Our good friend and food pal, Anne Byrn, author of the wildly popular Cake Mix Doctor cookbook series and the Dinner Doctor, is a cheater from way back. Long before she earned advanced degrees in cake-mix doctoring, Anne was doctoring pickles by transforming store-bought dills and sours into home-canned-style bread-and-butter pickles. Anne says cheater pickles were especially popular with her mother’s generation as a “homemade” Christmas gift, and a must for serving with the Christmas country ham. Our own sweet-hot version of cheater pickles enjoys a little heat from pickled jalapeños and tastes great with cheater meats. Pickled red jalapeños, if you can find them, are especially colorful for the holiday season. Sour pickles work best because their pungent flavor really hangs in there with all that sugar, but you can resort to regular dills in a pinch. We’ve had the best luck finding sours in big jars at Wal-Mart. The mustard seeds make the cheater pickles look even more homemade.
Turn humble onions into this thrifty yet luxe pasta dinner.
Serve a thick slice for breakfast or an afternoon pick-me-up.
This pasta has some really big energy about it. It’s so extra, it’s the type of thing you should be eating in your bikini while drinking a magnum of rosé, not in Hebden Bridge (or wherever you live), but on a beach on Mykonos.
Caramelized onions, melty Gruyère, and a deeply savory broth deliver the kind of comfort that doesn’t need improving.
Reliable cabbage is cooked in the punchy sauce and then combined with store-bought baked tofu and roasted cashews for a salad that can also be eaten with rice.
This is what I call a fridge-eater recipe. The key here is getting a nice sear on the sausage and cooking the tomato down until it coats the sausage and vegetables well.
This is the type of soup that, at first glance, might seem a little…unexciting. But you’re underestimating the power of mushrooms, which do the heavy lifting.
A dash of cocoa powder adds depth and richness to the broth of this easy turkey chili.