Pan-fried eggplant (gaji-gui) is a quick Korean side dish made with flour-coated eggplant and a savory soy sauce seasoning. Tender, juicy, and wonderfully smoky, it's ready in just 10 minutes.

My strongest opinion on Thanksgiving sides is that whenever possible, they should come in a casserole dish (or its chic French cousin, a gratin). I don’t mean that your sides should be limited to things that swim in cream, cheese, butter, or a happy combination of all three — although one dish in this category is highly welcome on my table — I simply mean that sides like this, that is baked in dishes with walls, tend to excel at holding up to resting times, reheat well, and stay warm longer.

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Fermenting can't get easier with this fish sauce based ferment of pickled peppers in soy sauce. It's made with traditional Korean green peppers that are mild, sweet, juicy, and super crispy. The flavorful juice in the peppers squirts out with every bite, so be careful!

This radish salad is super-easy to make and is the perfect side dish to rice or noodles. Fresh, crispy, spicy, salty and savory, it looks beautiful and tastes fantastic!

Do you have a big, neglected cabbage in your fridge awaiting the right inspiration? I had a feeling you did. The way I figure it, the sidewalks are currently covered in pink and white petal confetti, the ramps are here, and the asparagus is close, thus I’m crossing my fingers that this can be our last hurrah with heavy winter vegetables until at least November. We’re going to make it a good one.

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I realize, after 18 years as a part of it, that the rules of the food internet in the week before the American cooking superbowl we call Thanksgiving dictate that everything should relate back to turkey, stuffing, or pie. But friends, we have that abundantly covered in the archives, and the newsletter. So let me tell you what I’ve been making a lot lately to feed myself what I crave, and that is sheet pans of mixed vegetables roasted until almost charred, finished with a balsamic vinaigrette, and studded with heavenly, salty, crispy pillows of halloumi.

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I hadn’t planned to spend most of the fall to date making skillets upon skillets of baked, gooey, decadent macaroni and cheese, though given the state of things right now, perhaps this steady dose of comfort food was some unintended brilliance on my part. But mostly it started because we had baked mac and cheese from The Smith one night. My kids fought over the last scrapings from the pan and I reminded them — I honestly don’t even think they realize it sometimes — that I could make it for them, too. And so the next night, I pulled up my trusty Martha’s mac-and-cheese, a forever SK and internet favorite, and it immediately …irked me. Start with cooked pasta? Warm the milk for the bechamel? So many pans, so many bowls, so many steps. On a Tuesday, no less. It felt unacceptable.

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“I was looking for a simple roasted carrot recipe on your site and couldn’t find one,” a friend told me a month ago and I immediately put “simple roasted carrot recipe” on my sprawling, decades-long To Cook list because sometimes I forget myself, too. Spoiler: I was never going to write a simple recipe for roasted carrots.

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A simple, refreshing, nutty side dish I learned how to make from the Buddhist monks in Korea. A one-minute sautée brings it to life and makes all the other dishes on the table taste better!

If you were to make a multi-part Venn diagram combining my favorite salad things, you could nestle this right in the center. It’s one part wedge salad, the fork and steak knife kind, something I am so into I talked my podcast co-host Kenji (okay, it wasn’t hard) into dedicating a whole episode to it. And it contains cabbage, and not just cabbage but Napa cabbage, which I think deserves more credit as a salad green. [This can be convenient to know as it often comes in heads large enough to feed a small family for a week.] Napa cabbage is a little leafy, a little crunchy, and yet kind of juicy too and I’ve used it, sliced thin, in everything from this Italian-style salad to a classic Caesar.
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