Recipes By David Tanis
750 recipes found
Peaches With Zabaglione
You will need fresh peaches for this dish, which requires a bit of finesse. Zabaglione is a traditional egg custard flavored with musky sweet Marsala wine. Other sweet wines may also be used, like sherry or spumante. It takes just a few minutes to make, whisking over a double boiler. Zabaglione can be served hot, but in summer it is better cool. The faint butterscotch caramel-y flavor seems custom-made to accompany peaches.
Red Wine-Braised Short Ribs With Carrots
Everyone loves beef short ribs. Because the meat is well-marbled, a couple of hours’ slow cooking keeps it incredibly succulent. This homely combination of beef with carrot, cooked rather plainly, is classic in traditional French cooking, and produces truly delicious results. Like all other braises, this one improves if made a day (or two) in advance of serving, though you can certainly make it all in one go if you wish. Cooking it ahead accomplishes a number of things, not least of which is that it needs only reheating to serve. Another is that refrigerating the braise in its juices always seems to intensify the flavors. Yet one more reason: It is easier to remove the fat on the surface of the liquid when it is cold, rather than trying to skim it from the surface hot.
Sea Scallop Carpaccio
For an elegant, easy first course, all you need are large ultra-fresh sea scallops. Ask your fishmonger for dry-packed day-boat or diver scallops. The carpaccio takes only a few minutes to assemble.
Simple Sea Scallops Persillade
Sea scallops are available all year, but are abundant and quite welcome in winter. Like all shellfish, they are best when they are ultra-fresh. If you can get them like that, just let the freshness shine. These simple scallops are nearly naked, adorned with nothing more than butter, garlic and parsley. The idea is to accentuate, not mask, that straight-from-the-sea feeling.
North African Meatballs
In France, meatballs are called boulettes, and by far the favorite versions are the spice-scented North African type. Most of the neighborhood Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants in Paris offer them, served as an appetizer or a side, or in a fragrant main-course tagine with couscous. This recipe is an amalgam of several that I found on my bookshelf, among them one called boulettes tangéroises in an old French cookbook. Since I like things a bit spicier, my boulettes are more like Tunisian ones, in which hot pepper is more assertive.
Tomato Tart With Fresh Mozzarella and Anchovies
This rectangular tart is like a pizza but easier. Instead of a yeast dough, the base is a crisp pastry made with olive oil. The recipe makes enough dough for 2 tarts.
Fuyu Persimmon Salad
The Fuyu persimmon, round and squat and rather tomato-shaped, is the kind you can eat raw. You want to buy the ones that have turned truly orange (if they are greenish-gold, let them ripen for a few days), then peel them and slice them. The flesh is firm but sweet. Eat them plain, in the Japanese fashion, with a pot of tea. Fuyus persimmons make wonderful salads, too.
Simple Lamb Curry With Carrot Raita
Shrimp Salad With Horseradish Rémoulade
In this simple dish, winter ingredients come together in a springlike way: a composed salad of shrimp and watercress, garnished with golden beets, celery and hard-cooked egg. There’s a zippy horseradish rémoulade, spiked with fresh tarragon and dill.
Coconut Chicken Curry With Cashews
This Sri Lankan curry goes together fairly quickly despite the long list of ingredients. I used skinless, boneless thigh meat, because it always stays moist and can absorb a lot of flavor from a short marinade in ginger, garlic and spices. To intensify the taste, the cashews and coconut are used two ways. First, a handful of each is ground to a powder and added to the sauce. Then after simmering for 30 minutes or so, the curry is finished with a generous cup of thick coconut milk and garnished with toasted cashews. I also added, because I like it and thought it would harmonize nicely, a totally nontropical vegetable, parsnip — optional, but delicious.
Spanish Pork Skewers
For casual entertaining, the tapas experience translates well to the small home kitchen. One delicious hot tapas classic easily made at home is called pinchos Moruños, or Moorish skewers, essentially small kebabs of pork marinated in Arabic (Moorish) spices and grilled, usually on a hot steel plancha. Because most Muslim Arabs wouldn’t eat pork, one presumes the original dish was lamb. It’s anyone’s guess how it evolved into this ubiquitous tapa selection in Christian Spain. Nevertheless, now it means pork seasoned with garlic, cumin, coriander, pimentón and sometimes oregano. Once skewered, they need only about 5 minutes on a hot griddle.
