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I got an email today asking for easy recipes from someone who doesn’t particularly like to cook. I had been thinking about doing a post on amatriciana, and it’s pretty easy, so I decided to do it for today!

A caveat: There is great controversy about the “correct” way to make amatriciana. I love this article from the NYTimes about it.

I mentioned to my stepson, Ben, the other day that I had made scallion pancakes. Please post that, he requested! So here it is.

The recipe is adapted from Flour, Too, by Joanne Chang. She had the brilliant idea to use focaccia dough for her scallion pancakes. As a result, if you don’t want to or, for whatever reason, can’t make the dough yourself, you can use store-bought pizza dough from the refrigerated or frozen section of the supermarket.

My friend and fellow Latin teacher, Jamie, responded to my request and asked for some vegan recipes! Although I am not vegan, nor even vegetarian, I do have friends that are, and I have been able to adapt recipes when they come for dinner.

In addition, when I worked as a recipe-tester for The Berkshire Farm Table Cookbook, there were numerous recipes for which I tested a regular version, a vegetarian version, and a vegan version! When this cookbook comes out (in May, click here to preorder) you will find a wide variety of options for different dietary needs.

My friend and colleague, Lisa, and I have been talking about this recipe on and off since last year. She had asked for new ideas for the spices in her cabinet, and we even talked about doing a curry cooking class with friends, and I had thought of a few recipes I could include. Maybe once things get back to some semblance of normal we will finally plan that get-together.

For now, however, I hope you enjoy this family favorite! It’s surely not authentic (see my rumination on what “authentic” means anyway in my blog post about General Tso’s Chicken), but it’s easy and delicious and keeps well! We usually make a large batch so we can enjoy it for dinners and lunches over a few days – although when we still had kids at home it never lasted that long! (You can halve the recipe if you prefer.) It can also be frozen, and for “emergency” lunches for work (i.e. when we have no leftovers), I pack some Indian chicken and rice together in a plastic container, which I then pop out into a glass container to heat up in the microwave at school.

My dear friend, Debby, called me yesterday because she has some sour cream in her fridge and wants to us it in a coffee cake. The good thing about making baked goods with any dairy products before they go bad is that you can then freeze a portion of the baked goods for another day – if you have the willpower not to eat it all right away!

My favorite coffee cake recipe includes pear and pecans. My father used to send us a box of Harry & David pears every year, and since he passed away I have continued the tradition to honor his memory, sending them to my mother and my sister, and also making recipes with pears myself.

Greta, my son Daniel’s girlfriend, asked me today for the Guinness cake recipe I made when she and Dan visited. It’s another NYTimes cooking collection selection (original here, if you are subscriber) from Nigella Lawson. However, I do something different for the frosting. The original calls for a cream cheese frosting just on the top to mimic the foam on a pint of Guinness, but I prefer a coffee frosting with the earthy chocolate of this cake (which I’ve adapted from a different NYTimes recipe, the original of which is here).

Another request today, an easy mac & cheese recipe! This comes from the NYTimes cooking collection with some helpful tips to make this pantry & freezer cooking.

Although we all may be looking for recipes that take time these days, this recipe has two time-savers: You don’t cook the pasta first, and you don’t make a roux.

My friend, Olivia, who is 12 years old and whose school is closed, asked me for some easy recipes so she can try her hand at more cooking while she is stuck at home. She asked me for some dessert recipes to start, and, to be honest, because we do not eat dessert every day I usually am willing to try something more complicated when I decide to make a dessert.

But after discussing it for a while, she thought her parents would still be able to go to the store and get a refrigerated crust and two pints of blueberries, so here’s an easy blueberry pie recipe!