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

Eat well in the coming days with Aaron Hutcherson’s creamy white bean and fennel casserole, Tejal Rao’s toor dal, and Julia Moskin’s black bean soup.

For the 10th anniversary of NYT Cooking, we’ve collected recipes that racked up five-star ratings, topped our charts and went viral — plus a few that lit up the comments section.

This flexible, "no-recipe" recipe from The New York Times Cooking is classic, American-style comfort food; melt-in-the-mouth meat cooked in a rich, deeply savoury sauce. Serve it with steamed rice and wilted greens for a rainy day feast.

This recipe is a version of aglio e olio pasta, which is often known as midnight pasta because it can be made quickly with a few pantry staples: garlic, olive oil, red-pepper flakes and pasta. This recipe takes a bit more time because it calls for roasting the garlic first, but doing so adds a complex, mellow flavor to the entire dish. If you’re a planner, you could even roast a couple of heads of garlic in advance. (Roasted garlic will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for…

Pesto becomes more full-bodied with the addition of broccoli that’s blanched in the same pot as the pasta and fresher with the combination of mint and lemon. For a sauce that's light and loose, use only the florets — not the stems. Raw walnuts have a welcome natural sweetness and nice crunch that complement the pesto, but you can leave them out or substitute sunflower seeds if you have a tree-nut allergy.

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Pick up a heat-lamp roast chicken at the market on the way home — it’s O.K. — and tear it apart to feed four, or half of it for two, shredding the meat with your fingers

Making creamy soups in the slow cooker can be tricky because it’s not possible to simmer them with the top off and reduce the liquid. One easy way to thicken without reducing is to use a roux, a mix of flour and butter. Heat the roux in the microwave, then whisk it into the stock in the slow cooker before adding the other ingredients. (If you don’t have a microwave, simply melt the butter in a small saucepan, stir in the flour, let it bubble, then proceed.) This soup is best prepared on the…