Earlier this week, while flipping through Danielle Kartes’s new book, Rustic Joyful Food: My Heart’s Table , I spotted a recipe I hoped might put to use the half jar of sun-dried tomatoes sitting in my fridge. The recipe was for a pesto, something Danielle says she smears over “bread or fish or uses as an accompaniment to Brie and cured olives.” It called for many of the usual pesto players: garlic, nuts, parmesan, olive oil, and fresh lemon....

Many of you already know of this bran muffin, a Nancy Silverton creation served at the widely adored La Brea Bakery. Made with toasted wheat bran, freshly grated orange zest, and simmered and puréed raisins, it is one of the most delicious muffins — bran or otherwise — out there. This is a true bran muffin, not a brown muffin under the guise of bran muffin. Despite being nearly one hundred percent whole grain in makeup, it is perfectly sweet and super moist....

I’ve long accepted that oven-baked sweet potato fries are a culinary unicorn. Oven-roasted sweet potatoes wedges with caramelized edges and creamy centers are delicious, but they’re not crispy, and they’re certainly not fries. But I’ve been reading the latest Cook’s Illustrated science-y book, Cook’s Science , and I’ve learned that the solution to making crispy sweet potato fries is not as simple as deep frying them or even deep frying them twice (first at a lower temperature, then at a higher one) as most restaurant-style French fries are prepared....

This gluten-free pizza crust is shockingly easy to make, producing a thin and crisp crust with a nice snap and chew that tastes like the real deal. Any time I post a recipe for a baked good, whether it’s a muffin or a loaf of bread, I get this question: Can I make this with gluten-free flour? With muffins, cakes and the like, I often say “yes” or “likely yes” because over the years I’ve learned from various commenters that swapping in any number of one-for-one gluten-free flours tends to work seamlessly....

This tortilla casserole is packed with veggies — onions, red pepper, corn, and zucchini — beans, herbs, and cheese, all combining to make a super flavorful vegetarian dinner. Of all the culinary discoveries this year, this quick, red enchilada sauce has been the most welcomed. As a refresher, it’s made with broiled vegetables (tomatoes, onions, and jalapeño), fresh lime juice, and a chipotle in adobo sauce. It infuses anything it smothers with heat and spice, smoke and char, sweetness and acidity....

Chocolate pot de crème is a heavenly dessert, and when it’s made stovetop, it’s incredibly simple to make — there’s no water bath… hooray! A stovetop custard comes together in no time, and after an hour chill in the fridge, it’s ready to go. Dark chocolate custard + Grand Marnier + sea salt + homemade whipped cream — does dessert get any better? If you’ve ever made pot de crème , you’re likely comfortable baking with a water bath: setting vessels filled with custard (egg + milk) in a larger pan, filling the pan with hot water, then setting the pan in an oven to bake slowly....

These chocolate-covered peanut butter balls taste like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but better — think: dark chocolate + peanut butter + sea salt. This is a wonderful recipe to make for holiday gifting. Not only does the recipe yield 165 balls (!!), the balls can be made ahead of time. This recipe comes from the mother of one of my mother’s students, who made them as a thank you gift for teaching her son....

You don’t need any fancy equipment to make sourdough bread. If you have a sourdough starter and some sort of baking vessel on hand, you can start baking. This sourdough focaccia recipe, for instance, requires nothing more than a sourdough starter and a 9×13-inch baking vessel or something similar. If you find yourself, however, really getting into sourdough baking, and if, in particular, you’re after a crusty boule, you may want to pick up a few more pieces of gear....

Skip to Recipe Here’s a simple formula for you to use all fall/winter: roasted vegetables + cooked grains + mustard vinaigrette. I’ve made some variation of it three nights in a row, and I don’t see the streak breaking anytime soon. In Food52 Vegan it’s roasted cauliflower and freekeh; here I’ve used cabbage and kale, because that’s what I had on hand, but so many vegetables could work: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, carrots, parsnips, squash — what couldn’t work is maybe a better question?...

Once you cook start cooking bacon in the oven, it’s hard to go back to pan-frying and all the mess that goes along with it. There’s nothing to this recipe: 1. Lay bacon on a sheet pan — it’s OK to crowd the pan because the bacon shrinks, but try not to overlap the pieces or they won’t cook properly. 2. Transfer to 425ºF oven. 3. Cook until bacon looks evenly crisped to your liking, about 15 to 20 minutes....

