Recipes By Melissa Clark
1479 recipes found
Minted Cantaloupe Salad With Chamomile Syrup
Steamed Artichokes With Lemon Butter
Large, plump artichokes are generally better for steaming than smaller ones. They may take longer to soften, but you’ll end up with plenty of meaty petals to pull off and dip into the lemon butter. This recipe gives instructions for steaming the artichokes in a traditional pot, but a pressure cooker (either electric or stovetop) is a faster option if you have one. See the Note below for instructions.
Baked Polenta With Crispy Leeks and Blue Cheese
Baking polenta in the oven means you don’t have to stand over the pot, stirring the extremely hot, bubbling mass. Here, the polenta is cooked in stock for the deepest flavor. Then it’s topped with piquant crumbles of Gorgonzola dolce and crisp fried leeks, which add sweetness and crunch. You can serve this as a warming main course along with a crisp green salad, or as a rich and flavorful side dish to simple roasted meats or fish.
Eggs With Gigante Beans and Harissa
A combination of soft beans, harissa-imbued vegetables, crisp-edged fried eggs and salty bits of cured tuna (or prosciutto), this unusual brunch dish is substantial and interesting enough to serve for dinner. While the chef Ignacio Mattos of Estela restaurant in New York City designed the dish around the plump gigante beans, any white bean, canned or freshly cooked, will work just as well. You can make the the beans and harissa mixture a few days ahead. But don't start toasting the bread until the last minute. You need it as crisp as possible to contrast with all the other soft textures.
Fregola With Artichokes, Feta, Toasted Almonds and Herbs
Roasted Chicken With Lemon-Glazed Rhubarb
A tangy rhubarb-lemon glaze gives roasted chicken a touch of sweetness and a deeply golden, crunchy skin. The rhubarb, which is cooked in the oven along with the chicken (but in a separate pan), becomes syrupy and soft, scented with thyme, coriander and fresh ginger. Some of the rhubarb mixture is brushed over the bird to help bronze its skin, while the rest makes a chutney-like condiment to serve alongside. If you have thin-skinned, mildly sweet Meyer lemons, you can skip the blanching in Step 3 and add the slices straight from the rhubarb pan. Regular lemons, especially those with a lot of the bitter white pith, really benefit from a brief blanch. This dish is wonderful over polenta or rice, which can absorb both chicken and rhubarb juices. Add a simple green salad (spinach is especially nice here), and dinner is done.
Rhubarb Compote
This rhubarb compote is wonderful to have around, whether you eat it on pancakes, yogurt or just a spoon, and it couldn't be easier to make.
Toasted-Almond Poundcake With Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote
Poundcake is like brownies: a baker's challenge that sounds like child's play. The name itself is traditionally half the recipe – a pound each of butter, eggs, sugar and flour – but the technique is critical to producing a cake that is so tender it can stand alone but is still sturdy enough to hold up under a fruit compote, ice cream or sauce. This recipe, adapted from Joseph Murphy, a pastry chef at Gotham Bar and Grill, calls for melting the butter first, beating the eggs and sugar together until they are very thick, then whisking in the flours and the butter. Although the proportions are the same as for any other poundcake, the result is almost spongy, with a fine crumb.
Eggplant Ragù With Capers and Burrata
This eggplant dish is a lot like pasta alla Norma, minus the pasta. Instead, it’s the large, crisp chunks of eggplant that star, enrobed in basil-scented marinara sauce and topped with a melting, creamy mix of burrata and ricotta. In this recipe adapted from the chef Amy Brandwein of Centrolina in Washington, D.C., the cubed eggplant is topped with crunchy, salty eggplant chips, sliced ultrathin and deep-fried until golden. But if that’s one step too many when you’re cooking this at home, feel free to leave the chips out.
Harvest Tart With Pumpkin and Peppers
A savory, olive oil-crusted tart stuffed full of golden, roasted peppers, jammy onions and some freshly grated pumpkin is a great dinner party treat, although it's perfectly wonderful for a family evening repast as well. Salt the pumpkin ahead of time to draw out excess moisture, though if you are pressed for time you can skip this step. To perk up the caramelized intensity of the filling, it is helpful to fold in something zingy like olive or capers, or perhaps a good splash of lemon juice.
Sweet Rhubarb Focaccia
Here's a surprising twist on the traditional savory focaccia: a sweet and tart tangle of rhubarb rests atop a light and chewy bread which is then sprinkled with raw demerara sugar for a satisfying crunch.
Wine-Braised Oxtail
Don’t be scared off by oxtail just because you may never have cooked it before. It’s as meaty and rich as short ribs, and just as straightforward to prepare. In this hearty braise, the meat is simmered in wine with carrots and celeriac. Feel free to substitute other vegetables for those roots. For example: mushrooms, celery stalks, turnips, rutabaga, winter squash chunks, and sweet potatoes would all be happy additions to the pot. Or leave the vegetables out and serve the whole thing over mashed potatoes, egg noodles or polenta. Like all braises, it can be made at least four days ahead, and gets better as it sits.
Ravioli Alla Burrata With Pistachio Pesto
Roasted Fish With Brown Butter Corn
Corn cooked in browned butter is the backbone of this summer sauce, which is sweet and a little tart, nutty and very creamy.
