It’s been a busy year for the New York Times Cooking community, as you cooked your way through the changing seasons. Your responses to the more than 700 recipes we published in 2022 have been thoughtful, creative and truly inspiring! So here — drum roll, please — you’ll find The Times’s Margaux Laskey with the 20 recipes you loved the most. (Save the collection of the top 50 here.)
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a bowl of noodles took the No. 1 spot. J. Kenji López-Alt’s unabashedly pungent Vietnamese American garlic noodles (above) calls for 20 cloves of the stinking rose, about two entire heads. Rounded out with butter, fish sauce, soy sauce and Parmesan, it’s a pantry meal that, as the reader Lynn wrote in the notes, is “super easy and very delicious.”
Overall, this was a strong year for noodles. Genevieve Ko’s chile crisp fettuccine Alfredo with spinach is a fiery, creamy meal that is so simple it doesn’t require any chopping. And I’ve made Hong Thaimee’s extremely adaptable pad kee mao (drunken rice noodles) at least half a dozen times since it came out, most recently with broccoli and squid, and with cilantro instead of basil. It’s always fantastic.
Chicken is naturally a perennial favorite, and Kay Chun’s beautifully balanced one-pot sticky coconut chicken and rice earned the No. 2 spot on the list. It’s a little sweet from the coconut milk, and spicy from a hit of hot sauce right at the end. Another winner was Ali Slagle’s superbly simple Greek chicken with cucumber-feta salad. It’s like a chicken souvlaki, Greek salad and tzatziki all rolled into one 30-minute meal.
Many of you seemed bullish on tofu, too: Yewande Komolafe’s heady, vegan brothy Thai curry with silken tofu and herbs and my own crispy tofu with balsamic tomatoes proved popular.
And the sweet-toothed among you put Genevieve’s fluffy lemon ricotta pancakes recipe on the list, a favorite for whipping up into a lovely breakfast, brunch or unexpectedly kid-pleasing dinner (with or without its blueberry topping).
Others I’ve had my eye on include Hetty McKinnon’s genius kung pao cauliflower, a vegan take on the usual chile-filled, Chinese American chicken dish, and Naz Deravian’s elegant lemon spaghetti with roasted artichokes.
You’ll need a subscription for the recipes, because that’s what keeps the lights on and our ovens going. If you haven’t joined us yet, a subscription to New York Times Cooking might be the perfect gift to give yourself this holiday season (or a great gift for a kitchen-savvy loved one). You can also check us out on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram — where, just in time for your holiday baking binge, Genevieve gives smart and slightly messy advice for opening a new bag of flour. And I’m at hellomelissa@nytimes.com if you want to get in touch.
I love a good list, as you can see, and there have been some doozies this year. But my favorite ones are a thousand years old. The lists of the Japanese author Sei Shonagon from the Heian period are acute snapshots of the everyday, and include “Elegant Things” (duck eggs, wisteria blossoms), “Rare Things” (“a pair of tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly”) and “Things that look lovely but are horrible inside” (“a heaped plate of food” — a reminder to plate your dinner carefully!).
“The list is the origin of culture,” the writer Umberto Eco said, and lists exist “to make infinity comprehensible.” But as I peruse the culinary best-of lists of 2022, I think again of Shonagon: “In life, there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.”
Sam is back on Friday, and I’ll see you on Monday.
