The Low-Effort, High-Reward Dinner

So I recently joined New York Times Cooking as a contributor, and when their editors asked me for a low-effort, high-reward weeknight dinner, this is the recipe I gave them. It features a bed of creamy tahini yogurt sauce topped by crispy white beans, sweet, juicy roasted tomatoes, a bit of arugula, and you're gonna scoop it all up with some bread. It is so delicious that you will not believe just how easy it is. There's minimal chopping, and the oven does most of the work for you. The full recipe is at New York Times Cooking, but more on that later. For now, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to make the recipe, plus a high-protein variation. And we're gonna get started with our beans and tomatoes. One of the reasons I love this recipe so much is that the prep work could not be simpler. The first step is to drain and rinse our beans, and I've got two cans of cannellini beans here, but if you can't find them, great northern beans are another good option. It's important to dry the beans as best as you can, get off as much moisture, because we're gonna roast them in the oven, and drying them up will help them get even crunchier and crispier. From here, it's almost no work. You're just gonna add the beans to a sheet pan, drizzle with two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of dried oregano, salt and pepper to season, and then just spread it out in a single layer. Now, salt is a very personal preference, so just taste a bean, and if it's well-seasoned, it's ready to go. If not, add a little more salt. Good to go. Set that aside, and now we can get to work on our tomatoes. I've got two pints of cherry tomatoes here, which is about 22 ounces, give or take, and we are very lucky in Southern California, it's still tomato season, but I've also made this recipe many times with supermarket cherry tomatoes in the winter, and it's still really good. That's because cherry tomatoes are naturally sweeter and more concentrated in flavor than larger, standard supermarket tomatoes, plus we're roasting them, which is gonna bring out their natural sweetness. To roast the tomatoes, I'm gonna add them to a 13 by nine baking dish, because I find they stay juiciest that way, but if you don't have one of these pans, no worries, you can just use another rimmed sheet pan instead. And like the beans, the tomatoes need very little work. We're just gonna slice up three garlic cloves. Well, three big boy garlic cloves. We want a lot of flavor, and you wanna slice these thinly, but not paper thin. We don't want them to burn in the oven. Oh, and this is the only chopping required in this recipe. I told you it was a low effort weeknight dinner. We'll use a teaspoon of dried oregano, which is lovely with tomatoes. Some salt and pepper to season, of course. And I've got just a little bit of sugar here. This is gonna help the tomatoes get sweeter and juicier in the oven. My tomatoes are pretty sweet, so I'd say a half teaspoon is good, but if your tomatoes are less sweet, go ahead and use a full teaspoon. Slippery. And you're gonna drizzle everything with one and a half tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. And just mix it all up with your hands. You're gonna put both of these in the oven at 425 Fahrenheit for 25 minutes. The tomatoes will go in the top third of the oven, and the beans will go on the bottom rack. So the beauty of this recipe is we don't have to toss or flip anything in the oven. We have plenty of uninterrupted time to just casually make our tahini yogurt sauce. No stress, everything's very relaxed. And if you are interested in that high-protein variation I mentioned earlier, stay tuned. I will be sharing that in just a minute. To start our tahini yogurt sauce, we'll grate two fat garlic cloves right into the bowl. And you can use the same grater or zester to zest one large lemon, and then squeeze in two tablespoons of the lemon juice. And now for our yogurt, we're gonna add eight ounces of a creamy, tangy, unsweetened coconut yogurt. Unsweetened is very important. If you're plant-based like me, these are my go-to brands for yogurt. They're available at a lot of grocery stores, and they taste very similar to Greek yogurt. They've got a lovely tang and a really nice creaminess. And then you're gonna drizzle in three tablespoons of tahini. I'm a big fan of this tahini for the flavor and the texture, and also the convenience of the squeeze bottle. It's so nice. For a bit more flavor and to highlight the Middle Eastern flavors in this sauce, we're gonna add a teaspoon of Aleppo pepper and a heaping quarter teaspoon of ground coriander. Just season with salt and black pepper and refrigerate the sauce until you're ready to use it. Let's give it a taste. Ooh, it's bright and lemony, but creamy and decadent. So good. That took five minutes, so if you wanna use the remaining oven time to pour yourself a glass of wine, make a mocktail, turn on your favorite playlist, please feel free to do that. Now, I think this recipe is already pretty nutritionally balanced, but if you're looking for a higher protein variation, instead of making the tahini yogurt, make a batch of my whipped tofu ricotta as the sauce for this recipe. I've shown you how to make that in a previous video for New York Times of Cooking, and it's very simple, just a few ingredients, and the food processor does most of the work for you. And if you make that swap, each serving of this recipe will have about 25 grams of protein. I'll link that video right here. After 25 minutes, the beans and tomatoes should be done. You're looking for the beans to be golden and crispy and split open, and the tomatoes should be wrinkly and soft and starting to burst. We're gonna schmear this gorgeous, creamy tahini yogurt across a serving platter, and now you'll spoon the crispy beans on top, plus the hot, juicy tomatoes. Keep the juices in the tomato pan, though, because we're gonna use those in a second. So far, we've got protein, we've got fiber, we've got fats, we even have a vegetable, and then we're gonna add a second vegetable, some baby arugula. We're just gonna add it on top, kind of like a salad topping. Add a few handfuls of arugula on top, and to dress it, we're gonna use all of those sweet, garlicky tomato juices left in the pan, and then just a squeeze of lemon juice seasoned with salt and pepper. It's a very fun but simple way to dress your greens. And I highly, highly recommend scooping up everything with some bread. I've got pita today, but this is also fabulous with some sourdough. Oh! Ooh! Not called Juicy Tomatoes for nothing. That tomato fully exploded everywhere. That is so ridiculously good, and it was so, so easy to throw together. You can get the full written recipe at New York Times Cooking. I've left gift links in the description box below the video, or you can scan this QR code. Thanks so much for watching. Bye!