Recipes By Kim Severson
156 recipes found
Deep-Fried Turkey
Deep frying a turkey can seem daunting, but it is incredibly simple and produces a superior turkey that is unexpectedly juicy and far more forgiving in far less time than conventional roasting. It is equipment heavy, yes. Buying a “rig” — the large pot, propane hub and hooks — is your best bet, because it gives you everything you need to complete the task without much fuss. (Here’s the turkey fryer Wirecutter recommends.) Some contain a thermometer to clip to the pot. If not, you will need one, along with one to check the bird. And yes, there will be a lot of oil left over to contend with (see Tips). But once you accept those two things, the path to a truly delicious turkey is easy. Keys to This Recipe How long does it take to deep fry a turkey? The oil should get to 350 degrees in anywhere from 15 minutes to more than a half-hour, depending on the weather and how strong your propane hub is. Frying in peanut oil is the classic way, but any vegetable oil with a high smoke point can work. When you slowly lower the turkey into the oil (with the propane off!) the temperature will drop. Frying at about 325 is optimum. Start checking the bird’s temperature at about the 30-minute mark. When the temperature of the breast reaches 155 degrees, turn off the propane and then remove the turkey to a sheet pan. The interior will continue to cook. Make sure to let it rest for at least 30 minutes; carving it too soon will release steam which means you will lose all that great moisture that comes with deep frying a turkey. How to set up equipment for deep-frying turkey: To start, find an even place outdoors to set up the frying rig away from any structures. Gravel or cement is great. A level patch of lawn will work. A piece of cardboard or tarp under the propane hub can help catch drips. Have safety equipment including heat-resistant cooking gloves and a fire extinguisher nearby and you’ll be ready to fry.
Emily Meggett’s Crab Cakes
Mace, nutmeg’s peppery sister, is what makes the difference in these crab cakes. The recipe, adapted from “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island,” comes from Emily Meggett, one of the most well-respected cooks in the Gullah Geechee community, whose food traditions are built largely on the crabs, shrimp and fish they pull from the water near their homes along the southeastern shoreline. She has made thousands of these using freshly cooked blue crabs, but meat that has already been picked and processed works as well. Be sparing with the bread crumbs, which should just hold the mixture together, then add more if the cakes are falling apart. Make sure the pan is very hot, then reduce the heat the minute they hit the oil. Keep a close eye while they brown. These are lovely bites to start a meal, or can star as supper, alongside rice and fresh vegetables. Ms. Meggett serves them with what she calls pink sauce, which is similar to this sauce, with the addition of grated onion and lemon.
Chicken Ragù Hand Pies
Leftover chicken ragù — or really any savory filling that is not too liquid — can be tucked inside this tender dough to make baked hand pies. They can be frozen before or after baking, then tucked into lunches and eaten at room temperature. A couple of rounds of prepared pie dough from the grocery store would make a quick and easy substitution.
Cheese Straws
You need something to put out when people come over for a drink. Or when you need something savory in the afternoon when you wish someone was coming over for a drink. You can roll the batch into a couple of logs, freeze and slice and bake off a dozen or so at a time.
Bits and Pieces Party Cheese Ball
The cheese ball is a stalwart of the Midwest cocktail party, where it can be fashioned from processed Cheddar cheese and port wine, or pineapple and cream cheese. This recipe relies on the leftover ends of good cheese or even just one kind of good-quality, sharp cheese like Gruyère. The idea of adding butter comes from Vivian Howard, the North Carolina chef who features a cheese ball with blue cheese, chopped dates and bacon in her cookbook "Deep Run Roots." She calls hers a party magnet, and indeed, for all of the shade thrown at cheese balls, they are often the first thing to be eaten. They can be served with chutney, jam or simply alongside the best-quality crackers you can find.
Avocado-Cucumber Soup
This simple but elegant soup graced the table at one of the monthly luncheons held by the Thursday Afternoon Cooking Club, an organization of Wichita, Kan., women that has been meeting since 1894. Each month, the 24 women of the club gather over their best tableware to share recipes and cooking tips. English cucumbers work well for this recipe, but cucumbers fresh from the garden are a great choice if you have them. The soup could also be blended and served chilled in small cups and passed around on a tray for a cocktail party.