Coconut Barley Pilaf With Corn, Chicken and Cashews
Trout With Chive Butter
You can make this speedy dish casual and after-work-friendly or fancy enough for company. It all depends on how you garnish it. Using trout or salmon roe turns it into something quite deluxe, with the small pearls of caviar popping in your mouth. But a sprinkling of saline capers is nearly as delicious, at a fraction of the cost. No matter which you choose, the fish itself a snap to prepare. The butterflied whole trout broils up in under five minutes. After that it's smeared with a garlicky compound butter, which melts into a fragrant, savory sauce. Serve this dish with boiled new potatoes, crusty bread or rice to catch all the buttery juices.
Sake-Steamed Chicken With Ginger and Scallions
“Steamed chicken is not the kind of dish that makes my mouth water,” Melissa Clark wrote in 2011, when bringing this recipe to The Times. But she made an exception for this dish, inspired by Harris Salat, who helps run the website Japanesefoodreport.com. Here, a full chicken is steamed for about an hour and a half over a mixture of sake and water, leaving it soft and flavorful.
Steamed Sole with Smoked Trout Consommé
Swordfish With Lemon and Fennel
This dish is truly clever weeknight cooking — sophisticated, fast, unfussy and wholly delicious. Swordfish is cut into chunks, which cook faster than steaks, and then is sautéed in olive oil, butter or, for the best results, a combination of the two. The fat protects the fish from the heat of the pan, preventing the fish from drying out. It also provides lots of flavor, as do fennel seeds, garlic, lemon zest and red pepper flakes, which are added to the pan after the fish has cooked for a few minutes. Fennel fronds are a nice garnish, offering their light anise flavor and feathery texture, though you could use chopped fresh basil, parsley or cilantro instead. Cumin or coriander seeds can stand for the fennel seeds, or you can leave them out altogether and double the chile.
Swordfish With Sweet and Hot Peppers
A blissful blend of the reliably sweet (bell peppers, cubanelles, peperoncini) and the reliably fiery (Serranos, chile de arbol, Scotch bonnets) creates blissful balance. Here, the sweet peppers are sautéed slowly with onions to intensify their gentle honeyed character. Half of the hot chiles are left raw, sharp and biting to create as much contrast as possible. Eaten altogether, each bite is both hot and sweet, pungent from a touch of garlic, tart from a squeeze of lemon and faintly saline from the swordfish.
Umami Garlic Noodles With Mustard Greens
The key to this heady noodle dish, adapted from “Vietnamese Food Any Day” (Ten Speed Press, 2019), is to build complexity by layering umami flavors in the pan. The cookbook’s author, Andrea Nguyen, starts with ingredients that are familiar to many pan-fried noodle dishes: oyster sauce, fish sauce, mushrooms, garlic. But then, in a brilliant move, she augments it all with a big dollop of salted, European-style cultured butter to add both creaminess and acidity. There’s also a touch of monosodium glutamate (MSG) in the mix, which you can buy in Asian markets or other supermarkets sold under the name Accent Flavor Enhancer. It has a salty sweetness that deepens all the other flavors. But if you’d rather not use it, nutritional yeast also works well. If you can’t get mustard greens, substitute baby kale or spinach.
Spicy Pork Stew With Hominy and Collard Greens
I’ve long adored hominy, the earthy dried corn kernels you find in pozole, the chile-laced Mexican stew. When I saw dried heirloom hominy for sale online, I bought some. I knew that having it in the cupboard when a hominy craving struck was the best insurance against cheating and buying the canned version. Like dried beans, dried hominy needs a good long soak and a lengthy cooking. But there’s nothing difficult about the process. Many pozole recipes call for the finished stew to be garnished with shredded cabbage. But after bingeing on cabbage recently, I decided to take a different route, and stirred slivered collard greens into the pot at the end of cooking. They turned silky and soft and offered a nice contrast to the chewy hominy, the brawny pork and the spicy thick broth.
Broiled Fish With Lemon Curry Butter
Broiled fish fillets topped with a little butter and a squirt of lemon is a quick, easy weeknight staple. But when the butter is spiked with plenty of garlic, a jolt of curry powder and piquant fresh ginger, then brightened with fresh herbs, it becomes a superb, company-worthy dish that still cooks in under 10 minutes flat. Use your favorite fish here; any mild fillet will allow the buttery sauce to shine.
Pan Bagnat
The beauty of a pan bagnat: not only is it impressive and something different to share with fellow picnickers, it also wants to be made in advance. The longer it sits (up to 24 hours), the better it gets. The flavors marry, the oil and tomato juices mingle, the anchovies dissolve into the bread and all of it coalesces into a sophisticated whole that stays intact when you bite in. Pan bagnats can be a catchall for whatever vegetables are on hand: crisp hot and sweet peppers, fennel, cucumber and scallions. Even string beans, peas and fava beans can all work. The tuna itself is optional; some versions are ringed with just anchovies and sliced hard-cooked eggs. And at the time of year when wild salmon is in season, you could use some of the leftover cooked fish in place of tuna, which would make the sandwich even classier.