What to Cook for Dinner - Food & Wine

In the four decades of working with chefs and ace home cooks at Food & Wine, we’ve noticed that the best cooks all have something in common. It’s not the fanciest cookware or spendy ingredients. It’s that they know the key techniques, formulas, and strategies that coax the most flavor out of everyday ingredients, transforming them into next-level dishes. 

That’s the driving force behind 52 Recipes to Make This Year. A cookbook of sorts, it will carry you into 2024 with inspiration for weeknight cooking when you’re craving big flavors but are short on time. The recipes, divided into chapters, are designed to teach you how to upgrade your everyday. You’ll find bold new ways to use humble ingredients like beans and rice, as well as a convincing case for upgrading your pantry with global condiments such as gochujang — and for keeping MSG in a salt cellar next to your stove for everyday seasoning. Consider 52 Recipes to Make This Year a New Year’s present from us — one that you can revisit and learn from every week of the year.

These 52 recipes — each spotlighting how to use a key ingredient or a fundamental technique – will help you unlock the full power of your spice cabinet and pantry for meals that will satisfy you every week. Discover new and unexpected ways to use everyday favorites and broaden your cooking chops with ingredients that maximize flavor, transform classics, and delight in every way. We hope you cook, eat, and love this collection of pantry-powered recipes and make 2024 your best cooking year ever. — The Editors of Food & Wine

Christopher Testani / Food Styling by Victoria Granof / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

Canned tomatoes aren’t second-class citizens. Growing up, I ate many a canned green bean, cling peach (in heavy syrup!), and mushy serving of canned “petits pois.” Those fruits and vegetables are indeed poor iterations of their fresh originals, but a canned tomato is a different story — it has integrity and its own identity. While you can’t really make a salad using a canned tomato, you can achieve all manner of other deliciousness.

Coaxing canned whole tomatoes into the shape and size you want can be a bit sloppy, but you can mitigate the mess with the following strategies. When all you need is slightly smaller pieces: Break the whole tomatoes up while they’re still in the can. Either take a knife and slice through them several times, or use your kitchen scissors to snip them into pieces. Be sure the hinge of your scissors is clean because you’ll be submerging them in the tomato juices. (Yes, I see what’s in your junk drawer.) When you want uniform chunks or finely chopped tomatoes: Take the whole tomatoes out of the can and gently “squeegee” each tomato with your fingers to remove excess liquid. Lay them on your cutting board, and customize the size and shape.

Christopher Testani / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Claire Spollen

Today, American food stores are packed with global pantry products. Shops that once catered to immigrant cooks are gaining wider audiences. And when local stores are lacking, the internet delivers, offering unparalleled access to ingredients from around the world. The process took nearly 250 years, but for cooks today, our country is not so much a melting pot as a global-pantry-palooza.

Many of the traditional high-flavor ingredients of the global pantry evolved to solve a universal problem: spoilage. Cooks fought back; they dried, salted, smoked, sugared, fermented, or otherwise preserved everything. Fish and salt fermented into fish sauce. Fruit turned into complex vinegars. Soybeans became soy sauce and miso. These evolved into the prized flavor accents of the great cuisines of the world. With all the currents of history—migration, war, exploitation, and trade—they traveled. And the cuisines inevitably intermingled. 

We wrote The Global Pantry Cookbook mostly because of our own histories. Ann is the daughter of a Korean mom and a Mississippi dad. She grew up eating from two very rich traditions, knowing about kimchi and sorghum syrup. Scott was born in Canada but lived abroad as a kid, learning about kecap manis in Java, Indonesia; ghee in India; and sheep-milk yogurt in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Christopher Testani / Food Styling by Victoria Granof / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

For anyone who thinks of rice as plain and boring — well, there isn’t a grain of truth to that idea.

In reality, rice is a pantry powerhouse, highly versatile and immensely receptive to anything you might like to throw at it. If you’re stumped by what to make for dinner or stuck in a cooking rut, putting rice at the center of your plans (rather than just to the side of your plate) can be the key to opening the door to meals that are new and exciting but still easy enough to pull off on a weeknight.

