes. Add the mushrooms in as much of a single layer as possible and season with salt and pepper. Move them as little as possible at first to develop a strong color and crust. When they're well browned, set them aside with the onions.
When it's time for the soup to come out, prepare a beurre manié by mashing a tablespoon each of butter and flour together until they're combined. Take the pot out of the oven and turn it back up to 425℉, leaving the potatoes in. Put a colander over the pot and scoop the stew solids into it so that the liquid clinging to them falls back into the pot. Put the solids aside and the pot with just the liquid over a medium heat. Add the beurre manié and simmer for a few minutes, stirring a bit to incorporate - the liquid should reduce a bit and linger on the back of a spoon. Put the stew solids, onions, and mushrooms all back into the pot, stir to combine, and simmer just a little bit longer, tasting to adjust seasonings. The potatoes should be ready about when the stew is - taste for texture and look for good color and some blistering. Serve as a couple generous handfuls of potatoes topped with a couple generous ladlefuls of stew. It's Christmas, tell a ghost story over dinner.
Lifted wholesale from Deb Perelman's chicken fajitas recipe on Smitten Kitchen, with expanded instructions.
A condiment that I put on anything taco-adjacent as well as any chili, including the vegetable chili below. Prepare it the night before or morning of dinner - that afternoon at the latest.
Mix a solution of:
To this add half a red onion sliced to medium-thick half-moons. Cover your container and shake to distribute the brine. Don't worry if the onions aren't all submerged; as they pickle they will lose their firmness and collapse into the liquid.
Store in the fridge - this next part is critical - in a ceramic, stone, or glass vessel only, or one you plan to dispose of. No plastic, silicone, or rubber, not even a lid with a gasket - not because it's unsafe, but because cleaning the pickled onion smell out of these materials is a bitch, even if you polish the onions off within a few days. I use a ceramic bowl covered with plastic wrap; if you have one of those glass jars with an all-glass stopper rather than a seal, that's ideal. (If you do end up with a stubborn smell: brew a huge quantity of way-too-strong green tea, let cool to room temperature, soak the offending container in it for at least a day, then scrub thoroughly; repeat if necessary. I don't know what the mad science is here, but it works.)
Heavily modified from Chris Morocco's recipe for Bon Appetit; I have never made this exactly as Morocco wrote it, partly out of deliberate disrespect for a noted toxic boss, but mostly because the second I read his take I wanted to alloy it with my years of experience making Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon every Christmas.
WORK IN PROGRESS: This is good enough that I feel okay publishing it, but I have a lot more experimenting to do to refine my fusion and tweaks, but it'll be a while because as of writing it's April and this should not be eaten when it's warmer than 45℉ out.
As written this serves 6-8 and can be baked in a large-ish casserole dish or individual oven-safe serving vessels. If you have the latter, they're far preferable as presentation goes, because if you've never made shepherd's pie before you may be disappointed to discover that even one less rich than this has zero structural integrity - when baked altogether it will plate as a glop with no defined potato/sauce separation, though admittedly no one I've ever served this to has minded. When I lived without a microwave for a year (don't ask) I got really into those single-portion foil pans like takeout pasta comes in - they're made for the oven and they also freeze brilliantly, which makes them an ideal choice for this.
Chop the aromatics and mushrooms small and the bacon into lardons (neither has to be exact; for the bacon I literally just hold the slices over the pan and cut it in with kitchen shears.) Heat a large heavy skillet on medium (I like a cast iron) and add the bacon, with a very thin skin of neutral oil if you're worried about sticking. Cook the bacon until the fat is rendered out, and transfer to a large plate with paper towels, leaving the fat in the pan. (For this step and the subsequent meat steps, I like to move the meat to one side of the pan and tilt it the other way so the fat falls, then just scoop out with a heavy spoon - a few leftover bits that continue cooking will just add depth of flavor.)
Once the bacon is done, add the ground lamb. Do not move or break it up at first: Morocco is correct that this recipe rewards letting a deep color develop on parts of the ground meat, and then breaking it up to cook it through. Once the lamb is done, transfer it to the plate with the bacon, again leaving the fat in the pan, and repeat this process for the beef - Morocco is again correct that you should not crowd the pan in service of this same color development. I have beef with him, but it's not this one.
When the meat is finished and out of the pan, raise the heat just a bit and add the aromatics and mushrooms to all that fat you just rendered out. Season with salt and pepper and saute for a considerable period, longer than ten minutes, you want them softened and browning - this is about as "brown food tastes good!" a recipe as it gets. When they're ready, add the tomato paste and flour and cook for about a minute, stirring constantly, until they're fully incorporated with the aromatics and the whole mixture darkens slightly. Add the wine, scraping the surface of the pan, then lower the heat once it's simmering and cook down until the alcohol cooks out and it's reduced by half or so.
Add the broth and the fresh herbs - you can chop the herbs, as Morocco recommends, but I actually just picked them down to individual leaves and then added them in whole - I found I liked sharp hits of whole rosemary as much or more as the consistent flavor of chopped. Add the meat back to the skillet and add your chosen umami boosters, then stir everything to combine and simmer for at least 15-20 minutes; you want a gravy-like consistency, coating the back of a spoon and then some, though if you're freezing before baking leaving a little more liquid is a good idea. Start tasting after ten minutes or so to check and adjust the seasonings.
Wash the potatoes, peel them if you like (I prefer with skins), and put them in a large pot and cover with cold salted water by about 2". Put heat under it and boil until a knife goes through the potatoes with negligible resistance. People like to stress themselves out about overcooked or overworked mashed potatoes getting "gummy" or whatever the fuck, you don't have to worry about that here because of the amount of fat and additional cooking these will get, so err on the side of boiling them longer.
