30-Minute Shakshuka and More Recipes BA Staff Cooked This Week

It’s no secret that BA editors cook a lot for work. So it should come as no surprise that we cook a lot during our off-hours too. Here are the recipes we’re whipping up this month to get dinner on the table, to entertain our friends, to satisfy a sweet tooth, to use up leftovers, and everything in between. For even more staff favorites, click here.

April 14

Life-changing carrot cake

I’ve turned to the same carrot cake recipe for the past 17 years (Dorie Greenspan’s from Baking: From My Home to Yours, a book every baker should own), but now I have a new favorite for the next 17: Shilpa Uskokovic’s from BA’s March issue. Instead of a layer cake, which has brought me to tears more than once, it is a sheet cake, which requires no architectural integrity or good luck. Instead of grating carrots, you blend them. Instead of raisins, there is candied pineapple. Instead of too-sweet cream cheese frosting, this one is salty and tangy. It shook me to my core.  —Emma Laperruque, senior cooking editor

Carrot Sheet Cake With Cream Cheese Whip

Shilpa Uskokovic

The crispiest tofu nuggets

I love an audible crunch. It’s a sensation that eluded me (and my convection-less oven) until my boyfriend’s mom sent me an air fryer for my latest birthday. Now I won’t stop making loud foods: french fries, frozen egg rolls, and these marinated tofu nuggets. Potato starch and salt form a bark-like shell around the tofu, and a spray of cooking oil roasts the exterior to tater-tot-gold. Dip them in a mix of sambal oelek, soy sauce, brown sugar, and rice vinegar. Or maybe even ketchup. —Ali Francis, staff writer

Low-effort, high-reward shakshuka

We are moving soon, so the secondary quest of every meal these days is “use up whatever you can from the pantry.” This weekend the ingredients were my last can of tomatoes and a jar of roasted red peppers. The challenge: make Easter brunch. The solution: Claire Saffitz’s 30-Minute Shakshuka With Yogurt. And the result? A big, comforting pan of tomatoes and peppers, enhanced with a spiced oil, creamy yogurt, and (of course) just-set eggs. I didn’t have mint but for a little greenery, I added leftover broccoli rabe to the tomatoes and peppers once they had almost cooked down. A colleague told me they’ve made this so often they know the recipe by heart, and I am 100% headed on that route. —Sonia Chopra, executive editor

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30-Minute Shakshuka With Yogurt

Claire Saffitz

Bok choy gochujang omelet

Ali Slagle’s cookbook I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) is probably one of only a handful where I’ve cooked it cover to cover multiple times. One recipe I keep coming back to for breakfast is the bok choy gochujang omelet. To prep for the week, I let the bok choy marinate in the gochujang mixture in my fridge—teed up to use whenever I’m ready. This recipe is also the first time I ever put lime zest (or any zest, for that matter) into my eggs, and it changed my entire perspective. It gives you all the brightness of citrus without any excess moisture. Long story short: Put citrus zest in your eggs. —Urmila Ramakrishnan, associate director of social media

Easter-ready baked rice

As all of my family lives on the West Coast, I often celebrate holidays with friends—family by another name. For Easter I gathered with the same family with whom I formed a COVID pod. To accompany the host’s braised lamb, I made Yotam Ottolenghi’s Baked Minty Rice with Feta and Pomegranate Relish. I’ve sung this dish’s praises before. The relish has a bit of briny saltiness from the Castelvetrano olives, and sweetness from the pomegranate seeds and molasses. The baked rice is smooth while the relish has crunch. Bonus: It can be made early and finished just before your guests are summoned to the table. —Dawn Davis, editor in chief

Baked Minty Rice With Feta and Pomegranate Relish

Yotam Ottolenghi

Profiteroles with maple caramel sauce

As soon as I saw the photo of these ice-cream-stuffed, caramel-drenched profiteroles, I knew they’d be my next baking project. This recipe starts with choux pastry, a four-ingredient French dough that is surprisingly easy and fun to make. Choux can skew sweet or savory, so I split my batch in two: After piping the little rounds onto two baking sheets, I showered one sheet with grated Parmesan to make a version of gougères (fancy cheese puffs), which I served as an appetizer. The other sheet I baked as-is: At dessert time I sliced them in half to make sweet profiteroles, filled with a scoop of ice cream and draped in glistening sauce. —Zoe Denenberg, associate cooking & SEO editor

April 7

Nourishing berry smoothie

As if on cue, just when I was thinking I should try to eat more fruit, associate food editor Zaynab Issa developed this Get Up & Go Blueberry Date Cocoa Smoothie as part of her Sehri menu. It hits all the right notes. Dates (blended first so you don’t get bitsy, chewy pieces while you’re drinking) and two whole bananas make it so filling. Cocoa and coffee are flavors I wouldn’t think to pair with blueberries without Zaynab’s guidance. They give this just the right hit of roastiness that keeps it from veering into cloyingly sweet territory like so many fruit smoothies do. It’s become my morning go-to. —Antara Sinha, associate cooking editor

Get Up & Go Blueberry Date Cocoa Smoothie

Zaynab Issa

Crispy, frizzled chickpea bowls

I’ve met Ali Slagle exactly once, yet I have written about how much I adore her (and her very weeknight achievable recipes) on the internet so many times that it’s almost creepy. Here I go again with her Chile-Crisp Chickpea Rice Bowls recipe. Canned chickpeas are frizzled in a crunchy, vibrant slick of chili crisp for a few minutes until they absorb all of that salty-umami-spicy goodness. Then the chickpeas are piled on fluffy rice with a crunchy cucumber and tomato salad and—if you’re me—devoured so fast your mouth tingles. —Ali Francis, staff writer

Cheesy, crispy arancini

I already knew just from reading the recipe that these arancini would be a winner—how could you go wrong with fried cheese-stuffed rice balls? The only possible way to improve on this recipe, as I discovered last night, is to make the arancini with leftover Via Carota lemon risotto. The resulting fried rice balls are a study in contrasts: soft, creamy risotto meets stretchy, melty cheese and a crispy fried coating. Even after a plunge in hot oil, the lemon in the risotto shines through, leaving a lingering brightness. So here is your weekend plan: (1) Make this risotto al limone and (2) use the leftovers to make these arancini. —Zoe Denenberg, associate cooking & SEO editor

Mozzarella Arancini (Stuffed Rice Balls)

Molly Baz

No-recipe crispy tuna patties

I added this adaptable formula to my weeknight dinner arsenal shortly after this story was published, and I haven’t looked back. These choose-your-own-adventure tuna patties call for canned tuna, eggs, panko, and little more—let your imagination and your condiment preferences carry the rest. I opted for Kewpie mayo, hot sauce, and a drizzle of soy sauce on the first go. I ate one hot off the presses for dinner and another one cold, stuffed into a Hawaiian roll the following day. On my second pass at these (they’re that good), I introduced furikake to the mix, just because. —Li Goldstein, digital production assistant

Nora Ephron’s bread pudding

I’m a pretty terrible baker, but it’s really hard to get bread pudding wrong: It’s a giant pile of bread, sugar, and butter. Or as Nora Ephron writes in Heartburn, “caramelized mush.” I’ve been reading Heartburn for the first time, and after dinner last week, a friend and I decided to make the bread pudding in the book. We tossed together a dairy-and-sugar-laden mixture, soaked chunks of old bread in the whole thing (the older the better), and added raisins. Then we poured everything into a casserole pan and baked it for a couple hours. It came out, as promised, like warm, moist, sweet-buttery mush. Super easy, super comforting for a chilly spring evening. —Karen Yuan, culture editor

Heartburn

$27.00, Amazon

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit