cozy fall pastas
plus: easiest cinnamon rolls, high holiday sweets, and an interview with kristina cho
Monday, September 30, 2024
Good morning!
Strawberry milk! [See also: Homemade Strawberry Milk.]
Allrecipes, America’s Most Unruly Cooking Web Site [New Yorker]
The temperature drops approximately five degrees and my carb cravings kick in immediately: Welcome to the cozy fall pasta newsletter. Burying myself in a tangle of spaghetti is almost unthinkable to me during the heatwaves of July. But there’s a nip in the air this morning and I cannot think of a better cooking agenda than spaghetti and meatballs, or maybe spirals with broccoli braised in olive oil and garlic until its unforgettable. I hope you’ll find a few new favorites below.
But that’s not all! We’ve also got an interview with the wonderful Kristina Cho, whose cookbook Chinese Enough is out tomorrow and I want to cook everything in it. Plus I’ve got a new recipe on the site for faster, easier, and effortlessly veganized cinnamon rolls. And, if you’re in charge of desserts for the Jewish New Year, which begins later this week, I’ve got you covered.
Cheers!
Deb
My podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, launched this spring. Our newest episode, out last week, is all about Caesar Salad — which just turned 100! You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts, such as Apple, Spotify, and more.
easiest cinnamon rolls
New: These cinnamon rolls are no-knead, effortlessly veganized, and could be coming out of your oven in just over two hours, implicitly understanding the life truth that when you want freshly-baked cinnamon rolls, you want them as soon as humanly possible.
pasta with longer-cooked broccoli
A one-pan pasta dish with broccoli that's intentionally cooked longer, so it's tender, almost silky, and you can really taste the olive oil, garlic, and lemon. It's cozy and perfect for a rainy day.
quick pasta and chickpeas
A 20-minute, 5-ingredient (I bet all 5 are in your kitchen right now), abundantly flavorful dish that I cannot resist adding one slightly crispy and dramatically sizzling finish to. Have you made it yet? Few dishes make me feel rewarded for waiting until the last minute to figure out dinner.
skillet-baked pasta with five cheeses
A skillet-baked pink pasta with five cheeses and nestled shells that maximizes the charred edges. There's a lot of flexibility for swaps here if you, like me, are just heading to the fridge to see if there's anything you can rustle up for a Tuesday dinner.
spaghetti pangrattato with crispy eggs
One of my favorite things to make when I think I don't want to cook: spaghetti tangled with intensely seasoned crunchy breadcrumbs and a broken crispy fried egg comes together as a quick, perfect bowl of undiluted comfort. Monday dinner crisis, averted. [Video below!]
mushroom marsala pasta bake
A sizable portion of intensely flavored mushrooms, al dente noodles, mozzarella and a crunchy parmesan finish bake into something that couldn’t be further from the overcooked-to-collapse ziti most of us associate with baked pasta -- lucky us.
baked pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage
This is one of my favorite pasta bakes of all time: craggy with browned crunchy edges for miles, sausage, and broccoli rabe, and a lightly creamy pecorino sauce to hold it all together and I cannot recommend it enough for a cold, windy day.
perfect vegetable lasagna
A sky-high vegetable lasagna, five layers of noodles, sauce, cheese, and vegetables (that are not an afterthought, for once). The top layer is crackly with melted, deeply bronzed cheese over a thin slick of garlicky tomato sauce and might be the very best reason to make this.
my old-school baked ziti
A baked ziti exactly the way I like it, no jarred sauce, a bit of greens, ricotta on the side. It's spectacularly simple, effectively indulgent, and it makes bronzed, crispy corners worth calling dibs on.
spaghetti pie with pecorino and black pepper
Comfort food at its prettiest -- a tall, bronzed torte of a spaghetti pie, wound with an abundance of cheese, black pepper and, if you so desire, greens as well. Those edges are my happy place.
