Recipes By Ali Slagle
497 recipes found
Fish Laab
Laab (also spelled larb), a boldly flavored Thai dish, often combines ground chicken, ground pork or other ground meat with dried chile, scallions, shallots, fish sauce, lime, fresh herbs and nutty toasted rice, which you can make yourself or find at Asian markets. The dish also works with crumbled tofu, mushrooms, cauliflower or fish. In this quick-cooking fish version, fish fillets are pan-seared until cooked through, then broken into bite-sized pieces and tossed with the rest of the ingredients. Serve with sticky rice, small wedges of salted green cabbage, cucumber spears or lettuce leaves.
One-Pot Pasta With Ricotta and Lemon
This elegant, bright pasta dish comes together in about the same amount of time it takes to boil noodles and heat up a jar of store-bought marinara. The no-cook sauce is a 50-50 mix of ricotta and Parmesan, with the zest and juice of one lemon thrown in. That’s it. To make it more filling, add peas, asparagus or spinach in the last few minutes of the pasta boiling, or stir in fresh arugula or watercress with the sauce in Step 3. It’s a weeknight and for-company keeper any way you stir it.
Baked Buffalo Wings
For chicken wings that come out of the oven as crisp and tender as their fried counterparts, coat the wings in salt and baking powder. The combination promotes even browning, crackly-crisp skin and moist, tender meat. (Do this for roast chicken, too!) Then, cook them directly under the high heat of the broiler, which renders fat and fuses the spicy buttery sauce to each wing. You can buy any combination of meaty drumettes, wingettes (flats) or wing tips, or buy whole wings and break them down yourself, cutting at the joints to separate each wing into three pieces. Looking for a vegetarian version — or simply to add some vegetables to your spread? Try these Buffalo crudités.
Oven Bacon
Cooking bacon in the oven gives you perfectly crispy slices without any flipping or fussing, and the cleanup is superspeedy. It’s also the best way to make bacon for a crowd. You can cook the bacon directly on aluminum foil-lined baking sheets or on a wire rack set on top of the baking sheets. The latter method will give you extra crispy bacon, but you'll have to wash that greasy rack. Your choice! (To make bacon in an air-fryer, try our air-fryer bacon recipe.)
30-Minute Skillet Chicken Thighs with Crispy Garlic Chips
This 30 Minute, one-pan, few-ingredient, Chicken Thigh recipe is impossibly crisp and juicy, topped with a tangle of garlic chips that are fried in chicken fat.
Garlic Bread
You may have once struggled with dry or greasy breads reeking of burned or raw garlic, but it's time to put that behind you. This is a versatile recipe, as readily made with thin baguettes, as it is with rustic sourdoughs and airy Italian loaves. Cutting the bread like a Hasselback potato keeps the butter from seeping out and allows the garlic to infuse the bread with its flavor without scorching. But, if it's an extra cheesy garlic bread you're looking for, slip a little mozzarella into each slit.
Cacio e Pepe Con Ricotta
The idea of adding a puddle of ricotta on your cacio e pepe comes from Sora Margherita, a Roman-Jewish restaurant in Rome that's been around in the 1920s, and likely hasn't changed much since then. The cacio e pepe base recipe is inspired by one in Katie Parla and Kristina Gill's Tasting Rome, which comes from Leonardo Vignoli.
Sheet Pan American Breakfast with Bacon and Eggs
This recipe takes the quickest, best, laziest way to make American breakfast foods and organizes them—quite literally eggs, bacon, & hashbrowns on a sheet pan.
Broccoli Rabe Goma-ae
For this Japanese goma with broccoli rabe recipe, you could also put the sauce on spinach or any other dark green, corn, or fried or grilled eggplant.
Inside Out Bagel Grilled Cheese
Inspired by Sadelle's in New York City, my inside out bagel grilled cheese recipe includes two schmears of mayonnaise or butter and extra sharp cheddar cheese.
