One of the smartest things you can do when cooking for one is make large quantities of pasta sauce to freeze and then defrost and adapt into quick weeknight meals. Such sauces can go well beyond a simple marinara. When I asked the queen of Italian cooking in America, Lidia Bastianich, for her favorite approaches to such a thing, she quickly came to me with this hearty vegetable stew that can do triple, quadruple, even quintuple duty: Use a cup of it to dress pasta, of course, but also spoon it onto charred bread for bruschetta, use it as a base on which to nestle grilled fish or chicken, or try one of the companion recipes: Baked Egg in Fall Vegetables (page 33) or Fall Vegetable Soup with White Beans (page 58). I couldn’t resist putting my stamp on this recipe: I did what I do with many tomato sauces and splashed in some fish sauce to deepen the flavor.
This classic 15-minute sauce is your secret weapon for homemade mac and cheese, chowder, lasagna, and more.
Turn humble onions into this thrifty yet luxe pasta dinner.
Round out these autumn greens with tart pomegranate seeds, crunchy pepitas, and a shower of Parmesan.
The silky French vanilla sauce that goes with everything.
Caramelized onions, melty Gruyère, and a deeply savory broth deliver the kind of comfort that doesn’t need improving.
An extra-silky filling (no water bath needed!) and a smooth sour cream topping make this the ultimate cheesecake.
This pasta has some really big energy about it. It’s so extra, it’s the type of thing you should be eating in your bikini while drinking a magnum of rosé, not in Hebden Bridge (or wherever you live), but on a beach on Mykonos.
Crispy tots topped with savory-sweet sauce, mayonnaise, furikake, scallion, and katsuobushi.