Recipes By Melissa Clark
1476 recipes found
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.
Hazelnut Baklava
Rosemary Shortbread
This basic, buttery shortbread practically begs that you customize it to suit your own tastes or pantry supplies. The dough, which comes together quickly in a food processor, is already enhanced with rosemary, but nuts, seeds, citrus zest, spices, vanilla or minced dried fruit — or a combination of some of these — all make fine additions. Scale it up, scale it down. Add more salt, or use less. As long as you maintain the butter-flour ratio (one stick of butter for every cup of flour), you are free to play around. But the shortbread is delicious all on its own: tender, rich, crumbly, irresistible.
Lamb Meatballs with Mint
Prosecco And Lovage Cocktail
Beer Brats
Fans of Midwestern-style beer brats have strong opinions about the best way to prepare them. Some like to simmer the bratwurst in beer before browning them on the grill (as is the case here); some prefer grilling first, soaking in beer after. But everyone agrees that the brats should start out fresh and uncooked (rather than precooked, like hot dogs), then be served on a split, toasted roll with onions and plenty of mustard. Purists may shun adding the likes of ketchup, pickles and sauerkraut to the sandwich, but when you’re the cook, you get to choose which condiments to put out — or set aside.
Air-Fryer Spicy Chicken Wings
Chicken wings turn out perfectly when they’re cooked in an air fryer. Here, they are tossed with a bit of baking powder before frying, which yields a particularly crunchy, browned skin with a rough, craggy texture. It’s a technique based on one from Ben Mims’s cookbook, “Air Fry Every Day” (Clarkson Potter, 2018), which he learned from J. Kenji López-Alt from Serious Eats. After frying, the wings are tossed with a honey and chile-based sauce spiked with fresh lemon juice and zest. Sticky, fiery and impossible to stop eating, they are an easier, leaner version of deep-fried chicken wings, made without the mess.
Pasta Salad With Summer Tomatoes, Basil and Olive Oil
This summery dish walks the line between tangy, juicy tomato salad and hearty pasta salad. To make it, ripe tomatoes are marinated with capers, garlic, basil and lots of good olive oil until they almost fall apart, creating a wonderfully soupy dressing for the pasta. Then the pasta is added while still hot to mix; as it cools, it absorbs all the bright flavors. If you can, choose heirloom tomatoes in an array of hues, and serve this in a glass bowl to show it off. Cubes of fresh mozzarella, or bocconcini, make for creamy addition. Add them just before serving, so the heat of the pasta doesn’t melt the cheese.
Lemony Farro Pasta Salad With Goat Cheese and Mint
Combining rice-shaped orzo with chewy farro makes for a very satisfying pasta salad, with diverse textures and a nutty flavor. Even better, you can cook the farro and orzo in the same pot, and they can be dressed up to a day in advance. Use this basic recipe as a template for your own combinations. Here, a mix of creamy goat cheese, sweet dried apricots and sliced almonds are tossed with fresh herbs and a mildly spicy lemon dressing. But add what you have and what you love; the orzo and farro can take it, with grace. You can dress the orzo and farro mixture up to one day ahead, but don’t add the remaining ingredients until just before serving. The recipe feeds a crowd, so if you’re not making it for a party, consider halving everything, or plan on eating leftovers for lunch all week long.
Green Goddess Pasta Salad
Cheese-filled tortellini serve as a soft, plush base for this comforting pasta salad, which is studded with sweet sugar-snap peas and sliced fennel. The herb-flecked green goddess dressing is creamy and rich, with a tartly pungent edge from garlic and lemon juice. Like all pasta salads, this benefits from being made a few hours ahead, so the pasta can absorb most flavor from the dressing. But don’t add the vegetables until just before serving so they maintain their crunch.
