Recipes By Melissa Clark
1479 recipes found
Braised Veal Shanks With Apricot, Orange and Fennel
This osso buco is a tangy, tomato-based centerpiece for Rosh Hashana dinner, a meal usually built around sweet things like apples and honey (to welcome in a sweet new year).
Chicken Milanese With Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil Salad
A classic veal Milanese consists of pounded veal cutlets or chops that have been breaded in crumbs and sometimes Parmesan, then fried until the coating is burnished and brittle. Accompanied by a crisp, bright salad, it’s a meal both cooling and rich. In this version, chicken breasts replace the veal, and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella tossed with garlicky basil oil acts as the foil to the meat. If you want to work ahead, you can coat the cutlets in crumbs up to 4 hours ahead. Store them on a wire rack in the fridge. But try to serve them freshly fried when their coating is at its crunchiest.
Scallops With Sorrel Butter
Sorrel is a wonderfully pungent, tart spring green that takes well to rich and sweet ingredients. Here, it’s melted into a garlicky, buttery pan sauce and served with seared scallops. One thing to note: as sorrel cooks, it dims from bright green to olive drab in color. But a garnish of chives – with the chive blossoms if you can get them – will perk things up considerably. If you can’t find sorrel, you can make this dish with watercress or spinach, though you may need to add a squirt of lemon juice at the end to balance the flavors.
Veal Parmesan
A classic Italian-American Parmesan — a casserole of fried, breaded meat or eggplant covered with tomato sauce and molten cheese — is all about balance. You need a bracing a tomato sauce to cut out the fried richness, while a milky, mild mozzarella rounds out the Parmesan’s tang. Baked until brown-edged and bubbling, it’s classic comfort food — hearty, gooey and satisfying. Veal cutlets are the standard.
Lemon Barley Stuffing
Grain stuffings are an elegant alternative to bread stuffing on the Thanksgiving table, and one that happens to work well for any gluten-avoiding guests. Here the barley is tossed with roasted shiitake mushrooms, chive butter, hazelnuts and plenty of lemon to zip it up. Stuff it in the turkey if you'd like, or serve it alongside as a supple, addictive dressing.
Cornes de Gazelles
Cornes de gazelles are crumbly, crescent-shaped cookies filled with cinnamon, almonds and an intoxicating dose of orange blossom water.
Green Garlic Tabbouleh
This heady version of classic tabbouleh salad is for garlic lovers only. Instead of the salad relying solely on parsley, the green garlic stems add intensity and pungency to the mix, while a touch of mint adds freshness. You can tone down the garlic flavor by increasing the parsley-to-green-garlic ratio if you like, or vice versa. And if you can’t get young green garlic with floppy, soft green stems, use scallions or ramp greens instead. Garlic chives will also work. This is best made in late spring when green garlic is just coming into season; it will be at its most tender and mildest then.
Meatball Parmesan
Whether you scoop this onto a toasted semolina hero roll for a sandwich, or serve it straight from the pan with garlic bread on the side, meatball Parmesan makes a filling, savory meal. You can form the meatballs up to a day ahead and keep them in the fridge until you’re ready to fry. But they are best fried just before baking. Serve this with some kind of crisp green vegetable on the side.
Cannoli Cream Calzone With Honey and Orange
A calzone has many of the perks of pizza. Easy and crowd pleasing, it’s a good vehicle for using up odds and ends in the fridge. Taking a cue from Lucali’s Nutella-drizzled calzone, I attempted my own dessert version. I mixed honey, cinnamon and orange zest into ricotta before filling the pizza dough (the same one used for a savory calzone), then I dusted the top with powdered sugar after baking. A sprinkle of sea salt lent a savory contrast to this most sweet endeavor.
White Bean and Caramelized Onion Calzone
The calzone, like the pizza, is a crowd-pleaser, and a excellent vehicle for using up odds and ends in the fridge. This version, which is filled with lemony mashed white beans, caramelized fennel and onions, happens to be vegan. Full-flavored and soft-centered, it's not a traditional calzone but a delicious tart-like creation unto itself.
Skillet-Baked Eggs and Asparagus
Asparagus and eggs have an affinity for each other. The voluptuous yolk softens and smoothes the grassy sharpness of the vegetable, while the asparagus brightens up the dull richness of the egg. The pair’s most classic expression is asparagus hollandaise, but that is too fussy and time-consuming a preparation for a regular home-cooked breakfast. This dish combines the flavors in a time- and cook-friendly way.
Braised Sauerkraut With Lots of Pork
Two classic mixed braises always come to mind at this time of year. One is cassoulet, based on white beans and a blend of goose, duck and pork. The better alternative for my purposes was choucroute garnie, a vat of simmering sauerkraut that serves as a nice bed on which to mix and match a variety of pig parts. The beauty of a choucroute is that it lets you use whatever pork products you like or have on hand. A couple of hours later, the meat is cooked through while the sauerkraut has absorbed all the porky, smoky flavors, utterly transforming from pickled and puckery into something brawny in flavor and meltingly soft, especially if you add a couple of apples to bring out the cabbage’s sweeter nature. Pigs’ feet are not necessarily traditional in choucroute, but they add excellent flavor and body to the mix. If you are like my husband and prefer to eat your meat with a knife and fork (and I know that he is not alone in that department), you can always leave them out.
