For vegetarians, bake hollowed out eggplant halves filled with zucchini, tomatoes, and feta, and topped with bread crumbs and Parmesan. For a hearty second-day dish, mix leftover eggplant with pasta, ricotta, and feta.
This gratin of sliced potatoes baked with cream and milk is a French classic. Some versions contain grated cheese, but this one does not. You can also blanch the potatoes first, which we skip here. Slice the potatoes very thinly, either on a hand-held slicing gadget or fancy mandoline. Food-processor feed tubes are so narrow that potatoes must be halved or quartered lengthwise first, which will taste fine in the finished gratin, but it won’t look as elegant in the dish. Layer the potatoes with milk, cream, salt, and pepper. Not much to it.
You need half the cooked potatoes from the gratin, which are baked with lightly beaten eggs until the edges set. This Spanish dish is similar to an Italian frittata.
A hearty bowl of pasta plus savory cheese? You'd never know this whole-grain comfort food is diet-friendly! Squash supplies all the vitamin A you need for the day.
Meena Kumar doesn’t use standard curry spices when she makes zucchini because, she says, “Every vegetable needs its own specific blend of ingredients to bring out the uniqueness of the dish.’’ Because zucchini is a soft and watery vegetable with a delicate flavor, she says, it needs few spices. Here, she uses chili powder and mixes ground cashews and sesame seeds into the vegetable, which is garnished with fresh cilantro.
Leftover risotto, loosened with a little water, is delicious reheated. But you can also make rice cakes. Stir beaten eggs into the chilled leftovers, then shape it into disks, coat with flour, and sear in a skillet. Like stir-fried rice, crisping the cakes adds a new dimension of flavor and texture.
Use the same skillet to cook four eggs, sunny side up or over-easy. The soft yolks make an instant sauce over the golden mushroom-filled rounds.
Risotto has a reputation for being a labor-intensive dish that requires your undivided attention. It does take 30 minutes of constant stirring, but if you can boil pasta, you can cook risotto. When you stir chicken broth a little at a time into short-grain rice, the starches inside the rice kernels release slowly and lend a remarkable creaminess to the dish.
Dark leafy greens are the most nutrient-dense foods. That means that they contain more beneficial micronutrients per calorie than any other food, providing incredible nutritional bang for your buck, and in this case they're ready, and very tasty, in less than 15 minutes. Serve with lemon wedges for even more flavor.
Why you'll make it: Because it's the perfect pasta dish — few ingredients, easy prep, big flavors.