Drain the potatoes, then put them into a large bowl to cool for a bit. During this time you can whisk the egg yolks, melt your butter, and warm up your milk some - if you're using sour cream, whisk it with the egg yolks rather than warming it. Mash the potatoes; once again people stress themselves out about mashing methods and time, but I use an electric hand mixer because it's easy and I haven't had texture problems yet, at least for this. Once the potatoes are mostly broken down, add your warm fats/dairy and mash to incorporate, then add and incorporate the egg yolk and sour cream if using last. Season with salt and pepper and taste to adjust for texture/flavor.
You can prepare the sauce and potatoes simultaneously or one at a time. To assemble, stir the peas straight from the freezer into the meat sauce if using, then add the sauce to the bottom of your baking vessel(s), divided evenly if using more than one. Lightly shake and tap the vessel(s) on the counter to get an even distribution and surface on the sauce. Spoon potatoes over the sauce: to ensure an even cover with the sauce not leaking through, spoon very gently and cover gaps with more potato rather than trying to spread over them. Once the sauce is fully covered, then you can spread the potatoes for an even surface with a spoon or spatula, then top with grated cheese if using. If you're storing all or portions of the pie to eat later, assemble the sauce and potatoes and put in the fridge or freezer without baking.
When it's time to bake, preheat the oven to 375℉ and bake for 45-50 minutes or longer if frozen, until it's bubbling around the edges and the top is golden brown. Let cool for ten minutes or so before serving.
Tweaked from Deb Perelman's recipe for Smitten Kitchen.
This recipe cooks in a wide baking vessel such as a casserole dish, cake tin, or (my favorite) a bundt pan. Scale the number of pounds of spaghetti you'll use to best fit your chosen vessel.
For each pound of spaghetti:
Additional Includes: I usually add a chopped cured/smoked meat and some chopped precooked chicken sausage; you could also do other spices/herbs, green vegetables like broccoli, etc. I would not add ground meat or uncooked sausage as these will render fats that will make the dish greasy. Be careful about adding sauces or other liquid-heavy ingredients as these will compromise the structural integrity of the pie - for thick sauces like vodka cream I would make them extra-viscous and leave out the milk called for above, and I would recommend simply leaving thin sauces like marinara to the side as a condiment. For vegetables, prepare in such a way as to remove a lot of the water content before adding to the pie; as an example, Perelman's recipe recommends broccoli rabe, which she parboils, then chops, then pats dry after chopping.
Beat the eggs lightly, then add the milk and stir to combine. Grate the cheese in and add remaining non-pasta ingredients, again stirring to combine.
Intentionally undercook the pasta, 3+ minutes shorter than package directions, it should not be palatable - just past the point where water has penetrated the entire strand and it doesn't crunch any longer. Drain and let it cool some so it doesn't scramble the eggs, then toss it thoroughly with the egg mixture until the toppings and cheese well and truly distribute throughout the pasta.
Heavily grease your baking vessel. Bake at 425℉ for around 45+ minutes, until the parts you can see have browned and a knife turned in the center releases no loose egg mixture. Let cool for a few minutes before unmolding from the vessel.
Cut into slices to serve and store. Does great in both the refrigerator and freezer, and as a heavy snack or a meal depending on portion size.
Riffing on a recipe from Southern Living. An ex-lover of mine opened my eyes to the Thanksgiving miracle that is confit turkey days before dumping me - a second Thanksgiving miracle - but I got away with the leftovers and opened my own eyes to this third Thanksgiving miracle.
Preheat oven to 400℉. Hose up a loaf pan with cooking spray. When your pastry is thawed enough to work, line the bottom and sides, stretching and patching to fill any gaps.
In a big pot, saute your aromatics and mushrooms in butter low and slow, you want them translucent and sloppy rather than brown and crisping. Add the garlic for the last few minutes of the saute, and the spices and seasoning along with some salt and pepper for the final minute. Up the heat some and add the marmite and tomato paste, stirring to combine well until the tomato color darkens a bit. Add the flour and stir constantly until everything is combined. Add the broth, scraping the bottom of the pot to pick up any fond. Lower the heat and simmer for a while until it thickens considerably - eyeball your desired filling viscosity, making sure to account for the incoming cream. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in your turkey, cream, and peas.
Pour the filling into your pastry-lined loaf pan, then cover with additional pastry. You should score it somehow, but exactly how is up you you (I usually just cut a simple slit down the center). Beat the egg yolk and then brush it over the top of the pie. Bake for a few minutes past half an hour, then let it cool for another half hour before serving. Top with leftover cranberry sauce if you have some.
Tweaked from a recipe in Epicurious.
This is very good as written but I'm still pushing to improve it whenever I make it. The chili flavor could be more robust, and I have yet to explore toasting whole spices and using dried rather than canned beans, and most importantly it's not as filling as I'd want it to be. I've tried adding other squashes and eggplant; neither worked. For the moment, definitely serve this with a piece or two of cornbread.
This proportion serves 3-4.
Chop the aromatics, zucchini, and the tomatoes if you got fresh ones. If you got canned ones, rough them up in the can with a pair of kitchen shears.
Sauté the aromatics in olive oil for a few minutes. You want softened, not fully browned, but I do like to deliberately not move them so there's acute color in places. Once they're soft, add the seasonings plus some salt and pepper and cook for a minute more to toast the spices a bit, stirring constantly.
Add the zucchini and tomatoes, stir to combine, lower the heat, and simmer for 15 minutes or so. In the meantime, rise and drain the canned beans. Add those and the chocolate to the chili and simmer five minutes, then taste to make sure the zucchini is cooked through (if not simmer a few minutes more) and the seasonings are right.
Serve with your choice of chili condiments; I like sour cream, cheese, and pickled red onions.