We jokingly call these meaty, greeny, cheesy, beany, spicy baked chickpeas because, well, internet recipe naming conventions make us laugh but I really think of them as Pizza Beans 2.0. I introduced Pizza Beans 1.0 in my second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day, where I dreamed of a mash-up of Greek gigante beans in tomato sauce and an American baked ziti, with beans instead of noodles. I called them “pizza” beans to try to convince my then-kindergartener to try them with clever marketing. We still adore the recipe and all of the truly unexpected places it’s landed.
You might be asking yourself, Deb, why are you publishing a lemon tart recipe when the greatest lemon tart of all time already exists on your site? Okay, I’m embellishing a little, but I do really love the whole lemon tart and its sister recipe, the whole lemon bars in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook every bit as much as you — the simplicity, the complexity, the surprise of it all.
A dozen years ago I shared my mother-in-law’s recipe for apple sharlotka (which family just calls “apple thing”), a lightly sweetened apple dessert that’s as much a thick crêpe as it is a cake. It’s got a short ingredient list and is the kind of thing you make on a whim. It’s so rustic and simple, I honestly didn’t expect it to cause a ruckus — it’s not apple pie, crumb cake, or even my mom’s doorstop of an apple cake — but you surprised me. It has over 1000 comments and I’ve seen variations on it all over the internet. So where does this come in? I think of this as Sharlotka 2.0: Fancy Pants Edition.