A happy accident today. A “yogurt dip” recipe by Marcus Samuelsson went awry and turned out to be way too thin, so I made a marinade out of it and it was gorgeous. Here’s my recipe, adapted  yogurt dip.

In a small bowl, mix

• 1.5 C plain whole milk yogurt
• the juice of 2 limes (while you’re at it, check out this protip on juicing limes efficiently)
• 2 tsp parsley, minced
• 2 tsp cilantro, minced

In a small pan over medium heat, add

• 2 T olive oil
• 2 inches ginger, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• a few whole dried chiles de árbol, or 1/2 tsp red chile flakes

Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Then add:

• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander

Cook for a couple more minutes to get them spices toasty. Remove the chiles de árbol and do something else with them.

Allow this to cool a bit, then stir it into the yogurt mixture. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add:

• 6 bone-in chicken thigh+leg pieces

And refrigerate 1+ hours.

When you’re ready to cook, preheat the oven to 400F and bring out your chicken. Remove most of the marinade from the chicken pieces and place them on a rack in a sheet pan. Bake for about 45 minutes, basting with the remaining marinade twice during the final 20 minutes.

In November, we spent a week in the southeastern part of Sicily, one of my favorite parts of Italy.

Also where some of my favorite markets are. Siracusa top, Catania above.

Cooking at home is a lifestyle, and it has to fit your schedule and your routine in order to work. And while we haven’t made enough time for the farmer’s market, we’ve made do with the four good stores that are within a five minute walk. We can even get farmer’s market-grade produce at one of them–at a premium.

And still, at the end of a long workday, toward the end of a long work week, Karl and I often regress to whatever’s in the pantry. We know this. And until we get our act together and head to the farmer’s market, we’re trying to make the pantry nicer. We have Indian simmer sauces, Italian bean soups in jars, really nice tins of trout fillets in oil for simple rice bowls with nori. Add in frozen paneer and naan, frozen scallops and veggies, frozen stock, and a few things we always have in the fridge (eggs, milk, scallions, kimchee, miso, etc…) and it’s possible to pull together a delicious, sometimes nutritious, meal quickly.

And when we’re really lazy, there’s pasta. Here we draw a line in the sand: we always make the sauce from scratch. A can of diced tomatoes. A desiccated garlic clove, haphazardly chopped. Are those artichoke hearts from the back of the fridge still good? Perfect. Throw them in. Splash in some leftover red wine from the other night. Capers. Lots of pepper.

But what brings the entire thing come to life–the secret ingredient–is the olive oil on top at the very end. Lately, I am smitten with Costa dei Rosmarini olive oil from Liguria. Beautiful and silky, it makes even the humdrum pantry pasta sing out with fruity flavors, evoking the Italian summer. I’m putting it on everything.

What’s your favorite pantry ingredient these days? How will you make it through this winter?

We were invited to a holiday potluck, and after receiving my assignment (something meaty), I struggled for a few days with what to make — devils on horseback, meatballs, wings, pâté — but just wasn’t feeling it. But then I latched onto porchetta, which turns out to be excellent potluck food. I had to stop at three different meat counters before I finally found unsliced belly and then had to cheat a little with the roast tying job (ran out of twine), as is evident above, and the internal temperature soared well above the recommended 160°F, but in the end everything turned out okay. This Serious Eats recipe is incredibly forgiving and reaps a huge return for not very much investment (of active time, money, effort).

The only sad aspect of making porchetta for a crowd is coming across the inevitable skin discarder. Such a waste! Maybe next time I should make a sign requesting that all such culprits return their discarded skins to the platter so more discerning eaters can benefit.

I can’t wait to make it again.

The tonnarelli cacio e pepe at Flavio al Velovevodetto in Testaccio has left us pining for this dish days and weeks afterward. And now that I’ve found Saveur’s excellent recipe, it’s going into permanent rotation. (I think the last time I tried to make it, maybe a decade ago, I had improvised using a mere description and did not add enough pasta water, did not stir and toss long enough, did not use the right cheese — and ended up with dry clumpy globs. Very unpleasant.) With so few ingredients, the raw materials themselves are of utmost importance: you need the sharpness from the pecorino romano and the oozy, velvety lushness of the cacio. If Eataly had some fresh tonnarelli lying around, I would use that, but in its place I use dried bucatini (which is one of my favorite shapes anyway).

