Dinner
8856 recipes found
Penne With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
This exquisitely simple recipe came to The Times in a 2001 article about Paola di Mauro, an Italian winemaker in Marina, a small town southeast of Rome. She was one of a band of cooks who helped distinguish "cucina casalinga," roughly translated as "housewives' cooking." From her humble kitchen, Ms. di Mauro mentored some of the best Italian chefs and restaurateurs in the United States, including Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Piero Selvaggio and Tony May. Her recipe is easy and calls for just five ingredients – cherry tomatoes, olive oil, pecorino romano and penne pasta – but get your hands on the best ingredients you can afford. Ms. di Mauro intended this to serve four as a first course, but if you're making this for dinner, double the recipe.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Clam Chowder
Kasha
For years I have had uneven results with buckwheat groats, or kasha, as the dry-roasted grains are called. I have tried different methods, both stovetop and oven, and usually mixed the grains with an egg before cooking. Sometimes my grains cooked up to a mush, other times they held their shape but still seemed rather soft and indistinct. I sort of gave up on kasha for a while, opting for more predictable grains and pseudo-grains like quinoa and spelt. But I love the flavor of buckwheat, so this week I took another stab at buckwheat groats with a box of medium-grain kasha I bought at the supermarket – and everything changed. These grains were cracked, like bulgur, something I hadn’t seen before. I followed the directions on the box, and they turned out perfect -- dry and fluffy, with the wonderful nutty/earthy buckwheat flavor I find so appealing. To see if it was the cut of the grain only or the combination of the cut of the grain and the cooking method that gave me such good results, I used the exact same cooking method using whole toasted buckwheat groats. The whole groats turned out better than any I had made before, but they took three times as long to cook than the cracked groats, yielded a little less, and because all of the egg is not absorbed by the whole grains the way it is by the cracked grains, which have more cut surfaces to absorb the egg, you get some egg flakes floating on the top of the cooked kasha, which is not very attractive (though it’s easy to remove them).
Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.
Chicken and Escarole Salad With Anchovy Croutons
Think of this salad as an umami-charged version of a classic Caesar. The central difference is that the egg yolk, which is typically emulsified into a creamy dressing, is plopped directly onto the lettuces, leaving you to break it and let it mingle with the salty, garlicky, lemony dressing, which is bolstered with a bit of soy sauce. (If the whole, raw egg yolks freak you out, swap them for jammy soft-boiled eggs or crispy fried eggs.) The true reason to make this salad, though, is that it’s adorned with chicken-fat-laced anchovy croutons, made in the oven while the chicken finishes cooking. They are worth the price of admission.
Penne Strascinata
Breaded and Broiled Blue Cod
Saag Aloo
Penne With Swiss Chard and Cauliflower
Braised Endives With Blood Oranges, Pistachios, and Ricotta Salata
Herb and Radish Salad With Feta and Walnuts
This light, crunchy salad is inspired by sabzi khordan, the heaping platter of fresh herbs, radishes, walnuts and feta cheese that accompanies nearly every Persian meal.
Ribollita (Tuscan Bread Soup)
Roasted Pumpkin Salad
Braised Cabbage
The chef Floyd Cardoz shared this recipe with The Times in 2011. “I personally love cabbage,” he said. At Tabla, his restaurant on Madison Square Park, he offered lightly caramelized cabbage wedges that had been spiced with cloves, black mustard seeds, shallots, garlic and ginger. Mr. Cardoz brought out the sweetness of the cabbage, and in the plating of it, its beauty.
Penne With Brussels Sprouts, Chile and Pancetta
Pasta and sliced brussels sprouts make a good pair, the softened green shreds commingling with the chewy noodles in the sauce. Here that sauce is a simple one with big flavors: pancetta, rosemary, garlic and chile. The raw brussels are then added to the pan. A splash of lemon juice at the end is a bright touch. Within 30 minutes, dinner is ready. Vary this recipe at will — use regular bacon instead of pancetta, or skip the meat altogether and use extra cheese to make a satisfying vegetarian main course. Use a knife or a food processor (fitted with the slicing blade) to cut the brussels. A mandoline works too but isn’t necessary, because the brussels don’t need to be paper thin, or uniform in size. These are unfussy slices you can do by hand.
Penne With Ricotta and Asparagus
Italian Meat Sauce With Half the Meat
It’s been a long time since I have made tomato sauce with meat, and this one transported me back to the first recipe I learned to make. I called it spaghetti sauce, and it was a simple tomato sauce with ground beef. It didn’t taste that much different from this sauce, which has only a quarter pound of meat in it – but that is all it needs to have a rich flavor and a meaty texture. The mushroom base is a perfect stand-in for half the meat; you could double the amount for a vegetarian sauce.
Cracked Farro Risotto (Farrotto) With Parsley and Marjoram
Finally, a way to make something as comforting as an Italian rice risotto using farro. The chef Barry Maiden revealed this ingenious method to me. Soak the farro, drain and then crack the grains slightly in a food processor. This allows the thickly hulled wheat berries to release their starch, creating the creamy sauce that defines the dish. Farro has so much flavor and the resulting farrotto is much more robust than a rice risotto. It needs little more than fresh herbs as embellishment, but of course you could add any vegetable you like to use in risotto.
Silvano Marchetto's Penne All'Arrabiata
Grilled Albacore With Yogurt-Dill Sauce on a Bed of Arugula
This is based on a recipe for red mullet from “Classic Turkish Cooking” by Ghillie Basan. Red mullet isn’t so easy to come by in the United States, and albacore works well here. In the authentic Turkish dish, the red mullet is marinated in a mixture of onion juice and lemon juice with bay leaf. This step is optional; it tenderizes the fish and adds terrific flavor, but grilled albacore is nice enough on its own. Dill is the traditional herb for this recipe, but mint is very nice as well.
Gingery Cabbage Rolls With Pork and Rice
These fork-tender cabbage rolls, filled with savory pork, rice and ginger, are the ultimate comfort food — perfect to serve as a cozy meal on a cold night. When assembling the rolls, you can simply fold the cabbage leaf onto itself as you would fold a burrito — and don’t worry if the cabbage leaves tear. If there are any leftovers, reheat them with more chicken broth. They are good the day they are made, but even better the next day.
Penne Alla Vodka
Penne alla vodka is the perfect recipe for easy entertaining: short pasta is easier to cook in quantity than long strands and the sauce is amusingly retro -- think 1960s Rome, where the dish originated. But it is seriously good.