Beef Short Ribs with Star Anise and Tangerine
Beef short ribs, cut flanken style, are the best choice for any number of braises or stews, whether it’s Yankee pot roast or French pot-au-feu. Since they have the perfect fat-to-lean ratio, they always remain juicy. Here, a fragrant Chinese-inspired marinade featuring star anise, cinnamon stick, 5-spice powder and tangerine makes them anything but ordinary. Serve these short ribs in a Western manner with mashed root vegetables, or stick with Asian accompaniments like steamed rice and daikon radish.
Persimmon Salad with Pomegranate and Walnuts
Persimmons make a colorful cool weather salad, combined with dark red Treviso and radicchio leaves and glistening ruby-like pomegranate seeds. Walnut oil and shallots give the vinaigrette an earthy flavor, accentuated by caramelized walnuts with sea salt. You need the small apple-size Fuyu persimmons, which are delicious eaten raw. (The pointy Hachiya persimmons need to ripen to softness and are usually cooked for cakes or puddings.) Make this throughout the fall and winter. If persimmons are unavailable use pears, Asian pears or crisp tart apples.
Roast Guinea Hen with Grilled Radicchio
Oyster Pie With Leeks, Bacon and Mashed Potatoes
Baked with a topping of mashed potatoes and buttered bread crumbs, this hearty oyster dish is reminiscent of oyster chowder or stew. It is a perfect use for larger oysters. Ask your fishmonger to shuck them for you. (It’s possible to buy pre-shucked oysters in a jar, but freshly shucked oysters are obviously fresher tasting.) Figure three or four oysters per person.
Zuni Café’s Focaccia
The excellent hamburger at Zuni Café in San Francisco has always been served on a square of toasted rosemary focaccia. The pastry chef Annie Callan offers this house recipe: Scaled to a reasonable size, it is easy to put together and fun to make. Bake it in a 9-by-12-inch rimmed baking sheet for a nice, thick focaccia that can be cut into six 4-inch squares (the trimmings are a delicious snack), and split horizontally into a hamburger bun. The baked focaccia can be kept for several days in an airtight container and needs only a brief toasting to bring it back to life. But you can also roll the dough thinner and bake a more pizzalike flatbread, perhaps topped with stewed onions or peppers.
Quail and Grapes
Sooji Dhokla (Steamed Semolina Bread)
Dhokla is an irresistible Guajarati Indian snack that is essentially a fluffy, steamed savory bread or cake. They are often made with chana dal, ground chickpeas. But there are dhoklas made with other dried legumes, with rice and with corn, even with semolina (sooji), as in this version. Dhokla has a marvelous light, spongy texture. The batter is spicy with ginger and green chile; more flavors are added by popping mustard seed and curry leaves in oil for the final flourish.
Chimichurri Salsa
Lobster Summer Rolls
These Vietnamese-style rolls, from David Tanis, take a tiny bit of dexterity but fall under the kind of easier project cooking that yields big personal triumphs. Once you get the hang of tucking and rolling the rice-paper wrapper, the rest is simple. But, “if, despite your best efforts, your lobster rolls become unruly and fall apart, don’t despair,” he wrote back in 2013. “Just plop the perfectly good remains on a plate, drizzle with the dipping sauce and call it a rice noodle salad.”
Cold Rice Noodles With Grilled Chicken and Peanut Sauce
Maybe cold pasta makes you think of some mediocre quasi-Italian grab-and-go deli choice in a plastic clamshell. To me, it conjures up images of delicious Southeast Asian street food and warm ocean breezes. There, cool rice noodles are topped with crisp vegetables, sweet herbs, pungent sauces and usually a little savory element, like sizzled fragrant beef or nuggets of fried spring rolls. A bowl of these saladlike noodles is always appealing, and they’re excellent for hot weather wherever you may find yourself, even if you don’t happen to be on a tropical holiday. For a dish that’s not especially labor intensive, it ranks high on the flavor scale and tastes fresh, clean and bright: the kind of home-cooked fast food we can all appreciate.
Tangerine Ice
Porcini Broth
Peppery Lamb With Shell Beans and Cherry Tomatoes
One of the great joys of summer cooking is the availability of just-picked green beans, Romano beans and yellow wax beans, as well as tender, creamy fresh shell beans. They make a delicious colorful main-course salad complemented with sweet cherry tomatoes. To accompany it here, boneless lamb leg is coated generously with coarsely ground pepper and coriander, and roasted in the oven or in a covered grill until medium-rare. The peppery lamb pairs beautifully with the salad. Dressed with an assertive vinaigrette, this room-temperature dish is perfect for an al fresco lunch or supper. Use the method as a template for making similar salads all summer long, using other meats (or fish) if you wish. If shell beans are not available, you may substitute cooked dried beans or chickpeas.