Recipes By Tejal Rao
135 recipes found
Turmeric Tea
Turmeric milk is a simple infusion of warm milk with turmeric that exists with countless variations in homes across India, where it's known as haldi doodh. The drink might include black pepper, and a touch of jaggery or honey to sweeten it. This hybridized version lies somewhere closer to a masala chai with a dose of black tea and a spoon of fresh grated ginger. The recipe makes two dainty portions, or one robust one, but it's in the spirit of things to play with the ratios to suit your own taste, to use your sweetener of choice and even to replace the milk entirely with almond or cashew milk. Cooking with powdered turmeric is less messy than with fresh, and won't require gloves to keep your fingers from staining.
Panettone Bread Pudding
If you’ve bought a loaf of truly fantastic panettone, made in the Italian tradition from a natural starter, the kind that’s airy and melting, we hope you don’t have any leftovers. But if you find yourself with an excess of mass-produced panettone, or simply very old panettone that’s past its prime, here’s how to transform it into something special. Cut it into thick slices, as the pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt does with brioche, when she makes her bread pudding at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Toast them. Now layer the bread in a wide dish, and pour over a whisked custard of milk and eggs. It will look like too much liquid, but as it bakes, the panettone will soak it all up, becoming moist and tender and impossibly rich. It’s close enough to a casserole of French toast to make it ideal for a special holiday breakfast, but sweet enough to step in as dessert on a cold night. Vanilla would be a classic way to flavor the custard, but panettone tends to be quite sweet and perfumed already, so taste the bread first before adding extras.
Devil’s-Food Cake With Toasted-Marshmallow Frosting
Stella Parks developed this recipe for an all-butter triple-layer chocolate cake with a shockingly tender crumb and deep, fudgy flavor. The cake looks intimidating at first, but Ms. Parks's technique involves simply stirring all the ingredients together in a single 5-quart pan and then pouring it into 3 pans. Once they're cooled, level the puffy tops with a bread knife and put them together with marshmallow frosting for a true showstopper.
Pork Dumplings
This recipe for pork-and-chive dumplings comes from the chef Helen You, who learned to make dumplings from her mother in Tianjin, China. She serves these classic boiled dumplings, along with 100 other varieties, at her restaurant, Dumpling Galaxy, in Flushing, Queens. The filling is a simple mix of ground pork, seasoned with grated ginger, soy and garlic chives, and it works best with slightly fatty ground meat (about 30 percent fat, if your butcher asks). It's traditional to splash the meat with shaoxing, the Chinese rice wine, but You prefers to use sherry.
Beet Dip With Labneh
This recipe for a delicious raw beet dip comes from Botanica, a vegetable-focused restaurant in Los Angeles run by Emily Fiffer and Heather Sperling. The recipe is easy — throw everything into the blender raw — though it requires a little time for the blades to break down the beets with walnuts, olive oil and a few other aromatics. Fiffer and Sperling cleverly adapted the dip from muhammara, the Middle Eastern spread made from red peppers. Using beets creates another dish altogether, but one that tastes bright, sweet and earthy. Serve it with a dollop of labneh, as well as warm pita and quartered Persian cucumbers for dipping, and generously drizzle everything with olive oil and crunchy salt.
Cranberry-Lemon Stripe Cake
This small, rich, impressive cake is a bit of a magic trick. It looks like a standard buttercream-covered cake, but cut it open, and it reveals several fine pink vertical layers. The key is to make a thick, flexible sponge and turn it into a single jelly roll using three smaller, connecting pieces, joining them up as you go, then sitting it upright (check out this video for step-by-step instructions). In Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi's original version, that buttercream is flavored and stained with a pulp of simmered black currants, but this one incorporates the tartness of cranberries instead.
Baked Camembert Salad
Cheese encased in pastry and baked until brown might seem like an old-fashioned dish, but it’s one of the most reliable ways to please a small group of omnivorous people. Flaky pastry, warm, runny cheese, what’s not to like? Baking is also a great way to turn a mediocre wheel of cheese into something great. Cut the wheel in half, sandwich it with something savory and something sweet and wrap it up tightly with pastry. If you want to replace it with Brie, or another soft cheese with an edible rind, feel free — just make sure there aren’t gaps in the sides of the pastry, or the cheese will leak out in the oven.
Tamales de Pollo (Chipotle Chicken Tamales)
Guadalupe Moreno’s tinga de pollo makes for a delicious filling in this tamales formula from Alicia Villanueva of Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas in Hayward, Calif. Ms. Villanueva shared her recipe with Leticia Landa and Caleb Zigas for their cookbook “We Are La Cocina.” Her tamales are made with corn masa flour that’s softened and flavored at the same time with both fat and broth. The recipe is a project, but once you’ve done the work of preparing the husks, filling and masa, the process of filling and wrapping the tamales goes quickly.
