Recipes By Julia Moskin
392 recipes found
Salty Pluff Mud Pie
Community-supported agriculture takes many forms these days, but only in Charleston, S.C., will you find a C.S.A. for pie. Amy Robinette, who grew up in Spartanburg, S.C., is committed to adapting Southern desserts, which have often come to rely on supersweet and artificial ingredients, back to real food. In her kitchen, the chocolate chess pie her grandmother always made — filled with white sugar, evaporated milk, and cocoa powder — has been adapted to local ingredients. The pie gets its name from “pluff” mud, the sticky, sulfurous sediment that lines the bottom of the South Carolina tidal marshes; some say it is the true source of Lowcountry flavor. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Roasted Corn and Edamame Salad
A late-summer side with lots of crunch, spice and herbs, this is great with anything grilled. Hugh Mangum, the New York chef of Texas lineage who started the Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque chain, has brightened up the traditional Texas plate of meat, meat, meat and white bread with fresh sides like this one. It holds up well overnight, too.
Blotkake (Norwegian Cream Cake)
Blotkake, layered spongecake covered with drifts of whipped cream and fruit, is a dessert that Norwegians are passionate and possessive about. It is a traditional sweet finish for any festive meal, whether a long, dark winter lunch or a long, sunlit summer dinner. “Scandinavians really value lingering and feasting at the table,” said Maren Waxenberg, a Norwegian-American cook who lives in New York City and serves this cake at Thanksgiving. Cloudberries are a protected crop in Norway and are rarely available fresh in the United States, but raspberries are a good substitute.
Café con Leche Syrup
Cheddar Cheese Puffs
Cheddar replaces the more traditional Gruyère, Roquefort or Parmigiano-Reggiano in this French recipe for gougères. The Cheddar performs admirably.
Cheese Straws With Pimentón
Back in 2009, Julia Moskin spent some time with Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, the women behind Canal House Cooking. At the time, the two ran their photo and design studio for cookbooks and magazines out of a former newspaper office in the Delaware River Valley. And they spent their days creating recipes for cocktails and snacks, like these cheese straws with pimentón. Ready in a half-hour, they're as good as a party hors d’oeuvre as they are a snack for the whole family.
Edamame Dip With Red Onion and Sesame Oil
This recipe came to The Times from Rachael Hutchings, a young mother and blogger who spent three years living in Japan. Ms. Hutchings was featured in an article by Julia Moskin about the young people redefining Mormon cuisine, which is often thought of as casserole heavy. This recipe combines edamame with cilantro and red onion and spices things up with sriracha.
Coconut Brigadeiros
Fudge made from condensed milk is the base for brigadeiros, bite-size sweets served in paper frills and covered with sprinkles. “Brigadeiros are like the cupcakes of Brazil,” the cooking teacher Leticia Moreinos Schwartz said. “They are at every birthday party.” (They are named for a once-popular politician, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, who ran for president in 1945 under the slogan “Vote no brigadeiro, que é bonito e é solteiro” — “Vote for the brigadier, who’s good-looking and single.”)
Crispy Lamb With Cumin, Scallions and Red Chiles
Dongbei cai is the food of Northeast China. Weiliang Chen, the chef at Northeast Taste Chinese Food, the biggest of the Dongbei restaurants in Queens, makes an elegant, tender version of a popular Dongbei stir-fry of lamb with dried chilies, made fragrant and crunchy with cumin seeds — a legacy of the nomadic Mongols who long ruled Central Asia, carrying spices on horseback along with their arrows. Lamb is considered a Northern taste and excessively “strong” by many Chinese cooks; it is always cooked with powerful aromatics, like chili peppers and garlic, to subdue it.
Deborah Madison's Fragrant Onion Tart
The chef and gardener Deborah Madison has been writing almost entirely about vegetables for more than 25 years. This recipe comes from her book“Vegetable Literacy,” which breaks down the universe of vegetables into botanical families — the Carrots (carrot, celery, fennel, parsnips), the Sunflowers (sunchoke, cardoon, artichoke, endive, escarole, lettuce) and so on.
Bacon Scallion Cream Sauce
Here we have a re-education — or an education, if you're a first-timer — in the virtues of an old-fashioned cream gravy. A few tablespoons of this elixir can uplift plainly cooked meat like a lamb chop or steak, layering on the richness of cream but also the freshness of scallion and black pepper. Use plenty of each.These days, home cooks are not likely to keep meat drippings around in the kitchen to make a fat-and-flour roux, but there's nothing wrong with hacking a substitute from a lump of butter and a slab of bacon. Then cook them together with flour to make a golden, toasty-smelling roux. After adding the broth and cream, the sauce will seem thin, but stay the course: don't even think of adding more flour. It takes a few minutes for the flour's starch to absorb the liquid. Take the gravy off the heat when it still seems a little too thin: it will thicken further at the table.
