Weeknight - Supper

Charred Broccoli with Anchovy Butter

Delphine Roy — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dinner for two with bread, or a side for four
17 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

500 g broccoli
2 tbsp olive oil
40 g cold butter, cubed
4 anchovy fillets in oil, drained and chopped
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
½ tsp chilli flakes
1 lemon, juiced, plus wedges for the table
flaky salt

Steamed broccoli is a vegetable you have to be talked into. Charred broccoli is one you eat standing at the stove before it reaches the table, and the difference is entirely about heat and patience.

Most of the sweetness in a brassica is locked behind a sulphurous edge that boiling makes worse and browning removes. High, dry heat on a cut face converts sugars, drives off water, and leaves something closer to roasted cauliflower than to school dinners.

The flat face

Broccoli is an awkward shape and the trick is to make it less awkward. Cutting wedges through the stem, rather than breaking off florets, gives every piece a flat plane of dense stem to sit on. That plane is what browns. Loose florets have almost no surface that can contact the pan, which is why a tray of them comes out dusty and dry.

Peel the main stalk and slice it into coins. It cooks in the same time and it is better than the florets.

Anchovy as seasoning, not ingredient

Four fillets in a pan of butter melt into nothing visible in about sixty seconds. What is left is glutamate and salt — the same reason a Caesar dressing tastes the way it does without anybody thinking about fish.

If you are cooking for somebody who has told you they do not like anchovies, this is the dish to make them, and I would not mention it until afterwards.

Turning it into dinner

With bread and a fried egg it is a meal for two. With the crispy rice it is a better one. As a side it stretches to four and will still be the thing people mention.

Tomato Butter Pasta in Fifteen Minutes

Delphine Roy — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 bowls
28 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

800 g tinned whole peeled tomatoes
100 g butter
1 onion, peeled and halved, not chopped
1 tsp fine salt
500 g rigatoni or penne
grated parmesan
torn basil, optional

This is a sauce with four ingredients and one instruction, and it is better than most of what I make with twenty. The debt is obvious and worth stating: Marcella Hazan published the tomato, butter, and onion version decades ago and nobody has improved on it since.

What I have changed is only the ratio and the finish — more butter than she used, and the pasta tossed in the pan rather than sauced in a bowl.

Why the onion goes in the bin

Halved and left cut-side down in the simmering sauce, an onion gives up its sugars and its aromatics without ever contributing texture. By the end it is soft, spent, and slightly grey. Eating it adds nothing; leaving it in the pan makes a sauce that tastes sweeter and rounder than anything you can do with soffritto in the same twenty minutes.

If throwing it away offends you, chop it into a frittata the next morning.

The butter is structural

A hundred grams sounds like a lot because it is a lot. But butter is roughly eighty per cent fat and sixteen per cent water, and when it meets starchy pasta water in a hot pan it emulsifies into something that coats every tube. Cut it back to fifty and you get a thin, acidic tomato sauce that slides off the pasta and pools at the bottom of the bowl.

Two minutes short

Pasta pulled early finishes in the sauce, and while it does it releases starch into the pan and absorbs tomato instead of water. That last minute of hard tossing over heat is the only technique in the recipe, and it is the one that makes it look like restaurant food.

What else it is for

Double the sauce and freeze half. It is the base for a tray of baked pasta, the sauce for a quick shakshuka, and the thing to have on a night when the shopping list has run out.

Crispy Rice with Fried Eggs and Chilli Oil

Delphine Roy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2 bowls
20 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

For the rice

400 g cooked rice, cold, from the fridge
2 tbsp neutral oil
½ tsp fine salt

To finish

4 eggs
2 tbsp chilli oil with crisp bits
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp rice vinegar
3 spring onions, sliced thin
toasted sesame seeds

Every rice-eating culture has a word for the crust at the bottom of the pot, which tells you it was never an accident. Persian tahdig, Korean nurungji, Spanish socarrat — the same texture, arrived at independently, and always the part people fight over.

This is the lazy domestic version: no pot, no inversion, no ceremony. Cold rice, a wide pan, and the discipline to leave it alone.

The discipline part

There is exactly one way to fail at this, and it is stirring. Rice crisps because a layer of it stays in continuous contact with hot metal long enough for the surface starch to dehydrate and brown. Every stir resets that clock.

Six to eight minutes of doing nothing feels much longer than it is. Set a timer, walk away, and prepare the eggs while you wait.

