Crowd Pleasers

The ideal chicken caesar, quick dumpling soup, the tlayudas make a comeback, and my tried and true bolognese.

Sometimes it feels like my kids will negotiate anything (maybe a family full of future lawyers? God help me). They’ll push back on everything from bedtime, to the amount of ketchup on their plate, to why they shouldn’t be the one who has to put the basketball back in the garage. I know it’s normal, but it’s also exhausting. When it feels like one of those weeks, I aim for dinners that I know will go down with little to no push back. If I can avoid anyone at the table asking if they can have dessert (or beginning the coversation of how MUCH dessert) before half of us have finished eating, that’s a win. One less negotiation.

Make Ahead: Bolognese

I cannot tell you how many batches of this meat sauce I have made since the first time I put it together in our tiny West Village apartment (the kitchen had no drawers!). It’s easy to make and once the sauce is in your freezer, it’s just about as breezy to assemble as pasta with jarred tomato sauce, except that it tastes like a restaurant dish. I used to finely dice everything, which was kind of a meditative project, but somewhere along the way I started just throwing it all in the cuisinart and now you literally don’t even need a cutting board to make this. I like to serve it with rigatoni or wagon wheel pasta, which catches the sauce in its tubes and spokes, respectively. It’s also killer in a lasagne (like this one), or as something to bring a friend who could use a culinary hug.