The Best of BGSK

Whether you’re a good meal planner or a last-minute shopper like me, cooking (almost) every night is easier when you rely on a handful of tested and beloved recipe formats. On a given week, I tend to sketch out meal formats, rather than meals - which I’ve mentioned here before. Today, I’ve got more to say about my process, and I’m aiming to pass on some ideas about formulating your own go-to list of dinner types rather than dinners, whether you plan ahead of time or stop at the market nightly.

For me, the scoping goes like this: I pick a couple of formats for the week ahead, shop for ingredients that will work with them, and then let spur-of-the-moment plans, unexpected cravings, and random bursts of creativity take over. I don’t come home to an empty pantry, but I also don’t tie myself to saucy stir-fried pork on a night when it turns out I need pork fried rice.

Here are the 11 formats I turn to again and again.

1. Pasta with tomato sauce. The one, the only. Here’s how to make it the best ever. Make sauce by sauteing onions and garlic in oil, then adding broken-up whole canned tomatoes, salt, and oregano. Cook the pasta in salted water and scoop it right into the sauce. Finish with a lot of olive oil and a lot of parm. Also, put cubes of fresh mozzarella in the bottom of your bowl before filling it with pasta for a gooier delight.

2. Pasta with vegetables or other sauces. This gets a separate entry, because pasta is the best weeknight dinner in the world. Saute a few garlic cloves in some olive oil, then add a lot of a vegetable (zucchini, kale, broccoli, carrots, winter squash, or a mix!) and a little water and then cook, covered, until the veggie is really tender. Add the pasta straight from its pot of boiling water, plus some of the cooking water to make a sauce. Add a lot of parm and serve. And maybe some breadcrumbs, as in this brown butter-broccoli number. Alternatively: make pesto and toss pasta with that. Peanut noodles also count.

3. Soup & sandwich. The soup part can be really simple: broth with veggies or tomato soup. The sandwich could be a grilled cheese, a quesadilla, or even avocado toast. Honestly, the s&s pairing is so solid that two don’t even really have to match, flavor-wise, so whip up whatever you’re in the mood for. Here are some sandwiches and here are some soups. Come summer, consider replacing one of those s’s with a salad.

My summer solution to dinner comes in a one-word package: pesto. Right now, basil is fragrant, billions of vegetables are ripe and ready to be paired with pesto, and there’s little reason not to whiz together the green paste in your mini food processor while your pasta boils and your zucchini sautés.

But pesto can transcend its Ligurian herby roots. Forget basil for a minute, and blend together arugula or spinach (even quicker to make dinner if you’ve purchased pre-washed), radish greens, or even kale for a nutritious substance that delivers you plenty of vegetables even when you’re too tired to make a salad. Forget pasta, and turn pesto into a spread for tartines and sandwiches or a sauce for egg bakes. There’s a wide and delicious world of pesto out there. Here’s how to navigate it.

1. First, master pesto.
There’s not much to it. Bookmark the basic recipe for pesto right this second, mainly for the proportions. You’ll need nuts, vegetables, salt, garlic, olive oil, lemon, and usually a hard cheese like parm.

2. Eat with pasta and veggies.
I can never get enough of Whole Wheat Pesto Pasta with Broccoli Rabe. Leftovers make lunch the best thing ever.

3. Mix with yogurt.
A little bit of pesto plus a little bit of yogurt transforms into a sauce that’s great on fish, chicken, or Crispy Potatoes & Baked Eggs with Pesto Yogurt.

4. Add to quinoa salad.
In addition to pesto, roasted tomatoes, avocado, and mozzarella are responsible for this quinoa salad being irresistible.

5. Craft the best sandwiches.
What do Pesto Chicken Sandwiches with Arugula & Sundried Tomatoes, Roasted Eggplant Sandwiches with White Bean Spread and Chive Pesto, and Grilled Salmon Sandwiches with Heirloom Tomatoes & Chive-Cashew Pesto have in common? That’s right: pesto.

6. Use the whole plant.
Beets, radishes, and even carrots are all candidates for “whole plant eating,” by which I mean that you should slice radishes, pesto radish leaves, and pile both onto a Radish & Radish Leaf Pesto Sandwich.

Meat-lite is my mantra. I don’t eat steak at every meal, and chicken graces our pot no more than once every 10 days. I’m hardly a vegetarian though, and my favorite cooking quiz show (in my head) is to see how little meat I can get away with in what’s otherwise a non-vegetarian meal. Buying meat in smaller quantity keeps your wallet full, while adding a bit of bacon, sausage, or brisket to your healthful, inexpensive meal helps the vegetables go down.

1. Quinoa, Avocado & Apple Salad with Crispy Bacon & Honey-Dijon Vinaigrette. Bacon is the cherry on top of an otherwise virtuous, vegan salad.

2. Chicken Soba Soup with Miso & Spinach.A skimpy piece of chicken to feed two or more? Unheard of, til you bulk out the poultry with vegetables, broth, and noodles.

3. Homemade Baked Beans on Toast. The Brits figured out how to make a meal of beans taste amazing: add bacon!

Have you ever hosted a dinner party filled with friends whose sheer diversity of eating habits puts biodiversity to shame? What’s a host to do-besides serve gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free stone soup?

