French Onion Soup
Onions cooked slowly to deep brown, simmered in beef stock with a splash of wine, and finished under the broiler with toasted baguette and bubbling Gruyère.
- Total time
- 2 hr 5 min
- Yield
- Serves 6
Stovetop
Pans, hobs, and one-pot dinners.
Pans, hobs and one pot meals. A good share of these are built on what sticks to the base of the pan after searing, which is the most concentrated flavour in the kitchen and the thing most often washed away.
Where a recipe says to scrape the pan, that instruction is doing real work.
Wild Rice Soup
Creamy, mushroomy and thick with grain. The wild rice cooks separately because it takes three times as long as anything else.
- Total time
- 1 hr
- Yield
- Serves 6
Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding
Stovetop, stirred, and finished with egg yolks off the heat. Loose when it comes off, set by the time it reaches the table.
- Total time
- 50 min
- Yield
- Serves 6
Creamy Sausage Pasta
Italian sausage browned hard for its fond, deglazed with wine, and finished into a clinging sauce with cream, Parmesan and pasta water.
- Total time
- 35 min
- Yield
- Serves 4
Farmhouse Chicken Noodle Soup
A whole chicken poached into its own stock, then shredded back in. The noodles cook separately and that is not fussiness.
- Total time
- 1 hr 50 min
- Yield
- Serves 8
Beef Spring Rolls with Peanut Lime Sauce
Rice paper, herbs and seared beef, rolled cold. Nothing is cooked except the meat and the noodles.
- Total time
- 50 min
- Yield
- Makes 12 rolls
Creamy Spinach Tortellini Soup
Twenty-five minutes, one pot. The cream goes in off the heat and the tortellini go in last.
- Total time
- 35 min
- Yield
- Serves 6
Creamy Mushroom Sauce
Built in the pan the steak came out of, in the time the steak needs to rest. Ten minutes, five ingredients that matter.
- Total time
- 17 min
- Yield
- Serves 4
Chinese Sweet and Sour Sauce
Clear, glossy and sharp enough to cut through fried food. No ketchup, no food coloring, ready in eight minutes.
- Total time
- 13 min
- Yield
- Makes about 1½ cups (350 ml)
Big Mac Wraps
The familiar burger combination — tangy sauce, shredded lettuce, pickles, onion and melted cheese — rolled into a tortilla around seasoned ground beef.
- Total time
- 55 min
- Yield
- Makes 4 wraps
Homemade Barbecue Sauce
A thick Kansas City-style sauce built on tomato, molasses and smoked paprika. Twenty minutes on the stovetop and it keeps a month.
- Total time
- 35 min
- Yield
- Makes about 2½ cups (600 ml)
Homemade Eggnog
A cooked custard base, chilled overnight, thick enough to coat a spoon. Nothing like the carton.
- Total time
- 8 hr 30 min
- Yield
- Makes 5 cups (1.2 liters), serves 8
Orzo Pasta Salad
Dressed twice — once warm, once cold — so the seasoning goes through the pasta instead of sitting on it.
- Total time
- 30 min
- Yield
- Serves 8
Cheddar Bay Crab Cakes with Lemon Butter Drizzle
Barely bound lump crab with sharp cheddar and garlic, chilled hard so it holds, seared in butter and finished with lemon.
- Total time
- 1 hr 15 min
- Yield
- Makes 8 crab cakes
Creamy Chicken Gnocchi
Browned chicken thighs and potato gnocchi in a thyme cream sauce built deliberately loose, because the gnocchi thicken it themselves.
- Total time
- 35 min
- Yield
- Serves 4
Beef Tacos with Peach Vinegar Slaw
Hard-seared ground beef in warm tortillas, topped with a cabbage and peach slaw dressed at the last possible moment.
- Total time
- 32 min
- Yield
- Makes 8 tacos, serves 4
Cornmeal Onion Patties
A thick buttermilk cornmeal batter packed with finely chopped onion, shallow-fried crisp at the edges and tender through the middle.
- Total time
- 27 min
- Yield
- Makes 8 patties
Easy Fish Stew Delight
White fish poached gently in a tomato, fennel and garlic broth, with the fish added last and the pot never allowed to boil.
- Total time
- 45 min
- Yield
- Serves 4
Cheesy Spinach Dip Chicken Pasta
A cream cheese and spinach sauce held just under a simmer, folded through seared chicken and short pasta in one skillet.
- Total time
- 40 min
- Yield
- Serves 4 generously
Five-Spice Brussels Sprouts and Sausage Stir-Fry
Halved sprouts seared hard in rendered sausage fat, glazed with soy, honey and five-spice, done in one skillet in under twenty minutes.
- Total time
- 30 min
- Yield
- Serves 4
Chicken and Stars Soup
The canned soup of everybody's childhood, made with real thigh meat and stelline cooked apart from the broth so it stays clear.
- Total time
- 45 min
- Yield
- Serves 6
Easy Turkey Chili Recipe for Comfort Food Lovers
Ground turkey browned hard, spices bloomed in fat and a slow, lazy simmer — the three things that keep a lean chili from going dry.
- Total time
- 1 hr 20 min
- Yield
- Serves 6