Weeknight cooking

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Recipe of the Day: Hooni Kim's Japchae

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By Leslie Brenner

Do you enjoy stretchy noodles, vegetables and sesame? If so, you’ll love japchae — a beloved, homespun Korean comfort dish. The noodles, made from sweet potato starch, are called dangmyeon. This version of the dish is adapted from My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, the outstanding 2020 cookbook by New York City-based star chef Hooni Kim.

Make it once, savor those stretchy dangmyeon noodles, and I think you’ll be smitten. Want to make it gluten-free? Swap gluten-free tamari for the soy sauce. Want to make it vegan? Use water instead of the dashi. It’s a delightful weeknight dinner — one that pays delicious leftover dividends, if you’re serving fewer than four.

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Recipe of the Day: Tinga de Pollo (Chicken Tinga)

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By Leslie Brenner

“The first recipe any Mexican will cook as soon as they move out of their parents’ home and live on their own is chicken tinga.” That’s according to Enrique Olvera, Mexico’s most famous chef. He and his co-authors included their recipe for it in the “Weekday Meals” chapter of their 2019 cookbook Tu Casa Mi Casa: Mexican Recipes for the Home Cook.

They suggest serving it the first night as a soupy stew, on top of rice and accompanied by tortillas. (Sold!) On following days, you can reduce it down a bit, and use it to fill tacos (either with tortillas you make yourself or storebought ones). Or spooned onto a crisp tostada, layered with shredded lettuce, crumbled queso fresco, salsa verde and a squiggle of crema.

It’s very easy to make — hence its popularity as a recipe for new cooks. Highly recommend!

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Rapini-to-riches tale: A New York chef’s recipe inspires a fresh take on a favorite weeknight pasta

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By Leslie Brenner

For years — decades, even — the favorite weeknight dish in our household was pasta with rapini and Italian sausage. It’s easy and quick (about 5 minutes of prep), and that combo of slightly bitter greens with salty sausage and comforting grated parm is a winner. I’m not the only one who loves it — there are a gazillion recipes for it floating around out there.

At some point, we cut way back on white flour for health reasons, and our pasta consumption plummeted. We’ve tried myriad commercial whole-wheat pastas, but they usually eat like a punishment, cardboardy or gummy or both. We still eat pasta — joyfully and with gusto! — but it has become more a special treat than a weeknight habit.

Now, thanks to a dramatically better whole-grain pasta that’s new on the national market — Sfoglini Organic Whole Grain Reginetti — and a new approach to the beloved rapini-and-sausage marriage, we’ve made pasta a weeknight-at-home thing again.

In the old days, my rendition of the dish was cartoonishly basic. I’d put up a big pot of salted water to boil, trim the rapini, drop it in the boiling water, leave it 3 or 4 minutes, pull it out with tongs, shock with cold water, and cut the stems into large pieces. Next I’d heat olive oil in a sauté pan, crumble in and brown some Italian sausages, add a little garlic if I wasn’t feeling lazy, boil pasta (usually penne or farfalle) in the water that had turned green from the rapini, and while the pasta was boiling, toss the rapini in with the sausage and cook for a minute to pick up the flavor, along with a big pinch of Aleppo pepper or chile flakes. Sometimes I’d add a splash of white wine. Once the pasta was done, I’d toss it with the rapini and sausage, grate some parm on top and pass more parm with it at the table.

Farfalle with rapini and sausage, the old way. This one was made by a family member, who fancied it up with shallots.

A recipe in Missy Robbins’ 2021 magnum opus, Pasta, made me fall in love all over again.

The Robbins recipe — Orecchiette con Cime di Rapa — is the Puglian grandmother of my old favorite weeknight pasta. But as the New York chef explains in her headnote, in Puglia, the rapini (cime di rapa) is paired not with sausage, but with anchovies. Orecchiette, or “little ears,” is the traditional pasta shape for the dish — a tradition I generally left by the wayside, as I’m not a fan of store-bought dried orecchiette; hence, my use of penne or farfalle.

