Recipes By Melissa Clark
1476 recipes found
Cheesy Baked Pasta With Sausage and Ricotta
Like a cross between baked ziti and sausage lasagna, this mozzarella-topped pasta is rich with ricotta and crushed tomatoes — and cooks entirely in one pan, including the pasta. The Italian sausage adds meaty depth to the sauce, but vegetarians can leave it out or use their favorite plant-based sausage instead.
Skillet Meatballs With Peaches, Basil and Lime
You can make these gingery meatballs with any kind of ground meat (or vegan meat), but rich, brawny pork goes especially well with juicy peaches and the fresh basil. Make sure to use ripe or even overripe peaches (or nectarines). They should be very soft so they cook quickly, and very sweet so they contrast with the savory meatballs and tangy lime juice. Rice or rice noodles would fill this meal out perfectly and substantially, as would a crisp-leafed salad for a lighter, more summery supper.
Chocolate Shortbread Hearts
Fragile and supremely buttery, these cocoa-flavored shortbread cookies are dunked partway in melted chocolate and sprinkled with an optional topping of crushed freeze-dried raspberries. If you use them, the berries add verve both from their scarlet color and their bright acidity, which is nice against the richness of the chocolate. But other garnishes — flaky sea salt, chopped pistachios, crushed candy canes, toasted coconut — can be substituted. Be sure not to roll the dough thinner than 1/2 inch. Otherwise, the cookies are apt to break and crumble after baking. Their thickness helps keep them intact.
Cherries Jubilee
Although this classic recipe was named in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the method of sautéing cherries with butter, sugar and a splash of Cognac or kirsch probably predates those festivities. Flambéing the mixture helps cook off some of the alcohol and singes the cherries, adding a gentle caramelized note. But you can skip that step and just add an extra 2 minutes to the simmering in Step 5 after adding the Cognac. Serve this warm over ice cream, pound cake or both.
Fresh Ricotta
Why make homemade ricotta? Because you can. And because the results are so much better than most of the packaged stuff you can buy, especially at the supermarket. Making it yourself is also less expensive than buying fresh ricotta at a fancy gourmet market.
Almost Aunt Sandy’s Sweet and Sour Salmon
All my other relatives served gefilte fish at holiday meals, but not Aunt Sandy. Instead of breaking the fast on Yom Kippur with gefilte fish, kugel and bagels and lox, she made potage Parmentier, pesto pasta salad and, her masterpiece, sweet and sour fish in a shimmering aspic. In my version, I reduced sugar and substituted balsamic for the sharper wine vinegar. I added raisins and sliced lemons, an idea stolen from a similar recipe I found online. I eliminated the peppercorns, which were unpleasant to crunch, adding aromatic thyme instead. Finally, because I didn’t want aspic, I substituted prepared fish broth for the mess of boiling bones. The broth was light and refreshing with a gentle acidity that was balanced by the sweetness of the raisins. And the fish was succulent and rich and suffused with flavor.
Pasta With Tuna, Capers and Scallions
There are about a gazillion ways to cook pasta using other pantry staples — things like garlic, bread crumbs, pecorino, capers, olives and especially, canned fish. This recipe, pasta with tuna, anchovies and capers, showered with lots of green herbs and scallions, is one of my family’s household favorites. I like it with a long, thin, twirlable pasta — spaghetti, linguine or bucatini — but you can use whatever pasta you have on hand. Even macaroni works just fine and might even persuade your finicky kid to eat this dish (though, so far, mine abstains).
Baked Skillet Pasta With Cheddar and Spiced Onions
In this warming skillet pasta bake, onions — sautéed with cumin, coriander and allspice until golden and aromatic — do double duty. They form the base of the tomato sauce that's used to coat the pasta, and are mixed with grated Cheddar for the topping, where strands of onions mingle with the melted, gooey cheese. It’s satisfying and easy, with the pasta baked in the same skillet as the sauce. Serve it as a meatless main course with a crisp salad alongside, or as a rich side to a lighter chicken or fish dish.
Pressure Cooker Vietnamese Caramel Salmon
Searing salmon in a tangy lime and ginger caramel that’s spiked with Asian fish sauce is one of my favorite ways to cook the fish. Usually I make this in a skillet, starting it on the stovetop and finishing it in the oven. But it cooks beautifully and very quickly in the pressure cooker, turning wonderfully tender. If you like your salmon slightly rare in the center, seek out thick center-cut fillets. They are less likely to overcook than are thinner pieces. This is one of 10 recipes from Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot” (Clarkson Potter, 2017). Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in an Instant” is available everywhere books are sold. Order your copy today.
Berry Upside-Down Cake
You can use any kind of berries — fresh or frozen — for this jammy twist on the classic pineapple upside-down cake. Just note that adding all or mostly blueberries and strawberries will create a sweeter topping than mixing in more acidic blackberries and raspberries. Caramelizing the brown sugar in a skillet before adding the fruit gives you a particularly deep, complex flavor. Because of the moisture in the topping, you’ll need to bake this cake a little longer than other, similar butter cakes. You want the surface to be well browned all over, with dark brown edges that yield a slight crunch. Underbaked cake will be soggy, and apt to fall apart.
