Recipes By Melissa Clark
1468 recipes found
The Only Ice Cream Recipe You’ll Ever Need
This silky, luscious and very classic custard can be used as the base for any ice cream flavor you can dream up. These particular proportions of milk and cream to egg yolk will give you a thick but not sticky ice cream that feels decadent but not heavy. For something a little lighter, use more milk and less cream, as long as the dairy adds up to 3 cups. You can also cut down on egg yolks for a thinner base, but don’t go below three. Then flavor it any way you like. See the chart here for more than 16 flavor ideas. Or invent your own.
Asparagus Soup With Ricotta Crostini
In this puréed vegetable soup, asparagus and leeks are thickened with rice, which adds both body and a slightly nubby texture to the bowl. Little is wasted in the preparation; asparagus ends and leek tops that might otherwise be thrown away are simmered into a delicate broth that serves as the foundation for the other flavors. You can skip the ricotta crostini but some kind of crunchy contrast – plain buttered toast, breadsticks or crackers – makes a nice counterpart on the side.
Sugar Snap Pea Salad
In this unusual summer salad, funky, creamy Camembert and crisp, juicy sugar snap peas unite make a texturally complex and very flavorful dish. You can use any washed rind cheese here as long as it’s ripe enough to be spread on a plate. If you can’t find a gooey-centered cheese, you can substitute a creamy goat cheese instead. Pea shoots make an ideal garnish, echoing the flavor of the sugar snaps, but if you can’t get them, use any baby green or micro green in its place. If you want to work ahead, you can blanch the peas and mix up the dressing several hours ahead. But don’t combine the salad ingredients until just before serving. In this dish, freshness is key.
Quinoa Salad With Roasted Carrots and Frizzled Leeks
This quinoa salad, filled with soft roasted carrots, currants and a pomegranate molasses-spiked dressing, makes enough to feed a crowd, though you can easily halve the recipe for a smaller group. You can make it with any color quinoa you come across – it comes in shades of tan (called white), rusty red and brownish black. Just don’t mix them together in one pot because they all have slightly different cooking times. As for the pomegranate molasses, it's available in specialty shops and online, but if you don’t have it, substitute a good quality balsamic vinegar spiked with a little honey if you like. You can toss together the quinoa, dressing and carrots the day before serving, but don’t add the arugula until the last minute to keep it as fresh and crisp as possible.
Chia Seed Pudding
Chia seeds are nutritionally dense seeds that will thicken any liquid you add them to. Mix them up with coconut and almond milks and you’ve got an almost instant pudding with a tapioca-like texture and gently sweet flavor. This recipe is meant for breakfast, but if you add a little honey to the seeds as they swell, it will be sweet enough for dessert. You can use either black or white chia seeds here, or a mix. The pudding will continue to thicken as it sits, so feel free to thin it out to taste with a little more almond or coconut milk before serving.
Hazelnut Citrus Torte
A touch of quinoa flour gives this hazelnut torte an underlying smokiness that makes it more complex than most. It also makes it both gluten-free and kosher for Passover (make sure to select a quinoa flour that's listed as kosher for Passover). But if you can’t find quinoa flour, millet flour will work well, too, as would wheat flour (though of course it would no longer be gluten-free). With a supple, moist crumb, this torte will keep for several days, well-wrapped at room temperature, so feel free to make it ahead. Then serve it with a citrus sorbet or sweet citrus salad and a mound of whipped crème fraîche or mascarpone.
Chicken Stew With Sweet Plantains
Made on a Saturday afternoon, this accessible chicken stew (inspired by the dish mofongo) could deliver delicious Sunday sustenance from 11 a.m. onward.
Broiled Mussels With Garlicky Herb Butter
Garlic-laden herb butter is often called snail butter, because the French use it on roasted snails. But it’s too good to be relegated to snails — after all, how often do you cook snails? In this recipe, the green-flecked butter, flavored with a little Pernod, is slathered on mussels on the half shell, then broiled until the tops are brown-edged and golden. Although this recipes is somewhat involved, none of the steps are hard, and every except for the broiling can be done in advance. Save any leftover mussels and butter to toss with hot pasta for dinner the next day.
Dark Chocolate and Pomegranate Bark
Chocolate bark is the workhorse of homemade holiday gifts, and in Tom Faglon's version, he scatters fresh pomegranate seeds over the surface, where they glisten like rubies. Chewy bits of candied ginger are hidden inside the bittersweet chocolate, lying in wait to surprise you with their spiciness. Then, to make things even more interesting, Mr. Faglon strews the top with crunchy sea salt. This bark is as sweet and juicy as a box of chocolate-covered cherries, but a lot more sophisticated.
Simple Roast Turkey
For all the attention we lavish on Thanksgiving turkeys, the truth is more work does not necessarily yield a better bird. That's right: You can skip brining, stuffing, trussing and basting. Instead of a messy wet brine, use a dry rub (well, technically a dry brine) — a salt and pepper massage that locks in moisture and seasons the flesh. No stuffing or trussing allows the bird to cook more quickly, with the white and dark meat finishing closer to the same time. And if you oil but don’t baste your turkey, you’ll get crisp skin without constantly opening the oven.