As an anchovy enthusiast, I was keen to try Robbins’ version — which I did posthaste. I didn’t wait until I had time to make handmade orecchiette as the recipe directed; I grabbed a box of farfalle I had in the pantry. Wow — what a fabulous dish, and so completely different than my eons-old approach. Robbins has you pull off all the rapini’s leaves, chop them finely, chop the stems and florets pretty small as well, and braise it all so the rapini breaks down into a “kind of ragù.” The anchovy, aided and abetted by grated pecorino romano cheese, supplies abundant umami. Toasted bread crumbs add garlic-flavored textural pizzazz. So damn good!

Finely chopped rapini leaves

Meanwhile, a New York-based chef friend introduced me to the Sfoglini pasta, which has beautiful texture and excellent flavor. I hadn’t realized I could find the product (from a company also based in New York) in my neighborhood Whole Foods. How great would it be, I asked myself, to adapt Robbins’ rapini-into-ragù technique to my old favorite recipe, using the whole-grain reginetti? The ruffly shape of the pasta would be perfect with this sauce. I’d use Italian sausage instead of anchovies, crumbling it a little more than I used to, and swap Parmigiano Reggiano for the pecorino romano. Sure, finely chopping the rapini leaves and toasting bread crumbs would add a few minutes to my old standard, but I suspected the upgrade would be worth it.

And it is!

My recipe takes a bread-crumb short-cut, using store-bought plain ones rather than starting with a country loaf. You’ll be left with enough extra crumbs to make the dish again.

Whole-grain reginette and rapini

Down the rabbit hole

Now the rabbit hole part. I was not terribly surprised to learn from Robbins’ headnote that orecchiette con cime di rapa, which has variations in Puglia (sometimes it has clams, sometimes bread crumbs) features anchovies, not sausage; it makes sense, as historically it’s a poor seaside region where anchovies would be more accessible and affordable than meat. But Robbins and her co-writer, Talia Baiocchi, suggest that the combo of orecchiette, rapini and sausage is not Italian at all. Rather, the dish picked up its sausage variation on the way to America, and “ran with it to the point where most Americans assume it is traditional.”

Really? The combo of Italian sausage and rapini just seems so Italian.

I cracked my books and hit the internet, but after weeks of research, I have not found any definitive citation that tells whether pasta with rapini and sausage is traditional anywhere in Italy. Certainly the combination exists there; I have found several mentions of cavatelli with rapini and sausage, including one from Naples. And I’ve turned up several references to whole sausages cooked with rapini (but without pasta) in Puglia. I’ve also found a few one-off references to various other pastas with rapini and sausage — with maltagliati (on a site based just south of San Marino), with pici (in a Puglia-meets-Tuscany mashup recipe from La Cucina Italiana), or with cavatelli (on a Milan-based site). But altogether, I found so few references that it seems unlikely that it’s traditional.

The 10 or so Italian cooking reference books on my shelf turned up exactly nothing on the subject.

So for now I throw up my hands. Maybe someone will magically appear and supply a definitive answer, or at least a meaningful lead. (In a few days, I’m having dinner with my friend Carlo — who shed essential insight on the permissibility of putting ragù Bolognese on spaghetti. Perhaps he’ll have the answer.)

In the meantime, enjoy the pasta.

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The flavor-packed, vegan, zero-waste lentil-and-greens soup that earned a hundred encores and endless spins

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By Leslie Brenner

Feel like eating vegan today? Treat yourself to a pot of an easy, surprisingly quick-to-make lentil soup. It’s deliciously multi-dimensional: underlined with warm spices, brightened with tomato, umamified with dried mushrooms, enlivened with tender greens. It’s packed with phytochemicals and health-enhancing super-foods. It’s a colorful, health-enhancing heavy-lifter for your zero-waste aspirations that will fill your kitchen with gorgeous aromas.

It cooks in about an hour. Make a pot in the morning, and if you’re working at home, you have a week’s worth of magnificent lunches. Work somewhere away? It’s quick enough to pull together when you get home.

