At the end of the year I have a few eating traditions: I sharpen my favorite knives. I clean and organize the kitchen, and I try to catalog the tiny lessons I’ve learned. Here are three that immediately come to mind:
Seaweed goes with everything! Eric Kim’s asparagus pasta cleverly takes umami from dried kelp, which the rigatoni adds flavor to the cooking water, and from roasted seaweed, which gives even more depth and texture as a topping. I had never used seaweed in a creamy pasta dish before, but I will definitely do it again.
If you don’t already have a gim in your pantry, this recipe may convince you to buy it in bulk. The roasted seaweed is great as a slightly smoky topping on things like mushroom and cheese quesadillas, hot bowls of rice with pickles and wilted vegetables, and wobbly microwaved eggs.
Strategy is central to puff pastry dinners. Cooking everything on a flat pan makes no sense (sorry!), but cooking instant ramen noodles on a flat pan is genius. Hetty McKinnon dresses the cooked noodles in a little sesame oil and soy sauce and adds marinated tofu and bok choy. All that surface area in the oven means chow mein-esque noodles — soft in places, crispy in others.
It’s such a cool technique, and you can customize it with all kinds of different marinades and ingredients. Try a soy ginger marinade with tons of sweet corn and thinly sliced red onion, or a peanut marinade with broccoli florets and pickled chiles.
Some vegetables are tastier if you cook them forever. If you haven’t done it before, I know that the thought of simmering broccoli for an hour (a whole hour!) may seem a bit bizarre, but the broccoli ends up being wonderfully sweet and juicy, incredibly tender and luxurious.
If you don’t trust me, trust Alice Waters, who published that recipe in “Chez Panisse Vegetables” in 1996. Or rely on Nigella Lawson, who simmers peas for 4 to 6 hours to make the slow-cooked peas in “Cook, Eat, Repeat.” Trust Samin Nosrat, who will braise her Romano beans for about 2 hours.
Still skeptical? I’ll leave you with something Clare de Boer, a chef at King in New York City, once told me. She said that if you give some ingredients a little more time, if you don’t rush the cooking, they can “become a deeper version of themselves.” ?