Dinner
8856 recipes found
Challaw (Cardamom and Cumin Basmati Rice)
The Afghan Australian cookbook author Durkhanai Ayubi emphasizes that a distinctive quality of challaw — a simple Afghan dish — is the elongated and separate grains of white basmati rice. She shared this recipe from her mother, Farida Ayubi, for this fragrant and comforting pot of rice in their cookbook “Parwana: Recipes and Stories From an Afghan Kitchen.” In this preparation, the rice is first parboiled and then steamed and scented with cardamom pods and cumin seeds. It is worthy of a celebratory feast, alongside saucy dishes like sabzi, but easy enough for weeknight meals.
Kalua Pig
Bangladeshi Chicken Korma
Homestyle Bangladeshi chicken korma is likely more aromatic, flavorful, and deeply chicken-flavored than the heavy, creamy versions served in Indian restaurants. This recipe, adapted from Shama Mubdi, is also incredibly easy to make: You just stir everything together in a pot and turn on the heat. A last-minute addition of butter-fried onions adds sweet complexity. Serve with basmati rice and salad or South Asian pickles.
Whole Roast Suckling Pig
A whole roast suckling pig is quite special. No other feast food of the holiday season cooks so easily, and presents so majestically. With its mahogany, crisp skin and its sticky-tender meat, people thrill to be at the party where this is on the buffet. Measure your oven, and be firm with your butcher about the pig’s size, so you can be sure it will fit — most home ovens can easily accommodate a 20-pounder. Then, just give the pig the time it needs in a low and slow oven for its meat to reach its signature tender, succulent perfection, while you clean the house or do whatever it is you do before a special party. For the last 30 minutes, ramp the heat of the oven all the way up to get that insanely delicious crackling skin.
Moo Shu Pork
This is not your corner takeout's moo shu pork, but it is popular in China, where its northern origins are debated, according to the author Carolyn Phillips. The egg is thought to resemble the flowers of the sweet olive (osmanthus fragrans) shrub, hence its Chinese name, muxi rou, or osmathus blossom pork. The ingredients are stir-fried in batches to cook evenly and retain the vibrancy of the colors. The sauce is intentionally salty, so underseason the stir-fry and add just a dab of sauce to each wheat wrapper.
Shrimp Alla Marinara
This recipe quickly turns a batch of homemade marinara sauce into dinner. You can serve it right out of the pan, with crusty bread and a green vegetable. Or, remove the shrimp and toss the sauce with a pound of steaming-hot spaghetti or another long, thin pasta, then put them back together in serving bowls, placing the shrimp on top. Don't attempt to toss the sauce, shrimp, and pasta together -- the lively action needed to coat the pasta will break down the shrimp. You want them to be crisp and savory.
Pizza Margherita
This classic pizza — a small amount of mozzarella and a lot of fresh, sliced tomatoes — may inspire other pies in your kitchen. Sometimes I substitute goat cheese for the mozzarella, and sometimes I make this on a yeasted olive oil pastry. So it’s really not a pizza, more like a tart.
Tomato Crostata With Honey-Thyme Glaze
Ghanaian Spinach Stew With Sweet Plantains
This recipe is an adaptation of the smoky spinach stew served at Papaye, Samuel Obeng's restaurant in the Bronx. Built on a base of onions and ginger sauteed in palm oil, made fiery with habanero, and thickened with ground pumpkin seeds and tomatoes, the stew calls for African smoked, dried shrimp powder; its flavor is amazing. (Asian versions are typically unsmoked and chewier.) But smoked paprika and fish sauce make a serviceable substitute.
Lowcountry Okra Soup
Representing ingredients from at least four continents and five spiritual traditions, this okra soup is a true amalgamation of global culinary influences, from West Africa to Peru, all of which intersect in the Lowcountry kitchen. This version belongs to Amethyst Ganaway, a chef and writer of Gullah Geechee ancestry, a direct descendant of people once enslaved on the lower Atlantic Coast. Ms. Ganaway’s okra soup is not your Louisiana-style gumbo, thick with roux and rich with sausage and shrimp. It’s a simple, wholesome dish that, like the best Gullah Geechee cooking, emphasizes the freshness of its ingredients. As Ms. Ganaway advised, “The okra will naturally thicken the broth, and the fresher it is, the better it’ll do the job.’’ Since the vegetable is cooked for just 10 minutes, it grows tender but not slimy, while the pod’s caviar-like seeds add a textural pop with every bite.
Risotto With Smoked Trout
Wild Rice, Almond and Mushroom Stuffing
Wild rice can be the base of a satisfying and refined Thanksgiving stuffing, particularly when it is combined with mushrooms, almonds, sherry and herbs, as it is here. Use this savory mixture to stuff a turkey to serve to the omnivores at your table, or bake it separately and serve it as a side dish, one that is especially good for vegetarians and vegans.
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.
White Borscht
This white borscht, a nod to the tradition of sour soups in Ukrainian cooking, is simply a perfect meal: rich and satisfying, yet bright and delicate and clean all at once. It’s given its distinct tang up front, by soaking a hunk of sourdough bread in the simmering broth, and also at the end, by whisking in a little crème fraîche before serving. At the center is the delicious, subtle, complex broth. The better the kielbasa, the better the broth, obviously, and it’s worth using the whole garland for that complex smoky seasoning it imparts. There’ll be extra for snacking. The chopped dill keeps it all bright and fresh and lively in the mouth. A year-round classic to have in your repertoire, it’s especially beloved in colder months. When weather forecasters announce a dismal spell of sleeting days in a row, you’ll think, oh, good! White borscht weather!