If you keep lentils and a can of tomatoes on hand, and tend to have greens in the fridge (including that half-bag of tired arugula, or a some frozen spinach), you can put the soup together whenever you feel like it without shopping.

This is not the first time I’ve written about this soup; I dreamt it up 7 years ago and have been sustained by it and spinning on it ever since.

Start with aromatic vegetables: onion, carrot, celery and friends. Add herbs and garlic, then spices — turmeric and coriander. The base can be French green lentils or black Umbrian lentils, or both. A can of diced tomatoes plus water, and simmer for 45 or 50 minutes. Toss in greens — half a bag of baby kale, spinach or arugula, maybe some cayenne or harissa. That’s it.

Make it once, and then you can spin endlessly. Stare into your fridge before you start and see what vegetables need to be used up — raw in the drawer, or cooked leftovers. Is a turnip or a piece of daikon lurking therein? Dice it and throw it in with the carrots. Raw cauliflower or broccoli? Dice ‘em up and in they go with the tomatoes. Cooked spinach, carrots, cauliflower or what have you? Toss them in halfway through, or near the end. You are not sacrificing the soup’s integrity by cleaning out your fridge into the pot: You’re making something even more delicious.

You can play with the spices, too, depending on your mood. Sometimes I feel like pushing the soup in an Asian direction, and add ginger — fresh or ground. When I do that, I frequently throw in some red lentils for added dal-like creaminess. Maybe I’ll triple the turmeric and swap dried shiitakes for the porcini.

Anyway, you get the idea. If you’re the follow-a-recipe type, here are two — the original, and the gingery, turmeric-happy spin.

RECIPE: Gingery Lentil and Greens Soup

Are you more the let-me-loose-to-improvise kind of cook? Here’s a master recipe with endless opportunities to spin. I love to do this on Sunday, for the fridge-clean win.

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For the best (and easiest!) ratatouille, capture the fabulous flavor of late summer by roasting those vegetables

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Roasted Ratatouille

By Leslie Brenner

Ratatouille — the famous French stew of zucchini, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes — always sounds so much better than it winds up tasting. It took an actual trip to France for me to discover how to make one that’s actually pretty fabulous.

One evening on my recent sojourn there, I needed to make dinner for my French in-laws, whose gastronomic leanings present a challenge. Belle-mère and beau-père, my parents-in-law, require old-fashioned food (yes, French —what else is there?), while belle-soeur, my sister-in-law, is vegan. My husband Thierry and I? We just want something good.

Thierry had the answer: ratatouille.

Visions of courgettes and aubergines (so much more beguiling than zucchini and eggplants!) danced in my head, which I lost for a moment, conjuring next an image of a gorgeous dish of perfectly cooked late-summer deep greens and reds and golds.

And then a panic-pause as reality set in: Come to think of it, I’d never had a ratatouille I’ve loved — including, but not limited to the ones produced in my own kitchen. Liked OK, yes. Loved, certainly not. The result, achieved on the stovetop and not terribly fun to make, is usually kind of watery, tomatoey and monotonous, with pillows of eggplant that skew either spongy or sodden.

Components of a roasted ratatouille

Not seeing an alternative, and after all, it was late summer, I committed to the project and headed to the supermarché — actually, a lovely supermarché bio (organic) that had sprung up in the four years since I’d last visited the small seaside town, not far from Bordeaux. In any case, I’d buy some good crusty bread to sop it up; some great cheese post-ratatouille would probably be the highlight of the meal.

Necessity, I’d forgotten to remember, is the belle-mère of invention. And my belle-mère’s kitchen is not terribly well appointed. Therefore, failing to find a skillet large enough for ratatouille for five, I turned on the oven. I’d roast the eggplant, which might actually be an upgrade from cooking in a pan. (It was!) While I was at it, I’d roast a red bell pepper, and half of the zucchini, thereby saving room in the skillet. Why did I not roast all the zucchini? Because the oven was too tiny. (Go ahead and mentally insert that forehead-slap emoji.)