Well, she could choose one of these menus, for dinners at which one or more guests has got some special eating needs. They’ll accommodate the special person, but they’ll also delight everyone else. (Though if you want to please some serious carnivore with a veg menu, you could always just sear a couple steaks to your vegan spread. But that’s not really the point.)

Do you have any tried-and-true dinners that please the dietarily restricted and unrestricted alike?

**11 Dietarily Restricted Dinner Parties**

Totally Vegan
Chickpea & Vegetable Pot Pie (made with vegan puff pastry as crust)| Lemony Kale Salad | Chocolate Cranberry Cake

Vegan + Gluten-Free
Old Bay Peanuts | New York Corn Chowder | Shakin’ Hash Browns
Chocolate Bark made with Toasted Pecans & Dried Cherries

Vegetarian
Curried Lentil Soup | Muhammara Grilled Cheese | Peach Crisp

Vegetarian + Gluten-Free
Creamy Habanero & Tomato Soup | Cheesy Butternut Squash Enchiladas | Strawberry Mousse

Good morning. First thing Monday may seem like a strange moment to talk about our favorite hair-of-the-dog order, the Bloody Mary. Or, maybe not. Goodbye, weekend. Hello, week. Cheers!

All this winter, in its #SearchforMary, Stoli vodka has been toasting to that very same Bloody Mary, in all its regional variations-the drink can differ so much from bar to bar, not to mention from city to city. So, I set out to find what we’ve got on offer, Bloody Mary-wise, here in New York.

The Bloody Mary is an exquisitely American drink, less a cocktail and more like a culinary event, each drink creation an original moment to to invent the Bloody anew. With unexpected combinations of salty, briny, and rich, the tomato juice, celery, horseradish, and vodka manifest in tons of different delicious drinks, and I’m known to order them frequently-and to make them myself.

In my mind, there are a few ways a Bloody Mary can stand out. One, the garnish. Some of my favorite Bloody Marys keep it really simple in the drink itself, then pile on the pickles, celery stalks, and lobster claws (!) for a meal-like topping. Two, the booze. Tequila and gin can both create great Bloodys, though nothing holds a candle to the original vodka, which just works. Then three, there’s the balance. With all the strong flavors, you can wind up with too much of one thing: tomato, celery, even ice, but the best of the best balance all these proportionately with the flavor of the booze.

So that you don’t have to traipse all over New York City in your search for a brilliant Bloody, I’ve enlisted my tastebuds, Stoli’s ambassadors, and the collective local knowledge of New York City’s Bloody drinkers to bring you a short round-up of standout Bloody Marys. As with the drink everywhere, there are so many tweaks and variations that at first it’s hard to see what makes each of these particularly New York-y. But take a step back and you’ll see. In New York, creativity’s token city, there’s truly no limit to what our bartenders have done with the famous Bloody Mary, and this round-up highlights a vast array of tweaks.

Read on for a few recipes and check back Wednesday for my take on the New York City Bloody Mary. If I’ve missed your favorite NYC Bloody Mary, please let me know in the comments!

After I told you about the absolute easiest meals you could make for dinner, the ones with three ingredients or two minutes of prep or no possible excuse for not making them, I felt a little guilty. Some of us like to cook-we dream all day of the meals we’ll put together as soon as we have a little bit of extra time, bookmarking absorbing kitchen projects that we know will produce delicious results, in part because we made them deliberately. And so, in homage to the fact that doing things slowly can be as appetizing a prospect as whipping up a decent weeknight dinner instead of ordering takeout, here are a handful of excuses to spend a couple hours in the kitchen.

(Lead photo from an upcoming complicated project of my own, which I can’t wait to tell you about!)

**8 Complicated Cooking Projects**

1. Homemade Pizza. There’s a rhythm here: make dough, relax while dough rises, prepare toppings, bake, and eat. If pizza making seems a cinch, try crafting your own sausage as a topping.

2. Giant Layered Cookie Cake. This masterpiece involves shaping cookie dough into five even circles, baking them all (especially complicated if you only have one or two oven racks), cooling them, and then layering them perfectly with cream cheese icing. The result is ridiculously impressive.

There are no excuses right now. The year is new, and if you resolved to cook at home more, you can’t disasppoint yourself just yet. Like you, I sometimes get home at night and don’t want to cook. But I remember, almost always, that dinner doesn’t have to be fancy and that there are myriad meal possibilities that use only a few ingredients and dirty just a pan or two. At those moments, I re-resolve to cook, and in order that you can share in this minor triumph, I put together 11 dinners that take almost no effort, each with a mini summary of what to do so that you don’t really have to read the instructions.

**11 of the Easiest Dinners You Can Possibly Make**

1. Za’atar Roasted Salmon with Greens. Sauté greens and garlic in some olive oil. Turn on the oven, put the salmon on the greens, bake, sprinkle za’atar if you have it and then squeeze on some lemon.

2. Chicken Sausage & Ravioli Soup. Brown sausage, onion, and garlic. Add tomatoes and chicken stock, then simmer away. Cook ravioli and spinach right in the pot. Eat.

3. Grilled Swiss & Roasted Fennel Sandwich. Roast fennel. Pile onto a sandwich with Swiss and Parmesan. Toast in a pan with melted butter.