kima

The first time I made these was for a Super Bowl party where I’d already committed to bringing three other dishes and completely ran out of time. Grape jelly meatballs were the thing I threw together in the last twenty…

I made these the first weekend it actually felt like fall, mostly because I had a bag of cornflakes going stale in the pantry and didn’t want to waste them. Tossed the leftover tenders in cowboy butter almost as an…

I made this the first time because I had a half-empty jar of pizza sauce sitting in the fridge and no real plan for dinner. Twenty minutes later it was gone — not dinner, the dip. My family stood around…

I used to think crispy wings were a deep fryer’s job, full stop. That one batch changed how I make wings for good, and I haven’t dragged the fryer out since. These are baked, not fried, and the skin still…

I brought a pot of stovetop queso to a Super Bowl party a few years back, and by halftime it had gone grainy and sad at the bottom of the bowl. That’s the last time I made queso without a…

I brought this to a Sunday watch party last fall and made the classic slow cooker mistake — dumped all the cheddar in at the start instead of holding some back. It still tasted fine, but the top never got…

I made this the first time on a night I didn’t feel like babysitting two pots, and it’s been in the weeknight rotation ever since. Chili mac isn’t a new idea. Mine just skips the part where you cook pasta…

I burned the garlic the first time I made this. Not badly — just enough that the whole kitchen smelled like it, and I almost started over. Didn’t, though. Threw it in the slow cooker anyway and six hours later…

I started making these the week my oven’s broiler element decided to give up on me, which meant no more broiling chicken parm the way I normally do it. Ground chicken, a sheet pan, and whatever marinara I had left…

My grandmother made a version of this with cream of mushroom soup out of a can, and for years I thought that was the only way to do it. Then I tried building the gravy from scratch — real broth,…