Recipes By David Tanis
750 recipes found
Slow-Cooked Albacore and Fresh Shell Bean Salad
A recipe for a salad of slow-cooked albacore and fresh shell beans.
Summer Vegetable Salad
This simple salad is seasoned with nothing more than salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Made with fresh summer produce, it allows the vegetables’ flavor and sweetness to shine through, needing little adornment. But you can also dress the salad with oil and vinegar and garnish with some meaty anchovy fillets, or use an anchovy vinaigrette (see note); these are just as delicious spooned over large spicy arugula leaves. Halved nine-minute eggs would be another nice accompaniment.
Sweet-and-Sour Onions
Spicy Green Mussels
Basic Short-Crust Pastry
Regarding this basic short-crust pastry: the dough takes just 10 minutes to make, so resist the temptation to buy that pre-made crust from the refrigerator case. Homemade pastry always tastes better. Make it the day before. You can even roll it out, line the tart pan and keep it frozen until you’re ready to bake.
Spring Lamb and Chickpea Stew
Stews and braises are for year-round cooking, but warmer weather calls for a lighter approach. This stew is quite brothy, and full of greens, wilted in olive oil with green garlic, carrots and fava beans or peas. A healthy sprinkling of roughly chopped mint adds brightness. It’s important to use dried chickpeas, because they add flavor to the broth as they slowly cook with the lamb. And an overnight soak is essential: The soaked dried chickpeas will swell to three times their original size, which gives them the proper creamy texture when cooked.
Peppered Duck Breast With Red Wine Sauce
Back in 2011, this version of steak au poivre made with duck breasts was introduced as part of a New Year’s menu. Fancy enough for a gathering, but relaxed enough that it doesn’t feel like too much, you can make it any time you want something a little more special than your average fare.
Herb Omelet Pita Sandwich
There are other options besides fried falafel or spit roasted lamb to fill a pita. A less well-known filling is an herb omelet, called ejjeh in Lebanese cuisine. This version -- made with lots of chopped parsley, dill, mint and cilantro -- mimics the Persian herb omelet called kuku sabzi. It makes a perfect vegetarian sandwich filling, topped with a salad of chickpeas, chopped cucumber and tomato and a refreshing tahini-yogurt sauce.
Spicy Fried Shrimp With Green Chutney
This highly seasoned Indian approach to fried shrimp elevates the concept. Perfect for snacking with drinks, it can be a meal with rice, dal and vegetables.
Rustic Tomato Toast
This traditional Spanish snack couldn’t be easier to make. Aside from good toasted bread, it requires very few ingredients: a garlic clove, a ripe tomato, some olive oil and flaky sea salt. In fact, the ingredient list is actually the recipe in shorthand. If you want a slightly more elaborate toast, garnish with anchovy fillets, slices of avocado or grilled shrimp. But even in its simplest form, this rustic toast is always satisfying.
Spinach and Bacon Tartine
In Paris’s small neighborhood cafés and bistros, kitchens are extremely small, consisting often of no more than a small wooden cutting board and a wall mounted heavy-duty toaster oven. At lunchtime a hot open-faced tartine — bubbling with fragrant cheese — is a popular menu choice. Similar to a piece of pizza, a tartine is constructed from a thick slice of rustic bread, lightly toasted. A savory topping and some good French cheese precede a few minutes of browning under the broiler. This tartine has a light smear of Dijon mustard, wilted spinach, bacon lardons and the bold-flavored cheese called Raclette, which melts in a spectacular way. If you can’t get Raclette, substitute Gruyère or Emmenthaler. Accompanied by a green salad, it makes a quick light meal, or you may cut the tartine into small wedges to serve with drinks.
Arctic Char with Spinach Butter
Darina Allen, known as the Julia Child of Ireland, has run the Ballymaloe Cooking School on an organic farm in east Cork for more than 30 years. Here’s a lovely dish from her repertoire, a whole fish wrapped in a foil package, seasoned with nothing more than salt, pepper, butter and a sprig of tarragon. The fish emerges moist and juicy, ready for a creamy butter sauce packed with chopped spinach and herbs. Ms. Allen makes it with pink trout, which are plentiful in Ireland, but this recipe calls for Arctic char, which is more widely available in the United States. But you could substitute pink trout (also called coho trout) if you can find it, or large wild trout, or even thick fillets of steelhead trout or salmon.
Warm Lentil and Smoked Pork Belly Salad
For this recipe, you really do need to use French lentils. Ordinary brown supermarket lentils can be fine for soup, but for a good lentil salad, you want those beautiful little imported gray-green lentilles du Puy. If you must, reasonable substitutes include: the black so-called Beluga lentils or the tiny Castelluccio lentils from Umbria in Italy. These lentils keep their shape when cooked and have a firm, nutty texture that holds up in a vinaigrette. They cost more, but their superior flavor makes them worth it. Indulge.
Pan-Seared Veal Steaks With Green Peppercorns
Green peppercorns grow on the same vine as the black peppercorns you use in your pepper mill. The difference is the green ones are picked young, while the black have been allowed to mature and dry. Though they are occasionally available still fresh on the branch, flown in directly from Southeast Asia, green peppercorns are always available preserved in brine or freeze-dried. This classic French recipe employs them in a deliciously pungent sauce for veal steaks, though boneless pork loin chops or chicken breasts can stand in nicely.
Soft-Shell Crabs With Curry Butter
Fans of soft-shell crab look forward to the season — late spring and early summer — with feverish anticipation. The entire delicious crab is edible and may be prepared in many ways; deep-fried, grilled or pan-cooked. Here they are sautéed in a spicy curry butter, which complements the crabs’ rich flavor. (The recipe makes more butter than is needed for this dish, but is wonderful to have on hand. Use extra for cooking vegetables or eggs.) Serve 1 large or 2 small soft-shell crabs per person.
Lamb Flatbread With Za’atar
A favorite Middle Eastern street snack is a small freshly baked flatbread, brushed with a mixture of olive oil and za’atar, the flavorful Middle Eastern spice mixture that contains wild thyme, sumac and sesame seeds. It is uncommonly good. For a more complex, pizzalike flatbread, this recipe adds spiced ground lamb and feta, along with a shower of herbs. But if you simply want the plain za’atar version, omit the lamb topping altogether.
Cold Pork Roast With Fennel and Green Bean Salad
The intensely aromatic garlic and herb seasoning gives this pork roast outstanding flavor. It is best seasoned a day in advance of cooking (or at least a few hours ahead), and the roast itself may be cooked up to a day before serving. Served with a simple salad of fennel and green beans, it makes a perfect summer meal.
Pork Cutlets With Lemon and Capers
Meat, breaded and fried, is a can't-lose dinner proposition from Milan to Texas and back. Here pork loin is pounded thin, dipped in flour and beaten egg, then coated in bread crumbs and shallow-fried until golden and crisp. A little messy to make? Yes, but less so than you'd think. Accompanied by a mixture of chopped parsley, lemon zest and capers and a sprinkling of chopped egg, it's an elegant weeknight splurge. But a wedge of lemon is all the garnish a well-fried cutlet really needs.
Calamari With Herbs and Polenta
Spicy Lobster Pasta
This dish is a little fiddly, but it is well worth the effort, and much of the prep can be done ahead. The sauce is rich with the essence of lobster, balanced with a good kick of hot pepper. It needs a good chewy pasta like bucatini or thick spaghetti.
Spicy Grilled Squid and Green Bean Salad
Everyone loves calamari, but grilling is an easy, delicious alternative to frying. Grill the squid whole, then slice it into rings to serve warm or at room temperature, dressed with an assertive vinaigrette — in this case, with ginger, hot pepper, sesame oil and scallions. Cooking over hot coals adds a smoky note, but a stovetop grill works well, too. Any size squid may be prepared this way, but meaty larger squid works best. And, if grilling isn't a possibility, whole squid can also be broiled or roasted.
Stuffed Squid Sicilian-Style
Squid (or calamari, its Italian name) can be prepared in a variety of ways — fried, braised, grilled and roasted — and all are good. In this recipe whole squid are stuffed before roasting with a bread crumb filling that contains typical Sicilian ingredients like chard, fennel, anchovy, pecorino and pine nuts.
Cool Ziti With Eggplant and Tomatoes
You don’t find pasta salads in Italy, but in very hot weather, room temperature or cooled-down pasta with vegetables can be quite delicious, prepared in advance for a casual picnic or supper. Here, the quantity of juicy ripe tomato and eggplant makes this pasta dish more like a vegetable salad.
