September 2016

You’ve heard of one-pot dinners? These are one-sheet-pan dinners, which means easier cleanup with the added bonus of concentrated, roasted flavors. Here I use a traditional salade Nicoise as the starting point for a pan of roasted potatoes, green beans, and fish. Ham, squash, and apples are gratifying flavors of a New England autumn, and roasted chicken with fennel, bell peppers, and herbes de Provence gives you a little detour toward the south of France (if you shut your eyes tight and stand by the warm oven!).

This summery pasta is just as much about the vegetables as it is about the pasta itself. The star of the dish is the roasted eggplant, which caramelizes and softens in the oven. Those tender browned cubes then get tossed with cooked pasta and a quickly made sauce of fresh grated tomatoes, capers and chile flakes. Because the tomatoes need to be ripe and soft enough to fall into a purée when you rub the cut sides over the holes of a grater, heirloom tomatoes (which haven’t been bred for sturdiness during shipping) are a good choice here. But any juicy, flavorful, fleshy tomatoes will work.