Roasted Okra and Onions
Buy the freshest, firmest okra you can find. Pick pods that are no bigger than your ring finger. Slicing them lengthwise just before you roast them will keep slime to a minimum. This basic technique is very accommodating. You can add quartered yellow squash or zucchini, or even a chopped up fresh tomato. The trick is to roast the vegetables until the edges of the onion begin to turn brown.
Southern Red Velvet Cake
This is similar to the original recipe that began the red velvet craze. It was developed by the Adams Extract company in Gonzales, Tex. The original recipe, popularized in the 1940s, called for butter flavoring and shortening and is usually iced with boiled milk, or ermine, frosting.
Cucumber-Watermelon Salad
Asian (hoisin sauce) and Mexican (jalapeño) combine in this bright summer salad, which takes advantage of a seasonal favorite, watermelon and the ever-reliable cucumber. Flat-leaf parsley adds specks of deep green, and pistachios add crunch.
Dry-Brined Turkey
This fantastic turkey recipe borrows a technique perfected by Judy Rodgers, the chef from the Zuni Café in San Francisco, who had exceptional results salting chickens long before roasting them (also called dry-brining). No more fussy liquid brine that alters the texture of the meat — just crisp, golden skin and tender, moist meat. This turkey will be the talk of the table. Allow two days for the bird to season before roasting.
Crab Cakes With Crystal Beurre Blanc
This recipe came to The Times in 2006 from the Upperline restaurant in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. One bright light after the storms was an unexpected windfall in crab. The storms stirred up the marshes and shook up lots of food, so these crab cakes are made with an ice cream scoop and not a spoon. The real gem of the dish is the Crystal beurre blanc, an idea that mixes high French culinary canon with down-and-dirty New Orleans heat. Crystal Hot Sauce has long adorned many a table in New Orleans. It is more vinegary than Tabasco, which is too hot for this recipe. Baumer Foods had been making Crystal Hot Sauce for more than eight decades when the storms hit. Its New Orleans plant was flooded so badly that it was not reopened, but other bottlers kept Crystal on the shelves until the company could move into its new home, about a half hour’s drive from its damaged factory.
Fried Green Tomatoes and Shrimp Rémoulade
Southern Pan-Fried Chicken
In this recipe, Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock call for an overnight brine for the chicken and a further buttermilk bath that should last for 8 to 12 hours. That’s a lot of unattended prep time before you get around to frying them in a slurry of lard and butter flavored with country ham. This is a time commitment, but the result — cooked in a cast-iron pan — is food to impress, and impress deeply, a dish made of humble ingredients that would be welcome on the finest china. Even better? It’s just as good cold as it is hot.
Wild Mushroom Quesadillas
You don't have to use wild mushrooms, of course, but if you can get chanterelles — oh man. It takes a bit of time at the stove, but when the quesadilla is done, you have a great handheld food that is, among other things, very kid friendly.
Kerala Roadside Chicken
In the south Indian state of Kerala, a street stall selling food is called a thattukada, and one of the most well-known dishes served is something called chicken fry, or thattu chicken. The chef Asha Gomez, who grew up in the Kerala port city of Trivandrum and now lives in Atlanta, took that street chicken and adapted it into a quick-cooking recipe that relies on coconut oil for crispness, and curry leaves, ginger and garlic for flavor. It gets its heat and color from Kashmiri chile powder, a fruity pepper used in many Indian dishes. It’s worth seeking out the pepper online, or at a market that caters to Indian shoppers, where you can also find the fresh curry leaves that are key to this dish. Ms. Gomez serves it with the flaky paratha that’s unique to Kerala, but any flatbread, or even rice, works well. It’s also a great dish to set out as a nibble with drinks, as they do in the toddy shops of southern India.
Dolester Miles’ Coconut Pecan Cake
This is a rich, special-occasion cake that takes the traditional Southern coconut cake to another level, with ground toasted pecans in the batter and an easy-to-make Chantilly cream for frosting. It has become the signature dessert for Dolester Miles, who serves slices over a little puddle of crème anglaise at Chez Fonfon and Bottega, and sometimes at the Highlands Bar & Grill, the Birmingham, Ala., restaurants owned by Frank and Pardis Stitt. Assembly can be a challenge, so she suggests building the cake by stacking the delicate slabs of cake with filling in between each layer into a deep, round cake pan, then slipping it into the refrigerator for about an hour. The filling acts like a delicious glue. When the cake is inverted and unmolded, the edges have an even, professional appearance.