Salmon With Anchovy-Garlic Butter
Minced anchovies and garlic add a complex salinity to seared salmon, enriching and deepening its flavor. To get the most out of them, the anchovies and garlic are mashed into softened butter, which is used in two ways: as a cooking medium and as a sauce. Used to cook the salmon, the butter browns and the anchovies and garlic caramelize, turning sweet. When stirred into the pan sauce, the raw garlic and anchovies give an intense bite that’s mitigated by the creaminess of the butter. It’s a quickly made, weeknight-friendly dish that’s far more nuanced than the usual seared salmon — but no harder to prepare.
Salmon With Agrodolce Blueberries
Here, I paired fillets with a seasonal treat: fresh local blueberries. The berries would have been cloying with the fish by themselves, so I simmered them with white wine and vinegar, creating a sweet-and-sour sauce inspired by Italian agrodolce. The bracing blueberry agrodolce would have worked wonderfully on other fish, especially oily ones like mackerel and swordfish. I could also see spooning it over boneless chicken thighs before roasting, or pairing it with meaty pork tenderloin or chops that have just come off the grill in all their smoky glory.
Sweet Tomato Jam With Honey and Vanilla
Mayonnaise
This recipe is perfect for a small batch of mayonnaise and does not require a food processor. Whisk slowly as you drip the oil into the egg yolk, lemon juice and Dijon mustard mixture. Once it starts to emulsify, you can start adding the oil a bit faster. In all, it’ll be a few minutes of whisking for a beautiful light-yellow mayo that's worth every moment.
Red Wine Cranberry Sauce With Honey
What does a chef in Napa Valley do to jazz up her cranberry sauce? Add wine, of course. This recipe was inspired by Cindy Pawlcyn, the Napa Valley chef and cookbook author, and includes smashed fresh ginger for extra verve. It’s more tart than most cranberry sauce recipes, so if you like yours sweeter, feel free to add more sugar or a little more honey.
Hazelnut and Coriander Spiced Sous-Vide Salmon
Ultimate Pumpkin Pie
The type of pumpkin used to make canned pumpkin purée is very close to sweet winter squashes like butternut and honeynut. Making your own fresh purée from these varieties will give you the best possible pumpkin pie, one that’s both ultracreamy and richly flavored. Just don’t be tempted to halve the whole squash and bake it still in the skin. Cutting it into cubes allows for the most evaporation and condensation for the best texture and taste. If using a glass or ceramic pie pan, you might want to parbake the crust. Since glass doesn’t conduct heat as well as metal, the crust may not cook through if you don’t parbake.
Herby Bread-and-Butter Stuffing for Two
This fairly classic stuffing recipe has been scaled down to feed two (generously). Filled with buttery sautéed shallots and plenty of herbs, it’s rich and soft in the center, and golden and crunchy on top. A small shallow gratin dish, about 6 inches in diameter, is your best option for baking, but any dish, loaf pan, or skillet with a 3- to 4-cup capacity will work.
Lemon Poppy-Seed Pancakes with Greek Yogurt and Jam
Honey, lemon zest and poppy seeds are stirred into a batter enriched with Greek yogurt elevating the pancake from typical to terrific. With a scoop of ice cream, these could more than pass for dessert.
No-Bake Butterscotch Custards
Based on a traditional British pudding called posset, these ultrasilky custards set without the need for cornstarch, eggs or gelatin. (The acidity in the crème fraîche and brown sugar helps do that instead.) A dash of molasses is stirred in for complexity and to accentuate the bitterness of the brown sugar. But for a sweeter and more traditionally butterscotch flavor, you can leave it out.
Ham Bone Soup
This hearty soup requires a good afternoon simmer, filling your house with the aromas of all things good and warming. The marrow imbues the broth with a silkiness and richness, and the kale is thrown in for color and health. You might want hot sauce, or not. Either way, a bowl of this is the kind of thing that cures what ails you.
Garlicky Beef Tenderloin With Orange Horseradish Sauce
The allure of beef tenderloin pulls hard. When properly cooked until the surface is seared to a glistening mahogany and the center is tender and running with beefy juices, it is one of the most regal, festive and delectable things a cook can serve. As a finishing touch, serve the meat with a pungent, creamy horseradish sauce that is shockingly easy to prepare.
Quick-Braised Cod With Herbed Yogurt
In this blissfully easy weeknight dinner, cod and shallots are braised in butter and wine, then topped with an herbed, garlicky yogurt sauce. It’s fast, flavorful and comforting, especially when served with mashed potatoes to drink up the pan juices. You can substitute any other mild-fleshed fish for the cod. Hake, sea bass, flounder and porgy all work nicely, though you may have to adjust the cooking time, depending on the thickness of the fillets.
Mushroom Bourguignon
Meaty mushrooms simmered with pearl onions, wine and carrots make for a rich, wintry Bourguignon-style stew. The quality of the stock here makes a big difference, so if you’re not using homemade, buy a good brand. If you’re a meat eater, beef broth adds a familiar brawny character to this dish, but mushroom or vegetable broth work just well, especially because the whole dish is rounded out with a tamari for depth. For the best flavor, use as many kinds of mushrooms as you can get, and let them really brown when searing; that caramelization adds a lot of depth to the sauce. Maitake mushrooms give this a brisketlike texture, in a very good way.