A Pasta Cheat Code for Speed-Run Dinners

As January ends and those “cook more” resolutions start to waver, I’ve been thinking about my own roadblocks to cooking. Besides the obvious ones — I’m tired, I need to get groceries, I’m tired — one barrier is setting the bar too high. My dinner, I’ll tell myself, must be resourceful and clever, perfectly cooked and photogenic, healthful, colorful, flavorful, wonderful. And it must tick all these boxes or it doesn’t count; don’t even try otherwise. This is an impossibly completionist tack for a single meal.

So I’m thinking instead that just making yourself dinner is goal achieved, level cleared. Anything extra you’ve done is a cool bonus. Did you use up that last bit of yogurt? Here’s a handful of gold coins. Did you work in some good-for-you something? That’s a smiley flower! And if you made dinner and your loved ones loved it and want to eat it again, cue up this music.

That being said — and keeping with this retro video game metaphor — it is useful to have some cheat codes. My current favorite is beans + greens + pasta, and I’ve been riffing on Lidey Heuck’s five-star recipe for pasta with spicy sausage, broccoli rabe and chickpeas a lot lately. If I don’t have sausage I’ll just leave it out (maybe adding a bit more oil to account for the sausage’s rendered fat), and I’ve been using kale instead of broccoli rabe because that’s what my grocery store has. Sometimes I’ll add a little harissa or the rest of that can of tomato paste in Step 3. That’s a nice thing about Making Dinner: There’s no one way to win the game.

And for dessert: Dubai chocolate. Korsha Wilson wrote a delightful article for The Times about how Dubai chocolate — more specifically, the gooey, crunchy “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” chocolate bar — has taken over the world, and I can’t get this treat out of my head. Tempering chocolate must be some sort of final boss in the cooking game, but I’m going to play anyway; the combination of pistachio cream, delicate shredded phyllo and chocolate sounds too good not to try. Will I end up with perfect chocolate bars? Probably not. Will I still feel like I won? Absolutely.