Recipes By Julia Moskin
392 recipes found
Mole de Olla (Beef Stew With Chiles)
Mexico has innumerable beef stews: puchero, birria, puntas al albañil — but the most universal, according to writer Pati Jinich, is mole de olla, a true one-pot dish, often made for family gatherings, with vegetables like corn, zucchini, cactus and chayote added at the last minute. If the name seems surprising, Ms. Jinich said, the word mole doesn’t refer just to the famous thickened sauces of Puebla and Oaxaca, but any kind of “saucy thing.” What makes mole de olla a stew and not a soup is the rich purée of roasted dried chiles that both thickens and seasons it.
Mini Apple Tartes Tatin
The pastry chef Claudia Fleming is known for her work with fruit desserts, and this recipe, adapted from her cult-classic cookbook, “The Last Course,” is an easy version of the classic caramelized apple tart. If you have large apples (or like large desserts), make this in a jumbo muffin tin; you’ll need more puff pastry, but everything else remains the same.
St. John Beans and Bacon
The London chef Fergus Henderson specializes in making British classics even more delicious at his popular restaurant St. John. Here’s his fragrant, richly flavored version of traditional baked beans with salt pork, a dish that evolved into an American staple. Using lots of fresh herbs and a little canned tomato is the key; pass crusty bread at the table to mop up the sauce.
Pan-Roasted Fish Fillets With Herb Butter
A blast of heat in a cast-iron pan and a basting of golden butter does wonders for plain fish fillets. This life-changing method is adopted from a former chef and current fishmonger, Mark Usewicz of Mermaid’s Garden in Brooklyn, who also teaches cooking classes in topics like “How to Cook Fish in a New York City Apartment.” The cooking time is so short that the smell — which, if your fish is fresh and not funky, should not be overpowering — will dissipate quickly. And in the meantime, you have an easy dinner of tender fish with a toothsome crust, anointed with nutty, lemony brown butter and perfumed with herbs. You can use virtually any fish fillet, skin on or off, as long as it is not too thick. If the butter is browning too fast, reduce the heat and add a nut of cold butter to prevent scorching, or squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.
Pasta With Roast Chicken, Currants and Pine Nuts
Basic Vinaigrette
A basic vinaigrette deserves a permanent spot in every cook's repertoire. Ready in minutes and fine to keep in the fridge for weeks, it can totally change a salad. And it's highly adaptable. Add garlic or tarragon in place of the mustard, or infuse it with other herbs. For a creamy dressing, replace the oil with buttermilk, crème fraîche or mayonnaise. Some chefs even use vegetable purées or nut milks in place of the oil.
Muzaffar Seviyan (Sweet Vermicelli With Cardamom)
Desserts made with seviyan — toasted vermicelli noodles — are popular all over South Asia. Sumayya Usmani, who writes the food blog My Tamarind Kitchen, remembers eating this particular dish, Muzaffar Seviyan, every year in Pakistan, where she grew up, to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the feasting holiday that signifies the end of Ramadan. Toasting the broken noodles in butter until they smell nutty is the key to the dish’s depth; the next layer of flavor comes from cooking them in spice-scented milk or syrup; finally, nuts and dried fruit provide crunch and chew.
Avocado Toast
It may seem silly to give a recipe for avocado toast, but there is an art to it, as with most things that are both simple and perfect. Here, you want to make sure of a few things: that the bread you use is sturdy and has some taste; that there's enough salt and citrus to bring out the avocado's flavor; and that you use a good olive oil to bring it all together. These garnishes, from the Australian café Two Hands in Manhattan, are tasty but unnecessary.
Chocolate-Sesame Crunch Bars
For Philippe Massoud, the Lebanese-American chef at Ilili in New York, sesame desserts are the taste of childhood. In this easy recipe, he adds tahini and milk chocolate to breakfast cereal and comes up with a crunchy bar cookie that's delicious eaten on its own or sublime crumbled over ice cream.
Spicy Peanut Stew With Ginger and Tomato
Hearty stews needn't be meat-laden. Case in point: this rich, vibrantly-spiced vegan stew of eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini and peanut butter that is seasoned with North African spices like cumin, coriander, turmeric and cayenne. Fresh ginger and jalapeño add a little kick.
Marinated Celery Salad With Chickpeas and Parmesan
Celery is an underappreciated vegetable that brings wonderful crunch, perfume and bitterness to a salad (and no wonder: It’s related to carrots, parsley and fennel). Here it is front and center in a main-dish salad, especially satisfying with a poached egg or some charcuterie on the side. Buy full green heads of celery, not the pale hearts, and make sure the leaves are still attached. But if you can’t find celery with leaves, chopped parsley is a reasonable substitute.
Condensed Milk Ice Cream
Big Salad With Grains
There's no true recipe for a big salad, but for this robust green meal, you will want to keep a few rules in mind. Skip the soft lettuces, which tend to get squashed in a big salad, and start with sturdier greens, like kale or escarole. Add fruits and vegetables, a protein, like a hard-boiled egg, and a starch or two. You want a total of six to eight ingredients, before toppings. Too few, and it could get boring; too many, and the bowl gets crowded and confusing. Finish it off with a substantial dressing, like avocado, yogurt or tahini, and add a couple of toppings, like chives or chopped nuts. Serve with a side of whole-grain bread for a filling and healthy meal.
