November 2022

Patatas panaderas, a simple yet luxurious dish of thinly sliced potatoes accented with onions and garlic and baked in white wine and plenty of olive oil, is little known outside of Spain, but it deserves a place among the iconic potato dishes of Europe. In our version, we covered the potatoes with a tight foil lid so that the potatoes could soften. We withheld the wine for the first 40 minutes of cooking to prevent its acid from interfering with the softening of the potatoes.

Most sweet potato soup recipes call for so many other ingredients that the sweet potato flavor is muted. By cutting back to just shallot, thyme, and butter and using water instead of broth, we put the focus back on the main ingredient. We also puree some of the potato skins into the soup for extra earthiness. However, the real key to intensifying the sweet potato flavor was using only a minimal amount of flavor-diluting water. To do so, we let the sweet potatoes sit in hot water off heat for 20 minutes to make use of an enzyme that reduces their starch content.

In a spread of Greek appetizers, or meze, there’s often a warm feta dish like bouyiourdi (baked feta with tomato and hot peppers) or a saganaki (fried cheese). This recipe combines elements of these two classic appetizers into a sheet-pan meal. Softened feta provides a salty, creamy counterpoint to sweet, juicy tomatoes and chickpeas that are sticky from honey and spicy from dried chile. Try this version, then riff wildly: Switch out tomatoes for mini peppers, olives, dates or cauliflower. Swap the hot honey for anchovies, harissa, smoked paprika or turmeric.

This classic Venetian dish typically uses bigoli, a whole-wheat pasta shaped like fat spaghetti. We like it with regular spaghetti, as well as with bucatini (also called perciatelli), a tubular, spaghetti-like shape. Toasted bread crumbs, or pangrattato in Italian, aren’t traditional, but they add a welcome crispness. We use Japanese-style panko for its light, airy texture and toast it in olive oil before mixing in chopped parsley and lemon zest.

The anchovies should not be rinsed before mincing, as this will wash away some flavor.