Classic Pasta Salad With Mozzarella, Avocado and Basil
With its colorful jumble of tomatoes, avocado, olives, mozzarella and cucumber, this has everything you’ve ever wanted in a pasta salad. But feel free to customize the ingredients to suit your own tastes (see Tip), and to add lemon and salt to the dressing to taste. As long as you don’t overcook the pasta, and add it while still hot to the dressing, you really can’t go wrong. Make this a few hours ahead so the flavors have a chance to meld, but be sure not to add the avocado until just before serving.
How to Make Yogurt
Making yogurt couldn't be easier, and the results are more than worth the time. Let Melissa Clark show you how.
Peach Crumble Slab Pie
Juicy, fruit-filled, buttery and gently spiced, this recipe splits the difference between a peach pie and a crumble: a flaky, all-butter crust is a bed for the jammy sliced peaches, but a cinnamon-scented crumble tops it all off. Even better, this recipe feeds a crowd, making it ideal for toting to a picnic or barbeque. When peaches and nectarines aren’t in season, you can make this with a mix of plums and blueberries, cherries or ripe sweet pears. It’s best eaten after it cools on the day you bake it, but no one will turn it down the next day, either.
Seis Leches Cake
This recipe for a tres leches cake (a traditional syrup-soaked confection from Latin America) takes a good thing — namely the combination of milks that saturate its crumb — and doubles it. Instead of just the usual three milks (sweetened condensed, evaporated and heavy cream), it calls for six, adding coconut milk, condensed coconut milk and dulce de leche. Like the original version, it’s a dense, puddinglike cake flavored with cinnamon and rum. But here, notes of coconut and caramel lend complexity and even more richness. Serve this in small squares, preferably with a bitter espresso or some tea to sip between syrupy bites.
Bittersweet Brownie Shortbread
These chewy bar cookies combine two all-time favorites: crumbly, buttery shortbread and bittersweet brownies. Nut lovers can mix almonds, pecans or walnuts into the brownie batter, which gives the bars a delightful crunch. But those who prefer savoring the smooth, gooey centers of their brownies can easily leave them out. In any case, be sure not to overbake the brownies. As soon as the top sets, they’re done.
Chicken Paillard With Curried Oyster Mushrooms
Alain Sailhac, dean emeritus of the French Culinary Institute in New York and one of New York’s most venerable French chefs, gives inspiration here to recapture the glory of the chicken breast, that popular yet generally overcooked piece of meat. He suggests cutting the breast in half horizontally to make two thin pieces, then topping them with quick-cooking vegetables like mushrooms, zucchini or tomatoes, and roasting everything together. This supremely juicy and complexly flavored dish uses that technique and is a snap to put together.
Chicken With Garlic-Chili-Ginger Sauce
Crisp Chicken Schnitzel With Lemony Herb Salad
This schnitzel is light and crunchy with a crust that rises like a soufflé. The secret is to trap air in the crust when you cook the meat by moving and shaking the pan (Ms. Clark demonstrates with pork in this video.) You can use this technique with a variety of meat cutlets.
Poached Chicken Breasts With Tomatillos and Jalapeños
Boneless, skinless chicken breasts can be easy to overcook, going from tender to rubbery in a matter of seconds. Not so here, where the breasts are cooked in chicken stock in a very low oven, which keeps them moist and juicy. Tomatillos, jalapeños and garlic, which are roasted at the same time, turn golden and soft before being chopped into a vibrant, cilantro-laced salsa. Make this on days when you don’t mind having the oven on low for a couple of hours. It may take a while to cook, but most of that time is entirely hands-off.
Sweet and Spicy Grilled Chicken Breasts
Brown sugar gives these grilled chicken breasts a glistening glaze and caramel-like sweetness, while mustard powder and cayenne add an earthy kick. If you don’t want to bother making a mustard sauce for dipping, just serve these with dollops of good, strong Dijon mustard on the side. A crisp salad and some grilled corn completes the meal. And if you prefer dark meat, this recipe will also work with boneless, skinless thighs, though you might have to add a minute or so to the cooking time. Or use a combination of breasts and thighs for maximum crowd appeal.