Hello, and happy Saturday! Is everyone feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having fully shaken off the cobwebs of the last year, and eager to take on the adventures that await in 2025?
Yeah, me neither.
I can’t say that I’m feeling ready for a new year. (There are still folded stacks of 2024 laundry that need to be addressed.) But I do feel up for some refreshing recipes — colorful dishes with vivid flavors, maybe some ingredients I haven’t reached for in a while. I’m ready for recipes that are easy and breezy, reminders that cooking is equally joyful when it’s just for you as when it’s for a home full of holiday revelers.
What I want to eat is a poke bowl — a mound of vinegary sushi rice heaped with soy-dressed fish, pickles, fresh vegetables and furikake. Naz Deravian’s recipe is an excellent blueprint for the poke bowl of your dreams, with instructions for making your seasoned rice and marinated fish and suggestions for garnishes. I’ll throw some kimchi on there if I have it, especially if it’s Eric Kim’s cucumber “quick kimchi.” That’s something that came with a poke bowl I enjoyed in Honolulu, a place I like to return to mentally (if I can’t go physically).
Featured Recipe
Poke Bowl
My wonderful colleague Margaux Laskey has compiled a list of 13 cozy winter dinners to warm you up, and I have my eyes on these sheet-pan chicken tikka thighs from Zainab Shah. Boneless, skinless chicken thighs are marinated in ginger, garlic, red chile powder, cumin and garam masala, with yogurt to both tenderize and tangify. Zainab suggests eating any leftover chicken in a sandwich or salad, which sounds like a seriously envy-inducing desk lunch situation.
This zibdiyit gambari (spicy shrimp and tomato stew) recipe, adapted by Mayukh Sen from Yasmin Khan’s “Zaitoun: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen,” also looks incredible, the perfect counterpoint to December’s creamy casseroles. Jalapeño, garlic, dill and salt are mashed together to form a paste that provides the backbone of a quick-spiced tomato sauce. “This has become a family favorite and I have made it multiple times,” Sarah, a reader, writes. “Very quick and easy with warm, satisfying flavors.”
It’s not on the above list, but Alexa Weibel’s braised broccoli pasta is an absolute winter warmer, astoundingly creamy given the fact that there’s no cream involved. (If you skip the optional Parm or pecorino at the end, the dish is vegan.) Broccoli does double duty here: It’s blitzed with onion and garlic to form a soffritto of sorts; petite florets are tossed in later, cooked until tender and nestled into the pasta. If this recipe seems like a sister dish to my favorite broccoli-walnut pesto pasta, that’s because it is.
The grayer the days, the more I crave ginger. The first line in the intro to this Hetty Lui McKinnon recipe had me hooked: “Tofu and ginger share equal billing in this easy, economical weeknight stir-fry.” And I’d make the “thin slice” of ginger called for in this green smoothie recipe a thick one, because I live on the edge (of ginger adjustments in recipes).
