Easy!

A sandwich with meat, cheese, and a real vegetable inside? I should know about this.

That’s what I thought when, in researching a piece on Philly Cheesesteaks, I got extraordinarily distracted by the discovery of the steak hero’s porky brother, the Roast Pork Sandwich. While most sandwiches claim a couple tomato slices or some lettuce as all their vegetables, this sandwich has a heap of sautéed broccoli rabe inside with the pork and the cheese. That makes it, in my book, a complete meal, and therefore a dish I should know about.

Even better, both the pork and rabe can be seasoned and cooked in advance, making this satisfying sub accessible on a weeknight if you do some cooking over the weekend.

Normally, the cheese melted on top the pork and rabe is aged provolone. But here I use Roth Cheese’s nutty alpine-style melting cheese, which really rounds out the sandwich.

Well, now you know. When I’m looking to turn a traditionally vegetable-free meal into a dinner I don’t have to make a side-dish vegetable to serve alongside, I automatically add some kale leaves to the soup or the pasta, or, here, the pizza.

There was an article on the wall in the pizzeria I went to growing up about how you could do worse in a desert island food than pizza. You had the carbs, the vegetable, and the protein. You could eat a pie every day. You could eat a slice at every meal. It was a soft sell-you …

Big news! This toasty piece of delicious toasted Stonefire naan topped with tomato achaar (made and sold by my friend Chitra at Brooklyn Delhi) and homemade raita laced with grated cukes and toasted mustard seeds, is not like the other dishes on this blog, the ones that exist only on your computer screen unless you go through the trouble of cooking them yourself.

This delicious piece of Indian-inspired pizza is yours to eat on April 5th in Williamsburg (at Kent & North 8th; it’s Smorgasburg’s first day outdoors), where I’ll be helping welcome Stonefire’s traveling food truck to the city and sharing bites of the delicacy above with all of you. Come say hi!

Here’s a little more about what we’ll be serving. As you can see, it kind of resembles a pizza. In reality, everything is spiced with Indian flavors, rather than being morphed into an Italian look-alike like this naan meatball pizza. Instead of tomato sauce, we’ve got achaar, a sweet, spicy, and tangy relish that’s traditionally used as a topping for rice, curries, or dal. In place of cheese, there’s a cooling raita, a yogurt sauce often paired with achaar. Lastly, we replaced pizza’s basil or oregano with bright mint and cilantro.

Though you might not normally see this naan prepared in exactly this pizza-like style, you definitely could wind up at an Indian feast with condiments, bread, and herbs on the table and find yourself eating just this combination of achaar, raita, and naan, bite by delicious bite.

And if you’d like one of those delicious bites to be yours, come try the Toasted Garlic Naan with Tomato Achaar & Raita in real life. With me. In Brooklyn. See you on Saturday, April 5th outside Smorgasburg, Kent Ave. & N. 8th St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This post was sponsored by Stonefire. Read previous Stonefire posts here and figure out where to get your own naan on Stonefire’s store finder. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that keep Big Girls, Small Kitchen delicious!

There are no excuses right now. The year is new, and if you resolved to cook at home more, you can’t disasppoint yourself just yet. Like you, I sometimes get home at night and don’t want to cook. But I remember, almost always, that dinner doesn’t have to be fancy and that there are myriad meal possibilities that use only a few ingredients and dirty just a pan or two. At those moments, I re-resolve to cook, and in order that you can share in this minor triumph, I put together 11 dinners that take almost no effort, each with a mini summary of what to do so that you don’t really have to read the instructions.

**11 of the Easiest Dinners You Can Possibly Make**

1. Za’atar Roasted Salmon with Greens. Sauté greens and garlic in some olive oil. Turn on the oven, put the salmon on the greens, bake, sprinkle za’atar if you have it and then squeeze on some lemon.

2. Chicken Sausage & Ravioli Soup. Brown sausage, onion, and garlic. Add tomatoes and chicken stock, then simmer away. Cook ravioli and spinach right in the pot. Eat.

3. Grilled Swiss & Roasted Fennel Sandwich. Roast fennel. Pile onto a sandwich with Swiss and Parmesan. Toast in a pan with melted butter.

