You Don’t Need a Recipe.
'Good morning. There’s a brand-new cooking guide up on Cooking this morning, “How to Make Pancakes.” There’s excellent instruction in it for beginning cooks, and good, actionable intel for experts as well. Just taking a run through it today at lunchtime may suggest recipes you’ll want to make as soon as tomorrow morning, or for breakfast this coming weekend. Here’s hoping!
For dinner tonight, I’m thinking that a smoky bowl of braised kale would be nice, either alongside Melissa Clark’s recipe for grilled sweet and spicy chicken breasts, or to accompany mac and cheese, or just to eat with rice.
You don’t need a recipe. (And you could make the dish with collards, if you like, or any big, leafy green.) Place a big heavy-bottomed pot with a lid over medium-high heat and put a few glugs of olive oil in it. When the oil shimmers, sauté a diced onion and a few cloves of minced garlic in it until they soften, then hit the mixture with a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste and a good, heavy shake of smoked paprika if you have any, regular paprika if you don’t.
Stir that together and cook until it all begins to darken, then add a couple of cups of stock or water to the mix, along with a splash of red-wine vinegar. As it comes to a boil, add to the pot as many stemmed and chopped greens as you need to feed your crowd, and cover the pot to steam. Stir the mixture a few times as the greens soften, then season with salt, pepper and red-pepper flakes and serve. Holy moly, it’s fine.
Or how about Melissa’s recipe for stir-fried beef and sugar snap peas? Or Tara Parker-Pope’s recipe for a springtime spaghetti carbonara? I like a midweek salmon burger sometimes. It has been an exhausting week thus far. You may prefer Martha Rose Shulman’s recipe for a frisée salad with a poached egg on top.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/dining/you-dont-need-a-recipe.html?