Monday, March 3, 2025
Good morning!
The Quiet Joy of Doing the Dishes [Saveur]
Meet the Feminist Resistance Fighter Who Created the Modern Kitchen [Gastro Obscura]
A Kitchen Resolution Worth Making: Follow the Recipe Exactly [NYT, gift article; This is old but I smiled when I re-read it this week]
We are long overdue for a roundup of freezer favorites, and there are few cooking topics I get more questions about. What can you stock the freezer with if you won’t have much time to cook for a while or, like, 18 years? What can you bring friends that just had a baby? What can you bring someone going through a tough time? Maybe you just prefer cooking in bulk and freezing dishes off in smaller portions so you need to make dinner less often. The Smitten Kitchen is here to help! Some dishes simply freeze better than others and are more forgiving of texture change that happen when defrosted. Below, a few of our forever go-tos to stash away for busier times.
Plus, this week brings a new recipe for ziti-style baked chickpeas with kale and sausage that could also freeze wonderfully. And! We have an interview with the fantastic Molly Yeh whose third cookbook Sweet Farm! is out this week.
Cheers,
Deb
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 in the depths of winter? I thought you’d never ask! Try the ginger garlic chicken noodle soup, charred salt and vinegar cabbage, creamy coconut rice with chili-lime vegetables, and oven-braised beef with harissa. To finish, I recommend the oatmeal date shortbread, the chocolate dulce puddle cakes, and/or the white Russian slush punch. 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.
ziti chickpeas with sausage and kale
New! Pizza Beans 2.0! Hearty chickpeas, sausage, and kale are simmered in a spicy tomato sauce then finished with melted and blistered mozzarella and pecorino. We like to scoop it onto garlic bread, but it’s also fantastic, with or without the cheese, over polenta and pasta.
“One of the winning elements of ‘The Recipe’ is that it’s not prescriptive — rather than settling on one universal ‘perfect’ recipe, the chefs explain their personal preferences, then give listeners the information they need to make their own adjustments. By breaking their recipes down ingredient-by-ingredient, digging into what each one is doing, they make the science of cooking approachable and fun.” — New York Times, 7 Podcasts to Inspire a New Hobby
“J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Deb Perelman’s new podcast gets to not only the heart of how they make their recipes—but also the why behind each decision, too.” — Esquire, The 26 Best Podcasts of 2024
The latest full episode of my podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, is all about Brownies! You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts, such as Apple, Spotify, and more.
chard and white bean stew
A cozy but simple vegetarian stew with white beans, chard (or any greens you’ve got around), finished with a nonnegotiable slice of grilled sourdough bread (even better if it’s drizzled with olive oil and kissed with a little garlic). You could even top it with a poached egg, if you’re into it, or a little parmesan, but it needs neither to taste wonderful.
breakfast burritos
If you've ever made breakfast burritos and realized they were a staggering amount of work, this is the recipe for you. This sheet pan method is 100% easier and I include instructions for freezing and defrosting because future you is so glad you made extra, it's verklempt with gratitude.
crusty baked cauliflower and farro
A casserole, but not the boring kind. Here, I switched out pasta for a whole grain and ended up with a cozy, wildly flavorful, cheesy, crunchy-topped dinner that we make again and again.
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.
bean and vegetable burritos
My core recipe for a perfect-every-time vegetable burrito, one that’s filling, hearty, and exactly the way I like it: rice optional, ingredients that flex to what you have around, and as good from the freezer as they are fresh.
chicken empanadas with chorizo
Looking for something cozy to bake and take with you this weekend? The filling of these empanadas is some of the best braised chicken I've ever eaten. The pastry is a cinch to work with, bakes up beautifully, and makes individual pockets perfect for now, to rewarm tomorrow, or to stash in the freezer for future lunches.
baked chicken meatballs
Halfway to meatloaves, these baked meatballs are a longtime weeknight staple of ours -- we love them with roasted vegetables, potatoes, polenta or even a simple white bean salad with your favorite vinaigrette.
easy freezer waffles
It's finally ready: the perfect freezer-to-toaster waffle [cough, Deb-Os] and it couldn't be easier: a one-bowl, butter and yogurt-enriched batter that smells like heaven. I share all the tricks I've learned to ensure they come out of the toaster crisp outside and tender inside. They're ready to stash in your freezer for the weekend, or to make breakfast for dinner right away. [Video below!]
thick, chewy granola bars
No wan, tooth-breaking granola bars here. These are tall, loaded with pretty much anything you wish, and hearty so if you make a batch over the weekend, you've got breakfast and/or snacks sorted for as long as they last.
ultimate banana bread
The last banana bread recipe we will ever need has a towering height and a crunchy top that will be hard not to lift off in one giant tile and swiftly coat the underside with salted butter. The inside is plush and perfectly-crumbed, but never squidgy. I can’t wait to see how yours come out.
whole wheat chocolate oat cookies
Oat and chocolate chip cookies with both whole wheat flour and (optional) wheat germ -- no wait, come back! They're craggier, more nuanced, and flavorful than any oat cookie I've made before and I don't think you'll go back to making them the old way, either.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY YEH
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 Molly Yeh. Her new cookbook, Sweet Farm! More Than 100 Cookies, Cakes, Salads (!), and Other Delights from My Kitchen on a Sugar Beet Farm, is out tomorrow, 3/4.
1. What inspired your cookbook?
Out of all of the creative outlets in the world, writing recipes for sweets and watching them physically come together makes me feel most like a magical wizard and I want other people to have that feeling too. Pair this with the fact that I married a sugar farmer and, I mean, I couldn't not write it. I've dreamt of writing this book since my blog days but knew that I needed to have some other book writing experience before writing *this* book, so in my mind this book feels like a very long time coming. I love that sweets play a central role in happy celebrations. When you eat a sweet it's usually one of the best parts of your day, right?? I love the feeling that one of my recipes might play a role in that happy part of your day.
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?
The black sesame babka uses a dough that we tested at least 30 versions of. I wanted to shove as much moisture and flavor into the dough as possible while also using as straightforward a method as possible. I wanted to avoid using a tangzhong because I just didn't want to add an extra step in an already steppy recipe. My solution was using part potato flour which holds a massive amount of liquid (way more than bread flour), which contributes that extra moisture. Also a little coconut oil in addition to tons of butter supplies additional fat and a really lovely warm flavor that compliments black sesame so nicely. The dough gets put to use in other recipes as well, like puffy donuts, cardamom buns, marzipan poppy seeds muffins, and salty chocolate swirly buns. But the BSB is a very personal recipe for me since it brings together my Chinese heritage and Jewishness.
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?
The one-bowl any-butter cookie bars will allow you to use up the almost-empty jar of nut butter in your pantry and they'll come together so quickly your oven might not even be preheated yet. Also they're chewy, which is the #1 dessert texture.
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
I've thought through and obsessed over and lost sleep over every single step, ingredient amount, and technique in here. Each one has a reason. Many of the recipes are indeed bigger projects but that's intentional. I wanted to make the best possible sprinkle cake, the best possible cake donut, the best possible halva cookie, and a challah hotteok! If a knock-out could have been achieved with an easy one-bowl method, then I went with it. If not, I didn't. The goal wasn't easy recipes, the goal was really good recipes. (And lots of tahini, pistachio, rosewater, marzipan, and black sesame.)
Thank you, Molly! You can preorder Sweet Farm! right here.
easy freezer waffles
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 (currently out of stock but we’ll have more in soon!). 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!
