ziti chickpeas with sausage and kale

We jokingly call these meaty, greeny, cheesy, beany, spicy baked chickpeas because, well, internet recipe naming conventions make us laugh but I really think of them as Pizza Beans 2.0. I introduced Pizza Beans 1.0 in my second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day, where I dreamed of a mash-up of Greek gigante beans in tomato sauce and an American baked ziti, with beans instead of noodles. I called them “pizza” beans to try to convince my then-kindergartener to try them with clever marketing. We still adore the recipe and all of the truly unexpected places it’s landed.

Recipe

classic lemon curd tart

You might be asking yourself, Deb, why are you publishing a lemon tart recipe when the greatest lemon tart of all time already exists on your site? Okay, I’m embellishing a little, but I do really love the whole lemon tart and its sister recipe, the whole lemon bars in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook every bit as much as you — the simplicity, the complexity, the surprise of it all.

Recipe

potato leek soup

Eighteen years is long enough for a website to go without a potato leek soup recipe, don’t you think? I’ve always been a bit torn about it — it’s thick, pale, and can be a little sleepy. And yet if there is any time of year that’s going to bring out my cravings for filling and uncomplicated soup, if there’s any time of year when my nostalgia kicks in for the thick, hearty vegetable porridges I had in Ireland with brown bread and ale, if there’s any time of year when I’d happily act and eat like a slumbering bear in a childhood fairytale, it’s January. January is biting cold and generally irredeemable unless your only commitments are to comfort and coziness. I’ll do my best to keep us covered.

Recipe

invisible apple cake

A dozen years ago I shared my mother-in-law’s recipe for apple sharlotka (which family just calls “apple thing”), a lightly sweetened apple dessert that’s as much a thick crêpe as it is a cake. It’s got a short ingredient list and is the kind of thing you make on a whim. It’s so rustic and simple, I honestly didn’t expect it to cause a ruckus — it’s not apple pie, crumb cake, or even my mom’s doorstop of an apple cake — but you surprised me. It has over 1000 comments and I’ve seen variations on it all over the internet. So where does this come in? I think of this as Sharlotka 2.0: Fancy Pants Edition.

Recipe

chicken meatball and noodle soup

Making chicken noodle soup should be simple — in fact, we’ve got a new podcast episode out about just this. Choosing a chicken noodle soup to make should be simple too, thus I hadn’t intended to add a third chicken noodle soup recipe to this site. But, I’m kind of restless. I fidget. I always wonder if something could be better. And it’s from this place that I’ve come clean with myself to admit that quite often, my least favorite part of chicken noodle soup is the chicken. It easily overcooks in the broth, ending up dry and hard to chew. Do you know what’s not? Buoyant, tender chicken meatballs.
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Recipe

halloumi and fall vegetable roast

I realize, after 18 years as a part of it, that the rules of the food internet in the week before the American cooking superbowl we call Thanksgiving dictate that everything should relate back to turkey, stuffing, or pie. But friends, we have that abundantly covered in the archives, and the newsletter. So let me tell you what I’ve been making a lot lately to feed myself what I crave, and that is sheet pans of mixed vegetables roasted until almost charred, finished with a balsamic vinaigrette, and studded with heavenly, salty, crispy pillows of halloumi.

Recipe

skillet-baked macaroni and cheese

I hadn’t planned to spend most of the fall to date making skillets upon skillets of baked, gooey, decadent macaroni and cheese, though given the state of things right now, perhaps this steady dose of comfort food was some unintended brilliance on my part. But mostly it started because we had baked mac and cheese from The Smith one night. My kids fought over the last scrapings from the pan and I reminded them — I honestly don’t even think they realize it sometimes — that I could make it for them, too. And so the next night, I pulled up my trusty Martha’s mac-and-cheese, a forever SK and internet favorite, and it immediately …irked me. Start with cooked pasta? Warm the milk for the bechamel? So many pans, so many bowls, so many steps. On a Tuesday, no less. It felt unacceptable.

Recipe

glazed apple cider doughnut cake

Confession time! As someone with more opinions than I can fit in three cookbooks, one audiobook, and even 18 years of archives on this website, sometimes when I want to grumble about something food-related but it’s not the time or place, I tuck it in a little document called “rants” that is so full of cringe, you only have my permission to publish posthumously. But I can’t write a headnote for this particular cake without first owning up to #23 on the list in advance: “Apple cider cakes are lies.” Which begs the questions: Who hurt you, Deb? What gives? Essentially, my quibble is that you can put all of the wonderful fresh-pressed apple cider you want in a cake, but it rarely comes through to actually taste like apple cider. The flavor is not robust enough. I’m not saying it can’t be wildly delicious with all of the cinnamon spice we also put in these cakes, but it rarely, to me, tastes like an accurate representation of its name.

Recipe

roasted carrots with lentils and yogurt

“I was looking for a simple roasted carrot recipe on your site and couldn’t find one,” a friend told me a month ago and I immediately put “simple roasted carrot recipe” on my sprawling, decades-long To Cook list because sometimes I forget myself, too. Spoiler: I was never going to write a simple recipe for roasted carrots.

Recipe

easiest cinnamon rolls

What if I told you I had a from-scratch cinnamon roll recipe that was effortlessly veganized, required no kneading, and could be coming out of your oven in just over two hours? And what if I told you’d I’d been making it for years and didn’t tell you about it because I thought, for some bizarre reason, that the site didn’t need another breakfast bun recipe? Yes, I’d throw a jar of cinnamon at my head too. Good news, though, you can stop yelling now because I’ve come to my senses.