This creamy butter chicken recipe combines fragrant spices with simple ingredients like onion, butter, and tomato sauce for a tasty curry dish.

Easy Indian Butter Chicken

The Best Classic Shepherd's Pie - AKA Shepards Pie or Cottage Pie. Ground Beef (or lamb) with vegetables in a rich gravy, topped with cheesy mashed potatoes and baked.

Best Classic Shepherd’s Pie Recipe

Learn how to make scrambled eggs! Soft, creamy, and flavorful, they're an easy, delicious breakfast.

How to Make Scrambled Eggs

This is a lentil soup that defies expectations of what lentil soup can be. Based on a Turkish lentil soup, mercimek corbasi, it is light, spicy and a bold red color (no murky brown here): a revelatory dish that takes less than an hour to make. The cooking is painless. Sauté onion and garlic in oil, then stir in tomato paste, cumin and chile powder and cook a few minutes more to intensify flavor. Add broth, water, red lentils (which cook faster than their green or black counterparts) and diced carrot, and simmer for 30 minutes. Purée half the mixture and return it to the pot for a soup that strikes the balance between chunky and pleasingly smooth. A hit of lemon juice adds an up note that offsets the deep cumin and chile flavors.

Red Lentil Soup

With minimal prep and a quick cook time, this shrimp stew feels elegant for such an easy weeknight meal. You can also take the dish in a number of directions: Substitute the shrimp with an equal amount of flaky white fish or even seared scallops, or stretch the dish into a meal for six by stirring in some butter and serving over cooked spaghetti or rigatoni. A good glug of your best olive oil would also be welcome.

Lemony Shrimp and Bean Stew

When baked, feta gains an almost creamy texture, similar to goat cheese but with feta’s characteristic tang. In this easy vegetarian sheet-pan dinner, broccolini (or broccoli), grape tomatoes and lemon slices roast alongside the feta until the broccolini crisp, the tomatoes burst and the lemon rinds soften. (Remember, broccolini has a tender, delicious stalk so only the bottom ½-inch needs to be trimmed.) Serve this dish over a pile of orzo for a complete meal. If you like, cut the broccolini, feta and lemon into bite-size pieces and toss with the orzo.

Sheet-Pan Baked Feta With Broccolini, Tomatoes and Lemon

The universal appeal of shrimp scampi, frankly, isn’t the shrimp but the pan sauce: garlicky butter lightened with white wine and bursts of lemon, parsley and red-pepper flakes. Scampi is often tossed with pasta or served with crusty bread, but this version instead uses quick-cooking orzo. It simmers directly in the pan sauce, imparting a starchy gloss — and soaking up the garlicky scampi flavors. Toss the shrimp with some garlic, lemon zest and red-pepper flakes to marinate while the pasta gets a head start on the stove, then simply toss the shrimp on top of the orzo to steam. It all comes together in a flash, and feels effortless. Pair this dish with Caesar salad, steamed broccoli or arugula, or bask in its simple comfort, straight from a spoon.

Shrimp Scampi With Orzo

Homemade marinara is almost as fast and tastes immeasurably better than even the best supermarket sauce — and it's made with basic pantry ingredients. All the tricks to a bright red, lively-tasting sauce, made just as it is in the south of Italy (no butter, no onions) are in this recipe. Use a skillet instead of the usual saucepan: the water evaporates quickly, so the tomatoes are just cooked through as the sauce becomes thick. (Our colleagues over at Wirecutter have spent a lot of time testing skillets to find the best on the market. If you're looking to purchase one, check out their skillet guide.) Julia Moskin

Classic Marinara Sauce

Soft and chewy, these gingerbread cookies come together quickly and easily. Using oil instead of butter keeps the rounds moist and lets the warmth of the spices shine. A chai blend, which often highlights ginger and cardamom and includes the surprising heat of black pepper, gives them even more verve. If you don’t have one on hand, you can simply mix your own (see Tip). That spiced coziness is echoed in the glaze, but the cookies are just as satisfying unadorned. (For more of Genevieve's holiday cookie tips, see this article.)

Chewy Chai Gingerbread

These thick and buttery shortbread rounds are a riff on the ones sold by Walker’s Shortbread in Scotland. The main point of difference between Highlander shortbread and other varieties is the sparkly Demerara sugar that coats the edges, adding a distinctive sweet crunch. Using a small percentage of rice flour or cornstarch in the dough gives these an especially crumbly-soft texture while using all wheat flour makes them slightly snappier. Use what you have, relish the results.