Growing up, one of the dinner categories my sisters and I elevated to the top of the requested list was “Chinese food.” On nights when our parents conceded to our begging, we’d sit down to a table of two dishes, fresh from the wok: stir-fried noodles or fried rice and saucy chicken or steak tossed with equal parts vegetables.

Even though neither of them had traveled to China, they knew intuitively that the food there was richer in vegetables and lower in inch-thick General Tso Chicken-style crispy coatings than anything you could get at Hunan Balcony. In today’s parlance, I guess they were just making anything-goes stir-fries of the kind that got really popular at restaurants in the 2000s, but the perfect combination of ingredients and salty-sweet sauces always hit the spot.

In my diet, Chinese takeout has mostly given way to the less greasy Thai and Vietnamese-both of which have now crossed over, at least in New York City, from hole-in-the-wall joints to studied, elevated restaurants like Pok Pok and my new fave Uncle Boons. But an at-home dish of stir-fried chicken, in a thick sweet-and-sour sauce (borrowed from the ever-popular sweet-and-sour tofu), beats out any kind of takeout, almost any day. It’s got some oil, sure, but the dish also features a whole bunch of wintry turnips, both root and green, and a hearty portion of white meat chicken.

Over the summer, Alex came home from a weekend in Maryland with a container of Old Bay-flavored peanuts. As we devoured them, fingers covered with spices, I thought: I must recreate these.

Old Bay Seasoning is a 70-year-old Maryland specialty most often sprinkled on blue crabs and crab cakes. The mixture contains 18 herbs and spices supposedly designed to suit seafood so well that 1940s-era Marylanders would eat the free crabs that bars offered, and, due to the spice mix’s saltiness, order more drinks. The most prominent flavors are celery salt (vegetal, salty), paprika (sweet, earthy), mustard (pungent, hot), and red pepper (spicy). I also taste a citrus-y zestiness that probably cuts through the fishiness of a crab and also does great things for the richness of peanuts, the quintessential bar snack when there are no free crabs around.

Procrastinator that I am, it took me months to actually pour some spices into a bowl, add peanuts, and bake. But unlike most procrastination, this one had an advantage: these peanuts make a welcome addition to holiday appetizer tables, and they have serious gift potential, especially for Maryland ex-pats and those whose tastes run towards the flavor combination in a Bloody Mary.

Here’s a fun part of my morning routine: realize, as I’m heading towards go-to-work time, that I haven’t packed a lunch; consider, as I dream of getting out the door on time, that maybe the take-out lunch options today won’t cost $12 and taste mediocre; and go back to the kitchen to improvise a brown bag lunch from the fridge. Leftover grains, extra roasted vegetables, a handful of nuts, some leftover chicken, and good grated cheese go into a travel Tupperware, and, hopefully, become more than the sum of their parts. Some lunches are good, even deliberate. Some are humble. I have a real affection for humble food, so usually my makeshift approach works okay.

Sometimes, it works out way better than okay.

One day a couple weeks ago, that routine produced this unbelievably delicious little grain dish. I had roasted cauliflower, I had cooked bulgur, and I had leftover salad dressing from a recent dinner. Naturally, I mixed this all together. At lunch, I went in thinking I’d be eating something humble but found I’d happened upon a flavor and textural synergy I didn’t expect. Perhaps it’s in the proportions: the grain and the vegetable sit at about equal levels in the final dish. Perhaps the success is some otherworldly manifestation of the Middle Eastern techniques I’ve absorbed during these months of experimenting with the region’s ingredients and methods. Or maybe it’s just a little narcissism: this exceedingly delicious salad is delicious because I made it, this morning, from almost nothing, and each bite helped cure the lunch blues.

This sponsored post is part of an ongoing collaboration with Sargento, called Flavor Journey. Throughout the year, with the support of Sargento, I’m exploring Middle Eastern cuisine–at home, in Brooklyn, at cooking classes, and wherever the flavors may take me. You can see the whole series here. Sponsored posts let me do some of my best work on this blog, and I only ever work with brands whose values and products mesh with the content I love to produce for you. Here’s my affiliate disclosure.