Edna Lewis’s Peach Cobbler
This delicious cobbler, which features pie crust instead of a biscuit or cake topping, is designed to let the incandescent flavor of summer peaches shine, and it’s best made when they are in season. Edna Lewis, the cookbook author and chef from Virginia whose books are considered definitive in the Southern culinary canon, often suggested a lattice top for it, with bits of raw dough tucked into the filling before baking. Those bits cook into tender dumplings while thickening the fruit juice. Serve the result warm with ice cream or whipped cream, or all by itself.
Green Peach Salad With Simple Lime Dressing
Eddie Hernandez, who runs a string of Mexican restaurants in Georgia and Tennessee called Taqueria del Sol, came up with a delicious way to deal with hard, unripe peaches. Sliced thinly, softened with salt and brightened with lime juice and Serrano chiles, the peaches become a salad that’s a cousin to Mexican street snacks built from unripe mangoes and papayas and punched up with chile salt. The salad keeps well in the refrigerator for several days. Mr. Hernandez likes to eat it with a scoop of cottage cheese on the side, though dabs of goat cheese would do as well.
Frozen Fudge Pops
These easy fudge pops, with a mix of cream and milk, combine the fun of an ice cream truck Popsicle with the sophistication of a rich chocolate ice cream touched with salt. The key is making sure the ingredients are well emulsified in a blender. These will melt quickly so enjoy them right out of the freezer.
Strawberry-Peach Sangria
Part sangria, part punch, this is a refreshing and lightly alcoholic way to quench the thirst of a large group. Danielle Wecksler, a cooking instructor in South Carolina, created it for an outdoor Lowcountry boil in Charleston. It highlights local peaches and berries, and was created to counter the stifling Southern heat. “Part of the rationale is that when it is so hot, partygoers are going to suck down whatever you give them to drink,” she said. “So if you go with something that is a little lighter on the alcohol content, it keeps everyone from getting too tipsy.” This recipe easily doubles to serve a crowd. If you can’t find orange Curaçao, use a Curaçao-style liqueur, such as Grand Marnier. Triple sec, another type of orange liqueur, is slightly less sweet but would also work.
Pressure Cooker Beef Pho
An elegant, comforting bowl of pho usually requires blanching beef bones and then simmering them with spices for hours. Andrea Nguyen, a cookbook author who lives in drought-plagued California, wanted the same effect but in a recipe that used less water and less energy. This broth can be put together in less than an hour. It cooks in a standard stove-top pressure cooker for 20 minutes and in an electric pressure cooker for 30. “As much as I love to simmer a stockpot of beef pho for three hours,” Ms. Nguyen says, “it’s incredibly liberating to make a pretty good version for four people in about an hour."
Grilled or Oven-Roasted Santa Maria Tri-Tip
You might need to ask your butcher (assuming you have one) or even a store meat manager to order in a tri-tip roast. Two pounds is a good size, but if you come across a larger one, by all means grab it as the extra meat makes amazing sandwiches. The trick is to carve the tri-tip against the grain, which can change directions in this cut. So before you rub it and roast it, take a look at the raw meat and see which direction the long strands of muscle fiber are running on each part of the roast. After the roast has been cooked, and it has rested for 15 minutes or so, slice the roast in two at the place where the fibers change direction. Carve each piece separately.
Pan-Fried Tofu With Red Curry Paste
Raghavan Iyer says Thailand is the only country outside of India that worships curries with as much devotion. In the way Indian cooks use a blend of herbs and spices, Thai cooks use an array of curry pastes to create regional curries. He created three for his 2023 book “On the Curry Trail: Chasing the Flavor That Seduced The World” (Workman Publishing). His red curry paste is a version of the most common curry. When frying the tofu, add a little more oil if the pan seems dry and be aware that when the chile paste is added to the pan, the capsaicin can produce a head-clearing whiff of heat.
Green Tomato Salad
Green tomatoes are either nearly impossible to find or in such abundance that farmers at the greenmarket almost give them away. This recipe was inspired by Rachael Ray, who gets green tomatoes from a wholesaler when they’re scarce or has a favorite farmer at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan set some aside during the late spring and early summer when they’re abundant. You can adjust the amount of peppers to control the heat. And red tomatoes work fine if you can’t find green ones.