Recipes By Amanda Hesser
346 recipes found
Smashed and Fried Potatoes
As enjoyable as pounding the lights out of an innocent garlic clove or olive may be, probably the most satisfying flat food to prepare are these smashed and fried potatoes from Susan Spungen, which draw in part from a technique used to make tostones. You steam baby potatoes until they’re just tender, let them cool enough to be handled, then press them between your palms until they flatten a bit and you hear their skins begin to snap. Next, you heat up some oil in a skillet and fry the potatoes until they’re nice and brown on their flat sides. Each potato is then crisp and caramelized but still moist inside.
Ponzu
Croque-Monsieur
While French restaurant and country cooking have been thoroughly examined by American home cooks, somewhere between the two styles lies a branch of cuisine that has been almost entirely missed: France's bar and cafe food. This is the realm of snacks like tartines and rillettes, salads and savory tarts, and one of most delicious of all: the croque-monsieur (literally translated as "crunch sir.") Good croque-monsieurs have a few things in common: a single layer of French ham and Gruyere pressed between two thin slices of bread. Some, like this one, are filled and topped with béchamel, which makes the whole thing creamier and better. The bread is brushed with butter, and the sandwich is cooked on a griddle or toasted under a broiler so that the cheese almost liquefies and the bits of ham and cheese hanging out the side fall limp and caramelize. It should be rich, substantial and salty, so you will reach for a glass of wine or beer between bites.
Raspberry Vinegar
This recipe appeared in The Times in an article titled “Women Here and There — Their Frills and Fancies” in 1900. It's not meant for salads, but for summer drinks like shrubs. You may halve or quarter the recipe. Use any kind of vinegar you like, and feel free to switch up the berries. If cloudberries are all you have, so be it. You’re also supposed to macerate the berries and vinegar for three days. If you do it for just a day, it will still taste delicious.
Whole Roasted Cauliflower With Black-Garlic Crumble and Parsley-Anchovy Butter
The chef Sean Brock came up with this first course after making Craig Claiborne’s Bagna Cauda. Instead of bathing the garlic and anchovy in the oil, Mr. Brock has you bathe a whole head of cauliflower in it. You use a ring mold to hold up the cauliflower in a sauté pan, then brown it by spooning over bubbling oil and butter — a process that’s fun and a little hairy — and finish it in the oven. In place of garlic, you use fermented black garlic (which is soft and woodsy in flavor) and milk powder to make a “crumble.” You slice the cauliflower into large slabs, like cross-sections of a tree, and top them with an anchovy butter and the crumble.
Coleslaw With Boiled Dressing
Coconut Daiquiris
Cornish Game Hens Canzanese
Nina Simonds's Broiled Halibut With Miso Glaze
Raspberry Vinegar Tart
Kir Royales
Raspberry Vinegar Float
Rhubarb-Strawberry Mousse
Isle of Manhattan Fizz
Chocolate Dump-It Cake
“A couple of years ago, my mother taught me to make her dense but moist chocolate birthday cake. She calls it 'dump-it cake' because you mix all of the ingredients in a pot over medium heat, then dump the batter into a cake pan to bake. For the icing, you melt Nestlé's semisweet-chocolate chips and swirl them together with sour cream. It sounds as if it's straight from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, but it tastes as if it's straight from Payard. Everyone loves it.”
1968: Málaga Gazpacho
Raw Asparagus Salad
Creamy Pasta With Smoked Salmon, Arugula and Lemon
One selling point of smoked salmon is that you don't need to do much to it to get it on the table. Fold it on top of toast and dab it with sour cream and you have the lazy man's cocktail party. But take the salmon one or two steps further and you break out of the cliché. Salmon's buttery fat and smoke serve as useful flavoring elements. In this easy 15-minute meal, it's chopped up and used as a counterweight in pasta tossed with full-fat Greek yogurt, arugula, fresh dill, lemon zest and juice. It is, at once, lively and comforting.
Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta
Pamela Sherrid’s summer pasta, which The Times ran a recipe for in 1996, is a quintessential crossover dish: part tomatoes and warm pasta, part pasta salad and the best of both. It includes ripe summer tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil and cubes of fresh mozzarella. Ms. Sherrid’s recipe relies on prudent technique and a slacker’s sense of pace. First you combine the garlic, basil and oil and let the mixture macerate. A few hours later you add tomatoes and let it sit some more. Next, you pour the cooked rigatoni over the tomatoes, and cubes of mozzarella over the rigatoni. Then you gently mix the cheese into the pasta, coating it with a buttery veil of fat, before tossing it with the tomatoes at the bottom. If you have great tomatoes and mozzarella and you don’t overcook the pasta, it is a remarkably good dish. A puddle of sweet and salty tomato broth will form at the bottom of your bowl, so make sure you have some bread on hand to soak it up.
Crisp Pork With Scrambled Eggs and Yellow Chives
This recipe came to The Times from Charles Phan, chef at the Slanted Door in San Francisco. You can substitute green Chinese chives for yellow Chinese chives (which are available at Asian markets), but you will lose some of the spiciness.
Veal Chops Beau Séjour
Lotti Morris from Bennington, Vt., wrote: “I’m still using the original copy from the paper, now deep yellow with age, fragile, held together with Scotch tape. We were married 13 years when I first found it and tried it. It has been 50 years now, and this favorite dinner, I think, has contributed to the longevity of our marriage. It’s so easy, so quick. I couldn’t do without it.”
Beet-Rum Mousse
Spanish Olive Oil Cake With Kumquats And Toasted Almonds