perfect meatballs and spaghetti
This is the best (and easiest) spaghetti and meatballs I’ve ever made. A streamlined technique gets this whole thing on the table in under an hour, which means we get to have this for dinner more often. 🍝
my family's noodle kugel
Trying to explain noodle kugel to someone who has never had noodle kugel is hard. Trying to convince someone who has had this noodle kugel to eat it again... doesn't happen. Once you have it, there's only asking for seconds, and then for you to make it again every year forever.
fig, olive oil and sea salt challah
You don't have to celebrate the High Holidays to get obsessed with this, my favorite challah to date. The leftovers, should any survive until the next day, make unbelievable french toast. We like it with warmed honey and a dollop of ricotta.
majestic and moist honey cake
Dry, beleaguered honey cake is no way to kick off 5785. This best-in-category classic from Marcy Goldman is the kind you make every year -- deeply spiced, great crumb, and very cozy. It gets better as it has time to rest, honestly, just like me.
I’ve written three cookbooks and I’m a tiny bit biased, but I think you’d love them all. Wondering what you might cook from Smitten Kitchen Keepers now that school’s back in session and the leaves are changing colors? I thought you’d never ask! Try the peanut butter, oat, and jam bars, spiced sweet potato oven fries, tangy baked eggplant and couscous, and weeknight lemon chicken wings. To finish, I recommend the apple butterscotch crisp, the pumpkin snacking cake, and/or the apple cider old-fashioned. Were you looking for a list of all the recipes in each of my cookbooks? I’ve added these in a separate page and hope it makes it easier for you to find everything you want to cook.
AN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTINA CHO
My shelves are full of wonderful cookbooks I don’t get to talk about enough, so I’ve added this section so you can get to know the cool people behind them. Today we're chatting with Kristina Cho. Her cookbook Chinese Enough: Homestyle Recipes for Noodles, Dumplings, Stir-Fries, and More is out tomorrow, 10/1.
1. What inspired your cookbook?
There’s one particular meal that really stands out for me. It was December 2020, my husband and I had driven across the country from San Francisco to Cleveland to spend some of the holidays with my family after not seeing them all year. We finally reunited with my parents and they made the most comforting, simple, and soulful dinner. They served tomato egg, a brothy soup with tofu and winter melon, a squid and pepper stir-fry with black bean and garlic sauce, and some perfectly fluffy steamed rice. It tasted like home and I was so inspired by the way my parents cooked together and the love and care they put into feeding us. I wanted to write a cookbook that captured this spirit and way of cooking.
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?
It would have to be my Shacha Roast Chicken recipe. I was so adamant on having a really good roast chicken recipe in the book because I think it’s such a symbol of a good home cook. I tested so many variations of this recipe but none of them felt special enough to warrant a recipe in the book. That was until I tested a roast chicken basted in shacha butter and chicken fat, which is really an aromatic shrimp butter that you will want to dunk everything into. It is phenomenal and now my go-to roast chicken recipe.
3. What recipe is so low-effort, high-reward that it's worth cooking for dinner tonight, even if we're tired and don't want to cook?
Either the Tomato Egg or Welcome Home Steak. Both are in the Best with Rice chapter where the recipes are designed to cook in about the same amount of time a pot of rice takes to steam, so they are both really quick, easy, and deliver a lot of flavor!
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
The recipes in Chinese Enough are truly meant for everyday cooking. I wanted the recipes to be as approachable as possible but still provide lots of technique and knowledge, but yet they still feel special and exciting. I cooked and shot every photo in the book and most of the recipes were made in friends’ kitchens so I got the chance to test the recipes in an environment outside of my own home kitchen, which I think proves how adaptable and easy these dishes are!
Thank you, Kristina! You can preorder Chinese Enough right here.
spaghetti pangrattato with crispy eggs
shop my favorites
Ever wonder where I get my cutting boards, paring knives, offset spatulas and more than you see when I cook? I've created a page on Smitten Kitchen with links to some of my favorite kitchen items, the ones I'm asked about the most — yes, including the the Smitten Kitchen x Staub Braiser, which is back in stock! For each item, I've attempted to provide a range of shopping links so we're not just focusing on one giant retailer.
See you next week!
