5 Ingredients or Fewer

grilled nectarines with gorgonzola and hazelnuts

Listen, I don’t make the rules. These things aren’t rational. But at some point over our vacation in Scotland — a time when we mostly consumed fish and chips, more chips, steak pie, also with chips, a detail that I’m sure is unrelated — I began intensely craving the combination of peaches and blue cheese even though I can’t think of a time when they’ve crossed paths in my kitchen. Once we got home, I beelined for Salad Freak by Jess Damuck [Amazon, Bookshop, More Indies], a cookbook that came out this spring, because I had a hunch she’d put the idea in my head and sure enough, she had a combination of stone fruit and blue cheese waiting to fulfill my wayward vacation craving.

If you are thinking you don’t need a cookbook for salads, as I might have in the past, I’m here to tell you how wrong we are. We do, if not for exact measurements then for inspiration. For more creative ways to throw together what’s left in your fridge so nothing goes to waste. And to figure out what to eat when you’re in the third heat wave [fourth? fifth? heat waves are just a continuum now, aren’t they?] of the summer and everything you thought you’d want to cook in August no longer makes sense because it’s too hot to cook. Damuck’s book has us covered. There’s a breakfast salad with yogurt, cucumbers, eggs, and toasted seeds. There are soba salads and shredded kale salads and tortellini salads dressings with miso-mayo and horseradish goat cheese and a BBQ chicken cobb beloved by Snoop Dogg and every single thing is just a little bit unexpected and delivering the freshness I need right now.

buttered noodles for frances

For the last four weeks my son, the child who actually likes and encourages my cooking, has been at sleepaway camp, leaving us home alone with the one I affectionately call Buttered Noodles for Frances. Have you read the book? [Amazon, Bookshop, more indies] In it, a very picky badger named Frances doesn’t want to eat any of the food her mother makes, she only wants bread and jam. Her parents decide to give her exactly what she wants while the rest of the family eats poached eggs, green beans, and breaded veal cutlets. It does the trick — she tires of it and begins to embrace what the rest of the family is eating. Well la-de-da, good for them. Our badger is cut from more stubborn cloth. After the first week of trying to serve regular meals — food with variety and interest, the kind of stuff you might find on any page of the site but this one — I gave up and made buttered noodles every night. I want you to know that on what might be the sixth or sixteenth day, I’ve stopped counting, she has yet to request anything else.

buttered noodles -2

roasted tomatoes with white beans

Is July the most lethargic cooking month? I don’t mean this in a bad way. I know in our productivity-fixated culture (“so busy, crazy busy”) we balk at praising apathy but what if we leaned into it instead? It’s hot. The days are long. If midsummer demands some laziness, some loosened grip on to-do lists, if de-participation beckons and we can pull it off, I’d like to try it. I could even schedule it one day next week if I move some things around.

roasted tomatoes with white beans-03

snacky asparagus

You are fully invited to roll your eyes at the simplicity of this recipe. It’s not even a recipe. It’s more like a plating, a way of getting asparagus from market to table that I’ve been hooked on for over a year.

Here&#82…

You are fully invited to roll your eyes at the simplicity of this recipe. It’s not even a recipe. It’s more like a plating, a way of getting asparagus from market to table that I’ve been hooked on for over a year.

snacky asparagus-2

Here’s what makes it perfect: I love sauteed, roasted, and grilled asparagus, especially when the spears are sizzling hot and have crackly, charred spots, a mix of textures. But each of these methods has a tiny flaw, and that is timing. Roasted and grilled asparagus are amazing piping hot off the flame, but shortly after are a bit soggy. Still good, sure, but it goes further downhill the longer you wait to eat it. Poaching asparagus and popping it in an ice water bath preserves this perfectly-cooked, crisp-tender, bright green moment in time… for days.

snacky asparagus-3

lemon sorbet

I realize that in a week where the most public spaces part sludge, part abyss, you might not have frozen desserts on your mind, but I cannot hide what we are: year-round ice cream people. Maybe it’s just the peculiarity of a steam-heated apartment, keeping it a balmy 78 degrees in here all winter, but snow on the ground has never kept us from cold treats, especially lemon sorbet, which tastes the way beams of sunlight feel on your skin.

lemon sorbet-01 lemon sorbet-02 lemon sorbet-03 lemon sorbet-04 lemon sorbet-05 lemon sorbet-06 lemon sorbet-08 lemon sorbet-09

deviled eggs

I will never find it again [please send me a link if see the original], but a few weeks ago a TikTok* went through my feed in which a woman is invited to eat half a dozen eggs and she says “Oh no, that’s too much.” “But what if I scoop them out, mash it with mayo, and stuff it back together?” “Thanks, I’ll have the whole tray!”

