Nytimes cooking

The dishes our readers loved most this year include recipes for chicken, pasta, soup, burgers and more.

There’s nothing wrong with a dinner of pan-seared chicken seasoned with salt and pepper. But there’s everything right about the same chicken when you add anchovies, capers, garlic and plenty of lemon to the pan. What was once timid and a little dull turns vibrant, tangy and impossible to stop eating. And the only real extra work is chopping the garlic and a little parsley for garnish. In this dish, the cut of chicken is less important than the pungent pan sauce. Most people will probably…

Our 50 Most Popular Recipes of All Time (So Far) is a group of recipes collected by the editors of NYT Cooking.

In this recipe, which Pierre Franey brought to The Times in 1992 in one of his 60-Minute Gourmet columns, two teaspoons of lemon zest are added to a simple sauce of lemon juice, thyme, garlic and shallots. It is, at once, lively and elegant. To round it out, it needs a sturdy accompaniment. Mr. Franey suggested mashed potatoes with garlic and basil, with just a little olive oil swirled in.

Hetty McKinnon swaps spaghetti for rice in her umami-rich mushroom stir-fry.

One of the great things about baked pastas is that you can get two different textures in one dish. Take the typical pasta Alfredo that's prepared in a skillet: It’s delightfully creamy and lush, but the same, bite after bite. But add a green vegetable to that Alfredo pasta, pile it into a dish, top it with melty cheese and a crunchy bread crumbs, then bake it, and you get a vegetarian dinner that's got it all. If broccoli rabe isn't your thing, you can substitute cut asparagus or broccoli…

We asked the legendary cookbook author to go through his recipe archives and find his 10 favorites. (Naturally, his first pick was pancakes.)

Swirling chile crisp, a popular Chinese condiment, and spinach into fettuccine Alfredo gives you an immensely satisfying meatless one-dish dinner. The firecracker crunch of chile crisp intensifies when sizzled in butter before cream tempers its heat. Parmesan heightens the sauce’s savory umami, and pregrated cheese works just fine here. This astoundingly simple meal — it doesn’t even require any chopping — comes together in under 30 minutes but tastes as complex as anything you’d get at a…

Recipe video above. This is a wildly popular raw Broccoli Salad by Melissa Clark of the New York Times. The red wine vinegar lightly "cooks" the broccoli so it's not as hard as plain raw broccoli, then it's marinated in an intensely flavoured cumin, garlic and sesame infused olive oil. It is unexpectedly good, it's unique, and I keep making it so I wanted to share the recipe.Not a fan of raw broccoli? This probably isn't the dish to convert you, I'll admit. Try instead just lightly steaming…

Swirling chile crisp, a popular Chinese condiment, and spinach into fettuccine Alfredo gives you an immensely satisfying meatless one-dish dinner. The firecracker crunch of chile crisp intensifies when sizzled in butter before cream tempers its heat. Parmesan heightens the sauce’s savory umami, and pregrated cheese works just fine here. This astoundingly simple meal — it doesn’t even require any chopping — comes together in under 30 minutes but tastes as complex as anything you’d get at a…