Cacio e pere - just cheese and pears, with pasta.
Boil your choice of pasta. I usually prefer penne for this. While that’s happening, dice a pear or two, pan fry them in olive oil. Take some of the pasta water, mix it into some pecorino romano cheese to make a paste. Add pepper. Drain noodles, add them to pan, along with cheese paste. Mix it all together. Done.
It’s a dessert, but brownies made from the box, but substitute the oil for melted butter. Super easy, and delicious. The secret is always more butter.
Bread
If you are an omnivore foodie, gumbo. It impresses me, the depth and complexity of flavor in gumbo is delicious and very “me” if that makes sense, so it is something of myself I am giving to you.
If you are vegan foodie, a cream of mushroom soup made with cashew cream and fancy mushrooms, and some fresh sourdough bread (THE bread, as my kids put it) with a small salad of something fresh from the garden.
If you are my penultimate child and her girlfriend, apparently kimchi grilled cheese, I made them that once and they kept making it forever after, it is a ridiculously delightful sandwich.
Always something I personally like, for sure. I am a pretty experienced home cook at this point though. If you are not, I recommend the menu “Foods of Michochuan are Forever” on NPR, it has something for the meat eaters and the vegans, is outrageously good, uses ingredients that are available, and can be staged ahead of time and just reheated and make rice day of, so that you can enjoy yourself not be cooking all day. The soup I cheat with canned beans and canned tomatoes it’s great.
Lunch: I’ll make you the best hamburger you’ve ever had, either on the stovetop or the grill. Sides: Corn on the cob, fresh watermelon, homemade salsa and tortilla chips.
Dinner: Fist-sized meatballs with a heavy red sauce of meat and a ton of vegetables. I also use a high-protein pasta that gets cooked, then cooled in the refrigerator. Finished sauce + cold pasta ==> into a baking dish, bake covered; add cheese atop and finish baking. Serve with fresh bread and salad.
Dessert: I find a lot of American desserts are too sweet, so I make a chocolate and raspberry cake that turns down the sugar saturation and highlights the chocolate and the fruit.
I’m a pretty damn good cook for an American man my age who doesn’t work in a kitchen or similar.
As you can see, I do this meal a lot. It also costs me about $300 every time I do it.
I’m glad you can afford it and have loved ones you can share it with.
I make some pretty damn good Tamil-style goat curry, or green Thai curry. If they’re afraid of flavor, I make boef bourguingon and fondant potatoes made with duck schmaltz.
If I really care about em, I make Peking or Canton-style duck, a true labor of love, and if they want something sweet, I make one hell of a pumpkin cheesecake with candied pecan topping and Graham cracker crust. Or creme brulee, especially if I have fresh fruit. That always impresses, despite being one of the easier things to make.
I’ll be right over
sounds incredible. I’ve only had vegetarian/pescatarian Tamil cooking, would love to try goat curry
My go-to is probably a dijon-marsala pork tenderloin.
Coat a tenderloin in Dijon mustard and brown it. Toss it in the oven for 20ish minutes. Use a meat thermometer. Meat production safety is getting iffy these days.
In the same pan, sautée a shitload of finely-diced shallots in butter. Pour in equal parts cream and marsala wine. Reduce it by about half and add more Dijon until it tastes good.
Slice the meat and drown it in tasty sauce.
Hi hello, yes it’s me, your long-lost aunt, and I was wandering by and it smelled like you needed help with the way too much tenderloin you made, can I come in?
Bring a better bottle than marsala and you’re in.
Lasagna and garlic bread. But not just a can of sauce and ricotta. You have to do the full bolognese slowly cooked for hours, hand made noodles, bechamel instead of ricotta, and just a sprinkling of pecorino in each layer with the bechamel.
Bechamel is the shit for lasagna.
Once you make it that way, you can never go back.
With just a sprinkling of nutmeg. Oh yeah
Ooh, nutmeg? Ok, gotta try that!
Grilled cheese.
Pasta with olive oil and garlic (aglio e olio). It’s much more than the sum of it’s parts. It’s quick to make and the simplicity is impressive. Also I always have the ingredients at hand.
i sometimes add some chili flakes (toasted chiles de arbol are my favorite for this dish) or chopped fresh oregano.
You don’t want to overwhelm the simple flavors but sometimes one extra note can be nice. Also the quality of the olive oil really matters for this dish: i have a specific brand i go to because i prefer the subtle flavor even over the more expensive brands
Poached salmon
Sounds fancy, very tasty, and super simple. Literally just boil them bitches in some white wine, and then chop up some onion and cube some potato and cook those in a pan with some oil, salt, and pepper and that’s a full meal
Saw a neat tip today for poached salmon that had you place the salmon in the poaching liquid skin up, but only use enough liquid to cover the flesh, leaving the skin exposed, and place it under a low broiler to poach, so you get tender poached salmon with crisp skin.
Not a dish I make often and my partner abhors the skin (Monstrous, I know) but it seemed like a good tip!
That’s sadly impossible for me, I need to remove the skin. My dogs would never forget when I wouldn’t crisp it up for them to feast.
Wow, and I don’t even like fish and that sounds incredible.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to try that some time
enchiladas
green or red
shredded chicken, cheese, or shredded beefBiscoffeetoffee cheesecake.
Biscoff crust, coffee base, chocolate toffee crust. Beloved even by cheesecake haters.
What is this “Cheescake haters” of which you speak?
I hate cheesecake when I have none.
Not only did I hate cheesecake before I started making it myself, but a close friend is very anti-sweets but will always save room for this specific dessert.
Cinnamon buns
