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December 5, 2025 
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Good morning! Today we have for you:
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| Zaynab Issa’s smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt. Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. |
Our most popular recipes of 2025
Hello there! Happy Friday.
From time to time, I like to hand it over to you, our readers and fellow home cooks, to talk about a recipe. This feels like a particularly apt thing to do for our most popular recipe of 2025, Zaynab Issa’s smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt. Take it away, friends!
“We were moaning and groaning our way through this meal — it was SO GOOD. You know you’re eating good food when you’re plotting the way you’ll eat it for lunch the next day before the plate is clean. Looking for an excuse to make this again A.S.A.P.” |
“This meal is absolutely delicious and easy for a weeknight dinner for the family. I make jasmine rice on the side, as well. It is now part of our repertoire!” |
“This was PHENOMENAL. I followed the recipe to the letter with the exception of using pine nuts instead of walnuts. The pomegranate molasses really added a great kick of flavor and zing. Use it if you can. I heavily salted the meat and it was SO good against the cool creamy yogurt. Keeper!!” |
I know you know what I’m going to say next, but here goes anyway: Make sure to scroll through those comments for great suggestions and tips! Peter Dobbin, a reader, has shared additional spices you can add if you and your spice drawer are so inclined; other readers report swapping out the ground beef for ground turkey, lamb or chicken, or using dates instead of raisins. A highly ranked recipe like this one is perfect as is, but I think its real staying power comes from the creativity and resourcefulness it inspires, the satisfaction we find in adapting it for our palates and kitchens as we make it again and again and again.
Featured Recipe
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And, of course, you can find more reader favorites in our list of the 25 most popular recipes of 2025. Treat this as a cheat sheet for any “What should I make for dinner?” moments that might stump you in the coming weeks. It’s Thursday night and you’re running on fumes? Hoisin garlic noodles. Need to bring a veggie side to a potluck dinner? Roasted broccoli and whipped tofu with chile crisp crunch. Tickle in your throat? Chicken and red lentil soup with lemony yogurt. Oh, and if you want to end the year with everyone talking about what a cooking genius you are: Dubai chocolate.
New and noteworthy
From our collection of three-ingredient appetizers: Ali Slagle’s new hot honey whipped ricotta. After a whirl in the food processor, ricotta loses its graininess and becomes smooth and fluffy, the perfect landing pad for a drizzle of honey and Calabrian chile paste (or harissa or chile crisp or sambal oelek). I love Ali’s suggestion of pairing this with fruit — sliced apples, pears, persimmons — and I can see this as the standout of a cheese or charcuterie board.
If you make one thing this weekend
I’m in the midst of a pantry clean-out, and without thinking I dumped nearly a kilo (2.2 pounds) of dried beans into my Dutch oven to make Melissa Clark’s big pot of beans. This yielded, as you can imagine, a lot of cooked beans. I thought it would be too many, but I was wrong, and those beans kept me fed throughout the entire week in soups and stews and dips and pastas. You don’t have to make a huge pot of beans, as I did, but do make a big pot of beans this weekend. Your weekday lunches and dinners will thank you.
You said it
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| Sang An for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. |
View the recipe: Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake
Thanks for reading!
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