Recipes By Genevieve Ko
159 recipes found
San Choy Bao (Pork and Water Chestnut Lettuce Wraps)
San choy bao literally translates from Cantonese to “lettuce wrap,” and its contours are wide: cold iceberg lettuce, a stir-fry of finely diced vegetables and protein, and sweet Chinese bean sauce like hoisin. (The deep-fried noodles here aren’t essential, but they add a fantastic crackle to the juicy filling.) Unlike soft, warm comfort food, which lulls you, san choy bao wakes you up. It feels like a duel, with jabs of hot and cold, lunging back and forth between two worlds. The crunch of icy lettuce snaps into the filling’s steaming crisp bits, and if you can find fresh water chestnuts, you’ll be rewarded with their unique woodsy crunch.
Golden Diner Pancakes
This game-changing pancake recipe from Sam Yoo, the chef and an owner of Golden Diner in Manhattan’s Chinatown, combines all the nostalgia of diner pancakes with innovative techniques for a dish that makes your eyes widen at first taste. Mr. Yoo cooks a yeast-risen buttermilk batter in individual skillets to give them height like Japanese soufflé pancakes and a perfect roundness like those in the flapjack emoji. As soon as he stacks them on a plate, he drenches them with buttery maple-honey syrup, then tops them with salted honey-maple butter, both inspired by Korean honey-butter chips and reminiscent of Werther’s hard candies. A berry compote completes the meal with its fresh tang.
Hellbender’s Masa Pancakes
The chef Yara Herrera is clear: “I didn’t invent the idea of a masa pancake.” But she perfected the form at Hellbender restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens, where the theme of native heirloom corn runs through the tacos and tostadas on the menu. For brunch, masa gives the pancakes a sturdy crackle at the edges around a crisp top. Inside, it infuses the batter with a depth not usually found in pancakes, as does the addition of yogurt, yielding a crumb that’s at once fine and fluffy. Fresh masa, a doughy mass of ground nixtamalized corn, can be purchased from tortillerias and some Latin markets (see Tip). It’s blended into a batter that stays light using Ms. Herrera’s technique of cooking tall pancakes in tiny individual skillets. But masa harina, shelf-stable flour ground from dried masa, is more readily available and can be substituted as directed below, with the batter sizzled into the usual flatter rounds.
Homemade Protein Bars
Making your own protein bars may sound like a project, but this recipe comes together quickly and doesn’t require turning on the oven. Its greatest appeal, though, is how it combines the crackle of nuts and the creaminess of nut butter with earthy maple syrup. A fat pinch of salt and a touch of pepper bring out the nuts’ toasty bittersweetness. The black pepper sharpens the syrup’s caramel roundness, but try ground chipotle or other dried chiles for a smoky heat. There’s plenty of salt, but if you want even more, sprinkle flakes on top before chilling. Feel free to customize the nuts and seasoning: Just be sure to keep the ratios the same.
Easy Carrot Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting
The whole point of carrot cake is that, in its most ideal form, it’s a vehicle for cream cheese frosting, a triple stack of fluffy spiced cake, finished with generous swoops of frosting. Baking the cake batter in a half-sheet pan, then cutting the flat cake into three rectangles delivers thin, even layers and skips the hassle of baking and slicing tall cake rounds. To highlight the tang of cream cheese, this frosting includes sour cream instead of butter. It gives the whole thing a fresh lightness, each forkful equal parts tender cake and silky frosting. The resulting cake looks modern with its sharp angles but can still be cut into classic triangular wedges.
Lemon Butter Salmon With Dill
Glossed with a tangy blend of honey and lemon, this salmon caramelizes around the edges while staying juicy and tender. Dill, lots of it, brings freshness, green as cut grass. Wild salmon works especially well here because the butter in the sauce gives the lean fish richness. (Fatty farmed salmon will simply taste even richer, not a bad thing at all.) Quick-pickled cucumbers and mustard seeds offer a cool, crunchy pop to this dish, but the salmon is also tasty on its own. Serve this with rice, potatoes or a tray of asparagus roasted alongside the salmon.
Eggless Pancake Recipe
This breakfast startles in the best way: It tastes like cozy, steaming porridge, but looks and feels like delightful buttermilk pancakes. Tiny quick oats soaked in buttermilk, along with flax and honey, lend a unique tenderness. Biting into a round, crackly with butter and caramelized from honey on the outside, reveals the pleasant, familiar creaminess of oatmeal in the center. Flax meal softens alongside the oats, amplifying their nutty flavor and binding the batter, eliminating the need for eggs. The pancakes are flavorful enough to enjoy on their own, but also taste great with toppings like fresh berries.