Onto the stove’s electric heat went the medium skillet, then a glug of olive oil, into which I pressed, once it was hot, the remaining zucchini. I seared those rounds nice and golden-brown, so they’d maybe keep their integrity and some texture (they did!), then set them aside. Next I sweated diced onion, adding garlic, which I’d minced with a paring knife sharp as a spoon. Ding! The eggplant was roasted. (No, I didn’t use a timer, but felt this story could use a sound effect.) A fork poked into the thick rounds found little resistance, so out it came — and hey, turned out the red bell pepper and those darling courgettes were done, too. While the onion softened, I cubed the soft eggplant (not a problem with the spoon-knife!), peeled and cut up the pepper.

Now the pressure was on: The table was set, the entrées (first courses in France) were in place. I don’t even remember what the entrée was, so focused was I on the plat. Maybe the starter was saucisson, a crowd favorite for all but my belle-soeur. The clock was ticking perilously close to 8:00. I felt grateful that my 95-year-old parents-in-law were an ocean apart from the early-bird proclivities of America’s seniors.

Into the pan went the aubergine, along with the courgettes (roasted and pan-seared) and peppers for a brief hot mingle together, and then a couple cut-up tomatoes. I tasted and seasoned, and wow — that ratatouille was pretty damn good! I sent it to the table decorated with torn basil.

The verdict? They loved it.

You might be saying, of course they said they loved it. They’re your family-in-law. But it was ratatouille: It’s never that good.

It was very good. Nicer than any I’d probably ever had, with better texture and deeper flavor: Late summer concentrated in a luscious, light, saucy, tasty, vegan, traditional French dish.

Ten days later, I was back home, and Thierry — who remained in France for a bit — texted me that he wanted the recipe. (Thierry, who doesn’t even cook!) I wrote him out a recipe. He cooked it. He loved it again, and texted photos — also something he never does with food.

Craving it suddenly (how weird!), I made it again — at home, in my own kitchen, with sharp knives and full-size oven, and weights and measures for recipe building. Also a practical tweak or two, such as all the zucchini gets roasted, along with the garlic. The resulting method is simplicity itself. Everything roasts for the same length of time, and altogether it’s quicker, easier and less fussy than the traditional way. And yes, more delicious.

Traditionalists may scoff. To them I say: dudes. Try this. A hundred euros says you’ll never go back.

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Kate Leahy's 'Wine Style' is a delicious solo debut from a seasoned (and fascinating) cookbook pro

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Wine Style Lede.jpg

By Leslie Brenner

Wine Style: Discover the wines you will love through 50 simple recipes, by Kate Leahy, Photographs by Erin Scott, 2021, Ten Speed Press, $22.

Her name may not ring a bell — yet, anyway — but Kate Leahy is one of the most interesting cookbook authors around.

Leading up to the publication last week of her first solo cookbook, Wine Style, her publishing career had been one of collaboration; she’d been a co-author, working with chefs, restaurateurs and others on 10 wide-ranging titles over the past 13 years. Her first effort — A16 Food + Wine — won the IACP Cookbook of the Year award and the Julia Child First Book award following its publication in 2008. A16 is a captivating romp through the wines and foods of Southern Italy as expressed in Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren’s beloved San Fransisco restaurant of the same name.

If you could spend some time with that first book, along with Leahy’s most recent ones — Burma Superstar (2017), Lavash (2019) and La Buvette (which we reviewed last year when it was published) — you might sense a delightful sensibility running through all — Leahy’s it would seem, as she’s the common denominator. Those books all have an underlying intelligence, grace in the writing and overarching deliciousness. Each expresses a passion for deeply exploring culinary cultures, including the people who uphold the traditions, the places from which the traditions spring.

