Artichokes are my favorite vegetable. My favorite way to eat them is the way I have my whole life: cooked whole, each leaf dipped in a sharp lemony sauce until you get to the heart, whose choke you free with a butter knife then schmear with the sauce like you’re thickly buttering a piece of bread, and eat it while holding the stem like...

Over the pandemic, I quietly broke up with every pizza dough recipe I’ve shared to date. I know I have some nerve only telling you this now. The family wanted pizza for dinner weekly, and I was overdue for a homemade pizza reckoning. Why? Because after years of trying to get my home oven even half as hot as the ones at pizzerias that crank...

Hasn’t it always been too long since your last slice of profoundly perfect crumb cake? You know, the kind that’s a hefty square with at least as much height from big brown sugar and cinnamon crumbs as from a golden, buttery, sour cream-enriched and vanilla-scented cake? Yes, me too. I didn’t expect to be back here so soon, though. I truly...

Meatloaf has a PR problem. It took me a while to come around to it; I didn’t grow up eating it, and certainly nothing about the name — a loaf, a loaf of meat — convinced me I was missing a thing. But, slowly, I have tiptoed into the light, and now I get it. It’s not cute, but it’s objectively delicious. Imagine if we only ate things that...

While this is not the Smitten Kitchen’s only tomato soup — there’s one with roasted summer tomatoes capped with an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich in the archives, and further back, a classic cream of tomato soup adapted from Cook’s Illustrated — neither are this: a seasonless tomato soup I can make on any rainy day, along with the nonnegotaible...

It’s been way too long since we had a showstopper of a dessert. When I look over the last four years of archives, it seems that practical, slightly boring and grownup things like salad and dinner have nudged out cooking purely for the purpose of generating and distributing decadent joy. The Celebration Cake category looks like the land...