Why cold rice

Refrigeration retrogrades the starch: the molecules recrystallise and the grains firm up and dry out slightly. That firmness is what lets them hold a shape under a spatula, and the lower surface moisture is what lets them brown rather than steam.

Fresh rice, pressed into a hot pan, releases water, and water at 100C cannot brown anything.

The eggs are a delivery mechanism

Fried hard and fast in a good amount of oil, so the edges go lacy and brown and the yolk stays liquid. That yolk is the sauce — it runs into the broken crust and turns half of it soft while the other half stays crunchy, which is the actual pleasure of the dish.

What it is really for

This is what you cook on a Tuesday when the fridge has one container of rice and four eggs in it, and it is better than that sentence suggests. Add the charred broccoli on the side and it is a dinner you would serve someone.

Sheet-Pan Chicken with Gochujang Butter

Delphine Roy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 servings with the potatoes underneath
55 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

For the butter

60 g soft butter
2 tbsp gochujang
1 tbsp honey
2 garlic cloves, grated
1 tsp grated ginger

For the tray

8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
700 g small potatoes, halved
1 red onion, cut into thick wedges
2 tbsp neutral oil
flaky salt
2 spring onions, sliced, to finish
1 tsp toasted sesame seeds

The compound butter under the skin is a restaurant move and it takes ninety seconds. Everything else about this is a traybake, which is to say the oven does it and you do not.

The reason to bother with the pocket is temperature. Anything sugary — honey, gochujang, miso, most marinades — sitting on the surface of chicken at 220C is going to be black before the thigh is cooked. Tucked underneath, the same mixture is protected by the skin, melts into the meat as the fat renders, and seasons from the inside.

What the skin is for

Left dry and salted, chicken skin at high heat renders its own fat and crisps. That fat drips onto the potatoes below, which is the actual argument for putting them in the same tray: they fry in schmaltz rather than roasting in oil.

Which is also why nothing goes on top of the skin except salt. Not oil, not more butter, not the marinade.

The potato layer

Halve them and lay them cut-side down. They want contact with hot metal for the same reason the broccoli did — a flat face browns, a curve does not. Onion wedges go in among them to sweeten and half-collapse.

Anything with more water than a potato will ruin the tray. Courgettes, peppers, and tomatoes all belong in a different recipe.

Knowing when it is done

Seventy-five degrees at the thickest part, next to the bone but not touching it. Thighs are forgiving — five degrees over will not hurt them — but the potatoes underneath are the real clock, and if they are not tender the chicken has not been in long enough.

White Bean Stew with Lemon and Dill

Delphine Roy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 bowls, with bread
30 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

4 tbsp olive oil, plus more to finish
1 leek, sliced into rounds
3 garlic cloves, sliced
1 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
800 g tinned white beans, drained but not rinsed
400 ml vegetable stock
1 lemon, zest and juice
20 g dill, roughly chopped, stalks and all
flaky salt and black pepper

Tinned beans have a reputation problem: they are what you eat when you have not shopped. But a tin of beans plus four tablespoons of olive oil and a whole lemon is not a compromise, it is a Mediterranean dish that happens to take twenty minutes.

The thing that makes it work is the same thing that makes most bean dishes work — texture contrast between whole beans and crushed ones — and the thing that makes it taste like food rather than like a tin is finishing with acid and raw oil off the heat.

Crushing a third

Beans suspended in stock are a soup. Beans suspended in their own starch are a stew, and the difference is a spoon pressed against the side of the pan for thirty seconds. About a third is right: enough to thicken, not so much that everything turns to purée.

This is also why the tin liquid stays. Rinsing beans washes away exactly the starch you are trying to recruit.

Lemon off the heat

Citric acid is volatile and heat-sensitive. Squeeze lemon into a simmering pan and by the time it reaches the table it tastes generically sour rather than specifically of lemon. Off the heat, thirty seconds before serving, it stays sharp and floral.

Dill has the same problem, worse. It should barely be warm.

Fat as seasoning

Four tablespoons in the pan, then more raw over the top. The cooked oil carries the fennel and garlic through the dish; the raw oil sits on the surface and hits first. If you have a peppery oil, this is the dish to open it for — and if you are not sure what you have, that is a longer conversation.

What goes with it

Bread, and something bitter and green. It is also very good under a fried egg the next morning.