I'm fairly convinced that hummus is some of the best stuff on earth. It might look beige and boring in the bowl, but this blend of soft chickpeas, olive oil, tahini, lemon juice, and garlic creates a dip that is so much more than the sum of its parts. Skip the store-bought stuff — making it yourself is so easy and will be far tastier than just about anything from the deli section.
Garlic knots are easy to love. These tender pillows of yeasted bread are doused with garlicky, herby butter and are just about the very best thing you can serve as part of Wednesday night dinner. Yes, I said Wednesday! Yes, you can bake yeast rolls on a weeknight! Even better? These beauties are filled with soft, gooey cheese, turning them from everyday to extraordinary with hardly a minute of extra prep time added.
This recipe might look lengthy, but here's how we are going to do it: Make a quick yeast dough, put together a little garlic butter, and tie a few knots. If you start the dough now, you can be swirling fresh baked rolls into a warm garlic butter in about an hour.
While I don't follow a Paleo diet, I do believe in filling my life with delicious, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies as often as possible. These cookies are soft and chewy, with just a touch of firmness around the edges, and have a very generous helping of melty chocolate bits. Basically they're everything you'd want from a classic chocolate chip cookie. And if they happen to skip the grains, refined sugar, and dairy, well that is just fine by me.
Cheese crackers, whether they are square or shaped like an animal, are highly snackable. They're tender and crisp, a little buttery, and bursting with cheese flavor. Replicating these snack staples can be disappointing, as my 5-year-old told me often during attempt after attempt to make her beloved "cheddar bunnies" at home.
It wasn't until I started adding cheddar cheese powder to a basic cheese cracker recipe and leaving the baked crackers in the oven to dry overnight, that I finally got my long-awaited thumbs-up of approval.
Yes, it's true. You can cook a whole chicken in the Instant Pot. Just keep in mind a couple of things: The chicken must weigh four pounds or less (essentially a broiler-fryer), and it won't come out with a crispy, crackling skin like it would from the oven. I find that the convenience and the speed of the Instant Pot make up for those two differences, as does the delicious mushroom sauce this chicken is served with.
I'm a firm believer that a warm and buttery freshly baked biscuit is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves in the kitchen. Whether you're slathering them with thick jam or a dunking them into hearty stews, biscuits are weeknight baking at its best.
I love making biscuits morning, noon, or night, but cleaning up all the flour afterward? I wouldn't mind skipping that regularly in favor of getting dinner on the table faster some nights. In this recipe, my tried-and-true biscuit method is modified slightly for freezing, so you can make a whole batch on Sunday and bake off as many or as few as you need for dinner during the week.
On my list of favorite comfort foods, chicken pot pie ranks high — tender meat and veggies blanketed in a rich, creamy gravy and finished off with the flakiest, butteriest biscuits is hard to beat. It requires a bit of work to achieve all of those superlatives in one dish, which means it's something I don't always have a chance to make.
This version, however, is a dream for busy weeknights. Leaning on already cooked chicken and a bag of frozen veggies ensures the process is speedy. Everything comes together quickly in a Dutch oven before you drop mounds of homemade cream biscuit dough studded with sharp cheddar and thyme on top. Bake until bubbly and the result is a bone-warming dinner that will please the whole family.
My very first job when I was in high school was at a bakery down the street from where I grew up. In the midst of boxing up cakes, slicing bread, and slinging donuts on Saturday mornings, I developed a deep love affair with crumb cake that opened my eyes to a world way beyond Entenmann's. The buttery, plush dough, the fat crumbs, and powdered sugar were pure bliss.
This is a crumb cake meets muffin combo that's directly inspired by the classic bakery breakfast cake. And like their inspiration, these muffins have a fine, delicate crumb with a buttery, vanilla flavor and a thick topping of sweet crumbs. Ready to make them your reality? Let's get started!