Leahy is at once an expressive, talented writer and an outstanding, accomplished cook with a great palate — an unusual combination. Dig into her background a bit and you begin to understand: She began her career as a cook, and worked on the line at James Beard Award-winning restaurants including A16 (aha!), Terra in the Napa Valley and Radius in Boston. Later, she went to journalism school — at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Author Kate Leahy / Photograph by John Lee

Author Kate Leahy / Photograph by John Lee

Her projects beautifully and compellingly capture worlds, whether it’s Armenia and its diaspora (Lavash); the cult of laphet — edible fermented Assam tea leaves as practiced in the border regions around Myanmar, China and Thailand (Burma Superstar); or a cave à manger (a wine bar where you can eat) in Paris’ branché 11th Arrondissement (La Buvette). If you want to get an idea of the sensibility at work, check out 1000 Meals, the video series Leahy produces with John Lee, a wonderful photographer and videographer who’s Leahy’s frequent collaborator.

‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

Because there’s such depth and expansiveness in Leahy’s work, I was eager to dive into Wine Style, her first book as a solo author.

Quickly and irrevocably, I was hooked. Wine Style is chock full of smart, enticing recipes that not only pair well with your favorite reds, whites, and oranges, but are easy and delicious enough that they’re sure to become perennial favorites — dishes you’ll constantly be tossing together when friends are unexpectedly stopping by, when you’re heading to a picnic, hosting book club, or even on harried weeknights when you want an effortless yet satisfying dinner.

The first recipe I tried, a ridiculously simple dish of garlicky marinated mushrooms that cooks in a snap, was so good I made it twice more in a matter of days.

RECIPE: ‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

What to drink with that? Leahy suggests an earthy red — a Nebbiolo from Alto Piemonte or a mellow, traditional Rioja. Right she is; a Cune Rioja Crianza I’ve been been picking up for less than $15 was perfect.

Pretension is not part of Wine Style’s picture. “Most of the wines I seek out fall into the ‘charming and affordable’ camp,” Leahy writes in her introduction, “the kind of wines that make people smile without taking over the conversation.” These are the wines she and her friends bring when they gather every month for “Porch Time” — laid-back potluck dinners pulled together from unfussy recipes, often to be served room-temp (or backyard temp, as the case may be; none of them actually have porches).

And it’s in the spirit of Porch Time that she has created and pulled together the recipes that make up the book.

Types of wine (“wine styles”) serve as the organizing principle for those recipes: There are chapters on bubbles, whites (“crisp” or “rich”), orange wines, rosés, on through reds characteized as “picnic,” “reasonably serious” or “big” and finishing with sweet wines.

Leahy suggests pairings without getting hung up on them. The brief opening chapter, Wine Basics, is one of the best things I’ve read for beginners, or for food people who want to learn more about wine. I love that she focuses on texture and acidity — a welcome departure from the puffed-up lists of aromas that have infected wine writing for decades. Leahy provides an excellent section on natural wines, explaining the low-intervention winemaking philosophy (using sourdough as an analogy) and how it’s expressed in the glass.

Kate Leahy’s Harissa Deviled Eggs, from ‘Wine Style’

Kate Leahy’s Harissa Deviled Eggs, from ‘Wine Style’

And so, for Harissa Deviled Eggs — an idea I couldn’t resist — eggs’ propensity to coat the tongue propensity has Leahy reaching for scrubbing bubbles. Bingo! Prosecco was just the thing. And again, super simple; you don’t even really need a recipe if you can remember a third-cup of mayo, a tablespoon of harissa, a splash of lemon juice and half a dozen eggs. OK, here’s the recipe anyway:

RECIPE: Harissa Deviled Eggs

Another winning pairing: Poached salmon set on a charmingly disheveled fennel-celery salad, with caper mayo — sipped with Provençal rosé. I love the play of the fennel and celery, so similar in texture and different in flavor; I’d never thought of putting them together before, and it totally worked. Next time I’ll try it with Leahy’s other pairing idea: unoaked Chardonnay.

Leahy salmon rose.jpg

RECIPE: Poached Salmon with Fennel-Celery Salad and Caper Mayo

Freestyling with the recipes

I haven’t always managed to conjure Leahy’s suggested pairings; sometimes a dish sounded good, and I just went for it, wine or no.

