Main Dishes Archives

Baked Chicken Thighs with Butter and Onions

Keep your ferments, your sous vide pork chops, your deconstructed French Onion Soup; when it comes to dishes that I’m interested in, I’d much rather eat the favorite thing that you ate in childhood — especially if it’s something that your mother made for you with love. That’s the case with Aaron Hutcherson’s baked chicken thighs with butter and onions. It’s a deceptively simple dish that his mother made with a homemade spice mix, bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and just enough butter to give everything some pizazz. It’s a weeknight dinner that feels good enough for the weekend.

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Keema Pau

Have you ever been in a cooking rut? Sometimes I literally have no idea what to make for dinner even though I have a cookbook shelf overflowing with books and I read about food on the internet for 85% of my day.

Thankfully, I started this new podcast and my guests send me recipes to make that I would never think of making on my own. Case in point: this Keema Pau which was suggested to me by my guest this week, Karan Soni, who you may know from the Deadpool movies or the show Miracle Workers. Karan and his partner Roshan came over for dinner and noticed the Dishoom cookbook on my shelf and Karan lit up: he cooked his way through it during the pandemic and absolutely loved the food that he made. So when I asked him to send me a recipe for the pod, he referred me to page 109, which has the recipe for Keema Pau.

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Rosemary Dijon Rack of Lamb with Crispy Potatoes

Would you believe that I’ve cooked lamb necks, lamb shoulders, lamb legs, but never that most famous lamb preparation of all… a classic rack of lamb?

The reason’s actually pretty simple: rack of lamb is expensive. And as confident as I am as a meat cook, I’m always scared that if I splurge on something as decadent as a rack of lamb, I’m going to screw it up. And meat is hard to fix once you overcook it. Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry with this particular rack because it was a gift! Well, I received a gift certificate for $100 for an online butcher and I chose one 1 1/2 pound rack of lamb that, with shipping, worked out to the full $100. (I know, that’s insane, but now you know why I’ve avoided cooking lamb racks for so long.)

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Crispy Pierogi with Pork and Dried Fruit

The best pierogi I’ve ever eaten in my life — one that ruined all other pierogi for me — was at Michael Symon’s now-closed restaurant Lola in Cleveland, Ohio. I still remember what it looked like: a half moon of crispy dough stuffed with beef cheeks. It was maybe one of the most decadent things I’ve ever tasted; somewhere between an empanada and a calzone; the amount of labor that went into it was evident with every bite. I vowed to make it some day from Symon’s cookbook (which has my favorite chili recipe) but never did.

Enter Nicole Rucker, this week’s guest on You’ve Got to Taste This. Nicole’s in a cookbook club (sorry men, it’s women only) and one of the most successful recipes they’ve ever tested happens to be the pierogi recipe that she sent me to make this week. They come from Zuza Zak’s cookbook Pierogi, which makes sense, and they’re stuffed with this magical mixture of caramelized pork blended with soaked dried fruit, boiled in salted water, and then sauteed in copious amounts of butter. Needless to say, they were an absolute trumph.

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Baked Pasta with Fontina and Roasted Mushrooms

Some new friends were coming over the other night and I asked them what they ate and they said “we eat meat but mostly vegetables” and that’s when I knew I was going to serve them a pound of cheese. It’s not that I was trying to fatten them up or punish them for being so wholesome, it’s just that I count cheese as a vegetable. But on the off chance they were looking for real vegetables in their dinner, I decided to find a recipe that had cheese AND a vegetable and landed on Melissa Clark’s recipe for baked pasta with ricotta, fontina, and roasted mushrooms.

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Nancy Silverton’s Epic Eggplant Lasagna

Remember the end of The Goonies, when the Goonies reunite with their parents and they’re rattling off all of the things that happened to them on their adventure? And Data says, “The octopus was very scary,” even though there wasn’t an octopus, though technically there was an octopus, it was just cut from the movie?

That’s how it feels to tackle an epic recipe. And when it comes to epic recipes, the reigning queen on my bookshelf is Nancy Silverton. Her Frito Pie — which was a three day process — is still one of my proudest culinary moments. That recipe, like the one I’m about to tell you about, comes from her Mozza at Home, a cookbook that doesn’t get enough praise, possibly because it’s affiliated with a restaurant, even though it’s one of the best cookbooks on my shelf. (Put it on your list.)

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Sausages Braised in Tomato Sauce Over Polenta

It’s hard for me to think of dinners that aren’t pasta. When I have sausages in the refrigerator, for example, I think of all of the different pastas I can make with them: rigatoni with sausage and broccolini, ziti with sausage, onion, and fennel. I think I took it too seriously when Sophia Loren said: “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

A year or two ago, though, I developed a dinner that feels like a pasta dinner that isn’t a pasta dinner, it’s a polenta dinner. I take whole sausages, brown them in olive oil, add onions and garlic to the pan, make a quick tomato sauce, and braise the sausages in there. Meanwhile, I cook a pot of polenta at the same time.

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Spiced Pork Chops with Delicata Squash and Apple Chutney

Making new friends is always a treat but difficult to do when you’re supposed to avoid social gatherings and remain six feet apart while masked. Luckily, I made two new friends last year when the food writer Ben Mims and his partner J made the same move that we made back in 2011 from New York to L.A.

Ben moved here to write for the L.A. Times (his recipes are top notch; I made his tamarind lamb shanks last night and they were dreamy); we met for dinner at a steakhouse on Hollywood and Vine and he told hilarious stories about growing up in Mississippi, then told even funnier stories on my podcast Lunch Therapy.

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