Best Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Muffins
Nubby with oats, these tender brown sugar muffins have a hint of cardamom that brings out the richness of chocolate chips. Tiny quick-cooking oats offer a delicate chew in batter that comes together fast enough for weekday mornings. Right out of the oven, they’re crisp around the edges and fluffy. Over time, they become stickier and feel even more wholesome.
Sardine and Egg Sandwich
In 1939, New Orleans chef Lena Richard self-published a cookbook to meet the demand for her recipes. She was the first Black person to host a cooking show and also owned restaurants, had a line of frozen foods and founded a catering company and cooking school. In addition to showcasing the Creole dishes of New Orleans, “Lena Richard’s Cook Book” included a whole chapter on sandwiches for luncheons and tea time. This four-ingredient mix comes together easily and tastes both complex and comfortingly simple. The recipe below reflects her book’s version and the tips added here offer guidance for cooks today.
Spicy, Creamy Weeknight Bolognese
This pasta sauce captures the soul-soothing essence of a long-simmering Bolognese even though it cooks quickly. Searing ground beef gives it a caramelized taste that mimics the depth of slow-cooked meat. Adding a few spoonfuls of red curry paste doesn’t make it taste like curry, but gives it instant nuance and depth. Some rich cream at the end rounds the sharp heat to an enveloping warmth. To save even more time, you can chop the vegetables while the meat is cooking. The sauce tastes great on any type of pasta, but it’s especially nice with varieties that can capture it in their curves.
Chocolate Sesame Dumplings
Can you wrap just about any filling in dough and consider it a dumpling? These bite-size desserts prove you can. Lightly salted melted chocolate, creamy like a truffle, is stuffed into chewy homemade wrappers, naturally sweet from glutinous rice flour. Taking cues from black sesame treats often made for Lunar New Year, these sticky steamed dumplings include toasted sesame oil in both the filling and wrapper. Making dumplings from scratch is a fun group project and these are especially great for kids. The dough is the easiest possible kind to shape — it doesn’t require a rolling pin; it’s simply rolled into balls then pressed into flat rounds by hand.
Miso-Marinated Pork Roast
This pork roast tastes and smells like the holidays, savory with the scent of rosemary, cozy with a caramelized crust and warming with black pepper. Even though the marinade has only four ingredients, the finished roast has the wow factor of a restaurant dish. The best part about this centerpiece? You can’t mess it up. And though the accompanying cranberry sauce is optional, it brings a welcome fruity tang and pop of red to the table. The sauce can be made up to a week ahead of time and the pork can be marinated the morning you plan to roast it.
Old-Fashioned Shortbread
The classic cocktail transforms into a cookie here, with bourbon-soaked cherries and candied orange studding buttery shortbread. Balancing that fruity sweetness are sliced almonds, which give the rounds extra crunch and richness. To fully capture the spirit of an old-fashioned, the dough gets a final egg wash with whiskey on top. Keep a log of this slice-and-bake shortbread in the fridge to prepare fresh batches over a couple of days or bake them all at once and save the rest in an airtight container.
Cranberry Ricotta Cheesecake
Jammy tart-sweet cranberry sauce gives way to cheesecake fluffy with ricotta, which also gives this dessert a fresh-cheese milkiness that pairs perfectly with the tart fruit. Citrus zest and juice tie all the flavors together and give the whole dessert a holiday party vibe. The filling comes together quickly in a food processor, which purées the ricotta to smoothness. You can skip the cranberry topping to enjoy this cheesecake any time of year. Simply serve it on its own or with any fruit that’s in season. Despite the precautions taken in the recipe below, the top still may split and that’s OK. The cheesecake will still taste great and the cranberry topping will hide the cracks.
Shrimp Cocktail With Cranberry Cocktail Sauce
Imagine cocktail sauce, but with a fresh, fruity tang. That’s what you get when cranberries take the place of tomatoes in a dipping sauce with the welcome bite of horseradish mellowed by the woodsy sweetness of maple syrup. As special as it tastes, it requires only blending in a food processor. Be sure to use frozen cranberries straight from the freezer, which will purée into a smooth, tasty dip. (Fresh cranberries won’t break down as much as you try to blitz them and their sour bite is too sharp.) This fun spin on shrimp cocktail is a welcome-mat appetizer to a Thanksgiving feast, but also fun for any party.
