Recipes By Jennifer Steinhauer
38 recipes found
Frozen Key Lime Pie
This is the frozen key lime pie that ends up all over Jack Nicholson’s face in the film adaptation of the novel “Heartburn,” Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled recounting of her disastrous marriage to Carl Bernstein. A no-bake key lime pie recipe that's very easy to make, this formula uses a large amount of lime juice to guarantee a tart, impressive flavor. We recommend eating it, though, not using it as a weapon. The pie can be prepared ahead and frozen for up to a week before serving.
Tomato Soup
This recipe, adapted from Ted's Bulletin, an upscale comfort food diner in Washington, makes a simple yet satisfying soup. A generous swirl of half and half adds richness, and the unexpected addition of honey lends a subtle, earthy sweetness. Just add grilled cheese.
Oliver’s Chicken Stew
Remember the chicken-and-stars soup of your youth? This is like that, but heartier, more healthful and a touch more sophisticated. It's loaded with vegetables – carrots, leeks, celery – and seasoned with generous amounts of garlic, tarragon, thyme, parsley and bay leaf. Tiny little star pasta (stellini) make it unbearably charming, and a good squeeze of lemon juice brightens it all up. Serve it over slices of toasted Italian bread for the ultimate in comfort food.
Shrimp Pad Thai
Maybe don't order pad Thai this weekend and make it yourself? Here's a recipe to offer both an excellent facsimile of what's available from your favorite Thai place and the satisfaction that comes with having made the meal at home. This dish may introduce some new ingredients to your pantry (fish sauce and tamarind paste), and if you’re a parent, it might become a family favorite.
Chicken Paillard With Parmesan Bread Crumbs
This recipe doesn’t take long to get on the table, and you can get some aggression out at the start of the process by pounding down the chicken breasts. Then dredge the chicken in bread crumbs and Parmesan and sauté it in butter. At the end, you’ll spoon brown butter over the top and add a sprinkling of capers for a very simple meal that looks very fancy indeed.
Weeknight Lemon Chicken Breasts With Herbs
Boneless chicken breasts suffer a bad reputation, owing in large part to their propensity to dry out. The solution here is a lovely bath in an ample amount of olive oil, white wine and lemon, which seasons and tenderizes the chicken. Later, the marinade becomes an easy pan sauce once it cooks with the breasts. Use fresh herbs in the summer; in the winter, dried herbs will do the trick.
Slow-Cooker Butter Chicken
Not every version of butter chicken uses butter. Coconut milk gives this slow-cooker chicken its creamy richness. This is a fast recipe for the cook: Just prep it earlier in the day, even during your morning routine, getting your onion and spices going on the stove while simultaneously making lunches for grumpy children, folding dish towels, feeding the dogs and wondering once again why no one else has done any of the above. If you're preparing pork or beef in the slow cooker, you'll want to brown the meat first, but that's not necessary with boneless cuts of chicken. The meat will be cooked within 4 1/2 or 5 hours, but if you need to let it sit a little longer — up to 7 hours total, on low heat — it will still be delicious, though the chicken may be very soft and shred a tad.
Sumac-Scented Eggplant and Chickpeas
The cookbook author Cathy Barrow always finds creative ways to make use of ingredients. She created this recipe as a savory pie filling for her book “Pie Squared: Irresistibly Easy Sweet & Savory Slab Pies,” but it also makes a good vegetarian supper when served over rice, and a nice side dish too. (Make it vegan by omitting the yogurt to serve.) Pomegranate molasses can be found in Middle Eastern markets and health-food stores and adds bright, tangy sweetness to this hearty dish.
Cornbread Tamale Pie
This recipe came to The Times in a 2006 magazine article about the 75th anniversary edition of The Joy of Cooking, the soup-to-nuts cookbook found on practically every home cook's shelf since its first publication in 1931. Like many of the book's beloved recipes, this dish is a crowd-pleasing, homespun classic that is incredibly simple to put together. First, make a quick chili of beef, black beans, corn, green pepper and onion seasoned with chile power and cumin. Spread that in a baking dish, top with a simple cornbread batter and pop it into the oven. In about a half hour: tamale pie. Serve with hot sauce, a dollop of sour cream and a few slices of avocado. If you're trying to eat less red meat, ground turkey or chicken would make a fine substitute for the beef.
