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The first time I made this, I texted several friends that I had “just made one of the more delicious things I’ve ever made in my life,” a text I send maybe once a year, if that. Anyway, no the eggplant does *not* need to be salted, no we *will not be frying* the eggplant. Yes, it does basically taste like eggplant parmesan but lighter, fresher, tangier, crunchier. If you don’t care for capers, you can skip them, just know you are, in fact, missing out.
For me, a very good lasagna isn’t overly cheesy or too saucy or insanely indulgent—there should be a proper ratio of pasta:sauce:cheese so that each slice feels satisfying but also balanced. While I do love a creamy lasagna, I find bechamels a bit unnecessary and instead use heavy cream in conjunction with the ricotta and mozzarella to keep things nice and saucy. So, here it is, a recipe for a Very Good Lasagna. Nothing insane, no sneaky anchovies (just kidding—there are anchovies if you want) or expensive, hard-to-find cheeses. Just some good ol’ basic stuff layered in a baking dish and baked until melty, bubbly, and satisfying as well. I do have two pieces of advice: First, don’t skip the two-bake process—the initial bake (foil on!) is the shorter of the two, only meant to melt the cheese and warm the sauce through, and the second bake (foil off!) is where things get good, and by good I mean golden brown, crispy-edged, and impossibly delicious. During this step the sauce will also continue to cook the al dente noodles, which makes for deeply seasoned pasta and eliminates any excess water, preventing a soggy, runny lasagna. Second, when you think you’ve baked it as long as you can, maybe bake it a little longer—the browner the better here.
Less intensely indulgent than classic Baked Ziti and a lot less fussy than lasagna, in my old age this is sort of the only baked pasta I’m making these days. It’s got all the hits: pasta, cheese, sauce, but feels casual in a way that makes it seem possible to throw together for dinner to feed 6–8 of your closest friends tonight, if you wanted (especially when the sauce is made). So easy, you can kind of just close your eyes and put some things (boiled pasta, red sauce, cheese) in a baking dish, bake it, and love your life.
This pasta is all about the shallots, cooked down in a bath of olive oil to a jammy, caramelized paste. Tomato paste is there for tanginess, and anchovies for saltiness, but they serve more as background flavors to the sweetness of the shallot. This recipe makes enough caramelized shallot mixture for a double batch of pasta, or simply keep it refrigerated to spoon over fried eggs, or to serve underneath crispy chicken thighs or over roasted root vegetables like carrots or sweet potatoes. Note: While not meant to be an exact copy of the recipe above, Roman’s Caramelized Shallot and Anchovy sauce is a perfect replacement for days when you can’t be bothered to slice all those shallots. If you’re in the mood, melt down a few more anchovies in a bit of olive oil with a nice pinch of red pepper flakes before adding the sauce.
Hate to tell you, there isn’t really a “secret” to the meatballs being great. “Secrets” aren’t really my thing (unless it’s using mayonnaise in cornbread, which was met with mixed results except by everyone who made it who said it was AMAZING), but I will say there are two important steps that I feel like make a huge difference: 1. Letting the ricotta/egg/bread crumb mixture soak for at least 10 minutes. This is essentially the “soak milk in bread” step you’ll find in many meatball recipes, but I don’t like soaking bread in milk. Soaking bread in CHEESE though, yeah, I am FOR that. 2. Searing the meatballs in the pot, *then* making the sauce. I have done them on a sheet pan, and they are fine. They are not bad at all. But they are not brown. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but putting your meatballs on a sheet tray in the oven to “brown” them will steam and potentially overcook by the time they look anything close to “brown”. I have tested them in multiple ovens in different homes, and either coincidentally ALL the ovens absolutely suck, or this method isn’t great (unless you’re doing meatballs for a LOT of people). Doing them in a pot is more work, sure, but I do think you reap the rewards in the form of fat and juicy bits and browned, delicious meat that all flavor your tomato sauce as you finish gently cooking those meatballs.
Chili means many different things depending on where you are. At its most basic, you can expect meat cooked until tender in some sort of spiced, likely tomato-y sauce. This version uses ground beef (or turkey or pork), is heavy on the tomato, is well spiced but will not necessarily light your mouth on fire, and a good dose of canned bean (yes, there are beans in this chili). While it cooks in less than half the time as The Long Version, for some, even an hour is too long to wait for chili. In that case, you can find a different recipe (not by me), but I think chili, almost by definition, deserves a bit of time in the pot (even if it is The Short Version). I think of The Short Version as something you might spoon over a bowl of rice or a hot dog, maybe a split bag of Frito’s. The Long Version I think of as something for a dinner party, to set out with tiny bowls of toppings. Both are great for eating out of a mug as a midday snack.
This chicken parmesan is on a sheet pan, but I’m not calling it Sheet Pan Chicken Parmesan because I don’t believe that there’s any other way one should make Chicken Parmesan– feels redundant. The long and short of it is that much like my Little Eggplant Parm, my core issue with the genre of food known as “Parmesan” is that it is too wet, too saucy, too insulting to the labor it takes to make something crispy to start with. Of course, I understand that “wet” and “saucy” are often one's favorite parts about Parmesan– to that I say: We are not the same.
While not officially any sort of textbook version of pasta e ceci, the backbone here is still both pasta and chickpeas (ceci). The trick of letting the canned garbanzos swim in the pasta water for a brief time pays dividends, reviving them from their canned self, plumping them slightly and, most importantly, making their surface more receptive to flavor—important once the sauce comes into the picture. Olives and parsley are great here, but in the spirit of this sort of fridge-clean-out, do-less-with-more, accidentally fabulous recipe, I kept them optional.
Decidedly a tomato pasta with eggplant and not an eggplant pasta– so much so that the eggplant could easily be replaced with any vegetable– say, peppers, fennel or zucchini. The moral of the story is you can sauté any vegetable in sausage fat, add tomato sauce or puree and have a very good, saucy tomato pasta that’s more than the sum of its parts. With a little sausage on the side, it feels more like a “full dinner” and less like a “bowl of food”.
The best kept secret about tomato sauce is that the most wonderful way to use it isn’t pasta, it’s poaching fish. Pick a mild white fish like fluke, flounder, cod or halibut (and yes, frozen and thawed is okay!). Adding crushed olives at the end here would also be a really nice idea.
