Jammy Cookies and More Recipes We Made This Week

July 5

Not-chicken and tomatoey couscous

I’ll eat anything in the test kitchen, but at home I don’t cook meat. (More on this in last month’s edition of our new Feel-Good Food Plan.) Luckily, our Epicurious app has thousands of vegetarian recipes—and many of the non-vegetarian ones can easily be vegetarian-ified. Case in point: these grilled chicken thighs with tomato-corn couscous from deputy food editor Hana Asbrink. As Hana puts it, “Does this look like summer on a platter or what?” It does! I needed it. So instead of chicken, I simply grilled slabs of Halloumi, until they were charred outside and juicy within. A downright delightful dinner to welcome July. —Emma Laperruque, associate director of cooking

A favorite way to eat squash

My favorite way to eat summer squash? Yellow crookneck cut into rounds, plenty of butter, cooked until jammy. Second favorite? This Chocolate Zucchini Cake. A mound of the prolific summer produce goes into the batter, rendering the crumb so plush and moist, it may just be my favorite chocolate cake, full stop. Don’t skip the scattering of walnuts and chocolate chips (I use a chopped chocolate bar) on top. The nuts get deeply toasted as the cake bakes and the chocolate melts into little puddles for a bite that’s fluffy, crunchy, creamy, and rich: ideal for breakfast, dessert, or anytime snacking. —Joe Sevier, senior SEO editor

Pretty-in-purple cauliflower

Roasted cauliflower? In July? I, too, was horrified at this unseasonal bent, but my husband had procured two incredibly beautiful heads of purple cauliflower, so pristine they looked like they’d walked off a stock image website. I settled on making this Whole Roasted Cauliflower Salad. Though we didn’t have basil, parsley, or golden raisins, cilantro, chives, and an underripe apricot proved to be suitable substitutes. There’s a fair bit of chopping involved, but the end result is so full of texture and so pretty, that the prep is more than worth it. An excellent and impressive vegetarian main, I’ve bookmarked it to make again when the weather turns. —Shilpa Uskokovic, senior test kitchen editor

Whole Roasted Cauliflower Salad

This might look and sound like any other cauliflower dish out there, but this one serves up the perfect balance of crunchy, fatty, tangy, creamy, and salty. We can’t get enough.

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Buttery, jammy cookies

You know when you’re at the supermarket and you see a jar of mustard and you’re like, Oh! We need mustard! And then you get home and you realize, Oh! We already had two jars of mustard! That happens to me not infrequently. And so I found myself with a surplus of fig jam (how? why?), which seemingly no number of PB&Js could make a dent in. The solution became clear over the weekend: Jam Diagonals from senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic. They’re crumbly-tender, fuss-free, and exceedingly buttery. Heed Shilpa’s advice to use cultured butter (I went with unsalted Kerrygold)—it makes all the difference in the why-are-these-so-good flavor. —E.L.

All the comfort of jam-filled thumbprint cookies in a striking, reimagined shape—and a streamlined, less-fussy process.

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