Recipes By David Tanis
747 recipes found
Strawberry Parfait
Ricotta cream — sweetened fresh ricotta, lightly whipped — is used in Sicily to fill cannoli or frost traditional cakes. Here, it’s combined with whipped cream and strawberries for a layered “parfait” and a very simple but impressive dessert.
Spring Salad
Some salads are tossed, while others, like this one, are composed. Feel free to improvise here: A few spinach leaves, watercress, a handful of raw sweet garden peas or fava beans, or thinly sliced raw artichoke can be nice additions. For a true celebration of spring, make sure to gather an assortment of complementary leaves, herbs and vegetables, and arrange them artfully.
Tofu Milanese
The breaded cutlets known as Milanese are often made of veal, pork or chicken, but, here, tofu stands in with excellent results. To accompany, broccoli rabe is a delicious choice, though mustard greens of any variety make a fine substitution.
Kumquat Panna Cotta
Panna cotta is a creamy dessert custard, set with gelatin instead of eggs. It’s lovely plain or with a drizzle of honey on top. And, of course, it’s delicious with berries or stone fruit. Here, it’s topped with quickly candied kumquat slices, but a spoonful of marmalade or other homemade jam can be nice instead.
Radicchio-Anchovy Salad
Radicchio, once rarely seen (by non-Italians), is now a familiar produce staple, and many farmers’ markets also feature other red-leafed radicchio varietals, such as Treviso or Chioggia. Feel free to mix and match, but pair them with an assertive dressing: The pleasant bitter flavor of the red leaves calls out for something bracing.
Baked Lemon Pudding
My repertoire of sweet lemon recipes is limited, but, as it happened, my friend, the Irish pastry chef JR Ryall, was in town, with his new cookbook “Ballymaloe Desserts,” for which I wrote the foreword. It contains a recipe for a homey hot lemon pudding. It's not a soufflé, but it has a light, airy feel. And, as it bakes, it separates into distinct layers, custardy on the bottom and spongy on top.
Dandelion-Beet Salad
Wild dandelion greens are abundant in the spring, and you can find the organic cultivated ones from California in most supermarkets. They have a pleasant bitterness and are best tossed with a zesty dressing like the one here. But if you cannot find dandelion greens, you can also substitute sturdy, peppery arugula or watercress.
Creamy Chicken and Spring Vegetables
Based on the French preparation known as blanquette, this light, comforting dish will please anyone who likes chicken potpie. It’s meant to celebrate fresh spring vegetables and herbs, but frozen peas, lima beans and artichokes are also fine here. The vegetable combinations can be altered to taste or to be fewer in number. This is the version for company, with its savory white gravy enriched with white wine. A dollop of crème fraîche is added just before serving, along with a shower of fragrant fresh herbs. There are a lot of ingredients listed, but it’s not hard to put together this elegant meal.
Carrot-Leek Soup With Miso
This light, simple vegetable soup is very quick to put together. A little miso is stirred in just before serving to add depth, and a final squeeze of lime gives brightness.
Triple-Sesame Tea Cakes
Sometimes just a few cookies are what you want for dessert, accompanied, when in season, by a bowl of mandarins or tangerines. These sesame cookies aren’t too sweet, and citrus fruit, eaten out of hand, makes a refreshing end to a meal.
Baked Fish With Mushrooms and Ginger
A firm, white-fleshed fish like halibut, bass or grouper makes a neutral backdrop for a zesty, savory topping of stir-fried mushroom. Any type of mushroom will work, but shiitake are especially nice. Serve with steamed rice.
Black Rice Bowl With Bok Choy and Mushrooms
A bowl of rice with vegetables makes a healthy and delicious meal, especially if the rice is whole grain. Whole-grain rice comes in many colors, from golden amber to rusty red to purplish black. This recipe calls for Thai black sticky rice (also called sweet or glutinous rice), which is pleasantly chewy. In Thailand, black sticky rice is most often used to make sweet rice pudding with coconut milk, but it tastes very good in combination with savory ingredients. If sticky rice is not your thing, you could use Chinese black “forbidden rice,” or any other whole-grain rice. With stir-fried greens and shiitake mushrooms, this visually stunning dish is full of goodness, kissed with ginger, garlic and sesame.
Garlic Aioli
Zuni Café in San Francisco makes a traditional aioli with only four ingredients: garlic, egg yolk, olive oil and salt. No lemon or vinegar, no mustard, no pepper. Quarts of aioli are produced daily, mounted by hand with a wire whisk. You can, of course, make aioli with an electric blender or food processor in a matter of seconds, but, in “The Zuni Café Cookbook,” the chef Judy Rodgers describes how to make aioli with a mortar and pestle, the old-fashioned way. It takes patience, but the result is sublime. Choose a mild-tasting extra-virgin olive oil, perhaps a French one, or use a mixture of half-olive oil and half-neutral-tasting vegetable oil.