If mayonnaise is a page turner for you, this one may take a little convincing, but I urge you to stay with me. Here’s why: with five minutes of prep you can have this dish ready for the oven (long before it reaches its 450ºF roasting temperature, too), and the result—incredibly juicy, evenly browned chicken plus well-seasoned potatoes showered with tarragon—will have you marveling. This dish is a small miracle....

I am all for buying two or three wedges of nice cheeses, plopping them on a cutting board, surrounding them with grapes and nuts and maybe something exotic like quince membrillo, and crossing “make-hors d’oeuvres” off my to-do list. But every so often it’s nice to present something a teensy more special, more awe-inspiring, more spectacularly delicious. This baked fontina is the favorite party trick of my aunt — not the one that introduced me to salsa di parmigiano , the other one....

A little over a year ago, my neighbor introduced me to The New Basics Puttanesca , a sauce made entirely from pantry ingredients: a can of plum tomatoes, a (whole!) tin of anchovies, a (whole!) jar of capers. After everything—there’s garlic, olive oil, and olives in there, too—simmers together for about an hour, you toss it with hot pasta, and call dinner done. It’s one of those miracle dishes that materializes seemingly from nothing, a particularly good one to know this time of year, when fresh inspiration can be lacking....

Of all the baked treats I bring my husband on our weekly weekend meetings, I think this homemade granola — maybe even more than chocolate-chip cookies and rich, fudgy brownies — makes him happiest. With a tub of this oat-, nut- and fruit-filled mix on hand, and with the barest of kitchen equipment, Ben can enjoy a homemade breakfast with little effort. Mixed with yogurt or milk, sliced bananas or peaches, blueberries or strawberries, homemade granola truly is a treat....

If you’re looking for a delicious, seasonal, berry cake recipe to add to your morning-treat repertoire, this buttermilk blueberry breakfast cake is perfect! The batter can be made ahead of time and stashed in the fridge, allowing you to bake the cake off in the morning. What’s more? It freezes beautifully! Buttermilk is magic. It turns everything into gold: super-moist, super-delicious gold. This morning I awoke needing a simple, summery, cake-like-but-not-dessert-like breakfast treat....

If you love Thai chicken satay or the peanut sauce that accompanies it, you will love this “chopped satay salad.” It’s essentially chopped vegetables + flavorful dressing + herbs + toasted nuts. It comes together relatively quickly (especially if you have a food processor) and is infinitely customizable given the produce you have access to at the moment as well as to your tastes and preferences. I’ve been using cabbage, carrots, and raw beets*, but as the year moves on, I look forward to swapping in bell peppers, cucumbers, snap peas and other seasonal produce....

This tart is really fun and a little different than anything I’ve made before. I can’t promise a quick-and-easy dinner with this recipe — beets must be roasted; a tart shell must be baked — but with a little planning, assembly of this tart is quite simple. And it is so worth the effort. Why are beets, goat cheese and walnuts so good together? And why did I never think to bake them all together in a flaky, buttery shell?...

Grandma-style pizza is pan pizza with a light crust and crisp edges. The dough is nearly identical to focaccia and, as such, is just as easy to make. No mixer required. No fancy techniques. This style of pizza is perfect for feeding a crowd! Find step-by-step instructions below. Grandma pizza is sheet pan pizza, similar to Sicilian-style pizza but thinner: you use the same size pan but half the amount of dough....

Below you will find guidance for both making pie dough and parbaking or blind baking it. This trusted method will ensure your crusts do not shrink in the oven and will prevent your finished pies from having soggy bottoms . For many years, I shied away from parbaking my pie crusts. I never found the bottoms terribly soggy when I didn’t parbake, and I hated the process: from dealing with pie weights to chilling to baking, I found the process time-consuming, and, moreover, I always found the crust of my finished pies to be overbaked....

If you are familiar with Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce with onion and butter , you know it is made with three ingredients, four if you count salt. How then, you might be wondering, can such a sauce be simplified? Simply: by using unpeeled tomatoes. Here, the ingredients are the same as Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce but there’s no scoring of the tomatoes and blanching them to remove their skins, and there’s no discarding of the halved onion at the end....