The Secret to Deliciousness

Something Genevieve Ko, a deputy editor and columnist here in Food and Cooking at The New York Times, always says is that a combination of textures is an essential aspect of a delicious dish. Crunchy and creamy, chewy and runny, crisp and tender: Part of cooking is learning how to play ingredients off each other in interesting and appealing ways. (And it doesn’t stop with texture, of course. Think of the push and pull of flavor in sweet-and-sour sauce, or the mingling of hot and cold in an ice cream sundae with warm fudge sauce.)

That’s a theme in our five recipes below — look at those toasted crushed Ritz crackers heaped on the cod — and in Yotam Ottolenghi’s column in The New York Times Magazine this week, in which he writes about building salads by layering textures. His verdant recipe for yogurty butter beans with pistachio dukkah isn’t quite a weeknight dinner on its own, but you could serve it as part of a mezze spread and be very happy.

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1. Baked Cod With Buttery Cracker Topping

In this weeknight update of old-school New England stuffed and baked white fish, Sarah DiGregorio piles a lemony, buttery Ritz cracker mixture on top of cod, rather than rolling and stuffing long fillets. It’s all quickly roasted in the oven, for succulent fish and a toasted topping with extra crunch.

2. Shrimp Piccata Spaghetti

Butter, lemon and capers make up one of the fiercest teams in weeknight cooking, and together they bring enormous bright and briny flavor to this pasta dish by Kay Chun. But the star is the shrimp: They are cooked gently in butter, keeping them plump and juicy, a nice contrast with the al dente spaghetti strands and peas.

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3. Garlic Chicken With Guasacaca Sauce

Crisp chicken skin, tender carrots, creamy avocado-lime sauce: Yewande Komolafe’s easy sheet-pan recipe for garlic chicken with guasacaca, a condiment from Venezuela, delivers a pleasing mix of textures that is brought to life by the citrusy, herbal zing of that sauce.

4. Stir-Fried Lettuce With Crispy Garlic and Fried Eggs

Hot and crunchy cooked lettuce is a good-luck dish in Chinese culture. It’s often served as a side, but here, Hetty McKinnon pairs it with fluffy rice and runny fried eggs for a one-bowl vegetarian dinner. Hetty says you can scatter store-bought fried shallots on top, if you want to avoid the step of frying garlic chips. Just don’t skip that extra touch, which adds yet another layer of texture to this delicious meal.

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5. Bean and Cheese Burritos

Kay Chun makes fast vegetarian refried beans and uses them to stuff these easy burritos, which are then pan-fried until crisp and golden. It’s a particularly good and customizable meal for a tween who has recently announced they are vegetarian, or anyone who loves a crunchy, molten cheesy, deeply savory dinner.