Rum Cranberry Ice Cream With Walnuts and Chocolate Chunks
This recipe combines copious chunks of bittersweet chocolate folded into a custard base perfumed with good, dark rum and dotted with rum-soaked dried cranberries. It could perch easily on a slice of pecan, apple or even pumpkin pie, dripping lusciously down the sides. Although rum is used here, any dark brown spirit will work — particularly bourbon or brandy. Or if you want to leave out the booze, substitute orange juice and stir a little grated orange zest into the custard as it cooks.
Pork and Watermelon Salad
The mixture of juicy watermelon and luscious pork fat make the effort of this project recipe well worth it. The recipe requires making a kind of quick pickle of the rind, which gives the dish added character.
Fast Vietnamese Caramel Bluefish
The first bluefish catch marks the beginning of summer in the Northeast, where the rich-tasting fish are plentiful, inexpensive and sustainable. Bluefish are best enjoyed very fresh, so make sure to get yours from a reliable source. Eaten within a day or two of catching, the flesh is sweet and flaky, with a deep ocean flavor. In this recipe, fillets are simmered in a brown sugar, ginger and soy sauce mixture that mimics the peppery flavors of a classic Vietnamese caramel fish, but without having to make caramel. The result is complex, tangy, slightly sweet and comes together in under 30 minutes. And if you can’t get bluefish, other full-flavored fillets can be substituted. And if you can’t find lemongrass, use strips of lemon or lime zest instead.
Meyer Lemon and Blood Orange Marmalade
Scallion Pancakes With Squid
The textures in this delicious recipe for pajeon, traditional Korean scallion-based pancakes, are manifold: meaty from the squid, crunchy yielding to soft from the fried bits of batter, juicy from the scallion. It came to The Times from Hooni Kim, the chef at Hanjan in Manhattan. One of the secrets to this pancake is waiting for the oil to heat up before mixing the batter. That way, the batter doesn’t sit around and turn gluey. Eat them as hot as you can without burning your fingers. The risk is worth it.
Roasted Turkey Drumsticks With Star Anise and Soy Sauce
Back in 2011, Melissa Clark revisited the turkey. “Just because we don’t think to make it the star of a meal in May doesn’t mean turkey won’t taste as good as it did in November,” she wrote. She took several approaches: cooking the parts separately, then braising them slowly; simmering ground turkey with pancetta for a ragù; and this one, where turkey drumsticks are coated in a mixture featuring soy sauce, honey and star anise, then cooked in a 400-degree oven. It’s a worthy weekend meal, or one for a weekday when work gets out early. Pair it with white rice, to sop up the reserved marinade.
Sesame Flatbread
Rhubarb “Big Crumb” Coffeecake
Rhubarb is an alarmingly sour vegetable passed off as a fruit, but requiring a huge mound of sugar to effect the transformation. Crumb cake is a huge mound of sugar disguised as a cake, but demanding a bracing counterpoint to allay its cloying sweetness. In this cake, the two strike a perfect balance. The extra-large crumbs are made by pinching off marbles of brown sugar dough by hand. It takes a bit more time than pulsing the ingredients in a food processor, but the result is worth the extra effort.
Lemon Almond Cake With Lemon Glaze
Most lemon cakes rely on zest and juice for flavor. This one uses the whole fruit, pith and all, for an intense citrus flavor. There’s also almond flour in the batter, which gives the cake a dense richness. If you can get Meyer lemons, use them here. Most likely the hybrid of a lemon and a mandarin, Meyer lemons, with thin skins and plenty of juice, are a bit sweeter and less acidic than regular lemons.
Bread Pudding Frittata
At El Rey Coffee Bar and Luncheonette, you can get this rich, silky egg terrine all day long, but it’s particularly wonderful at breakfast or brunch. Although it does take time to put together, you can do all of it well ahead – up to 24 hours. And the last minute work is minimal (slice an avocado, chop up some fresh herbs). Don’t be tempted to skip the frequent stirring while the dish bakes. It may seem fussy, but in fact is the key to the luscious texture, which is somewhere between custard and bread pudding.
Grilled Pork Loin With Wine-Salt Rub
Grilled Pork Loin With Herbs, Cumin and Garlic
Pork loin is an excellent cut to grill for a crowd. The cut is larger and more marbled with fat than a lean tenderloin, which is entirely different and should not be used as a substitute in this recipe. The pork loin has a richer flavor and meatier texture. Butterflying a loin helps it cook quickly and relatively evenly over direct heat, which is the easiest way to go on the grill. If you’d rather cook this in the oven, you can broil the meat: Place the pork, opened and flat, on a rimmed baking sheet, and broil it on low for 7 to 12 minutes per side, until done to taste.