Spicy Mussels With Cauliflower, Basil and Lime
Green Goddess Roasted Chicken
Green Goddess dressing — a creamy, piquant blend of herbs, garlic and anchovies — is good to eat on salad. And it’s wonderful as a dipping sauce for vegetables. But its best use may be as a marinade for roast chicken. The mild chicken absorbs all the zippy flavors of the dressing, to emerge from the oven fragrant and golden, flecked with green. To intensify the herbal flavor, some of the green goddess mixture is set aside to use as a sauce. You could even pour a little on a salad or some vegetables on the side, and enjoy the best of all the Green Goddess variations in one savory bite.
The Frankies’ Fried Eggplant Sandwich
This extraordinary sandwich, served at Frankies Spuntino in New York, is crisp and tender, lightly oily in a good way, and filled with salty pungent flavor — and the secret to its goodness is in the technique used to fry the vegetable. And now you can make it at home. It’s not a sandwich to make on a whim. It takes a while to set up. But if you plan ahead — the eggplant can be cooked a few days in advance — you’ll be in for a feast.
Niçoise Salad With Basil and Anchovy-Lemon Vinaigrette
Here is a riff on a classic French salade niçoise. Traditionalists drape anchovy filets across the finished salad, but here, they're minced and used only in the dressing. Anchovy admirers can certainly add more for garnish — and anchovy avoiders can simply leave them out. The only cooking is boiling the potatoes and haricots verts, which can be done together in the same pot. Add a jammy egg or two if you like. Dressing the vegetables while warm helps them absorb all the good flavors more deeply, making this a salad that manages to be intense and light at the same time.
Green and Wax Bean Salad With Tomato Vinaigrette
This recipe calls for using past-their-prime tomatoes to make a vinaigrette by halving them across their equators, scooping out the seeds and grating the flesh on the large holes of a box grater. Seasoned with salt, vinegar and olive oil, it makes an flavorful dressing. Here, it's tossed with green and wax beans, sliced kalamata olives and torn basil leaves for a summer salad that's delicious cold or at room temperature. The vinaigrette can also be used as a crostini topping with white anchovies and fried capers, or in the base of an agrodolce to serve with fish or chicken.
Plum Chutney Crumb Pie
If you’ve never made chutney, you might think it to be one of those long-simmering, involved recipes that take the better part of a day. Really, making chutney is no harder than making applesauce. All you do is cook down the fruit with spices, herbs, sugar and, very important, a little vinegar to accentuate the tang, and you’re done. The intriguing flavor comes from the combination of ingredients, not from a complicated technique.
Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake
This lemon poppy seed pound cake is summery and quick to make, and perfect for a picnic. One tip: Cut up the pound cake before the picnic but leave it in the baking pan. It makes it easier to transport, and the pan protects it, too. Then serve it on its own, with ripe berries, and let the ants enjoy the crumbs.
Hot and Sour Seared Tofu With Snap Peas
Impatience was the main reason I failed at searing tofu. For years, I had given in to the temptation to poke it, turn it, examine it, annoy it. Then I finally learned that, like any very moist ingredient (fish, mushrooms, tomatoes), the less you bother it, the browner and crisper it will get. Once I figured that out, searing tofu was easy. These days it’s a fixture in our something-quick-for-dinner arsenal. In this recipe, I stir-fry it with sliced sugar snap peas. But any vegetable cut into small pieces (asparagus, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini, green beans) works well, too.
Chocolate-Crusted Banana Blondies
A buttery chocolate crust and a rum-scented, banana-imbued butterscotch blondie form two distinct layers that harmonize with every bite. The contrast between crunchy bottom and chewy topping is the whole point of the exercise.
Rice Pudding With Golden Raisins
Forget egg yolks and water baths. This is a simple and superb rice pudding that uses only milk, sugar, cream, rice, salt and your choice of flavorings: rum, almond extract, vanilla, orange zest, cardamom, nutmeg, anything else you can dream up. Add the raisins at the end so they don’t get too mushy as the pudding cooks.
Spicy Roasted Shrimp and Broccoli Rabe
This dish uses one of my favorite techniques for cooking just about anything quickly: high-heat roasting. All you do is spread seasoned protein and vegetables out on one rimmed baking sheet and roast everything at the same time. Here I’ve paired shrimp with broccoli rabe, which cook in about 10 minutes flat.
Haroseth Truffles
This recipe takes a traditional Passover treat, and gives it a little twist. Here, dried fruit and nuts are chopped in a food processor, flavored with cinnamon and moistened with a bit of pomegranate juice for a Sephardic version of the recipe. They’re rolled into balls, and dusted with unsweetened coconut. Feel free to substitute any dried fruit or nuts you’d like.
Soda Bread Buns
In this new incarnation of my soda bread recipe, I kept the crosses, but to maximize the surface area of the crumbly, crunchy outer crust, I baked the dough into small buns instead of a large loaf. That way, I was able to get more of the bumpy-textured crust in each bite.
Bittersweet Chocolate Mousse With Fleur de Sel
This is an intense, creamy one-ingredient chocolate mousse adapted from the molecular gastronomist Hervé This. The nearly instant recipe contains no cream or eggs, so a complex chocolate can shine. The mousse serves four, and it can be doubled. But even if you’re serving two, don’t be tempted to halve it. More of our favorite Valentine's Day recipes can be found here.