This quick soup, one of Chris’s go-tos on a snowy day, uses a genius shortcut ingredient: tomato sauce, but a few plum tomatoes keep the flavor fresh. Chris’s favorite mini pasta, ditalini, adds the umph to make it a meal.
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Alex Province’s Quick Version of a Traditional Cocido (Spanish Soup)
There’s nothing better than roasting a chicken low and slow for Sunday dinner. But, I don’t stop there. While I’m doing the dishes after dinner, I’ve got the chicken carcass in a stockpot simmering away on the stove so my husband Matt and I can have a delicious homemade stock for a Spanish soup later on.
Miso-Butter Roast Chicken and Potatoes
Slow-cooking a “roast” chicken yields moist, juicy meat but flabby skin—the easy fix is to run the carved chicken under the broiler to crisp the skin before serving. The miso-honey mixture that’s drizzled on before broiling helps the skin get deep caramelization, and it also reinforces the salty-sweet miso flavor you added in the beginning, which will have mellowed.
Winter Tomato Sauce
This is a slow-cooker adaptation of Marcella Hazan’s famous 3-ingredient marinara sauce. The butter makes the sauce plush. Good-quality canned tomatoes are a useful pantry staple year-round but especially in winter when fresh tomatoes seem a lifetime away.
Sticky Toffee Pudding with Maple Caramel
Sticky toffee pudding is a rich British dessert that’s basically an exceptionally moist date cake with caramel sauce poured over the top. Steaming in the slow cooker is an absolutely foolproof way to make it. The maple syrup in the easy caramel sauce is an unorthodox American addition—but maple goes so well with dates.
Braised Beef with Lots and Lots of Onions
This is one of those miraculous dishes that uses only a few basic ingredients (beef, onions, garlic, thyme, etc.), doesn’t require much technique or fussing, and yet produces a delectable and soul-satisfying dish that’s superb on its own but lends itself to leftover improvisation.