Chewy Brown Butter Cookies
Chewy, yes, but these big cookies still have that essential crisp ring around the edge and also include crunchy bits of pecans throughout. Cooked in browned butter, the nuts take on a toasty depth and taste even richer if you start with Elliot pecans, a sweeter, fattier variety grown primarily in Georgia. It’s worth seeking out very dark maple syrup too, which is labeled as such. Intense and complex, it’s ideal for baking because it’s strong enough in taste to act as a seasoning. Even with standard pecans and other shades of syrup, these thoughtfully salted cookies come out caramelly.
Microwave Baked Potato
The key to making a perfect baked potato in the microwave is cooking it at half power. Because microwaves generate heat that penetrates foods from the outside in, they can overcook the exterior and undercook the interior of big, dense ingredients like potatoes. At 50-percent power, the machine cooks the spuds evenly all the way through. Even at that lower wattage, the potato will cook far more quickly than it would in an oven and is a great method for preparing just one serving.
Microwave Corn on the Cob
In a microwave, corn steams to juicy sweetness in minutes without heating up the kitchen. The husks trap the vegetable’s natural moisture, and the silks slip off easily after being zapped. (In fact, this method is great for shucking corn quickly. You can microwave the corn for just a minute or so, until the husks and silks come off easily, then finish cooking the ears on the grill.) Microwaving corn is ideal when you’re preparing just an ear or two, but you can microwave as many as can fit in a single layer in your machine at one time. You’ll just have to cook them longer, about 4 minutes for two ears and 5 minutes for three.
Microwave Bacon
Sometimes, you just want a slice of bacon (or two) for yourself. Maybe for someone you love, too. And if you want — need? — that bacon now, there’s no faster way to cook it than in the microwave. The strips brown on a plate while a paper towel laid over them soaks up grease and prevents splatters inside your machine. Once you try this technique, you’ll have a better sense of how long your microwave takes to cook a strip or two.
Easy Blueberry Cream Scones
All you need is a bowl, fork and baking sheet to make these scones, which end up crisp on the outside and tender within. The recipe doesn’t include the added step of cutting butter into flour, which yields the kind of sturdier, breadier scones found in bakeries and requires extra tools, skills and time. Instead, it’s a streamlined version of cream scones, where the dough is often rolled or patted flat then cut into rounds or wedges. Dropping the batter onto the baking sheet in mounds not only makes these easier to throw together, it also ensures the scones stay soft, as does a short rest in the refrigerator. Folding in berries make these lovely for breakfast or brunch, while stirring in currants gives them a classic tea time feel. They’re rich enough to enjoy on their own, but they also taste great slathered with jam and clotted cream or butter.
Olympic Chocolate Muffins
How to make the viral 2024 Olympic chocolate muffins at home.
Bánh Bò Nướng (Honeycomb Cake)
Known in English as honeycomb cake for its interior pattern of holes stretched long like yawns, bánh bò nướng is tinted jade from pandan paste, which flavors the coconut milk batter. Glossy green pandan leaves, from which the paste is extracted, impart a scent that hovers like jasmine and vanilla with a grounding of soft herbs and toasted rice. The mix of tapioca starch and rice flour yields a texture that’s stretchy, sticky and soft. Hannah Pham’s take on this Vietnamese classic includes a crisp outer crust. She uses a Bundt pan so there’s more of the browned shell in each bite and, to make the exterior even more caramelized, cut down on the amount of butter brushed over the heated pan. For a foolproof cake, she calls for double-acting baking powder, avoids over whisking the eggs and passes the batter through a sieve.
Grain Bowl With Sardines and Sauce Moyo
A satisfying grain bowl doesn’t need to take a lot of time, especially if you start with a quick-cooking grain like fonio. Fonio, tinier than even couscous or quinoa, takes five minutes to cook and delivers a deep nutty taste. This ancient whole grain, which is also gluten-free, is prepared throughout West Africa, as is sauce moyo, a sauce of crisp onion and pepper, juicy tomatoes, chile and lime. Here, that sauce adds crunch to the tender, sandy grains, and tinned smoked fish delivers a savory richness. You can assemble the whole thing to enjoy at home or pack up to eat as a fresh and filling desk lunch.
Curry Roasted Half Chicken and Peppers
A half chicken, cut right between the breasts and back, is sold in most supermarkets and just what you want when cooking for one, offering both light and dark meat, and the juiciness that comes with all the bones. After it cooks — quickly, relative to a whole bird — it leaves you with two meals or one very hearty dinner. Here, this curry-rubbed chicken roasts over peppers and onion, which release their natural sweetness into the pan juices. It’s great over rice or with bread, and leftovers can be simmered with coconut milk for a stewed curry, or chopped and mixed with mayonnaise for a chicken salad sandwich.