Happy February! It’s a great month for cooking: Lunar New Year, the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras are on deck, and we have recipes for all of them. It’s also a good time to get creative with the soup and stew recipes we fell in love with in January, playing with what goes into them and what we’re serving alongside. Might we suggest sopa paraguaya, a cheesy cornbread recipe from Nancy Ojeda adapted by Christina Morales? It’s delightfully rich: Blended corn, canned or fresh, is mixed with lots of eggs and cornmeal to make a cornbread that’s creamy in the center and crisp at the edges. Serve with baked potato soup, turkey chili or on its own, devoured standing in the kitchen while it’s still warm.
Featured Recipe
Sopa Paraguaya (Cheesy Cornbread)
And we’ve got two more dishes that’ll nicely complement your sopa paraguaya. First: our five-star tomato soup, a recipe adapted from Ted’s Bulletin in Washington, D.C., by Jennifer Steinhauer. With almost 7,000 reviews, it’s a clear reader favorite, especially with kids. (“This soup is a 10,” writes Sebastian, a reader. “That’s based purely on how much my 5-year-old and 2-year-old children enjoy it.”) Eric Kim’s new recipe for Parmesan braised beans with olives is silky, luxe and gorgeous to look at — check out that “tinsel of fried rosemary and sage,” as Eric puts it. He calls for crusty bread to soak up that savory, beany broth, but we’d also happily nibble on some cheesy cornbread for a subtle hit of sweetness.
Let’s swap the Dutch oven for a sheet pan, shall we? You might recognize Zainab Shah’s sheet-pan paneer tikka as the cover star for Tanya Sichynsky’s guide to New Year’s resolution cooking. It’s a great gateway dish for anyone looking to add more vegetarian dishes to their repertoire, as well as a sure crowd-pleaser. Soft, bouncy cheese flavored with a vibrant marinade of yogurt, garlic, ginger, garam masala and a handful of other spices, roasted hot and fast with bell peppers and onions — what’s not to like?
And, swapping the sheet pan for a skillet, here’s one-pan crispy chicken and chickpeas, a hearty dinner from Yossy Arefi that barely requires any chopping. This is a great dish for those spice mixes you bought (or were given) and forgot about; sprinkle the chicken with that mix before cooking to flavor the crispy skin and the chickpeas and spinach that soak up the pan juices.
Lastly — because it’s not a winter weekend without a bit of baking — here’s Genevieve Ko’s new recipe for lemon blueberry muffins, which are fluffy and light from the addition of yogurt. And if you used up all your butter making Eric’s black sesame Rice Krispies treats last week, Genevieve’s got you: You can use oil for the melted butter. We’re all about flexible and fun for February.
Love those leftovers
Crumble your cornbread! Leftover sopa paraguaya will make a stellar topping for Lidey Heuck’s baked eggs with kale, bacon and cornbread crumbs or Alexa Weibel’s kale salad with cornbread croutons (maybe subbing in-season apples for the peaches). Adding greens, sautéed fennel and more cheese to leftover Parmesan braised beans gets you pretty close to these white beans and greens with Parmesan. That, incidentally, would also be good topped with those toasted cornbread crumbs.