Roasted edamame spoke to me: It’s something you can whip out on demand if you keep bags of it in the freezer and own a jar of furikake, the nori-and-sesame seasoning mix. Slightly defrost a bag of frozen shelled edamame, toss with olive oil and soy sauce, roast for 20 or 30 minutes, then toss with the furikake. For this, I pulled out a bottle of sake (which I had on hand) rather than orange wine (which I didn’t). Really good. (It’s also fabulous made with edamame still in their pods.)

Recently I was in Massachussetts visiting Cooks Without Borders’ design director, Juliet Jacobson, who put together Wine Style’s Beet and Potato Salad with Tarragon — another winner. We both loved the unlikely combo of the tarragon with dill pickles, though maybe if a reprint is ever in the works Leahy might consider adding a weight measurement for the pickles; “2 large or 3 small dill pickles” led to confusion. Were the pickles in our jar large? Medium? Who’s to say? We probably guessed wrong, as we wished it were a wee bit more pickle-y.

Juliet had also made Leahy’s Chocolate Olive Cake — which we’ll both be making again (and soon!). Made with almond flour, it gets moistness and fruitiness from the inclusion of prunes — and the combo of nuts and dried fruit certainly sounds fabulous with the Banyuls rouge or port Leahy suggests.

Wine or no wine, all those recipes are keepers — and Erin Scott’s engaging photos capture the dishes deliciously.

And there’s so much else that entices. Green Olive Tapenade and Baked Feta with Olives and Lemon both sound fabulous to smear on crusty bread. Ginger Chicken Salad, inspired by the Burmese salads Leahy fell in love with writing Burmese Superstar, looks enticing, as does oil-packed Tuna with Potatoes, Olives and Lemons. Leahy calls A Really Good Pasta Salad “handy for lunch, picnics, and dinners on hot nights.” It’s a match, she writes, for richer orange wines, “though no one would complain if you poured them a glass of lightly chilled Gamay instead.” Baked Peaches with Coconut and Sliced Almonds, which sounds terrific on its own or with its suggested Moscato d’Asti or dry or demi-sec Prosecco.

Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens, from ‘Wine Style’ by Kate Leahy

Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens, from ‘Wine Style’ by Kate Leahy

Because autumn will be here before we know it, I thought I’d leave you with a recipe I’ll certainly be making again as the weather cools: Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens. Made on a sheet pan, it’s just the kind of effortless yet delicious one-dish dinner I’m always looking for. Red onion and capers roasted with the cauliflower and sausages, along with a squeeze of lemon at the end, give it just the right zing.

And the wine? Leahy assures us there’s no short of reds that go with it, “but those with sunny dispositions, like Argentine Malbec or the Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre blends of the southern Rhône Valley, have a juicy quality that matches well with the sweetness of the caramelized cauliflower and sausages.” Indeed they do! And those sunny dispositions are always welcome — any time of year.

Wine Style: Discover the wines you will love through 50 simple recipes, by Kate Leahy, Photographs by Erin Scott, 2021, Ten Speed Press, $22.

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Recipe for Today: Try Mely Martínez's Chicken Veracruz-Style for a vivacious weeknight lift

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Pollo alla Veracruzana, or Chicken Veracruz-Style, prepared from a recipe in ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ by Mely Martínez

By Leslie Brenner

One of our favorite recipes from Mely Martinez’s delightful cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen, this easy weeknight dish gets its verve from a tomato sauce revved up with pimento-stuffed olives, raisins and capers. That combo may sound unlikely if you’re not familiar with the flavors of Veracruz, but give it a try anyway — we think you’ll be surprised and delighted.

Martínez’s original calls for fresh tomatoes, but you can substitute a can of chopped ones if you’re not finding nice ripe ones yet.

Enjoy your Recipe for Today!

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Recipe for Today: Ginger, garlic, fish and greens in parchment takes us to our happy place

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Halibut with garlic, ginger and baby bok choy roasted in parchment, from ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’ by Andrea Nguyen. A wide range of types of fish can be used in the dish.