Highlander Shortbreads

From December 2025 to January 2026, dujjonku, a portmanteau of “Dubai” and “jjondeuk” (the Korean word for chewy), spread like wildfire in Gimpo, South Korea. The pastry chef Kim Na-ra of Mond Cookie invented the confection, which is less a cookie than a truffle with the crunchy pistachio cream filling of Dubai chocolate, wrapped in marshmallow and dusted with cocoa powder. A fun project to make at home, this recipe calls for a little patience and a lot of attention. If you follow the directions carefully — taking care not to overheat the marshmallow shell so it stays chewy — you’ll be rewarded with eight perfect rounds.

Dubai Chocolate Cookies

This cookie, from my new cookbook “We Fancy: Simple Recipes to Make the Everyday Special” (S&S/Simon Element, 2026), fulfills all the wildest dessert desires, as it’s sort of a cookie, but also a cake and Danish all in one. (Plus, it’s huge!) It requires just enough care that you’ll feel like you’re creating something thoughtful and special for yourself, yet it’s doable because it’s a single cookie that no one even has to know is being made — no one except you and your air fryer (though you can also bake it in an oven).

Guava and Cream Cheese Danish Cookie

These ultra-fudgy brownies take the bittersweet elements of Vietnamese coffee — espresso and sweetened condensed milk — and turn them into dessert. For the most pronounced coffee flavor, there’s instant espresso in the brownie batter plus some ground espresso (or coffee beans) speckling the milky cream cheese swirl. To get the neatest, most crumb-free slices, chill the cooled brownies for an hour or so before slicing them upside down. Use a sharp knife and wipe it down between slices. These brownies last for up to a week when kept refrigerated in an airtight container, and they freeze well, too.

Vietnamese Coffee Swirl Brownies

Buttery and snappy with the floral sparkle of orange zest, these shortbread get an extra zing from a glossy lemon glaze. These holiday cookies — delicious any time of year — highlight the milky allure of butter in their not-too-sweet dough and come out tender if rolled thick and crisp if thin. For an extra-toasty depth, leave the cookies in the oven until they burnish to a deep brown. The tangy zip of these cookies, whether cut into decorative shapes or simply sliced into rounds or squares, glazed or not, is the perfect counterpoint to the season’s sugar excess.

Holiday Citrus Shortbread

Don’t worry: These cookies only look like slices of mortadella, getting their slightly chewy texture and marzipan flavor from almond paste and almond extract. It joins the tradition of fashioning “sausage” cookies, from chocolate kolbasa in Eastern Europe to the salami cookie that Brooks Headley has served at Superiority Burger in New York. Freeze-dried strawberries give them color and fruity contrast, and the dough comes together easily in a food processor, making it a one-bowl endeavor.

Mortadella Cookies

These holiday cookies take all the best parts of a towering coconut cake — the buttery, yellow cake and billowy cream cheese frosting — and shrink them down to the cutest tiny treat. Sweetened shredded coconut and unrefined coconut oil (for the most coconutty essence) in the dough is the source of their signature flavor, while a finish in glaze and more shredded coconut — tinted in whatever color you like — gives them their bright flourish. If you’re tight on time, though, skip the frosting and drizzle the cookies with some melted chocolate or toss them in powdered sugar to finish. They'll still look like they're ready to party.

Coconut Cake Snowballs

These candy-studded cookies take all the fun of your favorite concession stand players and bake them right into and atop a simple sugar dough. Toffee bits feature in a supporting role, never overshadowing the stars (the popcorn and candy, of course). If using gummy candy, be sure to save them for the top; otherwise, the cookies will spread too much as they bake. Feel free to play around with the mix, but make sure your popcorn (microwave or stovetop) is freshly popped for a crisper and more even coating.

Popcorn Bucket Cookies

Skillet cookies are perfect for lazy nights when everyone wants something sweet, but no one wants to work that hard for it. The batter comes together in one bowl, and it’s baked in a big skillet so there is no portioning dough, no baking in batches and very little time spent overall. It is important to use an oven-safe skillet. A well-seasoned cast-iron pan is perfect but a basic skillet or an enameled version works well, too. Just be sure to avoid anything with wooden or plastic handles. Serve big scoops of warm cookie in bowls topped with ice cream or whipped cream. Or, serve cooled slices like you would any cookie.

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