Skillet

If you keep canned beans, tomatoes, onion and garlic in your pantry, you can make this dish on any weeknight without having to shop. The pickled onions aren’t strictly necessary, but they are simple to make and add a welcome tangy contrast to the beans. Pickled peppers are a fine substitute. If you have a bell pepper or jalapeño or two, chop them up and sauté them with the onions. And if you want to be fancy, grate the zest off the lime before juicing for the pickles, and stir it into the sour cream.

For a twist on standard fried rice, we don’t just scramble an egg or two into the mix. Instead, we “poach” a few in hollowed-out areas of the fried rice until the whites are just set and the yolks are deliciously runny. While the eggs cook, the rice forms a golden brown, nicely crisped bottom crust.

Broccoli Delight was born on a night when I came home from work very hungry and without a plan, and my near-empty fridge came through for me.

It's also a dish that my teenage son claims is the “best thing you make.” While this could be construed as an insult considering how many other things I’ve made for him, I’m pretty sure it’s meant as a compliment, and that what he’s getting at is that pan-roasted broccoli florets bound to one another by melted-crispy sheets of cheese never disappoints.

To achieve stir-fried asparagus with a flavorful browned exterior and a crisp-tender texture, we had to start with a hot pan and only stir the asparagus occasionally. This allowed the vegetables to char and caramelize. To ensure that the vegetables cooked evenly, we diluted the sauce with water. This diluted sauce created a small amount of steam, cooking the spears through, before evaporating and leaving behind a flavorful glaze.

For great-tasting, cohesive burgers, we start by grinding tortilla chips in the food processor. We then pulse the beans with the chips so the beans maintain some texture. Eggs, and flour, which contains sticky amylopectin, help to hold the burger mix together. To keep the preparation simple, we add no-cook seasonings that bolster the Latin American flavor of the burgers. Letting the mixture sit in the refrigerator for an hour gives the starches time to soak up moisture from the egg, so the patties are easier to shape. 

This savory Dutch baby is like Yorkshire pudding meets a popover meets a gougère, flavored with browned butter, Parmesan and thyme. You can serve it for brunch, pancake style. Or try it as an hors d’oeuvre. Bring the whole thing out to your guests and let them tear it apart with their hands. Salty, cheesy and delicious. 

The curried vegetables will heat quickly in a skillet, then drop a few eggs in little wells in the vegetables until the whites just set. The dish is reminiscent of Middle Eastern shakshuka. Use toasted naan to scoop up sauce and golden runny yolks.

Pan-roasted fish seems like a simple dish, but in reality it is usually only well executed by practiced chefs. At home, the dish often results in dry, overbaked fillets. We set out to develop a foolproof recipe for producing succulent, well-browned fillets. From an initial round of testing, we knew we needed thick fillets; skinnier pieces end up overcooked by the time they’ve achieved a serious sear. We then turned to a common restaurant method to cook the fish: Sear the fillet in a hot pan, flip, then transfer it to a hot oven to finish cooking.

 The earthy, faintly bitter flavor of the blue-green leaves of lacinato kale is offset here by sweet dried cranberries and a splash of cider. You can also use curly kale, if you like.

My housemate Jason is from Phoenix, where a particularly prolific grapefruit tree grows in his yard. His mother sent us several plump, pungent fruits, which I decided to pair with thin slices of fresh fennel. The chickpeas are tossed with pimenton de la vera, a Spanish smoked paprika (available at Christina’s Spice & Specialty Foods, 1255 Cambridge St., Cambridge, 617-576-2090). Of the three classifications, the “dulce’’ variety is best for this recipe. Pimenton de la vera literally makes everything it touches infinitely better.