Recipes By Amanda Hesser
346 recipes found
Purée of Peas and Watercress
The Best Macaroni and Cheese
Amanda Hesser brought this recipe to The Times in a 1998 article about a return to simply-prepared, down-home foods in response to the brash, over-the-top 90's style of cooking. It's an adaptation of one found in Pam Anderson's book, "The Perfect Recipe," and it calls for stirring the mixture every five minutes while it is baking. This gives it the ideal balance of lightness and creaminess -- a detail that is missing from most macaroni and cheese recipes.
Orecchiette With Broccoli Rabe
Penne With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
This exquisitely simple recipe came to The Times in a 2001 article about Paola di Mauro, an Italian winemaker in Marina, a small town southeast of Rome. She was one of a band of cooks who helped distinguish "cucina casalinga," roughly translated as "housewives' cooking." From her humble kitchen, Ms. di Mauro mentored some of the best Italian chefs and restaurateurs in the United States, including Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Piero Selvaggio and Tony May. Her recipe is easy and calls for just five ingredients – cherry tomatoes, olive oil, pecorino romano and penne pasta – but get your hands on the best ingredients you can afford. Ms. di Mauro intended this to serve four as a first course, but if you're making this for dinner, double the recipe.
Penne With Spicy Cauliflower Sauce
Penne With Ricotta and Asparagus
Creamed Corn
This is a sweetly comforting dish, and it's remarkably simple to make. Fresh corn is best for this, but frozen corn would work as well. If using the latter, add a bit of water when cooking before you add the milk.
Straight-Up Rhubarb Pie
This sweet-tart rhubarb pie contains no distractions, like strawberries. The crust is made with shortening. (Butter is fine if you want a French tart, but it's not American pie unless it's made with shortening, the author Anne Dimock said.) The top is marked with 8 razor-thin vents. The pie can be fully assembled and frozen for up to 3 months before baking.
Arugula Mayonnaise
Tostones With Salmon Tartare And Avocado-Chipotle Relish
Basil Mayonnaise
Standard Mayonnaise
Hellmann's is a fine product. But homemade mayonnaise is something entirely different. It is perfectly delicious spread on sandwiches, but it can also become the foundation of a more complex dipping sauce or dressing. Make sure you use a mildly flavored oil so the richness of the egg, as fresh as you can find, can shine.
Roasted Red Pepper Mayonnaise
Rice With Edamame
This dish is called mame gohan, the Japanese version of rice and beans. The beans are simmered in dashi seasoned with mirin and light soy sauce, and then the same cooking liquid is used for the rice. Before serving, the beans and rice are folded together, with a light dusting of salt and black sesame seeds.
Popcorn Pudding
Sweet And Salty Popcorn With Orange-Blossom Honey
Soybeans In The Pod
Popcorn Soup
Lamb Kebabs With Couscous
Cranberry Onion Jam
Good Fruitcake
The ridicule that most fruitcakes face has everything to do with bad recipes, which skimp on fruit and load on the batter. In a good fruitcake the batter should barely be perceptible, acting merely as adhesive to bind the fruit and nuts. Broken down into its parts, a good fruitcake contains ingredients that most people love: plump dates, candied cherries, almond extract, pecans, walnuts and sugar. And when it comes out of the oven, it is showered in whiskey. This is by no means an inexpensive cake to make, and that is largely why it became a traditional gift. It is a cake that you wouldn't make for yourself. It is a treat.
Fresh Ginger Cake
David Lebovitz's headily spiced cake, which Amanda Hesser wrote about in The Times in 1999, calls for a quarter-pound of fresh ginger. Mr. Lebovitz, who was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., has since had a long career as a cookbook author and blogger. But this recipe, from his cookbook “Room for Dessert,” is from relatively early in his writing career. Boldly flavored with just cinnamon, cloves, black pepper and, yes, a lot of fresh ginger, it is simplicity exemplified, coming together quickly and without a mixer. The cake — much like the recipe itself — ages well, its flavors melding and deepening over time.
Eggnog
Homemade eggnog is simple, a recipe for novices, as long as they can whisk. Where many eggnogs go wrong is that they rely more on cream than on alcohol. It’s not a liquid dessert. It’s a drink, whose coarse edges are muted with cream and eggs. “The Joy of Cooking” has a recipe that hits all the right points, some of them in excess. Made as is, the drinker is apt to experience a brief moment of jolly followed by blacking out. For my adaptation, I cut some of the cream with milk and cut back on the alcohol just a touch so one could finish a glass while still holding onto it.
Dick Taeuber's Brandy Alexander Pie
In January 1970, The Times published a recipe for brandy Alexander pie. It was an unassuming confection: a graham-cracker crust filled with a wobbly, creamy mousse and enough alcohol to raise the hair on your neck and then make your neck wobbly too. Later that year, Craig Claiborne, then the food editor, declared it one of the paper’s three most-requested dessert recipes and ran it again. By rights, this should have been the recipe’s swan song. But thanks to Dick Taeuber, a Maryland statistician, the pie lived on. Taeuber discovered that you could use a simple formula to make the pie in the flavor of almost any cocktail you wanted (3 eggs to 1 cup cream to 1/2 cup liquor). In 1975, Claiborne renamed it Dick Taeuber’s cordial pie and published it once more, this time with all 20 variations (see note). Calling it a cordial pie doesn’t quite capture its punch or proof. Booze pie would be more fitting. It’s not the kind of thing you want to serve for a children’s birthday party.