Choose your own meatball adventureI almost never follow recipes, at least not exactly. I like to add a pinch of this and a spoonful of that, guided by what's in my pantry and what I'm hungry for. This is why I find it almost physically impossible to make the same thing twice. My recipe for meatballs with any meat is made for these sorts of improvisations — the variations are built right into the ingredient list. Like a culinary Choose Your Own Adventure, you select the meat (or your favorite meat substitute), the spices, the herbs and the aromatics to get the combination you want for dinner tonight, and you can rest assured that the recipe's basic structure will lead to a good ending. Try it out, and then recount your adventures in the notes to inspire fellow cooks. It's a risk-free way to be creative in the kitchen. Featured Recipe Meatballs With Any MeatSpeaking of creative, Ali Slagle's way of constructing easy seasonal recipes never fails to include a touch of artistic wizardry. In her oven-seared salmon with corn and tomatoes, she brushes mayonnaise all over the fillets, which adds moisture and helps them brown while searing. Then, she adds loads of lime zest to the vegetables to spark their flavors. It's a beguiling and effortless late summer meal. Then there's her mojo chicken with pineapple, in which she marinates chicken in a garlicky Cuban mojo sauce after — rather than before — broiling. The warm meat soaks up the flavors while keeping the dish's colors bright and lively, casting a spell on both the eyes and the stomach. Another practitioner of culinary magic, Hetty "The Great Foodini" Lui McKinnon is always breaking vegetables out of their traditional molds. Take, for example, her spicy mushroom and tofu mazemen. This vegan riff on brothless Japanese ramen brilliantly uses seared mushrooms and nubby bits of crumbled tofu to add protein and heft to the noodles. Then the whole thing is zipped up with an umami-rich sauce of miso, sesame paste and chili crisp. It's a dazzling meatless dinner that's ready, presto, in half an hour. If you have a garden suddenly teeming with zucchini, those prolific bunnies of the vegetable kingdom, you know it takes a creative mind to keep up with the yield. Melissa Knific has a great way to help use up the bounty in her new recipe for zucchini fritters. She offers a couple of options for dipping (ranch dressing or tzatziki), bringing us around again to a choose-your-own-adventure dinner. In fact, these fritters, and their sauces too, would pair well with those meatballs. For dessert, how about a kid-inspired candy bar with a grown-up sensibility? My almond and goat cheese candy bars are a lot like no-bake peanut butter bars, but with an almond butter and goat cheese mixture as the base, topped by a fudgy layer of bittersweet chocolate. It has a not-too-sweet sophistication you never saw coming. Abracadabra! As always, you'll want to subscribe to get all these creative recipes and so many more (oh, just tens of thousands more). If you need any technical help, the brilliant people at cookingcare@nytimes.com are there for you. And I'm at hellomelissa@nytimes.com if you want to say hi. That's all for now. See you on Wednesday.
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Monday, August 26, 2024
Choose your own meatball adventure
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