21 Recipes You Should Be Cooking This January

For a bright, crunchy salad, use fennel, chopped almonds, parsely, and grated pecorino cheese with a simple dressing of extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard. Make it even heartier by adding grilled shrimp or artichoke hearts.

This lemongrass chile dressing is a recipe you’ll use over and over again, but we especially love it on this salmon, cabbage, snow pea, avocado, orange, and cilantro salad. 

A touch of honey in this warm salad brings out the natural sweetness in roasted onions, sweet potatoes, fennel, and bell peppers. (Of course, you can change up the vegetables to whatever you want.) For an extra layer of flavor, serve with shaved parmesan or asiago cheese.

Combining mild, subtly bitter chicory greens with sweet shrimp is an easy win. A lemon juice- and zest-based dressing adds an extra zing that we just love.

Salads aren’t just for lunch. This Hearty Winter Salad is filling enough to make for dinner thanks to a mix of radicchio, slightly smashed potatoes, chickpeas, and a sherry vinegar dressing.

Make this silky squash soup on a particularly chilly January night. Corn adds a sweet note, while chicken broth makes it extra flavorful.

We remade the usual pork-based posole as a vegetarian version with toasted pumpkin seeds, green chile, zucchini, and vegetable broth. For a vegan version, just skip the final sprinkle of cotija cheese.

A little bit of heat sets this kale and chorizo soup apart from being another run-of-the-mill broth. When you’re at the farmers’ market, look for Red Russian kale, a mild-flavored heirloom variety with a purple and gray-green color.

A clear broth soup packed with soft cabbage, mushrooms, tofu, and rice noodles is perfect for a night spent at home. Bonus: the entire soup only takes 30 minutes to make.

Our lighter version of ribollita (a sturdy Tuscan bread and vegetable soup) has a ton of onions, carrots, celery, cannellini beans, tomatoes, Swiss chard, and just a bit of olive oil-toasted bread on top.

Beautiful orange slices of roasted red kuri squash and scoops of coconut rice are topped with a sticky sweet and spicy sauce. You can use any Asian chile paste or sauce in your refrigerator to add a touch of heat, but we especially like Huy Fong Foods’ sambal oelek.

Created by chef Nobu Matsuhisa in New York more than 20 years ago, this delicate, buttery dish is the simple, healthy dinner we crave after all those extravagant holiday parties. Our version features green onions and ginger.

It takes just a few minutes to prep the ingredients for this herby pot of beans, then they simmer to tenderness in a slow-cooker. There’s no need to soak the beans beforehand; they cook to a tender finish straight from the package.

You probably have most of the ingredients to this comforting Garbanzo Tomato Curry in your pantry already. The base of this dish is canned beans and diced tomatoes plus a mix of spices, so there’s not much pre-planning necessary. 

Chicken legs and thighs, bell peppers, potatoes, and carrots are tossed in panch phoron — a five-spice blend of black mustard seeds, fennel seeds, nigella seeds, fenugreek seeds, and cumin seeds — and roasted in a very hot oven to toast the spices. This dish brings almost as much comfort as your favorite oversized sweater.

Riced cauliflower is sauteed with onion, garlic, and brightly colored, earthy-flavored turmeric for a vegan side dish that can be used in grain bowls, soups, and salads. Make it on a Monday and eat it throughout the week.

Take advantage of leek season with this super easy one-pan supper. Roast mushrooms and leeks for 10 minutes, then add eggs and goat cheese and bake for another 10 minutes. We like it with crusty bread and runny yolks.

January is prime season for Brussels sprouts, so if you’ve never had raw Brussels before, now’s the time. This raw sprouts salad is very straightforward, which lets the sweet tangerines and sharp pecorino shine. 

In Antoni Porowski’s new cookbook Antoni in the Kitchen, the Queer Eye food and wine expert writes, “Brussels sprouts are one of my favorite vegetables, and I’ve had them every which way. At home, I always come back to keeping them simple: charred on the outside, with a nice firm-tender bite in the center. Prosciutto chips add a deliciously smoky, meaty umami bite.”

Tip: Cutting a little V into the base of each spout makes for even cooking while keeping the leaves intact.

Crispy Brussels Sprouts with Prosciutto Chips is excerpted from ANTONI IN THE KITCHEN © 2019 by Antoni Porowski with Mindy Fox. Photography © 2019 by Paul Brissman. Reproduced by permission of Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Meyer lemons are still in full swing, which is enough of an excuse for us to make this Meyer Lemon Salsa Verde on repeat. Eat it on scrambled eggs, grilled bread, steaks, or roasted vegetables. There’s really no wrong answer.

And of course, meyer lemons aren’t designated to savory dishes only. This Meyer Lemon Cake is a Sunset classic. Just be sure to cook the lemons before adding them to the cake to mellow their flavor.