Root Vegetable

This salad evolved from my father’s favorite road-trip snack—carrot sticks with roasted almonds, lemon juice, and salt. I’ve punched it up with fresh ginger, lots of parsley, and dates.

This pasta offers the familiar comfort of baked macaroni and cheese but with pops of pleasantly bitter bright green broccoli rabe throughout.

We tend to favor pickles that are bright with acid and low on sugar; anything labeled “half-sour” usually fits the bill. If using sweeter pickles, add a bit more vinegar and salt.

Beets can stand up to a hard roast and plenty of spice. Their sweet earthiness and firm texture mean they’re ideal for making meatless chorizo. If beets aren’t your thing, any sweet root vegetable will work.

This pickle brine–inspired dry rub turns potatoes and carrots crispy-creamy with pleasantly sharp vinegary tang. Toss them, still warm, with leftover shredded chicken and crunchy raw celery, onion, and yes, sliced pickles for a double-the-pickle, double-the-fun dinner salad.

Use this coffee spice mix as a dry rub on chicken, steak, pork chops, or carrots for dinner, or fold into chocolate chip cookies, coffee cake, ice cream, and more for dessert—it plays happily on both sides of the field.

It’s really satisfying to make chicken stock on the grill. The pot can sit in a corner of the grill as long as the grill is fired up, and the stock will only get better with each hour.

In this recipe, creamy mashed potatoes get jazzed up with crispy bits of bacon and sharp cheddar cheese, then wrapped in Savoy cabbage leaves before roasting in the oven.

I serve these pickles like a salad as a side with ramen noodles, gyoza (fried dumplings), or shumai (steamed dumplings), or with a sandwich. 

This soup coaxes big flavors from a short ingredient list. Patiently browning the onions and garlic is essential to adding flavor and depth to the finished dish.

Bright in color and flavor, the silky sauce for these meatballs is made from a purée of coconut cream, Thai green curry paste, and spinach.

Homemade green curry paste has more vivid flavor and aromatic intensity than store-bought, not to mention the freedom to control the spice level. Sopon Kosalanan of restaurant Khao King in, Queens says, “If you get it from a can, I don’t feel like it’s green curry. It doesn’t have the same aromas.” This is the recipe he makes in big batches for his restaurant every day.

You may not mistake these jammy-crisp, slow-cooked onions for bacon, but they are truly exceptional as a stand-in, giving a huge blast of umami to create a truly satisfying breakfast sandwich.

Chances are you’re trimming off and discarding way too much of your broccoli stems. The stems are so flavorful, they should be their own vegetable.

The magic of steam cooks the squash both quickly and evenly, and steaming the dressing with the squash opens up the flavor of the ginger, garlic, and scallions.

Olives and superfast pickled onions provide tangy balance for creamy-crispy potatoes and roast cod.

Everything in this dinner (including the eggs!) cooks together in one steamer insert.