Recipes By Melissa Clark
1468 recipes found
Roast Turkey Breast With Fig-Olive Tapenade
Coconut Oil Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Here, coconut oil deepens the natural caramelized flavor of roasted sweet potatoes, and it adds a delicate coconut essence. Brown sugar and nutmeg sweeten the dish, and a dash of black pepper makes it for adults. It's just delicious.
Coconut Oil Poundcake With Almonds and Lime Zest
Virgin coconut oil works beautifully in this poundcake, yielding a loaf with a tight, golden crumb and gentle coconut fragrance that is enhanced with lime zest, almonds and a grating of fresh nutmeg.
Olive Oil and Coconut Brownies
Because they are so moist, these brownies don’t cut into nice straight-edged squares like cakier confections do. Letting them cool completely before slicing helps them keep their shape. If you dig in while they are still warm, you might end up with something that is not just pudding-like but is unnervingly close to actual pudding, especially in the center. More of our favorite Valentine's Day (and chocolate) recipes can be found here.
Roasted Cauliflower Salad With Watercress, Walnuts and Gruyère
You can make this kind of salad with almost any vegetable that won’t wilt or burn when subjected to a copious slick of oil and a blast of high heat. Broccoli, brussels sprouts, beets, parsnips, sweet potatoes, winter squash and rutabagas all work well. One of the best vegetables for this salad, though, is cauliflower. The florets turn juicy and tender in the center while crisping and browning around the edges, and cauliflower’s mild flavor is amenable enough to pair nicely with almost anything else you toss in the bowl.
Braised Leg of Lamb With Celery Root Purée
A five-hour braise yields a tender, intense and velvety leg of lamb, soft enough to cut with the edge of a spoon. Carrots and parsnips lend sweetness to the pot, while a handful of chopped green olives add a bracing bite. Serve on a bed of garlicky celeriac puréed so smooth it could double as a creamy sauce.
Brown Sugar and Spice Apple Pie
Pasta With Spicy Sausages, Tomatoes, Rosemary and Olives
Garlicky Red Chili Hot Sauce
Chicken Quesadillas With Avocado-Cucumber Salsa
There is one caveat when using leftover grilled meat. As the meat chills, the flavors recede, becoming quieter and mellower. For these quesadillas that I made out of Sunday’s grilled chicken thighs, shredded and stuffed into a corn tortilla with a little cheese and quickly toasted, I stirred together a lime-zest-imbued cucumber and avocado salsa that added a welcome citrus edge.
Italian Sausage Sandwiches
These tasty sausage and melted provolone sandwiches are a snap to put together and can be made with grilled, roasted or pan-fried sausages. A quick slaw of cabbage, carrots, mayonnaise and pickled peppers adds a moist and spicy crunch.
Rhubarb Ice Cream With a Caramel Swirl
This ice cream is chock-full of sweet bits, but with enough satiny frozen custard to savor between the chunks. To keep the rhubarb from freezing into tooth-breaking fruity ice cubes, stew it with plenty of sugar, which keeps the fruit soft. The technique works with any summer fruit, though it’s especially nice with rhubarb, or gooseberries for that matter, both of which need a lot of sugar to tame their squint-inducing acid content. But you can substitute strawberries, apricots, cherries, peaches or plums as the summer fruit season progresses, adjusting the sugar depending upon the sweetness of the fruit.
Roasted Halibut With Lemons, Olives and Rosemary
Fish can be finicky dinner-party fare, especially for the distracted cook. Step away for a moment to sip your cocktail and your fillets might go from pearly to parched. This dish, though, inspired by one from Southern Italy, elegantly feeds a crowd. The fish, halibut, is seasoned with chile, salt and olive oil, then topped with rosemary, lemon and olives and roasted. It’s a lighter main dish that won’t leave anyone hungry.
Spicy Molten Blue Cheese Dip
Hot and savory and almost fondue-like, this blue cheese dip has a zippy flavor that works just as well with tortilla chips as it does with bell pepper strips, and keeps you coming back for more.
