Fall
24 recipes found
One-Pan Roasted Vegetables and Polenta
In this hands-off meal, the oven softens cornmeal into porridge-like polenta and also roasts and broils vegetables. Once the polenta has baked until set, it gets crumbled and tossed with a wintery mix of vegetables (here, brussels sprouts and sweet potato, but carrots, parsnips and winter squash also work). Lemon gives it all a lively pop and sage lends its fragrant bouquet. Roasting allows everything to deepen in flavor and broiling adds crisp, caramelized brown spots to this cozy dish. A topping of crumbled goat cheese and parsley bring a vibrant touch to a meal that is deeply satisfying any time of the day.
Persimmon Salad With Glazed Walnuts and Feta
Here, firm Fuyu persimmons are used in a most satisfying seasonal salad that’s fairly easy to put together. First, you mix up a simple vinaigrette that gets a touch of sweetness from balsamic vinegar (a drop or two of honey wouldn’t be out of place). Then, it’s all tossed with chicories, like radicchio, curly endive or escarole, and homemade glazed walnuts and the result really feels like and looks like fall. Similar salads sometimes add blue cheese, but feta suits this one beautifully. And, if you can’t get persimmons, use pears.
Plum-Cardamom Upside-Down Cake
Turn this easy to make (and easy to love) cake right-side up, and it’s a rustic beauty, generously made with any kind of pear. It keeps well and actually improves the longer it sits. So don’t give big servings. Have a reasonable sliver at the table after dinner and save a nice fat slice for breakfast.
Mini Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies
These pies require a fairly simple ingredient list — cream cheese, canned pumpkin purée, pumpkin pie spice and other baking staples — but one stands out: The butter, melted and browned until the milk solids toast, adds an intoxicating nutty flavor and aroma. The simple step takes the filling to the next level. The flavor of browned butter can easily be lost when mixed into batter and baked, so here, the fragrant butter is instead whipped into a classic cream cheese frosting. Sandwiched between two fluffy, delicately spiced pumpkin cakes, it really shines.
Sheet-Pan Ratatouille With Crispy Chickpeas
This colorful, vegetable-filled dish has all the flavors of ratatouille but requires a lot less work to get there. Instead of standing at the stove to cook the eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and peppers individually, they’re roasted all together on a sheet pan until they caramelize and collapse, turning silky and sweet. Spiced chickpeas are added to the oven halfway through cooking, giving them a chance to crisp up. Sprinkled onto the vegetables just before serving, they add protein and a delightful crunch.
Boozy Apple Crunch Cake
This cake is loosely inspired by German apfelkuchen, a simple apple cake that capitalizes on humble ingredients and great seasonal produce. In this version, brown butter, bourbon, almond and a hint of citrus perfume the custardlike cake, which gets an extra bourbon soak after baking for good measure. Slicing the apples thinly allows for them to nestle in a cozy pile in the center of the cake, almost as if the cake itself were laminated with apples, cooking through while maintaining a nice crisp bite. The top, a mixture of coarse turbinado sugar and chopped slivered almonds, provides a necessary crunch that sparkles. Boozy, crunchy and chock-full of apples, this cake can be served warm with ice cream or at room temperature, and is sure to be the “it” dessert at any fall function.
Sweet Potato and Brown Butter Snacking Cake
A snacking cake is something that can be made with everyday ingredients, often in one bowl and baked in a single layer. The best ones are fit for a celebration but also so easily assembled that they feel casual enough for snacking. This sweet potato cake comes together in about an hour, making for a perfect low-effort dessert that pays dividends. The cake itself is a cinnamon- and nutmeg-scented spice cake, owing its moist and tender texture to grated sweet potato and the addition of maple syrup. The star of the show, however, is the brown butter cream cheese frosting, which is at once nutty, caramelized and slightly tangy. Take care to ensure the brown butter and cream cheese are around the same temperature and texture, so that they emulsify properly and the frosting doesn’t split (look curdled). Move over, carrot cake! A new root vegetable is here to steal the spotlight.