Fabrizia Lanza’s Sicilian Pizza (Sfincione)
Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is street-food paradise, and among its many offerings is sfincione, a hearty pizza that’s baked in a rimmed sheet pan, allowing the dough to rise to a chewy thickness, and cut into large square slices. Sfincione is smeared with a frugal tomato sauce enhanced with umami from sheep’s milk cheese, onions and anchovy, along with olive oil and a handful of bread crumbs to make the cheese go further. When baked, the top is juicy, while the bottom is crisp from the generously oiled pan. Despite its origins as a street food, it is the perfect pizza to make at home. This easy and authentic recipe is from Fabrizia Lanza, proprietor of the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School, on the family’s country estate near Palermo.
Rosemary Rack of Lamb With Crushed Potatoes
Tender rack of lamb, though expensive, makes an elegant roast for a special-occasion dinner, and it’s quite easy to prepare. A brief marinade of pounded garlic and anchovy, Dijon mustard and olive oil heightens the flavor. For a simple accompaniment, roast small crushed potatoes in the same pan. Each eight-bone rack may be sliced into four thick chops, or eight thin chops, if you prefer.
Sausage and Peppers
For an easy, hearty dinner (or breakfast or lunch) buy fresh Italian pork fennel sausages, preferably from an Italian deli or butcher. Pair them with quickly stewed peppers and onions, splashed with vinegar, and fried eggs.
Winter Citrus Salad With Belgian Endive
Late winter really is the time for the best citrus. Produce markets have piles of blood oranges, as well as navel and cara cara oranges and grapefruit, the flesh of each in different vivid brilliant colors. For this salad, use as many kinds of citrus as possible. If you can find pomelos, they add their own kind of sweet tanginess. The combined flavor of sweet and sour citrus, fruity olive oil and coarse salt is seductive.
Easy Pizza Dough
This pizza dough is very easy to put together, and it's enough for four 10-inch-diameter pizzas. To make it even easier to roll out, prepare it ahead, and refrigerate it overnight. Refrigerated dough will keep several days. It may also be successfully frozen and thawed. Keeping preweighed individual frozen dough balls on hand makes it easy to have pizza whenever you like. (Thaw dough overnight in the refrigerator or leave at room temperature for several hours.)
Quick Fresh Tomato Sauce
When tomatoes are at their ripest, make a batch of fresh tomato sauce. At the market, look for the cracked, slightly bruised tomatoes sold at a discount. The flesh of the tomato should be dense, sweet and blood red. This makes a very fresh- and bright-tasting sauce in a manageable small batch. Take advantage of good tasty tomatoes and fill a few zip-top bags for the freezer.
Simple Steak au Poivre
Steak au poivre sounds as if it would be difficult, but it is actually quite simple to prepare, and makes an easy and elegant (perhaps somewhat pricy) meal. Essentially it is a sautéed steak, with a quick pan sauce. This version made with black peppercorns and Sichuan pepper tastes bright but not overpoweringly peppery or boozy. If you serve it with scallion-mashed potatoes, your home cooked steak au poivre will put the best neighborhood bistro to shame.
Rigatoni and Cauliflower al Forno
Cauliflower is perhaps the least appreciated member of the large family of cruciferous vegetables, no doubt due to memories of encountering it boiled, flabby and timidly seasoned, if seasoned at all. When cooked properly, it is a delight. Cauliflower can stand up to rather bold seasoning, in fact. In this recipe, it gets garlic, sage, red pepper and capers. And it is browned in olive oil, which further enhances the flavor. If you want a terrific side vegetable, just serve the sautéed cauliflower and skip the rigatoni. But combining the cauliflower with large-format pasta, pecorino cheese and bread crumbs, then baking it until crisply golden, makes for a splendid meal.
Basic Harissa
This spicy North African condiment has many versions, but usually contains dried hot red pepper, caraway, cumin and garlic. Just a small dab packs quite a punch, and can be used to brighten soups, sauces or marinades. Thinned with olive oil, it’s good drizzled over grilled meat or vegetables. Store it in the refrigerator for up to 1 month.
Homemade Pita Bread
Is it worth making pita at home? Absolutely. Store-bought pita (like store-bought sandwich bread) is often several days old. Warm, fragrant home-baked pita is obviously superior, and there’s a bit of a thrill when the breads puff up in the oven. And once you get the hang of it, it’s not difficult. For the best flavor, try to get freshly milled whole-wheat flour. Even though only a little is called for in the recipe, it makes a difference.
Chicken Saltimbocca
Saltimbocca means to “jump in the mouth” with flavor. It is typically a restaurant dish, but at home on a weeknight, a chicken breast version makes a very tasty facsimile. Pound the chicken and marinate it in a mixture of chopped sage, garlic and olive oil, then brown it quickly before it goes under the broiler with fontina cheese and a slice of prosciutto. Fried sage leaves make a savory garnish. There’s no sauce, but wilted spinach makes an excellent accompaniment.