Sauerkraut and Apples
In the Chesapeake, seafood often finds its way onto the Thanksgiving menu. But in Baltimore, which has a strong eastern European and German immigrant history, the holiday table demands something else. “The absence of sauerkraut when turkey is present, Thanksgiving included, is unthinkable, comparable to potatoes without gravy or crisp French fries without ketchup,” wrote John Shields, the chef and owner of Gertrude’s restaurant in Baltimore, in his cookbook “Chesapeake Bay Cooking.” (Sauerkraut is a mainstay well beyond Thanksgiving; Gertrude’s hosts an annual Krautfest in January.) Traditionally, homemakers fermented the cabbage in earthenware crocks in their cellars, but these days the fresh stuff is available to buy. On Thanksgiving, it’s often simply served as a side, or incorporated into dishes like this, in which the sauerkraut is braised in beer with bacon and apples.
Grilled Taleggio Sandwich With Apricots and Capers
Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. It is the gateway sandwich to the land of hot sustenance, the first stovetop food many children learn to prepare by themselves. This deluxe grilled cheese is inspired by a dish at the Foundry on Melrose in Los Angeles.
Aperol Granita
Forget the spritz. This refreshing granita is yet another way to use up that bottle of Aperol. This recipe, from Balena in Chicago, freezes Aperol with gelatin, grapefruit and orange juices. At that restaurant, it tops a grapefruit sundae, but you can have it on its own, on a warm summer day.
White Bark Balls
Homemade Oreos
This recipe for homemade Oreos came to The Times from the pastry chef Stella Parks, whose trick of rolling out the dough onto cocoa powder gives the cookie a chocolatey boost. Using shortening for the cookie cream will lend it a tacky texture, perfect for a cookie-aisle authenticity.
Buttermilk Layer Cake
Though there is nothing wrong with a bakery cake — all those gorgeous piped roses! — there is really nothing better than a homemade cake. Homemade cakes say, "It is perfectly fine to stuff into my smallish home, play pin the tail on the donkey and leave with a loot bag holding edible bracelets and a plastic puzzle that will break in a week." Take back childhood, people! Here is a marvelous recipe adapted from “The Joy of Cooking,” which calls out lustily for a chocolate frosting.
Goan Coconut-Milk Pilaf
Royal Fans
Gingerbread Cookies
These traditional cookies came to The Times by way of Jennifer Steinhauer in an article about her grandmother's beloved Christmas cookie recipes. Isabelle Steinhauer would bake between “15 and 20 varieties each season: cream cheese wreaths shot from a cookie press; papery wafers carefully dipped in colored sugar; elaborate cutout cookies of nursery rhyme characters, their eyes fashioned from metallic dragées that the F.D.A. has written off as inedible; all manner of confections with nuts.” There's nothing fancy about these gingerbread cookies, but they are tender, gently spiced (feel free to add more to taste) and completely wonderful with a glass of cold milk. If you don't like using shortening, some readers have had good luck using half solid coconut oil and half softened butter instead.
Lady Bird Johnson's Pedernales River Chili
This recipe, from former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, was featured in the 2011 exhibition “What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?” at the National Archives in Washington.
Homemade Twinkies
Dispirited by the possible demise in 2012 of Hostess, the company that makes Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Hostess cupcakes, Jennifer Steinhauer began to wonder if she could make Hostess snack cakes, as well as other much-loved junk food from the past, in her own kitchen. She started with this classic, the Twinkie, by buying a canoe pan, which conveniently came with a cream injector. This recipe is a traditional sponge cake-style recipe, with whipped egg whites and sugar forming the base, then filled by cream injector with seven-minute frosting. Neighbors were delighted when she shared the results, but it was short lived. By the next day, the cake had absorbed the cream -- so make sure to eat them fast.
Birthday Cake With Sherry Glaze
If you are a reluctant baker and make only one cake a year, let it be a birthday cake for someone you love. There is so little effort and so much glory to the project. A two-layer cake is simple to produce, but if even that seems daunting, no complaints will arise from a golden Bundt cake. In our times, the simple fact of a homemade cake is enough to impress. Drizzling a liquid glaze over the cake is much easier than frosting, just as pretty, and does not require alarming specialty gadgets such as an "offset spatula."
Pumpkin Panna Cotta
When you want a pumpkin dessert, but not the heft of a pie, this light and creamy make-ahead custard will do the trick. It's surprisingly simple to prepare; just combine the ingredients in a saucepan, heat, then strain through a sieve and chill for at least 3 hours. Divine.
Texas Chili
Chili tastes are highly personal, often inflexible and loaded with preconceptions — the political party of culinary offerings. “I don’t disagree with anyone’s chili,” Robb Walsh, a Texas food historian, the author of “The Tex-Mex Cookbook” and a restaurateur, told The Times. “If you are making a one-pot meal and you want to put beans in it, that’s fine. If chili is part of your cuisine, like Tex-Mex, there are other things you will want to do." This recipe is an amalgam of styles, with coffee and chocolate for complexity, hot sauce for kick and beans just because.