Peanut Butter and Jelly Pound Cake
This loaf cake is all the best parts of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, amplified. Tender and a bit denser than a traditional sponge cake, this perfectly peanut-buttery cake features layers of jam that ripple throughout the center so that each slice gets the proper ratio of jam to nuttiness. Use whichever jam or jelly you like, though note that jam varieties can be quite different, and some are much looser than others. (If yours feels particularly loose, reduce it on the stove for a few minutes or strain it before dolloping it into the loaf pan.) Roasted salted peanuts get strewn over the sweet, fruity glaze. This cake would fit in at the lunch table with a tall glass of milk, or at a dinner party with an espresso martini, because the love for a good PBJ is universal.
Pumpkin Blondies
Fudgy like a brownie but slightly cakey (and light) from the pumpkin purée, these delightful brownies are the ultimate fall sweet treat. They’re a riff on a Martha Stewart recipe, tweaked by Annie Marshall of Everyday Annie to include butterscotch chips and white chocolate. (If white chocolate’s not your thing, don’t worry: It’s not cloying, but adds perfect little pockets of sweetness.) Add nuts or don’t, but do chill a bit before cutting if you have the time, as it helps ensure clean, even squares.
Parsnips With Miso and Parmesan
Parsnips roast beautifully, their edges caramelizing as they soften and sweeten in the heat. Here, they’re paired with a quick miso-lemon dressing that provides sharp notes, bolstered by crisp golden garlic and thyme warmed in oil. A final layer of arugula and Parmesan, peppery, salty and bright, continues the contrast. What starts as a simple sheet-pan roast vegetable gets lifted until complete; depending on its company, it becomes the perfect side dish, or even a warm stand-alone salad.
Lazy Sugo
You might skim this recipe and think it looks anything but lazy. But compared to the way Samin Nosrat has always made Bolognese, this sugo is a piece of cake. This recipe, adapted from my cookbook, “Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love” (Random House, 2025), there’s no soffritto to chop and fry, no endless browning of the meat and no deglazing. You just get everything into the pot with minimum hassle and simmer it until it’s tender, occasionally giving it a stir. The only real effort involves taking the cooked meat off the bone and shredding it, but even that’s a small price to pay for three glorious quarts of rich, meaty sauce.
Zanzibari Mix (Urojo)
A fragrant, brothy green mango soup with a sour bite, Zanzibar mix is a staple of the archipelago’s street food stands. The soup is made with an aromatic base of onion, garlic, ginger and chile. It’s then typically topped with chunky mashed potato, crunchy bits that can include falafel or cassava chips, and a boiled egg. The essence is in the combination of ingredients, and the choice is yours. Here, the toppings include onions, tomatoes, spiced toasted panko, cilantro and any hot pepper sauce you like best, but feel free to improvise. The soup will make enough to cool, portion and refrigerate (for up to a week) or freeze (for up to three months).
Cantonese Noodle Soup
This simple Cantonese noodle soup is endlessly adaptable. Choose rice noodles or egg noodles, add pickled mustard greens, oyster sauce and chile oil for pungency and spice, or leave them out for a mellower broth. The combination of good broth, springy noodles and leafy greens makes for a satisfying foundation no matter how you zip it up.
Chicken Soup With Corn and Spinners
This recipe is a more streamlined take on a Jamaican Saturday soup, a simmered-until-tender marriage of beef or chicken and starchy vegetables. Thanks to a few strategic moves, this recipe takes only one hour but tastes like the result of an hours-long endeavor. Simmering bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs in chicken stock fortifies the soup, coaxing out gelatin from the bones and releasing fat from the skin to create a rich foundation. Instead of cutting corn kernels off the cob, the corn cobs are cut into pieces, which are less fussy to prepare, and more fun to eat — with hands, as nature intended! Handmade dumplings called spinners thicken the soup further and add a chewy bite.
Grilled Patty Melts
Oozy and crisp, a patty melt is always a treat to eat, but not so much to cook: The process can be splattery, and it can be tricky to make them for more than two people at a time. The grill not only solves these problems, but imbues the simple components — ground beef, bread, cheese and onions — with a hint of smoke. Grill the onions until golden, then the patties, mostly on one side, for a chargrilled exterior and medium-rare inside. While that’s happening, toast the bread and melt the cheese on the cool side of the grill. Serve with a pickle and mustard alongside to cut through the richness.
