Twenty years ago, I started this website because I wanted a place to share recipes I was excited about, as it’s practically coded into my DNA to be an unfettered yap about the things I love. [This is me.] The larger context was that upon reaching so-called adulthood, I’d found that while I knew how to cook, there were still so many things I hadn’t figured out, such as: how to turn a can of tomatoes into not just an okay pasta sauce, but a spectacular one; how to make really good meatballs; perfect hummus; and a crumb cake I’d want to make forever.

You’d think that 20 years and more than 1400 recipes later, I’d be closing this chapter. What could there possibly be left to know? Haven’t we kale salad-ed and tomato soup-ed and apple pie-d our way to fulfillment yet?

Well no, absolutely not. In fact, most days, I feel like I’m just getting started.

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Do you ever look around at the ingredients available to you, the energy you have to give to the cooking process — or, as I recently explained to a medium-sized child shortly before I got uninvited from future family events, the amount of fudge you have left to give from your, uh, bucket of fudge — and decided to boil spaghetti, toss it with garlicky olive oil, and call it dinner?

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I’m not sure if this is a sign of hitting a certain age — like a sudden interest in bird feeders (check, and please tell me about yours), or beekeeping (well, in the TikTok sense, not sorry), and animated conversations on the best pillows (I hate mine) — but I’ve found over the last year that I have very strong opinions on chicken salad and the correct way to make it, which, naturally, is my way. I hope I’m in the right place to release them into the world.

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How do you cook when your kitchen isn’t available for kitchen-ing? On a Sunday last April, I awoke at the crack of dawn jet-lagged from an (excellent) trip to Amsterdam* to an email from my apartment building that ConEd had found a gas leak in the main line to the building and had shut down service for safety. With this, I was indoctrinated into a society of New Yorkers I previously hadn’t known existed, as NYC is apparently riddled with tales of people who lived without gas for (what seemed like the minimum of) 6 months and up to 18 months while their building trudged at a snail’s pace through rounds of repairs and inspections.

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If you want a homemade pizza that requires no kneading, no special flour, or long wait time (because who among us has ever said “what I really crave is pizza that will be ready 1 to 3 days from now”), you should really, really be making more pan pizzas at home. You might even consider it a worthwhile addition to your 2026 cooking bucket list.

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Unless you’re living your life better than me (probably!), I bet it’s been way too long since you last had a baked potato for dinner — or, as they’re more charmingly called across the pond, “jacket potato.” And it’s a crime because they’re so cozy and uncomplicated to make, we could fix this right now.

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What did we get up to while our kids’ time away overlapped for two weeks this summer? Did we go on vacation? Did we party every night? The truth is honestly embarrassing, so middle-aged coded, Deb of the early Smitten Kitchen years would rage and weep. [“You promised you wouldn’t get lame!”] I got… orthotics. And even worse than considering this newsworthy, I love them. I caught up on appointments. I challenged myself to finish books before they were overdue at the library and occasionally pulled it off. Sometimes I drank an entire 8 glasses of water and went to bed by 10:30pm. Sure, we went out. We had uninterrupted conversations. We drank Hugo spritzes. We saw dogs playing in a kiddie pool set up in front of an open fire hydrant and lamented that the kids were missing it, then reloaded their last locations and photos from the camp stream a million more times. We said things to each other like, “I miss the kids, but not parenting.” I watched this clip and it emotionally wrecked me. I’d sleep through my alarm in the morning and nobody was there to tell me I make weird faces in my sleep or that they’d promised they’d bring homemade treats to school that day. Friends, it was wild.

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Until recently, I was fairly ambivalent about one-pan pasta recipes. I appreciate them in a pinch [here’s a longtime favorite; and this is my total comfort food], but I sometimes find that when the pasta is cooked in a sauce the whole time, it doesn’t quite get that al dente definition and structural integrity that it does when cooked in water. I’m so glad I didn’t quit on them, though, because with this recipe, not to be dramatic or anything, but I feel like I’ve finally cracked the code.

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We jokingly call these meaty, greeny, cheesy, beany, spicy baked chickpeas because, well, internet recipe naming conventions make us laugh but I really think of them as Pizza Beans 2.0. I introduced Pizza Beans 1.0 in my second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day, where I dreamed of a mash-up of Greek gigante beans in tomato sauce and an American baked ziti, with beans instead of noodles. I called them “pizza” beans to try to convince my then-kindergartener to try them with clever marketing. We still adore the recipe and all of the truly unexpected places it’s landed.

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Eighteen years is long enough for a website to go without a potato leek soup recipe, don’t you think? I’ve always been a bit torn about it — it’s thick, pale, and can be a little sleepy. And yet if there is any time of year that’s going to bring out my cravings for filling and uncomplicated soup, if there’s any time of year when my nostalgia kicks in for the thick, hearty vegetable porridges I had in Ireland with brown bread and ale, if there’s any time of year when I’d happily act and eat like a slumbering bear in a childhood fairytale, it’s January. January is biting cold and generally irredeemable unless your only commitments are to comfort and coziness. I’ll do my best to keep us covered.

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It’s humbling that way every September, without fail, knocks me on my rump. One week, you’re breezy and unscheduled, reading books on a beach and tearing lobster apart with your bare hands (indeed, we were in Maine) and the next you’re realizing a certain fetid backpack was never emptied on the last day of school in June, scrambling for after-school care, and despite the fact that I work every week of the year, somehow there’s a lot more to do. If dinner can’t be made in one pan in which everything cooks at once, I haven’t been making it. And yet I’ve made this chicken dish four times in the last month; it’s clearly time to shout about it across the internet.

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Last summer, when my younger child joined my older child at sleepaway camp for a month for the first time, leaving us unmoored and a little restless, we made a list of restaurants we’d been meaning to try and friends we don’t see enough and took this task on like it was our job. I barely cooked once. By the end of the third week, everything hurt and we realized our template for a child-free life (going out late, cocktails on weeknights, and generally behaving despicably) was based on our age and energy level when we were last child-free, which (I’m sorry as this fact seems to upset you guys as much as it does his actual parents) was almost 15 years ago.

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