A five-pound version of the hong shao rou from the excellent Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. Fed us for a week.

An amalgam of two recipes I found online: shrimp with tomato sauce and feta.

I’d seen some mention of this combination somewhere on the internets, and it stuck (as so many recipes do until I realize them — does this happen to you too?).

We happened upon some good-looking Gulf shrimp, and in our renewed effort to clear out the freezer, I also recalled that I had a quart of Marcella sauce squirreled away. The perfect confluence of events.

The result tasted exactly as I’d imagined (and hoped) it would, and I was gratified to hear from a Greek acquaintance that it is “ultra Greek.”

Definitely a new favorite.

My friend Lillian came up with this recipe for the much-lamented Gourmet back in 2007, but I only just discovered it a few weeks ago, which means that there were seven long years that I missed out on this.

Poke desired number of white Japanese sweet potatoes with a fork and roast at 450F for 45 minutes to an hour. Meanwhile, allow half or a full stick (believe me, you’ll want to make as much of this as you can) of butter soften, then mash butter with a few scallions, chopped, and spoonful or two of miso paste. She says to use white miso, but red has worked just fine for me. Split roasted potatoes and liberally apply miso-scallion butter. I want to put this stuff on everything.

I’m not big on the winter holidays, but over the last couple of years, compelled by the magical Massari panettone that my ever-generous friend Anna turned me on to, I have fully embraced Christmas cakes.

I used to think panettone was a dry, flavorless pincushion filled with weirdly colored bits that looked and tasted like plastic — and that’s because so many are. But good panettone might as well be a whole other phylum unto itself. Good panettone has a tender, feathery crumb, maybe with a slight pleasantly sugary edge to it, like a non-cloying cotton candy, and the extended proofing of the yeasted dough gives it a lovely toasty complexity. The candied and confited fruit taste fresh. Because they are.

This year, we may have gone a little overboard. In addition to the three panettoni on the left (from Eataly) and right (which Marisa hand-carried all the way from Padova) in the photo above, we also had a panbriacone (thanks again, Anna!), which is a liqueur-soaked panettone, and the Lekerlee lebkuchen. We only just finished the last panettone last week (and every year, I wonder how they have such a long shelf-life; for now I prefer it to remain a mystery), which was the red-boxed chocolate-and-cherry one. Texture was okay, but I thought it tasted like cough syrup. The Alajmo and Cova (just below) ones were top-notch.

The panbriacone (above) had a remarkably moist crumb and good flavor overall, but I think I’m too much of a lightweight to have more than a sliver of it. The alcohol was a serious punch in the face. (Alex polished off the rest.) Having now had these, plus the Emporio Rulli one last year, I can still say that Massari is still the gold standard. Get your hands on one if you can. And then be sure to ship it to me immediately.

How have I never had lebkuchen before? I was worried that this was going to be all style and no substance (admittedly, half the reason I shelled out for these was the tin, which was very well done — and a good place to store dog treats once it’s been emptied of lebkuchen), but the gingerbready spice cake was so delicious. I had the variety pack, which included one or two chocolate-covered ones. I didn’t think the chocolate was necessarily an improvement, though it wasn’t a detraction either. Chocolate or no, these are a new favorite.

This year, Carl introduced us to English-by-way-of-California Christmas cake. I went on a shopping spree at Bi-Rite when we were in the Bay Area over Thanksgiving and picked up Robert Lambert’s dark and white fruitcakes and June Taylor’s Christmas cake. Turns out super precious fruitcake made by hand from perfectly ripe, locally grown California produce is, yes, really fucking good. I would eat any of them again. And in fact, we are still hoarding the RL dark.

On the docket for next year: make my own fruitcake and get someone to make me a bûche de Nöel.