Shrimp spaghetti is to bayou kids what spaghetti and meatballs is to kids in the rest of the United States. This was my son Lucien’s favorite meal, which he would eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s a near perfect meal—simple, sweet, perfectly balanced—and it’ll feed a big family or a crowd of friends. The recipe draws from the Creole cooking technique of smothering tomatoes long and slow. This version is made with store-bought sauce, but you can certainly make your own tomato sauce and cook it down in the same manner. Homemade tomato sauce tends to be thinner, so you might have to thicken it a bit with tomato paste to get the right consistency.
In my experience, if you tangle vegetables in a mess of fried noodles, your kids will be much more likely to eat them. To that end, yaki udo is a family-friendly stir-fry that’s heavy on plants and fungi.
No traditional Danish Christmas dinner is complete without a dish of small caramelized potatoes. But this sweet, savory side dish is good for any time of the year.
I have one back-pocket recipe that can save any breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Popovers.
One of the reasons I like to cook mostly healthy food is so I can justify the occasional dish like this one.
Omu raisu (rice omelet) is one of the most popular dishes in Japan, both at home and in restaurants. To Western ears it doesn't sound immediately compelling -- lightly fried rice laced with ketchup and covered with a sheet of runny eggs. It's slathered with more ketchup to finish, which is probably why I jumped on the bandwagon almost immediately and have never looked back. My childhood recollections don't include any warm and fuzzy comfort dishes, so when I feel down and out or just need some food love, this is the dish I invariably turn to.
It’s taco Tuesday! Or any day! Who wouldn’t overuse exclamation points?! I loved taco night when I was a kid, when it meant yellow cheese, seasonings from a packet, and machine-molded tortilla shells—essentially, an insult to all of Mexico in one convenient box. It is, of course, better to make real tacos with sweet fresh flour tortillas.
This is absolutely one of my fallback dishes for entertaining families when I don't know how finicky the kids' palates are. My kids usually eat the grown-up version but occasionally one of them has a relapse of sorts and declares the sauce (which he loved the week prior) to be unfit for human consumption. Suddenly the simplified version of chicken breasts and rice or potatoes with no sauce is all he will touch. This is exactly the kind of flexible option that doesn't make the cook (aka you) nuts and vaguely irritated since you will make one dish, just one, that allows the blander eaters to enjoy the meal without rendering the adults bored out of their skulls.
Essentially a lasagna with tortillas standing in for noodles, this is one of those dishes that can miraculously be on the table in short order, made from things you most likely have in your pantry and fridge. If you don't like, or you don't have, one of the ingredients, skip it. Or, if you have something else that you think might be appealing all layered in (like slivered bell peppers to sauté with the onions, kale, chopped, cooked broccoli — whatever the people in your home will eat), then fling it on in.