Miso-Grilled Shrimp with Corn and Shishito Peppers
You could throw some shrimp and vegetables on the grill and call it dinner, but a sauce makes the whole thing sing. Here, a pantry-friendly miso-honey sauce does double duty: It coats the shrimp before grilling, helping the exterior caramelize before the delicate meat toughens. Then, once everything’s off the grill, dunk the shrimp, corn and shishito peppers into more sauce. (You get to eat this dinner with your hands!) Leave the tails on the shrimp so they don’t fall through the grates, and also because a crispy, crackly shrimp tail is a treat to eat.
Grilled Steak With Tomato Tartare
This warm-weather dinner channels steak tartare's signature combination of rare meat and sharp accoutrements: The steak is charred on the outside and medium-rare within, then topped with a mixture of chopped tomatoes, shallots, capers and chives. But unlike classic tartare, the embellishments are left in larger pieces for bigger, bolder punches. The steak and tomato juices combine to form a bright and briny sauce that you can sop with grilled bread or drizzle over a tuft of arugula, watercress or Little Gem lettuces.
Stir-Fried Pork and Plums With Fresh Herbs
This combination of pork with plums is a superb way to incorporate fresh fruit into an easy and exciting one-pan meal. Pork belly is quickly stir-fried to create a crisp exterior, and renders oil in the pan to blister slices of plum. (Apricots, peaches or nectarines will work just as well here.) Of course, you could pull out your wok for this, but a large cast-iron skillet will do just fine. With a mix of sweet, sour, spicy and savory in the sauce, this dish packs a complex array of flavors in every bite. Serve immediately over cooked rice or thin noodles and peppery or bitter greens.
Bacon Ranch Potato Salad
Destined to be the star of your next cookout, this potato salad is loaded with thick, crispy bacon, shredded Cheddar cheese, jammy eggs and crunchy scallions, all wrapped in a tangy, herby hug of ranch dressing. If feeding a crowd isn’t in the cards, this recipe is hearty enough to be a meal on its own, and lasts for days in the refrigerator. Feel free to add more vegetables to the mix, like tomatoes, cucumbers or celery; just be sure to add them right before serving to keep the bacon nice and crunchy.
Orange & Chocolate Zucchini Bread
A classic zucchini bread recipe with walnuts, chocolate chips, and grated orange zest and juice for an added (and might I say, lovely) citrus flavor.
Summer Ratatouille With Farro
Ratatouille tastes best the day after you make it, and in the summer, you can serve it chilled or at room temperature, with a vinaigrette drizzled over the top. Here, it tops a pile of farro. Top it with a poached egg, or with crumbled feta or grated Parmesan.
Wild Mushroom and Potato Gratin
Wild mushrooms add a luxurious dimension to this comforting, almost classic potato gratin. There is no cream here, just milk mixed with porcini broth (the result of soaking dried porcinis for 30 minutes in boiling water). You can use a mix of wild mushrooms, or just one type. Sauté them with onion or shallots, garlic and savory herbs (thyme and rosemary or sage), season them well and toss with the potatoes. The gratin requires 1 1/2 hours in the oven; first you will doubt that all of the liquid will be absorbed by the potatoes, and about halfway through you will be convinced that the finished dish will be watery and the potatoes hard. But by the end, once all the bubbling has subsided, the soft potatoes will have imbibed all of the flavorful liquid in the dish, and the top and edges of the gratin will be crusty, the way a gratin should be.
Trahana With Mushrooms
When trahana is cooked in broth, the broth thickens slightly, as it does when you make risotto with Arborio rice. I make this savory, comforting mixture of mushrooms and trahana the same way I make risotto, adding the broth gradually and stirring vigorously from time to time. You may not need to use all of the broth but it is good to have this much just in case. If you make it ahead and reheat, you will want to add some broth, so don’t throw out what you don’t use.
Grated Carrot Salad With Dates and Oranges
The influences here are Moroccan. The orange juice brings out the sweetness of the carrots. The juices combine in a delectable way, the salad sweetened all the more by the dates and cinnamon.