Stuffed peppers are what dinner dreams are made of. They can be filled with any combination of starches, meat, beans, and sauces, making them the ultimate leftover vehicle. The peppers get a quick steam in the oven before filling and then are baked into supple submission, making them a mostly hands-off dish.
Banoffee pie, as in "banana toffee pie," strikes an amusing balance between buttery rich sweetness and everyday fruit flavors. This playfulness is exactly what makes it extraordinary. This no-bake pie cuts into a buttery cookie crust full of a creamy brown sugar-flavored toffee filling. Just try saying that three times fast! Topping the sumptuous toffee filling with seemingly ordinary bananas and barely sweetened whipped cream brings balance back to every bite. Be assured this is still one seriously sweet dessert, but one that leaves a wake of ardent admirers in its wake.
Learn how to whip up a picture-perfect crumb crust and a sweet toffee filling, and make the best banoffee pie you'll ever have with this recipe.
One of the things I love most about pasta is how accommodating it is to any schedule. Have a weekend to roll homemade dough and stuff pockets of ravioli with hand-pulled mozzarella? Go for it, baby. Have an afternoon to slow-cook a perfect meaty ragù? The rewards will be rich.
But let's say you need to prep dinner in 10 minutes. You can't even boil a pot of water in that amount of time, but pasta is still your friend! Meet the no-boil pasta bake.
You might be thinking that a hearty, rustic loaf of bread like this one — with its shatteringly thin crust and tender, tangy interior — requires special equipment or skills or even a bread starter. Nope, this loaf is the simplest bread we know how to bake at home and it requires no stand mixer, no starter, no special knowledge, and no kneading.
This is a step-by-step guide for the now-ubiquitous no-knead bread. It's ridiculously easy, and very forgiving. If you're intimidated by baking ratios, volume vs. weight, baking scales, and kneading, this is a great recipe to start with. It will give you such a delicious loaf with about five minutes of hands-on time and almost no way to mess it up.
Bone broth, or a long-cooking, enriched stock, has moved from trend to bonafide kitchen staple with big brands and chefs rallying around this liquid gold. While beef bone broth gets the most fanfare, you can indeed make bone broth from chicken.
Not only will this thick, gorgeous stock make for a better chicken-noodle soup, but it also makes for ever better gravy, pasta sauces, and casseroles. Chicken bone broth is also much thriftier than its beef brethren and just as easy to make at home.
When I discovered that you can make caramelized onions in the slow cooker with no stirring and virtually no work, it was only a small step from there to French onion soup. Although I've made this bistro favorite the classic, Julia-inspired way, now that I know how to make it in the slow cooker, I'm probably never going back to stovetop!
Here's a step-by-step recipe for blissfully delicious French onion soup made from start to finish in the slow cooker. Well, right up until the cheesy toast. You still need the oven for that, but with soup this easy, what's a little broiling at the end?
As winter wanes into spring, it is perfectly normal to crave both creamy comfort food and the bright spark of fresh veggies. This soup has it all — tender chicken, chunky carrots, wisps of wilted spinach, bite-sized pillows of pasta and cheese, all with a silky broth to tie it together.
Pommes Aligot is more than just a cheesy twist on mashed potatoes. This incredibly magical blend of potatoes and cheese was born in the French region of Midi-Pyrénées, and it is a celebration of regional cheese, served on special occasions alongside sausage or roasted meat. It's traditionally made with Tomme de Laguiole or Tomme d'Auvergne cheese, although these fresh soft cheeses known for their melting qualities are pretty hard to find outside their tiny cities in the south of France.
While not as traditional, pommes Aligot can also be made with other melting cheeses like Gruyère and mozzarella and doesn't require more than a strong arm for mixing and a hearty appetite.
I firmly believe that banana bread is something you should be able to make anytime and anywhere, with a mixer or with a fork, in a loaf pan or in a muffin tin — whenever you have a few bananas going soft and freckly. Banana bread, I'm pretty sure, is at least 50 percent of the reason bananas exist.
