Recipes By Tejal Rao
135 recipes found
Katsudon (Pork-Cutlet Rice Bowl)
Katsudon is a comforting, belly-warming dish from Japan, composed of sliced pork cutlets simmered in a dashi-based broth with onion and eggs and served over a bowl of warm rice. It's an ideal way to use up leftover cutlets from the refrigerator, but it's even more rewarding when it's made with fresh, warm cutlets, and it comes together quickly enough for a weeknight. Variations of katsudon can be found on restaurant menus and home kitchens — and in anime. This recipe includes an optional addition of frozen peas, inspired by the main character in "Yuri!!! on Ice," whose parents serve katsudon with peas at their fictional inn. But it takes some delicious real-life cues from the work of Nancy Singleton Hachisu (who adds a small amount of julienned ginger to her broth, brightening it) and from the chef Tadashi Ono.
Tomato Salad on Cumin-Spiced Yogurt
This simple tomato salad is ready in minutes, and works best with a mix of ripe tomatoes from the market that are delicious enough to eat raw. Layered on cumin-spiced yogurt, and slathered in a bright herb dressing, it’s hearty enough to have as a late summer meal with a piece of grilled bread. The recipe comes from chef Preeti Mistry, who ran a restaurant in Oakland called Juhu Beach Club, inspired by her unique experience as an Indian-American born in London to Asian parents from East Africa, raised in the American Midwest, who was cheffing in northern California.
Roasted Cauliflower With Ras el Hanout
The Argentine chef Tomás Kalika serves this delicious whole roasted cauliflower family-style at Mishiguene, his Buenos Aires restaurant Mr. Kalika adapted the idea from the chef Eyal Shani, whom he worked for in Israel, and who helped propel the whole roasted cauliflower to international fame. Poaching the cauliflower in advance ensures that it is tender and moist all the way through. You could easily substitute water for milk, particularly if the idea of discarding the milk bothers you. But Mr. Kalika says milk helps flavor the vegetable and encourage browning. (And the cauliflower-infused milk can be reused to make a béchamel sauce, for instance.)
Sabut Raan (Roast Leg of Lamb)
This recipe for a whole roasted leg of lamb comes from the cookbook author Sameen Rushdie, who wrote "Indian Cookery," the classic published in Great Britain in 1988. On Sundays, after a matinee at the Metro Cub Club in Bombay, the Rushdie family often sat down to a special lunch of roast lamb. In this version, the yogurt marinade turns into a rich sauce as it mixes with the braising liquid in the oven. Ms. Rushdie still turns to the dish as the centerpiece of a dinner party, because it can be set up ahead of time and cooked in the oven. The leg is trimmed of all fat, so it’s important to keep it moist: For the first couple of hours of cooking, keep it covered, with some water in the pan, then uncover and let the surface brown a little at the end.
Tomato Cobbler With Ricotta Biscuits
Nicole Rucker, the chef at Fiona in Los Angeles, makes biscuits with a particularly tender, cakelike crumb. Her secret: ricotta. Strain the cheese well to get rid of excess moisture, and don’t be afraid to dust the dough with flour as you work, to keep it from getting oversaturated and sticky. The biscuits, baked atop a mix of tomatoes seasoned with sugar and vinegar, rise tall, with soft insides and crunchy, golden crusts. The dish lies somewhere between a savory course and sweet one, and you can serve it either way.
Tahini Ranch Dressing
This ranch-dressing adaptation comes from Julia Goldberg, a cook at Superiority Burger, Brooks Headley's vegetarian fast-food restaurant in New York. While traditional ranch relies on buttermilk and mayonnaise for its creaminess, the base in this version is tahini, or sesame butter, mixed with lemon juice and water until it turns smooth and glossy. Maple syrup and a generous amount of salt are crucial to mimicking the intense salty-sweetness of bottled ranch. The thick herb-packed sauce can be used as a versatile dressing for raw or grilled lettuces, a dip for crudités or a tangy sauce for grilled meat. After hours at Superiority Burger, the cooks like to experiment, drizzling it over oven-browned potatoes, or folding it into burritos. The recipe makes enough so that you can experiment with leftovers, too.
Poached Eggs in Red Wine (Oeufs en Meurette)
Oeufs en meurette is a classic French dish of poached eggs covered in a rich red wine sauce filled with lardons, mushrooms and onion. When the writer Michael Harlan Turkell was working on his book “Acid Trip: Travels in the World of Vinegar,” he picked up a tip from the French chef Bertrand Auboyneau of Bistrot Paul Bert in Paris. A generous amount of red wine vinegar, added to the sauce, lightens and brightens the dish, all the while emphasizing the flavors of red wine. Use the best-tasting vinegar you can get your hands on, since there's enough of it here to really redirect the taste of the sauce. To turn the recipe into a full, hearty meal, just poach two eggs for each person, instead of one, and add a side of simply dressed salad greens.