Tsukune Miso Nabe (Chicken-Meatball Hot Pot in Miso Broth)
Naoko Takei Moore makes this comforting hot pot of ginger-spiked meatballs, mushrooms and tofu in a donabe, or Japanese clay pot. She sells them at Toiro, her Japanese cookware shop in Los Angeles, and has written a book on the topic, “Donabe: Classic and Modern Japanese Clay Pot Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2015). The traditional cookware can be used to cook rice, steam foods and even set up to work like a small grill. It’s a wonderful, versatile piece of equipment, though if you don’t have one, you can use another heavy-bottomed pot with a lid, and still turn out a beautiful meal. Have this hot pot on its own, or with a side of warm rice.
Paneer con Tomate
Pan con tomate, the Spanish dish of grated tomato on grilled or toasted bread, is summery and extremely satisfying. Grating a tomato somehow emphasizes everything delicious about it, heightening sweetness and acidity. Paneer con tomate is built on the same principle, but swaps the bread for pieces of crisp-edged, lightly fried cheese. Here, the tomato pulp is seasoned not with olive oil, but with a glug of coconut oil infused with mustard seeds and curry leaves. If you’ve got homemade paneer, which is looser and softer, then there’s no need to fry it. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.
Cheese Fondue
Fondue is a classic, communal, Alpine dish, and one that's easy to put together. Grate the Gruyère, Appenzeller and Vacherin Fribourgeois in advance (either the day before, or in the morning), and wrap it up tightly so it doesn't dry out in the fridge. When you're about ready to eat, everything is ready to go: Melt the cheeses into a simmering slurry of white wine and cornstarch, stirring until the mixture is smooth, and season with ground pepper and a splash of kirsch. Cut bread, small boiled potatoes and cornichons make for a nice accompaniment, as do any other blanched vegetables that can hold up to a dip in hot cheese.
Roasted Broccoli With Almonds and Cardamom (Malai Broccoli)
This recipe comes from the British cookbook author Meera Sodha, who adapted it from a dish she tasted in Goa, India. It's a smart, simple technique that turns the broccoli crisp and creamy at the same time: charred florets with a lick of thick nutmeg-spiced sauce baked into every nook and cranny. Ms. Sodha uses a mix of cream cheese, yogurt and ground almonds. Don't be afraid to get messy and use your hands to thoroughly coat the broccoli in the sauce; it pays off later.
Pan de Jamón (Venezuelan Ham Bread)
This recipe for the traditional Venezuelan Christmas bread comes from Martha Beltrán in Austin, Tex., who brought the recipe with her when she moved to the United States and now considers it essential to her family's Thanksgiving feast. Ms. Beltrán always starts the bread the day before she serves it, laminating it with butter three times before rolling it up with ham, bacon, olives and pimentos. The process can be long, but the dough can be left in the fridge for a flexible and forgiving amount of time, even overnight. When the finished loaves are sliced, each piece reveals a festive butter-slicked swirl.
Roasted Squash With Coconut, Chile and Garlic
Mix dry coconut, dry chile and garlic together, and you can easily brighten a batch of roasted winter squash. But this South Indian home-cooking technique is versatile and works with many kinds of vegetables too. Cut a head of cauliflower into florets, and roast that instead. Or shave brussels sprouts or red cabbage very thinly, and cook it in a skillet, adding the coconut-chile-garlic mixture when the vegetable is cooked. In the spring, try it with fresh peas or fava beans. In the summer, try corn kernels. The variations are endless.
Swiss Chard Slab Pie
This crowd-pleasing recipe by Justin Chapple comes from Kristin Donnelly's book "Modern Potluck" and makes the most of Swiss chard, using both leaves and stems to fill a vegetarian slab pie with a buttery, peppery crust. That filling, tangy with reduced white wine and bound with sour cream, tastes just as good warm as it does cold, and can feed a crowd any time of day. Note: Wash leaves and stems thoroughly to avoid any traces of grit in the finished pie.
Cheesy Pan Pizza
This recipe for a crisp, cheesy pan pizza was developed by Charlotte Rutledge, along with her team of test cooks at King Arthur Flour’s rigorous test kitchen in Vermont. It uses a number of simple techniques to achieve maximum texture and flavor. The dough is folded a few times before it goes in the fridge for a long rest, which develops its flavor and airiness. Cooking the pizza in cast iron gets the edges brown and crackling, and layering the cheese and sauce creates an extra cheesy top with no soggy layer. Make it once in its simplest form, then use the model to play around with the fermentation time and toppings.