Sautéed Salmon With Brown Butter Cucumbers
A gorgeous salmon fillet needs little more than a sprinkling of salt and pepper and a few minutes of gentle sautéeing in melted butter. You could stop there and serve the fish with salad and a crusty piece of bread. Or you could go one quick step further and add minced garlic, chopped cucumber and dill to the pan. The cucumber turns nutty in the pan’s brown butter, with a tender exterior that remains crunchy in the middle — a nice contrast to the silky salmon. Wild salmon, which is costlier than farmed fish, is worth the price for its sweet, smooth texture and brilliant color. Be sure not to overcook the fillets, which should be soft and barely opaque.
Grilled Clams With Lemon-Cayenne Butter
Roasted Chicken Thighs With Peaches, Basil and Ginger
A ripe, succulent peach is one of nature’s greatest gifts. But a hard peach? It, too, is a gift, especially in this simple recipe from Melissa Clark. A roast in a 400-degree oven cooks the peaches alongside boneless, skinless chicken thighs, drawing out their flavor and softening them as they meld with those flavorful drippings. Speaking of those pan juices, don’t cast them aside: Sop them up instead with crusty bread. You won’t regret it.
Olive Oil Granola With Dried Apricots and Pistachios
The secret weapon in this addictive granola is, yes, olive oil, which gives the oats and coconut chips a wonderful crispy bite. Make sure to add the fruit after baking (putting it in the oven will dry it out), and feel free to improvise: swap out the apricots for dried cherries, the pistachios for walnuts, the cardamom for a little nutmeg. But double the batch. You won’t want to run out.
Rhubarb Raspberry Cobbler With Cornmeal Biscuits
Rhubarb is often paired with strawberries, but in this cobbler it courts a new dance partner, the raspberry. If rhubarb is young and fresh, you can trim it in seconds. If it has fibrous outer strings, peel these off as you would those of celery. The cornmeal in the biscuit dough will nicely offset the nubbiness of the raspberry seeds. You can eat it warm from the oven, smothered in heavy cream for dessert, then spoon up the leftovers cold the next morning for breakfast, topped with yogurt.
Roasted Broccoli With Shrimp
Here is a fast, delicious one-pan supper that could not be simpler, or tastier. Just coat your ingredients with a generous amount of olive oil, seasoning well with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, and place them on a baking sheet. Put it in the oven at a high temperature (in this recipe 425 degrees) and let the heat do the work. The vegetables will soften and caramelize, offering real depth of flavor. Here, we add shrimp at the end, which cooks quickly, to deliver an easy weeknight meal.
Quick Steamed Flounder With Ginger-Garlic Mustard Greens
This recipe, inspired by a Chinatown dinner, puts the bold tastes of sesame oil, ginger and soy sauce front and center. Here, a steamed piece of flounder sits on a bed of mustard greens, limp, tender and infused with garlic. The greens take the place of choy sum, a relative of bok cho, and give the dish a slightly mustardy flavor. It’s a quick, healthy weeknight dinner packed with flavor. Try it tonight.
Pasta With Roasted Garlic, Pancetta and Arugula
For this pasta, garlic is roasted in the oven to bring out its sweetness, then sautéed with bold flavors: salty pancetta, fiery chile flakes and a squeeze of lemon. Chopped peppery arugula and a pound of penne round out the dish. It takes 40 minutes to an hour to roast the garlic, but you can do it a day in advance, and it is worth it for the final, honeyed results.
Red Lentil Soup
This is a lentil soup that defies expectations of what lentil soup can be. Based on a Turkish lentil soup, mercimek corbasi, it is light, spicy and a bold red color (no murky brown here): a revelatory dish that takes less than an hour to make. The cooking is painless. Sauté onion and garlic in oil, then stir in tomato paste, cumin and chile powder and cook a few minutes more to intensify flavor. Add broth, water, red lentils (which cook faster than their green or black counterparts) and diced carrot, and simmer for 30 minutes. Purée half the mixture and return it to the pot for a soup that strikes the balance between chunky and pleasingly smooth. A hit of lemon juice adds an up note that offsets the deep cumin and chile flavors.
Pie Crust
Some people shy away from making pie crusts. Here is a recipe to banish all fear, a simple dough of butter and all-purpose flour, easy to make and dependable as can be. If you plan to make a pie with a top crust (such as apple, cherry or blueberry), double the recipe; when it's time to chill the dough, divide it in half and shape into two disks to put in the fridge. The dough will also keep for 3 months in the freezer, if you want to stash a few disks there. Defrost in the fridge overnight.