“I was thinking I’d make chili this week.”
“The Pierre Franey turkey chili?”
That’s how the chili conversation goes in my house. There are other chilis, of course — Texas chili, white chicken chili, chili con carne, chili without carne — but the Pierre Franey turkey chili is the one we make over and over. It’s a delicious, economical use of ground turkey and gobbles up a bunch of cans in my pantry: tomatoes, kidney beans, chicken broth. Pierre’s recipe calls for celery, which is maybe not a chili mainstay but adds a fresh, herbal note. I’ll skip it if I don’t have it, but we’ve entered the part of the year when I always seem to have a couple of stalks that need using up, so in they go.
And, like all those homey soups and stews, the Pierre Franey turkey chili just gets better the longer it sits. It’s our go-to dish for welcoming someone home after a trip (flight delays just equal more simmer time) and any low-key, lazy Sunday when we want a big pot of comfort with little fuss. On a timelier note: Consider it a top contender for feeding your trick-or-treaters upon their return from the candy hunt.
Featured Recipe
Turkey Chili
It’s started to get cold where I live — last night’s temperatures dipped below freezing — so I find myself more and more excited to use my oven and bask in its residual heat. Let’s slide out our sheet pans, shall we?
First up: Kay Chun’s sheet-pan chicken with squash and dates, which also features crispy roasted chickpeas and a briny caper-olive relish to complement those sweet dates. Like most sheet-pan dinners, this is an efficient weeknight meal, but it would also be a beautiful Saturday supper (ask one friend to bring wine, another to get some bread and maybe some vanilla ice cream while they’re at it to make these sundaes with the extra dates).
Perhaps you wish for fish? If you have a bottle of oyster sauce in your fridge, you have the base for a salty-sweet barbecue-like sauce to coat salmon and broccoli. Kay’s smart recipe cooks onion, garlic, tomato paste, brown sugar, rice vinegar, soy sauce and oyster sauce together until it’s a thick, glossy sauce that does double duty as a glaze and finishing sauce. As Kay notes, it also serves as a terrific marinade for chicken and steak, so you may want to make a double batch of it.
We’ve well established that dips definitely count as dinner; I’d go so far as to say that most manner of apps and sides can be dinner, too. I’d gladly eat several of Nargisse Benkabbou’s savory feta turnovers with a tangle of lemony arugula on the side, or with a cool, crunchy cucumber salad to play off the turnovers’ creamy feta filling.
Similarly, I’d pile these burgundy roasted beets onto a shallow bowl of cooked lentils or farro and call that dinner. Or a thick piece of toast that I’ve slathered with labneh. Or a swirly pool of hummus with a splash of vinegar and a pile of pita. Put another way: Like Doug Funnie, I’m really into the beets.
Lastly: We have some big updates to our comments section in the iOS app. (Don’t worry, it’s still one of the most fun places on the internet.) You can now search the public comments, reply to comments and mark comments as helpful. We also moved your private notes — which you can now edit and delete — to the recipe page below the preparation steps of the recipe. (For those on Android, don’t worry, we’ll have similar updates for you soon.) A note from Gina, a reader, on Yossy Arefi’s pumpkin oatmeal cookies that I’d mark as helpful (if not ingenious): “I baked the recipe as written, but used the frosting between two cookies, to make oatmeal sandwich cookies.”
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