ImageCarolina Gelen’s creamy sun-dried tomato pasta.Credit...Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell.

Whygg777, hello there. It’s Eric Kim, filling in for Melissa Clark.

A good, smart recipe is like water: You can lead a horse to it, but you can’t make the horse drink. Will you let me lead you to Carolina Gelen’s latest for us, her creamy sun-dried tomato pasta? It is so much more than meets the eye, and all of it is worth drinking.

But which detail do I love most? Is it the use of an entire jar of sun-dried tomatoes (both the fruit and its oil) that scratches the satisfaction center of my brain? Or maybe it’s the mingling of the tomatoes, red-pepper flakes and shallots in that oil, which maximizes the flavor of all four ingredients?

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Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta

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It’s probably the raw garlic that’s finely grated into the pot off heat, a trick that results in a sharper, more pronounced bite. (Follow the reader Emmie’s lead and add a can of chickpeas for protein and fiber. “So delicious!” she wrote in the recipe’s comments.)

Just as delicious: a new Little Gem salad with tamarind dressing from the food writer Ifrah F. Ahmed. “Developed with turmeric in mind — an ingredient many Somalis add to salads — this recipe balances heirloom tomatoes with the tang of tamarind,” she writes. “It offsets the pungent sharpness of onions and radishes with the caramel-like flavor of dates and maple syrup.” Divine!

I also have chicken, salmon and pork for you. A few years ago, I developed this recipe for roasted chicken with fish sauce butter, starring crispy bone-in thighs and schmaltzy croutons, to make use of stale milk bread I had lying around. To this day, it’s still one of my favorite chicken preparations, especially with a green salad like Ifrah’s.

Ali Slagle’s brilliant crispy salmon with mixed seeds showcases a nutty, fragrant mix of assertive and mild seeds (like sesame and fennel, for instance, or sunflower and coriander), which sticks to the fish with a little yogurt. Or, as Ali writes, you can “swap in a ready-made seed mix like everything bagel spice or dukkah.”

Think of Melissa Clark’s porchetta pork chops as the shortcut version of the classic Italian dish of whole roast pig stuffed with garlic, rosemary and fennel. Stuff the same garlicky, herby paste into the center of thick-cut chops to great weeknight effect.

ImageCredit...Linda Xiao for The New York Times Food Stylist: Judy Kim.

A couple of sturdy, rimmed baking sheets are all you need to whip up sheet-pan bibimbap, a recipe I came up with while feeding my family of four during the pandemic. All of the vegetables roast on one tray, while leftover rice reheats and eggs fry on the other, a technique I learned from Genevieve Ko. If you’re unsure about sheet-panning your eggs, check out our demo of the method in this video produced by my colleague Natasha Janardan.

And you might as well leave the oven on to bake a batch of Samantha Seneviratne’s pumpkin cookies. It’s fall after all.gg777

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