Spaghetti in Spicy Tomato Sauce (Lombrichelli all’Etrusca)
Salt-Baked New Potatoes With Pink-Peppercorn Butter
This way of cooking recently harvested new potatoes, by burying them in a plaster of damp salt and baking them, is a triple pleasure: effortless, tasty and very fun. The salt crust seasons the potatoes perfectly, just as it would if you’d boiled or steamed them in salted water, but the airtight seal concentrates their special flavor and texture. They come out dense, waxy and almost creamy. Bring the pan of cooked potatoes to the table right from the oven as is, so everyone can puzzle over the curious-looking white crust, and then delight over the discovery of the piping hot little beauties revealed inside once the surface is cracked. Dig them out and swoop through the butter before popping into your mouth, their skins so paper-thin they snap when you bite into them. Their appeal is irresistible.
Fresh Tomato Sauce
This is a quick, simple marinara sauce that will only be good if your tomatoes are ripe. If you have a food mill, you don’t have to peel and seed the tomatoes; you can just quarter them and put the sauce through the mill.
Julia Child's Provençale Tomato Sauce
This is an under-the-radar basic from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” featured in a New York Times article about readers’ favorite Child recipes. It is a tomato sauce with onions, garlic and basil, raised high with a perfumed whiff of orange peel and coriander seed. Make it when the farmers’ market is overflowing with good tomatoes, freeze it in plastic bags, and use it until there is no more. It is a combination of two things Mrs. Child loved: good technique and fresh Provençal flavors. It is a great recipe.
Kanom Jeen Nam-Prik (Rice Noodles With Spicy Shrimp and Coconut)
Crispy Spiced Cauliflower Steaks
This recipe, developed by 19-year-old Ella Heckert and her mother, the chef Kelsie Kerr, yields crisp cauliflower steaks with a golden crust so tender that they shatter upon first bite. Made with brown rice and tapioca flour, the incidentally gluten-free batter is delicate but unfussy. This version is spiked with fresh turmeric and garam masala spices, but consider it a blank slate and feel free to experiment with other spice combinations, too. At Kerr’s Berkeley restaurant, Standard Fare, the batter is used throughout the year to coat all sorts of other ingredients, including winter squash, eggplant and even housemade paneer, which is a perennial favorite. Try the dish with cauliflower, then make it your own — you’ll be surprised how long the crust remains crisp!
Rosemary and Citrus Turkey for a Crowd
This recipe makes things easier on you if you’re feeding a crowd at Thanksgiving. Instead of roasting two birds, or a giant, hard-to-maneuver 22-pounder, borrow a trick that caterers use at large weddings. There’s the official wedding cake for show, while in the kitchen there are sheet pans full of the same cake recipe, baked into flat, easily sliceable pieces. Using the same logic, here you’ll find a recipe for one whole turkey roasted for that Norman Rockwell moment. Then, pans of easy-to-carve turkey parts are cooked in the same oven at the same time. Monitor everything carefully: The whole bird takes the longest to roast, while the parts roast in about half the time, the white meat often finishing before the dark. You will need a large roasting pan with a rack, and two 9-by-13-inch baking pans.
Hilib Sambuus (Fried Beef Dumplings)
Sambuus are a Somali relative of Indian samosas; the two fried dumplings are separated by sea and likely related by trade. While hilib generally means meat in Somali, hilib sambuus are often filled with spiced ground beef. But chicken, tuna and more seafood variations exist; salmon sambuus are beloved by the Somali diaspora of the Pacific Northwest. If you have time, making sambuus pastry from scratch is ideal, but you can buy premade wraps at the grocery store, or utilize tortillas, as this recipe does, for an even quicker process. Store-bought tortillas are cheaper, faster and preferred by many working-class diaspora families for getting sambuus made quickly, which is ideal during Ramadan, when they are widely popular. While they are delicious on their own, you can pair them with Somali-style hot sauce, if you’d like some optional heat.
Roast Turkey With Berry-Mint Sauce and Black Walnuts
The flavor of heritage turkey breeds is richer and more pronounced than that of commercial turkeys sold at supermarkets nationwide. Put plainly, heritage breeds taste more like turkey. Heritage birds are raised outside, pecking at a varied diet. They tend to have meatier thighs and smaller breasts, and a higher ratio of dark meat to white meat. The Onondaga tribe, among others from the Northeastern United States, would have been able to serve them with forest berries, perking up the rich, dark meat with color and flavor. Sparked with mint, this berry sauce is bright and fruity, with just enough acid to complement the richness of the turkey.
Leg of Lamb With Savory Beans
In France, gigot d’agneau — leg of lamb — is, well, de rigueur for a proper Easter meal. But it is always appropriate for any special dinner party, or any occasion throughout the year when you want an impressive main course. The technique is simple and requires few ingredients (garlic, thyme and rosemary), but the result is very flavorful. Seasoning the lamb for at least an hour in advance of roasting is essential. Refrigerate it overnight for more intense flavor; it’s also less work to do on the day of the feast. Just remove from the refrigerator, bring it to room temperature, and it’s ready for the oven.