Sugarplum Gingerbread Cake
This deeply spiced gingerbread cake recipe comes from the cookbook author Genevieve Ko, who found inspiration in the light-as-air cakes she tasted from Chinese bakeries in Southern California, as well as the sweets — hot candied ginger and sugared, dried plums (a.k.a. prunes) — that her grandmothers offered her as a child. Ms. Ko's cake uses oil, not butter, which gives the crumb a fluffy, moist texture. The liquid base of rehydrated prunes brings sweetness along with depth of flavor.
Potato-and-Radicchio Tart
This recipe for a satisfying savory tart is adapted from the pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz, who makes endless variations on the dish, building it in up in thoughtful layers. You can play with the format, too, swapping out the ingredients based on what you have on hand. Start with a cold pâte brisée, then go from there: Spread a fine layer of cheese such as ricotta or mascarpone, then season it with lemon zest, salt and pepper. Now move onto a denser layer of cooked vegetables, such as cauliflower, potato, leek or squash, lightly seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper. Fill the gaps in the vegetables with pieces of cheese. When the tart comes out of the oven, consider a topping of herbs, lightly dressed salad leaves or even a couple of fried eggs.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Onion Pie
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s 1970 cookbook, “Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl,” combined memoir and recipes in a new way, and introduced many readers to a brilliant new voice in American food culture. This onion-pie recipe is like many of her recipes, simple and deeply satisfying home cooking rooted in the South, but with a truly global point of view. If you want, you can toss a handful of cooked ham or grated cheese or fresh chopped herbs into the mix before putting it in the oven. It’s especially delicious chilled, the next day, when the flavors have mellowed and the custard has become creamy.
Quick-Pickled Vegetables
Almost any seasonal vegetable will lend itself to being pickled in a mix of apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar, tweaked with a little salt and sugar. Use a mixture of what's in season, and choose small, slender vegetables when you can. Whatever you choose, make sure to scrub vegetables well and peel away roots and thick skins.
Chilled Golden Beet and Buttermilk Soup
The beauty of this quick, simple soup recipe is in its layers of bright and carefully balanced acidity. Golden beets, puréed with buttermilk and lemon juice, have a sweet, gentle twang; Erin French, a chef from Freedom, Me., takes things even further, garnishing each bowl with fresh herbs, finely chopped shallots macerated in rice wine vinegar, and dollops of sour cream. Serve this soup as a side or with crusty, garlic-rubbed grilled bread to make it a meal.
Shrimp and Potatoes in Sambal (Sambal Goreng Kentang Udang)
If you're seeking seriously intense heat and rich, layered flavors to go along with it, Indonesian sambal will deliver a two-for-one punch. The chef Retno Pratiwi uses a mix of red bell peppers and two kinds of red chiles to form the base of the exquisite, bright red sauce, softening it with a little coconut sugar and brightening it with aromatics. You can reduce the number of chiles or opt for milder ones if you're not looking for a kick. Then use it to cook shrimp, as in this recipe, or to enliven other meats and vegetables.
Halibut Niçoise
What if salade niçoise wasn't a salad at all, but a warmer, heftier dish with a beautiful piece of butter-browned halibut right at its center? Erin French, the chef at the Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Me., does just that with her Maine halibut niçoise, in which the main components of a classic niçoise are accounted for, but totally reconfigured. Beans and new potatoes are in a simple shallot dressing; eggs are poached so the yolks are still soft and runny; garlic and anchovies season a quick tapenade. If your cast-iron pan fits only two fillets comfortably, cook the fish in two batches to avoid overcrowding.
Turkey Salad With Fried Shallots and Herbs
This recipe is adapted from Naomi Duguid's chicken salad in "Burma: Rivers of Flavor." It incorporates shallots two ways, raw and fried, as well as the deeply savory oil used to fry them. Bright with lime juice, the raw heat of a green chile and plenty of fresh herbs, it's excellent plain, or with some chopped cucumber and lettuce beneath it, for crunch. As Ms. Duguid points out in the book, it's a dressing that can be applied to refresh all manner of leftovers, from the roasted turkey you're left with the day after Thanksgiving, to the roasted vegetables.
Roast Turkey Pav
This dish was inspired in equal measures by a cluttered refrigerator on the day after the Thanksgiving, and the pav bhaji of western India — a gloriously spiced mash of vegetables served with buttery, toasted buns. It works beautifully with roast turkey meat, cut into small pieces, though it's ideal for scraps of meat pulled off the turkey carcass after making stock, giving them a second life and infusing them with flavor. Serve the dish with garnishes of cilantro and red onion on the side, allowing people to determine their own ratios, or take control and garnish the whole pan yourself. Either way, don't skip buttering and toasting those rolls.
Burned Toast Soup
The cookbook author Jennifer McLagan developed this recipe for a simple toast soup, a rustic dish that stretches leftover bread into a comforting meal, after tasting an upscale version of it at a restaurant in Paris. She includes it in her 2014 cookbook, "Bitter: A Taste of the World's Most Dangerous Flavor." The recipe requires thorough and severe toasting: The bread should turn black along its edges and deep brown all over. Use thickly sliced bread, so it's not carbonized all the way through, and the ratio of burned bread to deeply toasted bread will work in your favor. Once the bread soaks up the bacon-infused stock and is blitzed with milk and mustard, all of its intense, smoky flavor will mellow.