Globally, rice is a mainstay — it’s the primary food staple for more than 50% of the world’s population. But while eating rice may be a cornerstone for sustenance, preparing it — and doing so well — is a blend of culinary art and food science. Unlocking the power of rice, whether through toasting raw grains to heighten their nutty notes (an essential technique for countless pilafs; releasing the starches by stewing grains (broken to encourage creaminess) into a savory mushroom porridge; simmering rice with broth to build a hearty casserole of baked rice with clams; or cooking it in condensed milk to make a sweet, sticky rice pudding.

Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Margaret Monroe Dickey / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

My father is an American cook in that quintessential sense of boundlessness. Although his parents, by way of Newark, New Jersey, are of Ukrainian Jewish stock, his repertoire ricochets across the map, encompassing golden brown veal cutlets with an anchovy-caper sauce, stir-fries of beef and broccoli, and lattice-crusted apple pie perked up with ginger juice. He is an entirely self-taught cook who developed his skills by leafing through cookbooks and cutting recipes out of newspapers.  

One of my favorites in our family dinner rotation was what we called “pearl pork balls.” The name referred to the shaggy, pearlescent coat of sticky rice that formed around each small meatball after they were steamed until fluffy in bamboo baskets. He originally got the recipe out of Mrs. Ma’s Chinese Cookbook by Nancy Chih Ma, published in 1960. But over the years, he made it his own, swapping in ground pork and leek for the original beef and chopped onion, excising the mashed potato, opting for minced ginger instead of ginger juice, and adding vinegar to the seasoning of soy sauce, sugar, and salt.

One ingredient that he did keep was one you rarely see in American cookbooks these days: MSG, or monosodium glutamate. It was once a core seasoning ingredient in recipes but has since fallen out of favor.

Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Torie Cox / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

There is an enemy lurking in your spice cabinet. Not the cream of tartar, leave her out of this. Not even the mysterious spice blend that has been there forever and is now probably mostly dust but you can’t throw it out because your uncle made it and it's the only thing he uses when he visits. No, this enemy is far more insidious, and, I regret to say, omnipresent. It is irritating. It is legion. It is the terrible plastic doohickey that they put on the top of your bottle of spices. 

The technical term for these unbelievably irritating contraptions is the “sifter cap.” It’s the little round piece of plastic with holes in it that allegedly allows you to shake a small amount of spices into your dish without dumping an enormous amount of cumin or cayenne or turmeric into the pot. 

You would think that would be useful. But as anyone who has ever used spices with these nefarious prophylactics on them knows, what they in fact do is inhibit the movement of the precious spices to such a degree that you can never get the right amount. I hate them with my entire life.

Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Rishon Hanners / Prop Styling by Claire Spollen

We're in a boom time for beans, thanks to the Instant Pot and a heightened awareness of beans as a sustainable, cheap source of protein in a time of rapidly escalating climate change (and a growing number of plant-based eaters). Once you have heirloom beans, you need to put in some work to make them not just edible, but tasty. It has come to my attention that it isn't necessarily common knowledge that vegetables and beans deserve to be seasoned just as effusively as a whole roast chicken or a cut of steak. If you boil some beans, without much in the way of salt or seasoning or anything else, they're not going to hurt you, but they're probably not going to be as delicious as they can be if you do a few really simple things to add flavor to them. There are times when you want beans to be relatively unseasoned — like when they're an ingredient in another dish — but if you want to eat beans, say, with a bowl of white rice, you'll have a lot more flavor if you add a few simple things as you simmer them.

Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Margaret Monroe Dickey / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

Whether your home bar contains just a bottle or two or a full panoply of spirits and liqueurs, your liquor cabinet can be a source of easy upgrades to everyday cooking. The same flavors and aromas you might savor when sipping a cocktail are amplified and dispersed throughout food as it’s cooked. Despite alcohol’s relatively low boiling point (173°F compared to water’s boiling point of 212°F), food scientist Harold McGee notes that “it’s impossible to cook out all of the alcohol [in a dish].” As it cooks and some molecules evaporate, the initial burn associated with drinking alcohol will lessen and in some cases almost completely dissipate (depending on the length of cooking), but the flavors of the spirit will remain and actually become concentrated.

Think of your spirits collection as a second pantry. Try starting with a splash of piney gin mingled with fruity Castelvetrano olives to create a simple pan sauce like in cookbook author Amy Thielen’s Dirty Martini Pork Chops, or explore the versatility of sherry and Cognac, which bring complexity and a gentle sharpness to cut through the rich and cheesy sauce in Creamy Chicken and Root Vegetable Gratin.

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