You know 'em, you love 'em, now share 'em here.
Recipes that are simple, straightforward, don’t result in a sink full of dirty pans, but do result in food so good you’d eat it every day except for the fear of getting sick of your favorite nommy-noms.
Oh? Shall I get the party started?
The runner-up: Fried Pasta.
It involves bacon. Really, what more do you need to know?
Roughly chop onion and slice bacon strips. Fry in a frying pan along with some leftover (read: already boiled) pasta. Any shape or size pasta will do just fine - tubes, farfalla, linguine, orzo… it’s all good.
If you use really trimmed center-cut bacon, you may need to add a pat of butter so the onions and pasta brown without burning dry. But nice, white-ribboned, fatty bacon renders out all the fat you need.
It works best if you start the bacon by itself over low heat, so some fat melts out without actually cooking the meat, then turning the heat up a bit and adding the onion and pasta to the rendered fat … but if you’re drunk or a lousy cook or otherwise inattentive to detail, throwing it all in a pan together works fine. You can be sloppy about chopping the onion, too - tiny, neatly minced pieces of onion will burn anyway.
You will never throw out leftover pasta again. I often throw a little extra pasta into the boiling pot when making it (to serve with sauce) so I have leftovers to stash in the fridge. The pasta gets crispy and redolent of onion and bacon, and the whole house smells good after you make it.
And my personal favorite,
the winner,
the king of all stupid-simple recipes … is … <drum roll> Toaster Oven Chicken Breast <trumpets blare>
Line your toaster oven tray with thick foil - the good stuff, not the cheap, flimsy, grocery-store brand foil you bought on sale - and place upon it one or two bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts. (Skin side up, bone side down.)
Sprinkle the skin liberally with kosher salt, and lay a few thin slices or shavings of butter evenly spaced over the skin. (Maybe a Tbs or so of butter per breast, maybe less, but I like butter and the chicken breasts they sell at my supermarket are so monstrously big that the Other Horseshoe and I often split one, so I kind of go to town with the butter.)
Add a small amount of water to the tray - just enough to fill the bottom but not to any appreciable depth. I dunno, less than a 1/4 cup water?
Bake at 400 F for 30-45 minutes, depending on how large your breasts are. Snicker at recipe instructions. If your toaster oven is small and the tops of the meat are close to the top burners, you may want to knock it back to 375.
Why the toaster oven?
Because it doesn’t heat up the whole kitchen (it gets over 100 here in the summer for weeks on end, so this is no small consideration) and because it’s been a long time since I’ve lived in a house where the oven has an actual window, and my toaster oven allows me to see what I’m doing and how brown the skin has become.
And the skin, man. It’s the best part. All that butter and dry heat make it crackling crisp. The meat stays juicy, without drying out like white meat so often can, because of the relatively short cooking time.
But the best part? The best part of all? The little bit of water you add keeps the fond at the bottom of the tray from burning. It protects the precious from that nasty burnings…s… sorry. But it’s amazing.
Once you take the meat out of the tray and put it on your plate, add a little more water to the tray, just high enough to cover the line of fond. (You’ll see it.) Let it sit and soak while you stuff yourself silly. Then come back, gently scrape every last chickeny brown bit off the foil (this is why you use the good foil) and tah-dah! the richest, tastiest, *fastest *chicken stock ever. It makes just enough to cook a small portion of quinoa in, and quinoa cooked in rich, tasty chicken stock is so good it’ll make you cry.
So, those are my two favorites.
What’s yours?