Breakfast Salad
From the same trend that brought us avocado toast, the breakfasts served in Australian cafes often include bright vegetables arranged in eye-catching ways. Salad is definitely not part of the traditional American breakfast menu, but on a sunny morning the combination of chilled, crunchy greens; protein-rich cheese and eggs; and an eye-opening dressing is hugely appealing. This one was created at Carthage Must Be Destroyed, an airy (and slightly eccentric) Australian-style cafe hidden behind an unmarked entrance in Brooklyn. The chef and owner Amanda Bechara likes to leave the lettuce leaves whole to make it easier to eat with your fingers. (You can prepare the vegetables the day before, and skip marinating the feta if you must.) This would also make a lovely lunch.
Fruit-Filled Scuffins
The scuffin is a frankenpastry — part scone, part muffin and, like a doughnut, filled with jam — but despite its complex genetics, it is very easy to make. It is even somewhat healthy (for a pastry, that is), using whole grain flour and flaxseeds, and keeping the butter minimal. If you are more of a butter maximalist, feel free to indulge by making a crumb topping for the scuffins: Measure 3 ounces cool butter (instead of 2 ounces melted butter) and use your fingers to rub it into the dry ingredients until coarse crumbs form. The spices can be varied (swap in nutmeg, ginger or allspice for the cinnamon or cardamom), and so can the jams. Do not use jelly, though — only jams, conserves, preserves or fruit butter will do.
MJ’s Egg Casserole
Salted Honey Butter
The lush combination of honey and butter is a classic for biscuits, but adding crunchy salt is a modern touch that makes this topping sing. The chef Joe Dobias uses alaea red salt from Hawaii for color contrast, but any large-grained sea salt will work. If using other salts, you may need less — add sparingly and taste as you go.
Grilled Corn With Chile Butter
In South Africa, charred ears of corn (called braai mielies) are year-round, smoky-sweet roadside snacks. This version is a side dish for the American summer, when corn and grilling are both in season. The cobs are slicked with butter and sparked with chile heat; in South Africa, they would be served alongside a pile of charcoal-grilled lamb chops or steak or giant prawns, or all of the above. For a more rustic effect (and more effort), use the corn husks as a wrapper instead of aluminum foil. Soak the unshucked cobs in cold water for at least 15 minutes. Peel back the husks but do not detach them from the cobs; remove all the cornsilk. After rubbing on the butter, rearrange the husks around each cob and tie in place with twine.
Deep-Dish Apple Pie
If you’re going to the trouble of making a pie, why not make it a blockbuster? This pie, adapted from the professional pie coach Kate McDermott, is both deeper and wider than the traditional nine-inch version. The thicker rim is especially satisfying, like a buttery, crumbly slab of shortbread. You can use a 10-inch deep-dish pie pan, or a deep nine- or 10-inch square, or another 2 1/2- to 3-quart baking dish of your choice. A mix of apple types always makes the best filling.
Classic French Toast
Here's a recipe for the kind of French toast people line up for outside restaurants on Sunday morning. It's simple: no new ingredients, tools or technology needed. You don’t even need stale bread. What you do need is thick-cut white bread, dunked into an egg-milk mixture with extra richness from egg yolks and heavy cream. That gives the French toast a buttery taste and firm but fluffy texture. (Oversoaking is the enemy here; the mixture should fill the bread, not cause it to break.) For an appetizing, lacy brown crust, sprinkle on sugar toward the end of cooking: It will caramelize and turn glossy. Just make sure to keep the heat low after you add the sugar. Otherwise, it could burn quickly over high heat.
Simmered Kabocha Squash With Scallions
When you can’t eat one more roasted winter vegetable, this bright, fragrant soup-stew does the trick. It's from “A Common Table” by Cynthia Chen McTernan, who publishes a food blog called Two Red Bowls. Kabocha, which she calls her “soul-mate squash,” has a special earthy texture and a nutty flavor, but you could also do this with buttercup squash. Serve as a side dish, or as a light dinner with freshly cooked rice and a fried egg.
Cinnamon Crunch Banana Bread
This easy cake — no mixer required — is a popular staple at Bakesale Betty in Oakland, Calif. Pie, cake, cookies and a legendary fried chicken sandwich are the only things on the menu, but locals start lining up long before opening time. They’re that good. Betty herself, the baker Alison Barkat, adds a cinnamon-sugar topping and honey to the classic banana bread formula for a deeply caramelized, moist result.
Rye Pecan Pie
To streamline operations in the pastry kitchen at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the restaurant’s pastry chef, Avery Wittkamp, devised an enormous solution, which can be easily adopted by home cooks. She bakes this pie in a 10-inch springform pan, using a thicker, stretchable crust that can line the deep sides; it stays in place even when the pie is unmolded. Impressively, the tall bark-brown crust rises over a filling as wide, majestic and mahogany-brown as a redwood tree. She bakes the pie longer than usual to fully brown the crust, and gives it a higher crust-to-filling ratio than a traditional pie. She also deconstructs the traditional pecan pie filling into three strata: the custard, the chopped nuts and the whole nuts, each one delicious and distinct. (Don't be intimidated by homemade crust. Our pie crust guide will tell you everything you need to know.)
Steak ’N’ Bacon Cheddar Meatballs
This is essentially a bacon cheeseburger in meatball form. The cooked steak should be diced into small bites, not ground, for the best texture.