Egg in a Bagel Hole
This egg in a hole bagel recipe is better than the sum of its parts because 1. the bagel gets griddled 2. one bagel feeds two people 3. it's a toad in a hole.
Lemon Chicken Wings
Grilled Sausages, Peppers and Onions
The well-loved trifecta of sausages, peppers and onions can be found at Italian street fairs, ballparks and on weeknight dinner tables. They’re often roasted or braised, but this recipe makes smart use of a grill: Sausages cook over indirect heat to prevent bursting, while peppers and onions soften and char over the flames. At the end, while the sausages and rolls spend a few minutes over direct heat to brown and crisp, the cooked vegetables rest in a tart vinaigrette to balance the sweetness of the peppers. Tuck the sausages and vegetables into the roll, then add mustard, giardiniera, mozzarella or nothing at all.
Caramelized Zucchini Pasta
This recipe transforms two pounds of grated fresh zucchini into one cup of caramelized zucchini that’s rich, sweet and jammy enough to become a pasta sauce. Cooked over moderately high heat in a combination of olive oil and butter, the zucchini fries in its own juices and concentrates its flavor. Adding garlic and basil lends sweetness, but consider adding anchovy, preserved lemon or red-pepper flakes. As browned bits appear in the skillet, deglaze with a few tablespoons of water, chicken stock or vegetable stock to help prevent burning and to incorporate all of those tasty caramelized bits into the sauce. With time and patience, you’ll have a not-so-pretty but delicious mixture, like caramelized onions made with zucchini. Eat it tossed with pasta, as is done here, or add it to sandwiches, pizzas or antipasti spreads. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.
Double-Tomato Pasta Salad
For full-spectrum tomato flavor, this pasta salad pairs fresh tomatoes with sun-dried tomatoes. The sun-dried tomato oil and the water that’s released from salted tomatoes serve as a built-in dressing. Nuts and herbs add crunch and freshness, but you should feel free to add more embellishments right before serving, like mozzarella or shaved Parmesan, white beans or chickpeas, sardines or another tinned fish, or briny condiments like capers or olives.
Cucumber-Avocado Salad
Crunchy cucumbers and creamy avocados are the stars of this simple five-ingredient salad. Peeling the cucumbers in alternating stripes helps them soak up seasonings while maintaining their shape. After being cut into bite-size pieces, they are combined with salt to draw out moisture, concentrating their flavor. Cubed avocado is tossed with lemon juice or vinegar to prevent browning, then everything is stirred together vigorously so that the avocado breaks down a bit to add a glossy coating. Finish with a hit of red-pepper flakes for heat, or embellish with herbs, lettuces, beans, soft-boiled eggs, feta, nuts and so on.
Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake
With just a 9-by-13 pan, a spoon and four store-bought ingredients, you can make an ice cream cake that’s creamy, crunchy and fudgy in every bite. It starts with crushed chocolate-mint cookies that are covered with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Next, it’s topped with a layer of ice cream sandwiches, with their cakey cookies and vanilla ice cream. Follow that with more mint chip ice cream, and you’ve made a six-layer cake without breaking a sweat. Feel free to experiment here: Swap out the mint cookies for snickerdoodles, pretzels or broken waffle cones, and the mint-chip ice cream for coffee, peanut butter or strawberry ice cream — or any combination that sounds good to you. Slice the cake into pieces big or small, then drizzle them with hot fudge or Magic Shell. This cake serves a crowd, but you can halve the ingredients and build it in an 8-by-8-inch pan for a smaller group.
Chicken Piccata
Chicken piccata is an Italian-American staple beloved for its piquant flavors cradled in a silky, butter-rich pan sauce. It also doesn’t hurt that it cooks up very quickly. This version is mostly traditional except that it uses lemon two ways, calling for lemon slices to be caramelized (to soften their tang) and for a hit of fresh juice at the end (to brighten the whole dish). This ensures a sauce that's neither too rich, nor too puckery. Serve with a starch — pasta, polenta, rice or white beans — for sopping up the sauce, and a green vegetable, such as a kale salad, broccoli or green beans.
