40 Ingredients Forever

a Superiority Burger dupe A few weeks ago I went into the city to have dinner with two parts of my heart that hadn’t been all together in over three years. My two friends and I shuffled into a booth at Superiority Burger and it felt like that opening scene in a holiday movie when the childhood friends come home for the holidays and you catch up for hours at a diner. Even with so much to talk about, the food did get some attention.

Such a good list. Hello and thanks for playing Dinner Tetris, a series here at 40 Ingredients Forever where a reader shares the ingredients they always have on hand and I dream up three dinners using those ingredients.— Ali I was super curious to get Ottolenghi’s list of 40 forever ingredients — the only ingredients he’d cook with for the rest of his life! — because he cooks so confidently with hundreds of ingredients.

40 Ingredients Forever is a newsletter where all the dinners use the same 40 ingredients. The result? Maximal joy and minimal shopping. I am enthusiastically pro dinner salad. It has nothing to do with health and everything to do with how alive dinner immediately feels when there’s a variety of textures bouncing off one another and the pierce of the dressing’s acid running through every bite. But, as you know from all those salads impulsively purchased for lunch, not every salad makes a full meal.

Remember when broccoli was “yucky”? I don’t know why the tides changed on this vegetable, but Americans now spend an average of two billion dollars a year on it. I’m so glad we love broccoli now because it’s dependable, versatile, and cute. You can buy it from any grocery store, it lasts a long time in your fridge, and you can do so many things with it. Not only is this vegetable one of my 40 forever ingredients, it also made the title of my next cookbook, Sunny with a Chance of Broccoli.

Hello wonderful people. Design by the one and only Linda Huang! I am over the moon, stars, and milky mozzarella way to show you the cover of my next cookbook, SUNNY WITH A CHANCE OF BROCCOLI: EASY, HEALTHY DINNERS, out February 16. In the world of this book, healthy food is delicious, doable, and delightful —because broccoli’s only good for you if you actually eat it. This book is for anyone who wants to eat a little healthier without a whole new personality or pantry. (Is that you?

Hello and thanks for playing Dinner Tetris, a series here at 40 Ingredients Foreverwhere a reader shares the ingredients they always have on hand and I dream up three dinners using those ingredients.— Ali carla lalli inspires me to remember that your superpower is your you-ness, and to write recipes that are real. She came out with her third and most personal book this week, Food is a Feeling, and I love that she’s like you know what I’m including a recipe for buttered rice with sautéed kale.

TKTKTKTKKTTK Welcome to the slouchy phase of tomato season. At this point in their lifespan, not all the tomatoes are quite firm enough to hold together in a salad. So let your cooking encourage their soft bodies to collapse – to smush, slouch, exhale their sweet juices. Sure, today’s recipe is a chicken dinner that features these tomato gushers and takes 20 minutes and one sheet pan.

Fresh tomatoes are fickle friends/foes and that is why I choose cherry tomatoes most often (and why they’re one of my 40 forever ingredients). They are the trustiest of the tomatoes because their size makes them more consistently sweet. As I wrote in this recent NYT article, tomatoes the size of gumballs have less space for water to dilute their tangy juices, so they’re more consistently flavorful. (And when I say “cherry tomatoes,” I mean any small tomato — cherry, grape, Sungolds, etc.

40 Ingredients Forever is devoted to recipes that are abundant in flavor and joy yet streamlined in process and shopping—because they’ll all be made using my 40 go-to ingredients. Only fools futz with Marcella Hazan’s perfect tomato sauce, in which canned or fresh tomatoes, a halved onion, butter, and salt simmer together for 45 minutes or so. The butter softens the tomatoes’ acidity and gives the sauce a creaminess, and the onion sweetens the sauce without making it oniony.

Welcome to Dinner Tetris, an advice column here at 40 Ingredients Foreverwhere a reader shares the ingredients they always have on hand and I dream up three dinners using those ingredients. If you’d like your pantries Tetris-ed into dinner, head here. Samin Nosrat’s Tetris is here. Ham El-Waylly’s Tetris is here. A high-protein, high-fiber Tetris for subscriber Shayna is here.