5 Ingredients or Fewer

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.

crispy crumbled potatoes

My love of french fries is vast and well–documented — preferably in a golden, crisp and glittering-with-fine-salt heap with some aioli, an artichoke or oysters and ice-cold, very dry champagne, outside at a bustling cafe in a life that seems a bit distant right now — so I hope you will take this statement with the utmost gravitas when I say that these crispy potatoes are as good as, if not better, than fries.

I first had a version of them at Barbuto restaurant (of the chocolate budino and kale salad fame) nearly eight years ago, and I’ve watched cooks making them in the open kitchen dozens of times since. Cold, boiled potatoes are crumbled directly into a fryer in irregular chunks and not taken out until they’re a deep golden brown. Once drained they’re tossed in a big metal bowl with salt, a lot of pecorino, and a few sprigs of fried rosemary. They are perfect, absolutely perfect.

5-Ingredient (or Fewer!) Meals to Get You Back in the Cooking Game

Have you ever been in a cooking rut? When days go by and you just can’t bring yourself to make an honest meal, instead ordering in or eating out or cobbling together odds and ends and calling it dinner? I think it’s safe to say we’ve all been there. I certainly have. Thankfully these ruts don’t last very long before I’m inspired by a perfect roast chicken or eager to try the internet’s latest viral recipe. And when I’m ready to get back into the swing of things, I jump straight into the kitchen.

For me, that's where everything begins, from whipping up a hearty breakfast to get me out the door or prepping lunch for the week, to wrapping up the day over a quiet dinner. My time in the kitchen doesn’t mean elaborate or complicated feasts (not always, at least!). Most nights, I just want an approachable meal that requires as little effort—and as few ingredients—as possible. Which is where these recipes come in. They’re simple without feeling uninspired, they only need a handful of ingredients (five or less— not counting salt, pepper, and cooking fat), and they help get me back into tip-top cooking shape.

cider-glazed bacon-wrapped dates

Let me state for the record that I am usually opposed to sharing non-recipes like this. Thus, whenever I’ve mentioned bacon-wrapped dates as part of a party or Friendsgiving menu and have received a surge of comments and DMs asking me for the recipe, I’ve responded, “Just Google it — recipes abound!” Or, more huffily, “That’s it. That’s the recipe.” But I’ve begun to question why I want to send your beautiful faces elsewhere, especially because when you do Google for a recipe, it’s going to lead you to what I consider inadvisable places. And now, like clockwork, here come Opinions:

Before wrapping pitted dates in bacon, I’ve, on the advice of countless glossy food magazines, stuffed almonds and/or pistachios inside the dates. I have filled them with blue cheese, goat cheese, and, truly the worst, fiddly matchsticks of aged manchego and if I could, I’d take every one of those minutes of my life back because forgive me for making us sound like a bunch of savages here, but I can barely taste them in the end, but they increase the amount of time it takes to put together what should be the simplest party trick up your sleeve threefold.
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roasted cabbage with walnuts and parmesan

I began making variations on this dish about a year ago and since then it has become — and I’m sorry, I know how annoying unrelenting, gasping praise of every recipe that crosses your social media threshold can sound, despite feeling certain that here it’s warranted — everything. It’s a warm salad for cold weather. It’s Starter Cabbage for people who are cabbage suspect (savoy is lacier and less heavy than the white/red stuff). It’s a quick vegetable dish that’s not a salad or bland broccoli that my kids, by some rare miracle, agree to (they like the crispy crackly outer leaves). It’s even better from the tray (which keeps it hot) than it is from a plate, which is basically a reward for being as lazy as I prefer to be. With prep and even oven-warming, it takes exactly 20 minutes to make. Finally, it’s the kind of humble, economical dish that feels good at a time of year when we need to shell out for so many extra things.

The recipe is inspired by one in that astoundingly good vegetable cookbook I talk about a lot here (see: this asparagus salad and this soup) because I think (ahem, after my own two) you might enjoy it a whole lot: Six Seasons. I made, okay, quite a few changes — the cooking time was too long without flipping it, and it’s better when cooked on two sides. The original recipe has saba (an acidic wine reduction) or vinegar but I got the flavor I wanted with just lemon. There were breadcrumbs but I skip them; the cabbage is roasted in butter, not olive oil, but I found it just smoked a lot. I add lemon zest, since I’m already using a lemon. The nuts are already toasted in the recipe, but mine never are so I worked it into my take, below. Honestly, I haven’t looked at the original recipe in so long (you won’t need to once you’ve made it once or twice), I had to pull down the book just to see what changes I’ve made.

perfect apple tarte tatin

[Welcome to the second episode of the Sous-Chef Series, a sporadic feature on SK in which I invite cooks I admire over to my small kitchen to teach me — and thus, us — to make one of their specialties. Spoiler: I’m the sous! …

[Welcome to the second episode of the Sous-Chef Series, a sporadic feature on SK in which I invite cooks I admire over to my small kitchen to teach me — and thus, us — to make one of their specialties. Spoiler: I’m the sous! Previously: Making potato vareniki with Kachka’s Bonnie Frumpkin.]

Almost without fail, the more bafflingly short an ingredient list and the more stunningly delicious the outcome, the more likely it is to rivet me. I don’t need all recipes to have 5- or 10- or fewer ingredients — I fare poorly under arbitrarily restrictive confines — but doesn’t it just blow your mind that you can make the apple tarte tatin above with only apples, sugar, butter, lemon juice, and a sheet of defrosted puffed pastry?

Or, you should be able to. When made well, this upside-down apple tart looks like snug copper cobblestones on top of a rippling puff of flaky pastry. If you’re lucky, the apples will taste like they drank a cup of caramel and then napped in what they couldn’t finish. I love it enough that I’ve written about it twice (!) in eleven years but my efforts were… mediocre at best. I mean, just look at them — too thin, too sparse, too pale, apples either under- or overcooked, and way too many apples have dissolved long before the cooking time should have been up, despite being “good baking apples.”