Seared Chicken With Salami and Olives
Salami and olives, stars of the charcuterie board, make this any-night chicken dinner something special. Ingredients cured in salt like bacon, salami, olives, capers and anchovies are powerhouses of umami and flavor, two things cooks aim to develop. Salami is also packed with fatty richness, so when crisped, its seasoned fat turns plain old water into a brawny pan sauce. If you find your olive-salami sauce is too salty, balance the salinity with sweetness in the form of honey or brown sugar. (For a similar longer-cooking dish, check out Donald Link’s braise.)
Crispy Pepperoni Chicken
Imagine a topping made of crispy pepperoni and crushed pizza crust, and you’ve got pepperoni crumbs, the genius creation of Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, authors of the cookbook “Italian American” and chefs at Don Angie, a restaurant in New York. To make them, cook chopped pepperoni until it gives off its salty, spicy, garlicky and brawny fat, then toast bread crumbs in that fat. In the book, the crumbs are sprinkled on a wedge salad, but they do wonders for weeknight chicken, too. What simply seared chicken breasts lack in fat, flavor and texture, these crumbs make up for easily. As for sides, consider a radicchio salad, iceberg salad, roasted peppers, roasted broccoli rabe or simmered broccoli.
Chimichurri Chicken
Green chimichurri, the classic Argentinian sauce often made with fresh herbs, garlic, red-pepper flakes and red-wine vinegar, livens up whatever it’s spooned over: steak, chicken, tofu, fish or vegetables. In this simple recipe, boneless chicken gets three layers of zesty chimichurri flavor: First, it’s marinated in the sauce. Then, it’s sautéed, grilled or roasted, which further intensifies the flavors and encourages caramelization. Finally, just before serving, it’s drizzled with fresh chimichurri for a bright finish. You can make the sauce in a food processor, but chopping the aromatics by hand makes it especially fragrant. Keep the extra to serve with the chicken, alongside fluffy white rice, crusty bread or creamy potatoes.
Rosemary-Paprika Chicken and Fries
This sheet-pan chicken dinner was inspired by patatas bravas, the crispy potatoes typically served with a spicy sauce and aioli in tapas bars all across Spain. Here, there are potatoes, of course, but they’re cut into matchsticks and browned on a sheet pan; and there’s a garlic mayonnaise for dipping. (Make real-deal aioli if you have a few minutes to spare.) But instead of the traditional smoky, brick-red sauce, similar seasonings are smeared onto chicken before roasting: a mix of lemon, garlic, rosemary, smoked paprika and red-pepper flakes. Using bone-in parts keeps the white meat juicy, while the skin gets crisp and some of the schmaltz glosses the fries.
Honey-Mustard Chicken Tenders
The combination of honey and mustard has been around since ancient Egypt and Rome, and midcentury American cooks used it in any number of dishes, from baked chicken to glazed ham. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s, when restaurants started pairing the zesty sauce with breaded pieces of boneless chicken, that it became wildly popular. As a coating for chicken, honey mustard not only tastes great, but the acidity in the mustard helps keep the meat juicy. For hot honey mustard chicken tenders, add 1/2 teaspoon cayenne to the honey mustard. For an even quicker dinner, do steps 1 and 2 up to a day ahead. (Refrigerate the chicken and store the toasted panko at room temperature.) Eat the tenders dipped into barbecue sauce, hot sauce, ketchup, or — you guessed it — more honey mustard.
Chicken Salad With Fennel and Charred Dates
The unlikely inspiration for this savory-sweet salad comes from Lilia, an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, where vanilla gelato is adorned with sea salt, honey, olive oil and fennel pollen for a dessert that is citrusy, creamy and fresh. The savory spin goes like this: Thinly slice two fennel bulbs, then mix with shallots and shredded cooked chicken. Dates cook in olive oil so their outsides blister and their insides become caramel-like and soft. Fennel seeds and red-pepper flakes are added to the skillet, which creates a spiced oil for dressing the salad.