Sri Lankan Dal With Coconut and Lime Kale
"Red lentils are the king of weekday cooking," said Meera Sodha, the British cookbook author. In this robust dish, she turns to quick-cooking red lentils, deepening their flavor with fried green chiles, garlic and ginger. It's not traditional to serve the kale on top, but it turns a simple dish into a luxurious, complete meal: Just add hot rice and a spoonful of yogurt on the side.
Hibiscus Quesadillas (Quesadilla con Flor de Jamaica)
Dried hibiscus is cheap and plentiful, usually available in specialty grocery stores or international supermarket bulk bins. It has a place in kitchens around the world, in drinks and syrups and remedies and stews. The calyxes of the flower — the part we actually eat — also happen to have a high pectin content, making them ideal for jelly making. Lately, the ingredient has been marketed as a kind of health food, or meat substitute, but the ingredient has deep, ancient roots and stands on its own. Adriana Almazán Lahl, who owns a catering business in San Francisco, rehydrates the flowers and sautés them with onion and chiles, then folds the spicy mixture into flour tortillas with a little cheese. The result is a quick, delicious meal, and an excellent way to use up the entire flower. Be sure to rinse the hibiscus well before you get started; grit hides in its folds.
Tomato and Fennel-Seed Pickle
Though mango and lime pickles are easy to find on the shelves of Indian grocery stores, home cooks in India pickle all varieties of fruits and vegetables, including tomato. India’s pickle queen, Usha Prabakaran, documented this tomato pickle, flavored with a generous amount of fennel seeds. It’s capable of adding flavor and heat to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Asafoetida has a pungent smell out of the jar, but mellows as it cooks and gives the pickle its personality — don’t skip it!
Kubaneh (Yemeni Pull-Apart Rolls)
The Jewish-Yemeni bread kubaneh was traditionally cooked in the residual heat of the hearth on Friday night, low and slow, ready to be eaten on Shabbat morning. At his restaurant, Nur, the chef Meir Adoni adapted a recipe that requires less than 30 minutes. You'll need a stand mixer to aggressively knead the basic yeasted dough, but afterward the fun of this bread is shaping it by hand, one bun at a time. With generously buttered hands, spread each piece of dough into a big, sheer sheet, then roll it up like a log and swirl it into a bun. Don't worry about a few rips and creases here and there in the dough as you spread it. Keep laminating, creating fine layers of fat as you roll and swirl, and those will give the baked kubaneh additional volume, texture and a rich, buttery flavor that make it one of the world's great breads.
Kuku Paka (Chicken With Coconut)
This rich dish of chicken in a spiced coconut sauce comes from Kenya's coast, though creative cooks now produce variations of it all over the country. This simple version was adapted from many of them, including Kirti Patel, Agnes Kalyonge and the author Madhur Jaffrey. It requires slowly grilling the marinated chicken, ideally over charcoal — a little extra work that lends the finished kuku paka a wonderful smoky flavor — though in a pinch, you can use a grill pan on the stove. Note: The coconut sauce should be creamy but not flat, so be sure to spike it at the end with enough lemon juice to give it the edge of sourness that is one of this great dish's defining characteristics.
Watermelon-Rose Trifle
This trifle is inspired by one of Sydney’s most exquisite cakes — layers of almond dacquoise, ripe watermelon and rose-flavored cream, covered in strawberries. The pastry chef Christopher Thé invented it for a friend’s wedding, and after he introduced it to Black Star Pastry, the cake became a huge hit. Treating it like a trifle means you can be a little messier, and it’s O.K.: The cake still comes together beautifully.
Gonzalo Guzmán’s Pork-Braised Butter Beans With Eggs
Gonzalo Guzmán is the chef at Nopalito, a Mexican restaurant with two locations in San Francisco. His bright take on frijoles puercos, or pork and beans, is inspired by a version he once tasted in northern Mexico. It involves butter beans simmered with chile and onion until tender and plump, mixed up with crumbled chorizo and scrambled eggs. The result is a delicious, one-pot meal with a fresh garnish of cheese and herbs, and it makes for an ideal breakfast, lunch or dinner, ideally with a stack of warm tortillas on the side.
Cochinita Pibil
The traditional way to make Yucatecan cochinita pibil is to bury a pig in a steaming, smouldering, stone-lined pit and cook it slowly for many hours. The pork has first been marinated with a bright red paste of achiote seeds, garlic, spices and bitter orange juice, and then wrapped in banana leaves. This tender meat is pulled and served simply in its own juices with hot tortillas and pickled onion. Diana Kennedy’s no-fuss method for home cooks involves baking a small piece of pork in the oven for just a few hours, inside a heavy lidded pot, with a little water at the bottom.