Appetizer
3523 recipes found
Chilled Pea, Lettuce and Herb Soup
This elegant soup is sweet and heavenly. The texture is silky and the consistency thick -- but only because there are lots of peas in it. I used water rather than stock when I tested this recipe, and it worked just fine.
Puréed Tomato and Red Pepper Soup
I noticed that the most popular boxed soup at my supermarket is a tomato and red pepper soup, so I decided to come up with my own version.
One-Pot French Onion Soup With Garlic-Gruyère Croutons
I don’t make onion soup at home partly because I lack the flameproof bowls that chefs run under the broiler to melt the cheese. And what’s the point of making onion soup without the elastic cap of gooey Gruyère? The more I pondered this, the more I wondered if I could skip those individual bowls, layer the croutons and cheese directly into the soup pot, and just broil the whole thing.
Pureed Potato and Broccoli Soup With Parmesan Croutons
The broccoli is added to this classic potato soup towards the end of the cooking time, so that it maintains its bright color and sweet flavor. The soup will have a silkier texture if you take the time to strain it after pureeing.
Susan Gubar’s Matzo Ball Soup
To comfort you and yours, here is my recipe for The World’s Lightest Matzo Balls (which evolved over the years from Jennie Grossinger’s cookbook “The Art of Jewish Cooking.”). While cooking, they rise to the top.
Fennel, Garlic and Potato Soup
This anise-scented soup is reminiscent of the classic potato and leek soup known as vichyssoise, but it’s lighter and contains no dairy. It’s good hot or cold.
Egg Lemon Soup With Turkey
Modeled after a classic Greek egg lemon soup, this is one of many light, comforting soups that make a nice home for leftover turkey. If you haven’t made stock with the turkey carcass, a quick garlic or vegetable stock will do. Make sure that the soup is not at a boil when you add the tempered egg-lemon mixture, or the egg yolks will curdle. The soup should be creamy.
Tiny Pancakes For Caviar
Eating caviar in a restaurant or supplying it for a group of people is extravagant to the point of recklessness. Buying a small tin and demolishing it entirely yourself is hedonistic heaven. I love these pancakes with caviar. Unlike regular blini, they do not need yeast, so they take only a few minutes to rustle up. I think of them as potato pancakes, but actually they use only a little potato starch, not real potatoes. They are very plain and not enormously potatoey, but they are the best carrier imaginable for anything salty. (Try them with sour cream and lox.)
Red Cabbage and Apple Soup
This is a sweet and spicy winter soup, inspired by a classic red cabbage and apple braise. The yogurt is important here; it enriches the soup at the end. You could also use fat-free sour cream.
Shrimp and Brown Rice Soup
This irresistible soup is inspired by a Southeast Asian dish traditionally made with Thai jasmine rice. The recipe is adapted from one in “Hot Sour Salty Sweet,” by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford.
Smoked Bluefish Pâté
Bluefish is not a famous table fish; it is inexpensive and widely available, but you don’t see it in restaurants often, even in this ravaged-ocean, sell-anything era. (Some states have issued advisories limiting its consumption, citing high levels of PCBs in the meat.) The knock on it is it’s oily, it’s “fishy.” Its dark, compact meat is for cats, not fine, upstanding people like us. How untrue — and demonstrably so, as the following recipe will show! A fresh-caught bluefish of moderate weight, quickly cleaned and kept on ice, is as fine an eating fish as American waters produce. Alan Davidson, the British seafood don, says much the same in his indispensable “North Atlantic Seafood,” albeit in a different accent: “It does not keep very well,” reads Davidson’s entry for Pomatomus saltatrix, “but, if bought and cooked with dispatch, offers firm flesh of an excellent taste.” Bluefish, in short, is an excellent protein. Some words about what you’re dealing with: dense meat with an off-white, almost gray hue, the pork shoulder of seafood. Bluefish lends itself to tough treatment: smoking, for instance, or slow-poaching in oil.
Crabmeat Justine
Smoked-Trout Spread
The guests are trickling in, and soon the table will be overflowing. But not just yet. What to do? Several days in advance, you may want to whip up your own smoked trout spread to pack in a bowl and offer with bagel chips or squares of pumpernickel. Those impatient stomachs will thank you.
Spiced Holiday Pralines
Living in the South, Elizabeth Choinski has seen plenty of pralines in her time, flavored with the likes of chocolate and coffee. But she had never come upon pralines imbued with the classic spice flavors of the holidays. So she made her own, mixing cloves and cinnamon into the pot. The resulting pralines are superb: aromatic, creamy as they melt in your mouth, then crunchy from the nuts.
Benne Cheese Wafers
Chilled Corn Soup With Honeydew Polka Dots
Glazed Bacon
Betty Groff, the home cook turned proprietor of Groff’s Farm Restaurant, once said that there were only two authentic American cuisines: Pennsylvania Dutch and Creole. Her brown-sugar-glazed bacon represents the former, and she occasionally served it as an hors d’oeuvre at her restaurant, which she started in her family’s 1756 Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse in Mount Joy in the late 1950s. The restaurant became a place of pilgrimage for food lovers, among them Craig Claiborne, who wrote an article about it in The New York Times in 1965. This recipe, which Ms. Groff said “will amaze every guest,” serves six, but she noted that you can easily scale it up to serve 30, or possibly more.
Ricotta Gnocchi With Parsley Pesto
Gnocchi are little savory Italian dumplings, most often served as a pasta course. They are often made from a dough of potato, egg and flour, but there are many kinds. Some are made with cooked semolina, such as gnocchi alla romana, which are baked with cream and cheese. Fresh ricotta is the secret for these exceedingly light, airy dumplings. Bound with eggs and only a handful of flour, they can be served in broth, with a light tomato sauce, tossed with butter and sage leaves, or with a simple green pesto. Look for the best fresh ricotta: The low-fat commercial type doesn’t qualify. Drain it well before using, or the dough will be too wet. Put it in a fine mesh sieve set over a bowl and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Use the drained liquid whey in soups or smoothies.
Vietnamese Pancakes
Creole Crab-Meat Soup
Deviled Ham on Toast
Spicy Fried Fish Balls
While eating in Kuala Lumpur food stalls, Zak Pelaccio, chef of Fatty Crab and 5 Ninth restaurants in Manhattan, first tried otak-otak, an intense, spicy mackerel paste. Although in Malaysia you’d usually find otak-otak steamed, he rolls it into balls and deep-fries them as a cocktail snack for 230 Fifth, a rooftop bar where he consults on the menu.
BBQ Eggs
Pickled eggs are popular bar food everywhere, but at Backyard Barbecue in Tompkinsville, Ky., they come with a fiery twist. The eggs are pickled in an incendiary amalgam of cayenne, melted butter and vinegar. This is the classic dip for Monroe County pork-shoulder steaks, repurposed to pickle eggs. The preparation is simple, but budget seven days to complete the pickling process.