I have never met Rick Martínez — I would love to, ideally with Choco in tow — but I consider him my cookie godfather. In 2017 he wrote about his favorite brown butter chocolate chip cookies for Bon Appétit; I made them and won third place in New York magazine’s staff holiday cookie contest that year. I’ve made the cookies a million times since, to the point that friends refer to them as “those cookies.” Rick does a lot of things well (like grilled chicken and brown butter glazed radishes and refried beans), but damn if that man doesn’t know a chocolate chip cookie.
His new recipe for piloncillo chocolate chip cookies, then, deserves a red carpet rollout, blaring trumpets and ticker tape confetti. Grating the piloncillo (unrefined whole-cane sugar) is admittedly a bit of a chore, but the depth of flavor it adds to the cookies — notes of caramel, butterscotch, molasses, brown butter, even honeysuckle and anise — is well worth the elbow grease. It also adds texture, as the larger pieces of broken piloncillo render like bits of toffee inside the finished cookies. These are destined to be “those cookies.”
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Piloncillo Chocolate Chip Cookies
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Shifting from sweet to savory, David Tanis’s spring chicken with mushroom and lemon is a perfect excuse to go wild with all those fresh, leafy herbs at the market: dill, tarragon, parsley, chives and mint. Or go all in on your favorite (for me, that would be evergreen and ever-ready parsley). Leftover herbs can go into Melissa Clark’s all-purpose green sauce — which, incidentally, would be delicious on leftover chicken.
Spring is also springing in this seared fish with creamed kale and leeks from Alexa Weibel, where the sautéed leeks do double duty, first infusing the cream that dresses the kale, and then mixing in with the rice to form a pale green pilaf.
Springtime also means fava beans. But as much as I love those beautiful, tender little beans, I don’t love the shelling and peeling it takes to get to them. Thankfully, the fava beans in Ifrah F. Ahmed’s fuul (Somali-style fava bean stew) come from a can, and I’m going to try it with the frozen favas I have stashed in my freezer next to the peas. (It’s always springtime in the freezer.)
Pasta amatriciana isn’t springy, per se, but something about Kay Chun’s recipe feels perfectly suited for blue skies. Maybe it’s the colors: the pale pink of the guanciale, the vermilion sauce or — a true sign of the shifting seasons — the glass of dry rosé I want to drink with it.
Lastly, I’ve had a strong hankering for nachos lately. (This is misleading; I almost always want nachos.) Ali Slagle’s loaded vegan nachos aren’t any more work than your standard loaded nachos, and the result — crunchy chips and all the necessary nacho building blocks draped in a creamy, smooth cauliflower-based queso — can be devoured by meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike. I love diving into these vegan nachos knowing that the “cheese” sauce is actually a vegetable, a real “gold stars for me” moment.