Here is a very basic and very forgiving recipe that takes all of 10 minutes to whisk together. An hour of waiting while your house fills with tempting aromas and then you'll be snacking on your very own slice of warm, fresh-baked banana bread.
Say hello to your favorite new addition to the cold-weather recipe rotation. It sounds like a cliché (because it is), but this recipe adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. Ribbons of crunchy cabbage, the fresh sweet pop of peas, and an underlying smokiness powered by sausage turns what could have easily been a standard one-pot pasta into something crave-worthy week in and week out.
In the last few years, bone broth has become a grocery store staple. While you could always find beef broth or stock in the soup aisle of your grocery store, it wasn't until recently that you could find bone broth being sold as well, let alone being served like a latté at the coffee counter. We have our wellness-minded, Paleo-eating friends to thank for reviving our love and admiration for this long-cooked homemade stock. Make no bones about it, bone broth is essentially a deeper, richer beef stock made by simmering collagen-rich beef bones until you end up with a rich, nutritious, and deeply savory broth.
It's the kind of thing that's perfect for sipping from a mug on a cold day, or for dressing up and turning into a hearty soup for dinner. Want to try making it yourself? Let's do it!
These pancakes are bananas. No, I mean they are literally made from bananas. And eggs. Eggs and bananas, and that's it. I can see that look you're giving me right now, but you just have to trust. These two ingredients, whisked together and given a little skillet love, are truly something magical.
Don't believe me? Take a look at our step-by-step recipe and decide for yourself. Meanwhile, I'll be over here with the rest of these pancakes, licking my plate clean.
Last year my family relocated from Atlanta, Georgia, to Boise, Idaho. Idaho, of course, is the potato capital of the western United States, growing one-third of the nation's Russet potatoes. Naturally, they take their french fries very seriously. Order fries at any restaurant or drive-thru and they'll ask you the following question: "Fry sauce?" This pink-hued sauce falls somewhere between commonplace condiment and cult food obsession with every chef and local claiming to have a favorite, secret recipe.
For those unfamiliar with fry sauce, this condiment is traditionally a combination of ketchup and mayonnaise flavored with everything from black pepper to garlic to horseradish. The resulting sauce is always rich and creamy with tons of tang and a back bite of spicy, peppery goodness. Basically, it's the perfect dip for salty, freshly fried potatoes. Here's how to make it at home if you never make it to Idaho.
Simmering a pot of chili for hours on a cold winter day is one of my favorite things to do — or at least it used to be.
Last winter I planned on making a batch of chili, got all my ingredients together, and ... life happened. After spending all day running around, I thought that chili was no longer an option. Then I eyed my Instant Pot. To be honest, even though I love pressure cooking, I was skeptical. Would the fast cooking time rob the chili of the deep flavor that I love?
Answer: Nope!
Milk, lemon juice, and about a half-hour of your time — that's all you need to make a batch of fresh, creamy homemade ricotta. You're not going to believe how easy and foolproof this is! And trust me — once you make your own ricotta, it's hard to go back to the stuff from the tub.
Great slaw can upstage salad whenever it gets a chance. This one, full of sweet and crisp apples and dressed with honey and lime, is familiar yet not run-of-the-mill. It pairs with everything from a ham sandwich to fish tacos, but is satisfying enough to stand on its own as a meatless meal.
Traditional stovetop bone broth takes a minimum of 24 hours, but ideally more like 48 hours to transform a pot of water, acid, and collagen-rich bones into a deep, golden-brown liquid with a texture like barely set jello. Truth is, when you cook bone broth on the stove for that long you and your house will smell like beef broth for days. The good news is there is another way.
Broth in an electric pressure cooker can feel like nothing short of magic, but cooking broth under pressure is a technique that professional kitchens and wise home cooks have been using for decades. Cooking the bone broth in a closed environment and under pressure speeds up the process, which means you can go from bones to luxurious broth in about eight hours — most of which is still hands-off. In this cooking lesson, we're going to show you the simplest way to do just that with beef or chicken bones.