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the intended effect, but I’ve been craving deviled eggs since. I know we often think of them as a holiday party food, so this might make little sense, but I absolutely love them in the summer, especially when it’s too hot to cook anything real and I only want to eat, like, two cold salads and a handful of potato chips for dinner. Deviled eggs — basically egg salad with less gloop (my food writing chops are legendary, I know) — are the perfect piece to round out the meal. I like to keep hard-boiled eggs in the fridge anyway, so it’s just a matter of peeling, popping out the centers (why is this so fun), mashing them up, and spooning them back in.

17 Easy, Inspiring Meals That Are Busting Us Out of Our Cooking Rut

By now, you’ve probably heard about (if not, begun to experience…) what folks are calling the pandemic wall. Nearly a year into this new state of living we’re collectively experiencing, there’s plenty to fret about—and frankly, without aiming to go f…

By now, you've probably heard about (if not, begun to experience...) what folks are calling the pandemic wall. Nearly a year into this new state of living we're collectively experiencing, there's plenty to fret about—and frankly, without aiming to go full-on Eeyore, it's exhausting. But because cereal for dinner gets old after the third night straight (trust me...I'm speaking from experience), I turned to the Food52 team to find out what's keeping them eating well and saving their energy these days.

Below, 17 dinners that require only a handful of ingredients and minimal active cooking, like speedy grits, bubbly bakes, or done-in-a-flash fish. Let us know what you're cooking these days—we gladly welcome suggestions.

Nigella’s No-Churn Ice Cream Is a Genius Way to Chill Out

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Today: 4 ingredients. 1 step. No cooking. No churning….

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Today: 4 ingredients. 1 step. No cooking. No churning. Ice cream!

Not having an ice cream maker never stopped us before. We've done all kinds of weird stuff in the name of doing it for ourselves. We've nested coffee cans and shaken (or kicked) them; we've returned obsessively to the freezer to stir; we may or may not have purchased this ball.

layered yogurt flatbreads

For many years I’ve been fascinated by variations on yeast-free yogurt flatbread recipes that follow a loose formula of a cup of yogurt, a couple cups of flour, some salt, fat, and water. Sometimes there’s baking powder, sometimes there’s not. It’s kneaded together as you would a yeasted bread dough and left to rest for about 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, during which a transformation occurs and the dough becomes springy and smooth and very lovely to work with, like a freshly-opened can of Play-Doh. Once rolled thin, they’re pan-fried, and look, they’re fiiine. But they’re never as good as I want them to be.

With yeast scarce, I decided to revisit these flatbreads early in our Inside Days and see if I could make headway with them using scallion pancakes as my guide. The core of scallion pancakes is similar — a simple, yeast-free, dough, also kneaded and left to rest before you roll it out. But instead of frying them right away, you brush them with oil, sprinkle them with scallions, and roll the pancake into a tight cigar, and then the cigar into a snail. This snail of wound dough is left to rest again, and then rolled into the final pancake. The hidden layers of flour and oil help the layers lift and separate into flaky layers as you fry the pancakes. And this layering, it turned out, was exactly what my yogurt flatbreads were missing.

roast chicken with schmaltzy cabbage

I didn’t know I needed a new roast chicken in my life when Helen Rosner, the New Yorker’s roving food correspondent and all-around fascinating person, posted on her Instagram a few weekends ago that she didn’t have her usual vegetables to put under her roast chicken so she was using cabbage instead. Yet the very next evening, so was I, plus twice since then, and likely one more time before this week is out and I have a hunch I will not be alone. Rosner won a James Beard award for an essay I still routinely quote from to my kids (“but chicken tenders have no terroir!” because we live in opposite land where they don’t like them but I do — but that’s a whole other blog entry) because it delights me so much. A year ago she nearly broke the internet when she said she likes to use a hairdryer to get the crispiest chicken skin. All I’m saying is that when Rosner talks about chicken, I find good reason to tune in.

Look, I really like cabbage. I was never tormented with it as a kid, so I love it with the abandon of someone who chooses it. I like it in salads. I like it pickled. I love it roasted. But even if you’re not me, even if you’re cabbage-hesitant, I think you will find cabbage cooked slowly in salty buttery chicken drippings until charred at the edges and caramelized throughout — the cause of fighting at dinner over who got the best pieces of cabbage (!) — to be best thing to eat with roast chicken since potatoes.