By Leslie Brenner

How does this sound: a dish that’s light, easy and quick to prepare, that features whatever fish looks best in the market, that’s super healthy and creates no mess to clean up? And what if it’s not only perfect for a weeknight, but so delicious and lovely to behold that you’d happily present it to someone you truly wanted to impress?

Well, that’s how we felt too, the first time we made the gingery halibut parcels from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day. To achieve it, toss sliced baby bok choy in sesame oil, set a portion’s worth on a sheet of parchment, top with fish (the award-winning author suggests halibut or salmon), spoon onto it a quick sauce of ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, soy and a touch of oil and seasoning, scatter on slices of scallion, wrap it up, and slide it into the oven. Fourteen minutes later you have something wonderful.

How wonderful? I’ve made it four times in the last six weeks. It’s crazy that this simple combo of ingredients turns into something this delightful; the whole is much more than the sum of its parts on this one. Every fish I’ve used so far — halibut, petrale sole and striped bass — cooked perfectly in that package. In that 14 minutes the bok choy achieves ideal texture, the flavors all come together and the sauce envelops all in gingery, umamiful happiness. Salmon will be next. Or scallops. Or snapper.

I like to serve it with brown rice, spooned right onto the parchment to mingle with the sauce; jasmine rice is wonderful with it as well, and gets to the table much quicker.

Enjoy your Recipe for Today!

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This Rapini, Cannellini and Italian Sausage Melt is our new favorite easy, one-pan weeknight dinner

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Our recipe for a cannellini, rapini and Italian sausage melt is gluten-free and incredibly cravable.

Our recipe for a cannellini, rapini and Italian sausage melt is gluten-free and incredibly cravable.

By Leslie Brenner

When you come right down to it, we’re all looking for the same elusive thing: Weeknight dinners that are quick and easy to make, delicious and satisfying. And if they can also be craveable, gluten-free and made in just one pan, so much the more fabulous.

An Italian-flavored Rapini, Cannellini and Italian Sausage Melt I recently concocted fits that bill — and then some.

I spent most of my adult life whipping up, at least once a week, pasta with Italian sausage and broccoli rape (aka rapini, aka broccoli rabe). It has long been my favorite easy comfort dinner. Though the dish is traditionally made with orecchiete as the pasta shape, I always used penne — smooth ones, not penne rigate. I just enjoy them more than those flat little ear-shapes.

No need for a recipe to achieve that old standard: Just blanch a bunch of rapini (saving the vitamin-filled water to cook the pasta in), brown a pound of Italian sausage, add the rapini, cook the pasta (saving a little cooking water), add pasta to rapini and sausage, along with a little pasta cooking water, cook briefly, add grated parm, a shake of Aleppo pepper and serve. To me it’s one of the most simply perfect dishes in the world. Garlic is a welcome but not entirely necessary enhancement.

But at some point I seriously cut back on refined-flour products (along with sugar), and so the dish changed for us from once-a-week favorite to once-in-a-while special treat.

Then came The Great Confinement, and with it, the feeling that under the circumstances, we should be able to eat whatever we want. The pasta dish appeared on our table with increasing frequency, the longer the pandemic stretched out. I made it with whole wheat pasta a few times, but it tasted punitive.

Beans, I thought. Beans and greens: Such a dreamy combo. Why not swap the pasta for cannellini beans — from a can, so it’s quick and easy? With the Italian sausage, of course. And Parm stirred in at the end.

It was good, but it wasn’t craveable. It wanted some spicy zing, and something melty on top.

Next time, I stirred in some harissa — North African chile paste kissed with caraway seed — and a bit of fresh rosemary. And then, after stirring in the Parm, I topped it with slices of fresh mozzarella. Not too much; I wasn’t looking for decadence, just irresistible, creamy deliciousness. Under the broiler it went, till it was bubbly and browning.

Eureka!!!

Treat yourself tonight, and let me know what you think.