Recipes That Make Life Worth Living
All these recipes have the same genetic makeup in common: they’re easy, they require few ingredients, and the ingredients they do require make up a sum that is much better than their parts. They’re usually quick (except the bread, and you will always need time for this to rise, so relax), and they are all delicious. I love them and consider them family recipes now.
Molly Baz Chicken Thighs with Burst Tomatoes and Harissa
If I had to pick only one recipe to make for the rest of my life, it would be this one. I’ve made this recipe most out of any others. Once I discovered it on the Bon Appetit website, I made it weekly for months. What impresses me so much about it are the choices Molly Baz made for ingredients and the simplicity of the set up. There is virtually no prep involved besides picking oregano leaves and cutting up feta. You make it all in one cast iron skillet or Dutch oven. The cooking time is for however long it takes to fry and bake chicken thighs. I know it by heart. It’s cooking for those at the very beginning of their cooking education, but its flavours are complex and layered.
The ingredients are accessible and cheap, yet they elevate the dish in a way that makes it all feel so special. Opting for bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs over boneless skinless chicken breasts not only is cheaper, but more delicious. I don’t eat a lot of fresh oregano and feta but this recipe reminds me of how far these ingredients can be stretched. I make this chicken for myself mostly but my parents also love it. My friends who are “health conscious” and “babies” eat around the chicken skin which bothers me but here we are.
I don’t know how to outdo this recipe. It’s customizable and versatile. I use shaved parmesan cheese when I don’t feel like buying a whole container of feta. I use whatever fresh herb I have in the fridge (basil, parsley, dill, thyme) if the No Frills doesn’t have fresh oregano that week. I will always trust Molly Baz’s skills for this one. She’s a gift.
Bonnie Stern No Knead Artisanal Bread
Do you like fresh, homemade bread? Great, me too. I’ve been making this recipe since at least 2015. I first heard about it from Lainey Gossip who said she learned to bake bread at home with this recipe. It’s not labour intensive but it’s time intensive because you have to prep it a day in advance for the dough to rise. Then you have to be home pretty much all day the next day because it needs to rise for another 2 hours. Then you need to heat the oven for another 30 minutes. It’s a lot to do but having to stay at home while your kitchen fills up with bread fumes isn’t the worst punishment for your efforts.
This recipe is simple. I’ve memorized the ingredients: 3 cups of all purpose flour, 1 tablespoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of instant rise yeast and 1 ½ cups of warm warm. That’s it. If most people knew how easy it was to make bread, I still think they wouldn’t do it but it’s impressive how cheap the ingredients actually are. Not cheaper than buying actual bread from the store when you factor in the time it takes to make everything, but definitely worth it if you care about avoiding preservatives in your food and you don’t have a life.
The prep and instructions are pretty foolproof, most of the time I bake it for less than the hour it suggests (27 minutes with the lid on the dutch oven, 22-25 minutes with it off, waiting to see when it browns.)
Because it’s fresh bread, I usually try to eat as much as I can when it’s fresh out of the oven. I put some unsalted butter on it, then some kosher salt on top of that and the butter melts from the heat of the bread and tastes so good. But as it cools, the bread gets harder and less delicious to eat. My solution to this is to give the remainder to my roommates or my sister and her family who live nearby. Someone should be eating the bread fresh. If no one is around, I’ll cut it into slices and freeze it, forgetting it's there until I go into my freezer for something else.
Chef Resha Carnal Dish Chocolate Chip Cookies
I love Chef Resha. She’s so funny. She taught herself how to cook and has the kind of charisma and likeability that I appreciate in my chefs. She’s also very hot and makes the most complicated, ingredient-heavy dishes. I’ve made so many of her recipes at this point and I’m always baffled at how many ingredients she calls for. Her ingredients are just laying around her amazing kitchen because she stocks her pantry like the pro she is. But I don’t typically have marsala wine and fresh panko.
This one, though, is straightforward and all the ingredients are necessary, particularly the brown butter from the top of the recipe. This is the first recipe that introduced me to the concept of browning butter to give your dessert a nuttier, more caramel-like depth of flavour. She is transcendent. She is a genius. She does too much because you do too little - Phaedra from the Traitors.
Another part of this recipe that I find so funny is the point where you’re whisking the butter, sugars, vanilla, and eggs. You whisk and then you rest and then you whisk again and you rest again. It’s incredibly annoying. While you’re doing it, you wonder why you agreed to make cookies like this when you could have just mixed everything with a stand mixer, but no, here you are analog mixing in your bowl from Dollarama like you know what you’re doing. This recipe makes me feel like I know how to bake. And that is impressive.
I believe that everyone has an Alison Roman recipe that they go back to, whether they want to admit it or not. While I have tried the shallot pasta, its leftovers are too dry and lacking for me. Even though I’m impressed that the recipe calls for an entire can of tomato paste, I really don’t think it needs that much tomato paste. The shallot pasta is not my Alison Roman recipe, but it may be yours. The dip is mine.
I made the dip once and have never looked back. There was a point (like three months ago) where I was just making it for myself weekly and my lunch and snacks between online meetings would consist of whatever vegetable I had in the fridge that day (if I even had vegetables), leftover bread, and Cheez-its dipped in the dip. That’s all I would eat between 9am - 5pm for weeks on end because I couldn’t stop thinking about this dip when I didn’t have it. I scrape the bowl clean every time.
When I bring this somewhere, or host people at my house and they eat it, their eyes get big and they ask me what’s in it. It’s so basic. It has labneh with lemon and pepper in it. The only modifications that I make are that I use way less oil than the recipe calls for (like 1/6th of a cup and even then it feels like a lot) and I use whatever chili crisp I have in the fridge instead of red chili flakes. This makes the colour even more red. Labneh isn’t at every grocery store that I’ve been to but it’s becoming more available as time goes on. If the store doesn’t carry it, I don’t replace it with greek yogurt, because the thickness of the labneh is so integral to the consistency of the recipe.
Do I know what a pilaf is? No. Does it matter? No, obviously not. The first time I made this recipe, I was three glasses of wine deep and needed something substantial to put in my stomach. It came out great and has come out great every subsequent time I’ve made it. I could make this recipe in my sleep at this point.
The measurements are all suggestions and you can’t overdo anything except maybe the lemon juice. I don’t always have goat cheese on hand but you need it for the recipe to be good. In this way, it’s not that flexible, however I usually add tomatoes and avocado and sometimes spinach to this for extra nutrients. Sometimes I get creative and add oregano or herbs de provence to the mix. I reiterate: you cannot mess it up.
My favourite part of the recipe is when the quinoa is cooking and you’re pretty toasted and you’re making the goat cheese and oil mixture that gets added once the quinoa is fully cooked and hot. Frying and subsequently burning pine nuts because I lose focus while looking at my phone is the most luxurious way to waste 25$. Putting everything together easily at the end of an already simple cooking process is just a bonus.