December 2021

Piccata sauce — that buttery, briny combination of lemon, butter and capers, silky in texture and tart in flavor — is not just for chicken or swordfish. It’s also a zesty anchor for roasted vegetables. Here, cauliflower is roasted at high heat, which concentrates the flavor, adds nuttiness and encourages caramelization, before being doused with the sauce. Chickpeas make this a fuller vegetarian meal, but leave them out if you’d rather.

This is a sticky, no-knead dough, so, some sort of baking vessel, such as pyrex bowls (about 1-L or 1-qt) or ramekins for mini loaves is required to bake this bread. You can use a bowl that is about 2 qt or 2 L in size to bake off the whole batch of dough (versus splitting the dough in half) but do not use this size for baking half of the dough — it is too big.

This recipe, inspired by Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, delivers the best of all worlds: creamy, saucy comfort, with a consistency that’s slightly more set than a stovetop version, thanks to a final bake in the oven. It stays voluptuous and molten as a result of a higher ratio of sauce to noodles, which are cooked completely so they don’t soak up as much liquid. The Velveeta is necessary here, as it has sodium citrate, which prevents the sauce from separating in the oven. Elbow macaroni works fine, but cavatappi is an especially fun shape to eat with its telephone-cord bounciness.

For a twist on standard fried rice, we don’t just scramble an egg or two into the mix. Instead, we “poach” a few in hollowed-out areas of the fried rice until the whites are just set and the yolks are deliciously runny. While the eggs cook, the rice forms a golden brown, nicely crisped bottom crust.