When you see that you have to boil oranges for 2
hours to make this recipe from Middle Eastern cookbook author Claudia Roden, you
may be tempted to thumb to another cake, but I implore you to stay put.
Sure, you might want to start using whole grain
flours in all your favorite baked goods—they’re a purer form of the ingredients, 
An eggy custard base has a nasty habit of muting
other flavors in ice cream.
A blueberry is just a sack of tart-sweet juice,
barely contained by a thin, taut orb of skin. It’s nature’s tiniest water
balloon,
As James Beard learned from his mother, the key to
a better, more tender shortcake is egg yolks. This doesn’t sound so strange,
until you learn the yolks are from hard-boiled eggs. 
We’re taught to zest our lemons carefully, to shear
off just the thin yellow top coat that holds the citrusy perfume—as if some of
the bitter, spongy white pith might sneak in and ruin everything. (And sometimes
it does.)
Even if we’ve started to recover from mushy
brussels sprout flashbacks, we can still take them further than roasting them
plain—by shoving them into a puddle of fish sauce vinaigrette, for
example.
Broccoli overcooked carelessly tastes stale and
murky. But when you push beyond that disappointing just-too-done state (and
throw in a whole lot of olive oil bubbling lazily with garlic, anchovy, and hot
peppers), you find yourself with a miraculous substance.
Cauliflower takes well to roasting: All those
starchy crevices get nutty and sweet and come into their own—catching oils,
crisping, browning, basking.
Tofu’s proponents have tried to get us to see all
the ways to improve its texture—freezing or pressing or boiling to rid it of
spare water, broiling or roasting to crisp it up.
You might not think there’d be ways to improve
upon the egg sandwich—fry an egg, melt some cheese on toast, maybe get a
When we think of a sandwich ransacked from the
fridge, it’s usually eggs, or grilled cheese, or something salumi-based. But
with only a little more effort you can get something more restorative out of a
desperate kitchen sweep.
Eggplant can be a mystery. Will it brown
handsomely or stick to the pan? Will its flesh relax, or stay stiff and chewy?
Will it be sweet, 
Fried rice is meant to be a hallmark of kitchen
efficiency, yet most recipes and tutorials call for day-old rice (the grains are
drier and firmer than freshly cooked rice and will absorb flavor without
clumping and sogging).
“Simple doesn’t mean easy,” Marcella Hazan wrote in
2004, a quote widely cited to explain her cooking style and influence.
ADAPTED FROM CARLO MIDDIONE
This version of boeuf bourguignon will do
everything a bourguignon needs to do and will do it in time for dinner tonight.
There is no beef in it. 
Spaghetti and meatballs doesn’t have to be a meal
that you simmer all day, nor does it need to put you into hibernation once
you’ve eaten it.
By some accounts, this is the most googled of all
brisket recipes. There are unverified reports that it was even served in the
White House for the Obamas’ first Passover Seder—and for good
reason.
The juiciest, speediest, most bewitchingly golden
roast chicken also happens to be the one with the recipe you can remember
without googling. Just 10 minutes a pound at
