Southern 3-Ingredient Sausage Pinwheels
These show up at every church potluck, every football spread, every holiday morning in the South. Three ingredients — crescent dough, cream cheese, and breakfast sausage — rolled into a log and baked into golden pinwheels that disappear faster than anything else on the table. I made a batch for…
Smashed Chicken Parmesan Texas Toast
Twenty minutes. One skillet. Chicken Parmesan without the breading, the frying, or the oven. Ground chicken mixed with Parmesan and seasonings gets spread onto frozen garlic Texas toast, cooked chicken-side-down until golden and crisp, flipped, topped with marinara and mozzarella, and finished with the lid on and the heat off…
Strawberry Cheesecake Cookies
Six ingredients, one of which is a box of strawberry cake mix. I'm not going to pretend this is a scratch recipe — it's not. But the cake mix does the heavy lifting for flavor and color, the cream cheese makes them soft and slightly tangy, and the finished cookies…
Peach Salad Dressing
Half a ripe peach, olive oil, lemon juice, honey, salt. Into the blender, done in two minutes. This is the dressing I make all summer when peaches are good. The peach doesn't need to be peeled — the skin blends completely smooth and adds color to the finished dressing. What…
Easy Fat-Free Tea Loaf
This is the recipe for when you want something baked that has almost nothing in it. Four ingredients: tea, self-raising flour, dried fruit, one egg. No butter, no oil, no added sugar. The fruit soaks overnight in strong tea, absorbs it, and that liquid is what makes the loaf moist…
Glazed Lemon Bread
I keep a loaf of this in the house for about half the year. It's simple enough to make on a weeknight — one bowl, one loaf pan — but it's the kind of thing that looks like you made an effort. Somewhere between a quick bread and a pound…
Vegan Lemon Cookies with Lemon Icing
The trick to making these cookies genuinely lemony — not just lemon-scented — is rubbing the zest into the sugar before anything else. Spend two minutes pressing the zest between your fingers against the sugar crystals and you'll see the mixture go fragrant and slightly damp. That's the essential oil…
Thai Red Prawn Curry
Most home versions of Thai red curry taste flat because they skip the most important step: cooking the curry paste in coconut milk until the oil separates. It looks like a small thing — two or three minutes of stirring — but it's what develops the aromatics in the paste…