Thick Yogurt With Beets, Garlic and Dill
Ana Sortun of Oleana restaurant, in Cambridge, Mass., created a menu based on the traditional cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Turkey and Greece, with many influences of spice and seasoning from the Arab world. She has created surprising but successful dishes like parsnip hummus; this beet-spiked tzatziki (the Mediterranean's traditional cucumber-yogurt-garlic salad), radish salads and rhubarb compotes.
Forager’s Soup
This simple soup, packed with greens, is adapted from “Forgotten Skills of Cooking,” by Darina Allen (Kyle Books, 2009). It’s ready in 20 minutes, or can even be made in advance, for a creamy soup that warms and comforts while being highly versatile. Use any spring greens you like, whether sorrel, dandelion greens or chives. And make it vegetarian by using vegetable stock, and omitting the chorizo bits.
Roasted Squash and Ginger Noodle Soup With Winter Vegetables
Cold Tomato-Cilantro Soup
This cold soup made with canned tomatoes suggests (but beats out) gazpacho, and has a huge hit of cilantro. Serve it at a summer dinner parties, or simply paired with a grilled cheese. It’s also incredibly refreshing by itself.
Flan de Leche
This traditional Iberian flan, is now sometimes called “Flan a la Antigua," or Flan of the Past. That’s because it doesn’t include the common New World ingredients of condensed and evaporated milk. Instead, it is pure poetry made of eggs, sugar and milk. It does call for modern technology — blender and microwave — to streamline the preparation. The edge of sharp caramel against the round sweetness of custard is what makes the dish, so be sure to cook the caramel well past golden.
Orange Butter Cookies
The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss.
Beef Roast With Melted Tomatoes and Onions
“I would rather be the kosher Rachael Ray than the kosher Martha Stewart,” Susie Fishbein told our colleague Julia Moskin in 2008, after the release of one of Mrs. Fishbein’s popular “Kosher by Design” cookbooks. “My books speak to harried everyday cooks like me.” This fabulous roast of beef with melted tomatoes and onions serves as an excellent example of her appeal – and the leftovers make incredible sandwiches the next day.
Salty-Sweet Peanut Butter Sandies
This modern classic is reverse-engineered from a cult cookie at City Bakery in Manhattan. They are saltier, richer and tangier than the usual crisscross rounds, thanks to updated ingredients like sea salt, cultured butter and brown sugar. And like any good “sandy” cookie, they have a soft, crumbly texture that melts away on first bite.
White House Fruit and Oat Bars
This recipe came to The Times in an article about Bill Yosse, the White House pastry chef under President Obama. "Mr. Yosses’ most recent mission is changing the White House tradition of the bottomless cookie plate. (Among White House journalists, President Clinton was known for going straight from a grueling run into the pastry kitchen. Only part of it is visible through a window, but reporters outside recognized him by his sneakers.) To edge out the cookies, Mr. Yosses decided to create a child-pleasing crunchy granola bar without nuts, chocolate or white sugar. “We went through many tastings on this one,” he said in his skinny galley kitchen, patting the final result, a mix of toasted oats, sesame seeds and chewy dried fruits into a sheet pan."
Maple Leaf Rag Sundae
This recipe came to The Times in 2011 from the Franklin Fountain in Philadelphia’s Old City, where the Maple Leaf Rag sundae pays homage to Scott Joplin’s 1899 composition with maple syrup, walnuts, crushed pineapple and house-made banana ice cream. It’s easy to make it home, because the recipe doesn’t require homemade ice cream (although it wouldn’t hurt.) And most of the pieces can be made ahead of time.
Black Cake
Although black cake is descended from the British plum pudding, for Caribbean-born New Yorkers and their children, who number more than half a million, it evokes nostalgia for the islands, where the baking was a solemnly observed annual ritual. The cake is baked just before Christmas and eaten at Christmas dinner and afterward, in thin slices, for as long as it lasts. Because of the soaking of the fruit and the use of brown sugar and a bittersweet caramel called browning, black cake is to American fruitcake as dark chocolate is to milk chocolate: darker, deeper and altogether more absorbing.
Chocolate-Mint Thins With Candy Cane Crunch
This cookie is a handmade homage to the Girl Scouts’ classic combination of dark chocolate and mint. A bright, festive decoration of crushed candy canes adds color and crunch. If store-bought dark chocolate cookies are available, you can use them instead of making your own. And if you temper the coating chocolate instead of simply melting it, your chocolate shell will have a bit more snap and durability.
Julia Child's Berry Clafoutis
This recipe is for a delicately sweet dessert whose elegance should not distract from its ease (it can be made while the rest of dinner is in the oven). Make sure you have fresh berries, and serve the result warm. We call for blueberries or blackberries here, but feel free to try it with whatever seasonal fruit catches your eye.