Simple Cooking

Pico de gallo, but make it roasted.

This all-purpose chile crisp—which is tangy, spicy, and addictive—will give your other condiments an inferiority complex. You’ve been warned. Put it to good use on eggs, meat, seafood, or hearty salads.

Once you’ve paired this sauce with all sorts of vegetables and proteins, reinvent it. Try adding chopped toasted nuts, minced tender herbs, spices (such as cumin, turmeric, or coriander), and/or finely chopped dried fruit (like raisins, apricots, and/or dates).

If you don’t feel like smoking up your kitchen by charring the beans on the stovetop, try grilling or just blanching them instead.

You don’t have to use mozzarella; other fresh cheeses like ricotta, goat, or feta will work, though you might miss that stretchy molten-cheese effect.

If you’d like, soak the beans overnight before cooking; it will help them cook more quickly and evenly.

A well-seasoned cast-iron pan is your friend here. If, despite your best efforts, the frittata sticks when you turn it out, just flip it back over so that any imperfections are hidden underneath.

Use the smallest tomatoes you can find at the market for this dish. They’ll be extra sweet and have thin skins.

This recipe packs in all the punches puttanesca is known for—salty! briny! olive-y!—without the need to cook a sauce. Two types of tomatoes are involved: beefsteaks get blended until smooth, and then tossed with cherry tomato halves.

The key to this classic pesto recipe is to add the basil at the very end, instead of blending everything all at once—that way, the basil maintains its flavor and vibrant green color.

Cooked in a pan on the grill, this double-decker smash burger won’t smoke out your kitchen, blanket your stove with grease, or force you to spend even one more minute of the sweet summer nights indoors.

Herby cumin-spiced lamb and squash over a bed of creamy hummus makes for a delicious and simple dinner. Serve it with lots of toasted pita for scooping everything up.

Lamb chops need enough time on the grill to let the fat render. You’ll get flare-ups as the fat melts onto the coals—that’s inevitable—but instead of letting the chops char, just move them to a new spot as needed and keep going.

If you’re going to turn on the oven in August, it better be for a good reason: This sauce, made from broiled tomatoes and peppers, is tangy, smoky, juicy, and definitely worth it.

Sweet corn is perfectly paired with briny clams in this dish that’s easy enough for a weeknight, but elegant enough for a special occasion. Serve it with plenty of good bread to dunk in the broth.

Not just for salad: Drizzle this savory herb-infused oil over grilled vegetables, steak, or roast chicken.

Our go-to I’m-feeling-fancy dinner is a perfectly medium-rare steak and a pile of vegetables. And the more cherry tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers you throw into the mix, the more it’ll feel like summer.

If you make this slaw ahead, the vegetables will continue to soften as they sit and become more like pickles, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

The method for marinating the feta in this salad is also a good trick for other fresh cheeses—try goat, mozzarella, or paneer.

You can use various heirloom cucumbers for this savory-sweet salad recipe; if you can find them, flaunt them.