Easy, breezy, beautiful covergruel

In defense of simple recipes for simple minds.

Author

Sarah Steimer
May 13, 2026

For lunch today, I made this dish. I used walnuts instead of pistachios, caper brine instead of olive brine, and I left the raisins the hell out. I chose the recipe at random and measured nothing; it was incredibly satisfying.

In my never-ending quest to make life better with several small changes, I have been making more robust lunches. By robust, I do not mean time-consuming or finicky. I just mean, not a sad salad or open-faced PB&J with haphazard carrot slices. It’s my midday act of grace toward myself. For this, The New York Times’ Cooking is a perfect companion.

Which made this rant over on Radicchio Salad feel delightfully bizarre to me. Caitlin Dewey included it in her Links newsletter this week — correctly noting (warning?) that it’s “almost entirely unreadable” — because she found the argument intriguing: Has cooking media become a little too practical, where it once was aspirational and ambitious?

One must next wonder: Are NYT games too fun? Is the news too real? The weather too wet??

I have no interest in carefully picking apart Radicchio Salad’s argument — what little of it I could make sense of — but criticism of basic recipes astounds me. The tipping point for the author appears to have been a recipe for avocado toast with sardines, posted just last month. How dare the Times offer a new approach to a classic? How infuriating to learn that a few quick techniques — rubbing the toast with garlic or using the sardine oil to make a vinaigrette — could add a lovely touch to an otherwise snooze-y lunch.

Please!! These recipes are a public service. If there is one email I open each time it hits my inbox, it is a NYT Cooking newsletter. I make a quick scroll of it, checking to see if I happen to have any of the starring ingredients on hand. And if the recipe is relatively simple to make and it has easily substitutable components? Excellent. 

(Also a bonus of the Cooking recipes: While prepping, I like to scroll through the extraordinarily bitchy readers in the comments section. A lot of opinions about roast times and how long you should let a cooked, peeled egg sit on the counter!)

The complaint for “more aspirational” recipes feels akin to something else I’ve been chewing on: performativity. We’ve heard about performative leisure, performative offlineness, the performative male, and so on. Wanting recipes to be harder, more ambitious, more whatever feels like once again tapping into some need to prove something. And for what it’s worth: You can just go find a harder recipe somewhere else!

For me, right now, I’m not trying to have a project, and I’m not trying to prove anything by way of marinating techniques. I’m trying to have lunch. And the older I get, the more I want a little more satisfying simplicity. With seven deadlines spread across three publications/clients, I need to know what I can do with half a head of cabbage and a can of chickpeas in under an hour. I’m a perfectly capable cook, but I’m also running dangerously close to empty and don’t mind a little hand-holding.

(In any case, Dave is the project cook. Let him be the one to impress with a meal. He does it so well!! PLEASE MAKE THE FANCY CHILAQUILES AGAIN!!!)

In recognition of the simple and satisfying, I am sharing with you (paywall-free!) some of my favorite easy meals from NYT. I have plenty others outside of the Times, but they’re all either in PDF form or in a cookbook. And, by all means, share your recipes in the comments.

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