Pickled Mushroom Salad
This recipe for roasted mushrooms dressed with sherry vinegar and spices is an adaptation of Patch Troffer’s delicious pickled mushrooms at Marlow & Sons, where it’s served simply as it is, with a drizzle of chile oil. Mixed with some sliced vegetables and roughly picked herbs, it makes for an excellent snack with a glass of wine, or a fall salad. Or serve it with a spoonful of something creamy, like crème fraîche or mascarpone, and pile everything up on thickly cut toasts.
Peach Polenta Cake
This simple, summery cake gets its rustic texture from polenta and ground almonds. Most of its sweetness comes from cut peaches that bubble in a light caramel at the bottom of the cake, then decorate the top when you flip it over. The recipe is from King, a small restaurant in Manhattan where the chefs Clare de Boer and Jess Shadbolt swap the stone fruit out to use whatever is sweet, juicy and in season. Try the cake with peaches, nectarines, plums or even a mix of all three, but make sure to give the cake the time it needs to turn golden brown and firm to the touch. At King, the chefs use the Italian brand Moretti's stone-ground polenta bramata. For a more rustic cake, with a little bite, use coarse polenta. For a more tender crumb, use finely ground polenta.
Venison and Trotter Pie
This lavish, British-style meat pie is a delicious, time-consuming project. It comes together over many hours, layering the flavors and textures of many different meats, and seals it all in a buttery homemade dough. The recipe belongs to the chef Angie Mar of the Beatrice Inn in New York, who makes the pie at her restaurant in smaller ramekins, so that each person gets her own marrow bone. This family-style version serves several people, but a single bone works beautifully: As the pie bakes in the oven, most of the marrow melts out, bubbling into the sauce, making it even richer. The pie filling, made from potatoes and venison braised in trotter stock, is thickened with a little flour, but it should be slightly loose when you're putting the pie together. The crust requires suet, and though you could make it all-butter if you wanted to, it seems that if you've come this far, and located the marrow bone, the trotters and the venison meat, you may as well go all the way. The finished pie is certainly worth it.
Rice Porridge With Squash and Brown Butter
This recipe for a rich, winter-y rice porridge comes from Minh Phan, the owner of Porridge + Puffs in Los Angeles. Ms. Phan is a porridge whisperer, creating all kinds of complex, beautiful rice bowls, and her velvet porridge rich with roasted squash is no exception. To make a simple version of it at home, roast a mix of squash then purée it with brown butter and a little half and half. Stir the mixture into loose, cooked rice for a comforting meal you can eat plain, topped with pickled vegetables and herbs, some browned sausage or dressed salad leaves. Ms. Phan lets the cooked rice rest overnight so the grains absorb the seasoning evenly, but if you’re in a rush, you can go ahead and eat it right away.
Surnoli (Coconut-Rice Pancakes)
Surnoli are soft, round and puffy pancakes, about the size of a diner’s silver dollars, and they can be served like them too, as a warm stack with a piece of melting butter on top. But surnoli batter contains no egg and no flour, and it isn't flipped at all but left to cook through on one side. Made from puréed raw and cooked rice, as well as coconut, and fermented with yogurt overnight, the konkani pancake becomes airy and takes on a gentle tang. Have it plain with a drizzle of ghee, or even a little honey. And if you want to try them savory, open a jar of your favorite Indian pickles instead. If you want to skip the longer fermentation, you could add a half teaspoon of Eno — an antacid made from sodium bicarbonate and citric acid, commonly used to fizz batters in Indian kitchens — just before you're ready to start cooking.
Quick Mango Kulfi
Traditional kulfi is made by boiling milk to reduce it, and to concentrate the milk solids, then freezing the base with flavorings such as fruit pulp, spices or nuts. Though kulfi is often compared to ice cream, it's nothing like it: Kulfi isn't churned. The protein and sugar create a rich, dense texture that is slightly crystalline and quick to melt. This recipe for instant mango kulfi takes short cuts, using canned sweetened condensed milk and heavy cream. It's a recipe that has no fixed season, that takes no time to mix up and that comes straight from my mother. She made it all year long when I was growing up, to hold us over in the lonely gaps between trips to see family in India. It's inauthentic — and delicious.
Eprax (Kurdish Stuffed Vegetables and Lamb)
This recipe for eprax, a multilayered casserole of Kurdish-style stuffed vegetables and lamb chops, comes from Parwin Tayyar in Nashville. To make the dish, sometimes called dolmas, Ms. Tayyar prepares a gently spiced lamb and rice filling, and uses it to stuff a mixture of vegetables, such as squash, tomatoes, potatoes and cabbage. Carefully layered in a pot with a little liquid, the vegetables simmer and steam together on the stove until they're tender. Then the whole dish is tipped out into a messy, delicious pile to be eaten with flatbread, pickles, hummus or a cucumber sauce. It may seem like a complex process, but once all the vegetables are prepped and the filling is ready, things go quickly. The dish is flexible, and what Ms. Tayyar provides is a blueprint: You can stuff any vegetables you have on hand, as long as you remember to stuff them loosely.