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721 recipes found
Deep-Fried Cauliflower With Crispy Dukkah Coating
Deep-fried cauliflower is a Middle Eastern specialty, so why not make it even more Middle Eastern and use a batter made with dukkah, the complex Middle Eastern condiment made with a mixture of nuts, seeds, spices and, in this version, chickpea flour. The batter is thin (you have the option of adding a bit more chickpea flour) but the cauliflower gets just enough of a coating to come out of the oil with a perfect thin crispy shell. Serve it with garlic-laced yogurt or with tahini sauce. In this recipe you have the option of using olive oil, which is traditional; but use a work-horse oil, not the expensive oil you reserve for drizzling and dressing salads.
Greek Bulgur With Brussels Sprouts
I love the way the bulgur swells and fluffs after you let this comforting, nourishing dish sit once it’s cooked. In fact, I liked the leftovers even more than the freshly made dish. I also love the lemony flavor, the result of just a small amount of lemon juice added at the end of cooking. This is one of the few times I am happy to allow brussels sprouts to cook until they are quite soft.
Amaranth Porridge With Grated Apples and Maple Syrup
Amaranth is a tiny seed – it isn’t really a grain, though that is how we treat it – and has both sweet and grassy overtones. I experimented with preparing it as a polenta, like the teff polenta I made earlier in the week, and seasoning it with nut oil or mixing in a little Parmesan. It worked that way, but I still found that the flavor of this food works better with sweet flavors, and the texture did not benefit from the long oven simmer, the way the teff did. So again, I decided that amaranth is best served as a breakfast porridge. I toasted the seeds in the pan before adding water, and this added a wonderful popcorn dimension to the flavor. The aroma of this cereal as it cooked reminded me of the smell of the whole wheat Ralston Hot Cereal that my mother used to make for me. The amaranth will cook in about 20 minutes on top of the stove. I add milk halfway through the cooking, and the amaranth retains a nice grainy texture.
Creamy Goat Cheese and Cucumber Sandwich
A creamy goat cheese and cottage cheese blend provides satisfying and comforting flavor. I use sumac to bump up the already satisfying and comforting flavor of the creamy goat cheese and cottage cheese blend that blankets cucumbers, celery and dill. My first choice for bread is pumpernickel, but black bread or whole wheat country bread are also good.
Baked Orzo With Artichokes and Peas
This is a Greek-inspired pastitsio, a comforting béchamel-enriched mix of orzo, artichokes and peas. Rather than butter, the béchamel in this dish is made with a couple of glugs of good extra virgin olive oil.
Baked Orzo With Tomatoes, Roasted Peppers and Zucchini
Orzo is a type of pasta that looks like rice. It’s popular in Greece, where it is baked in casseroles like this one. If you like comforting dishes like macaroni and cheese, you’ll like this.
Greens and Chayote Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Lightness is not an attribute usually associated with enchiladas, the most comforting of Mexican tortilla foods. But these enchiladas, filled with a mix of blanched seasoned chard and succulent diced chayote and covered with a classic cooked tomatillo salsa, are both light and incredibly satisfying.
Herb Fritters
Inspired by a recipe in Clifford A. Wright’s “The Little Foods of the Mediterranean,” these fritters are light and delicate. You can use a mix of herbs and finely chopped greens – mild ones like spinach and chard, or more robust greens like dandelion or arugula – or all herbs, or all greens. You can also use this batter as a vehicle for other finely chopped or grated vegetables, like cabbage or carrots, onions or leeks. The fritters make a great hors d’oeuvre or side dish.
Teff Polenta With Toasted Hazelnut Oil
Teff is a challenging grain to work with. The flavor is strong, the grains tiny, and the mixture stiffens up very quickly once the grains are cooked. The chef Jason Bond makes a comforting teff polenta at his Bondir restaurants in Cambridge and Concord, Mass. He cooks the teff on top of the stove, in milk, and adds a finely chopped chipotle chile to the mix, which contributes a nice smoky/hot flavor. I liked the idea of teff polenta, and tried a few different methods for it. Teff will cook up in about 20 minutes on top of the stove, but if you use the oven-baked method outlined here, modeled on the method I often use for cornmeal polenta, you will get a creamier result. The oven method takes much longer, but the time is unsupervised – no frequent stirring as you must do on the top of the stove. This method doesn’t work so well if you use milk, however, because the milk forms too much skin in the oven, which forms curds when you stir the mixture (though I do like the flavor of the teff cooked in milk a lot). I tested the recipe using both stock and water, and liked both results equally. The chipotle adds a nice smoky/spicy flavor to the teff, but you can leave it out and just focus on the nutty flavor of the teff alone, with the hazelnut oil. I love the toasted hazelnut oil finish; it harmonizes with the nutty/earthy flavor of this grain. Serve the teff as a side dish or top with roasted vegetables or a vegetable or bean stew. You can also allow the teff to stiffen, then cut into squares and fry in the squares oil or grill them. You will get best results if you soak the teff for a few hours or overnight.
Collard Greens With Farro
Farro with anything is comfort food, and the combination of farro and collard greens is particularly hearty and nutritious. The time required to cook the farro will depend on how long it has been sitting on your shelf. When it’s less than a year old, farro softens nicely. The older it is, the longer it will need to cook.
Endive, Apple and Kasha Salad
Nutty, earthy grains of kasha go beautifully with crunchy, juicy apples and bitter endive, long a favorite salad combo. Cut the apple into small dice – 1/4 to 1/2 inch – to maximize this marriage of grain, fruit, nut and bitter salad green. The acid to oil quotient in the dressing is on the low side; I use lemon juice only and sweeten the mix with a little honey. You could also use agave nectar, and leave out the Gruyère in the salad for a vegan version; though I love the Gruyère here because it, too, has a nutty flavor. This salad holds up well on a buffet.
Orzo With Peas and Parsley Pesto
This is like a pasta version of the classic rice and peas risotto, risi e bisi. It’s a beautiful springtime dish. You can make a whole batch of pesto so that you have it on hand for other uses (like sandwiches), but for this dish you’ll need only a half batch.
Teff Polenta Croutons or Cakes
One of the things I like most about teff is the texture of the tiny grains. This is particularly nice when you cut up stiff teff polenta into rounds or squares and fry them in oil. The surface browns beautifully and the little round grains on the surface become toasty and crunchy while the centers remain soft. I serve thin slices with salads, or in place of a cracker, topped with something. The thicker cakes can be used the same way you would use the softer teff polenta, drizzled with oil, topped with a sauce or a vegetable dish, or sprinkled with Parmesan, feta or blue cheese. They can serve as a side dish or at the center of the plate or bowl.
Moussaka With Roasted Mushrooms
In this Balkan style Moussaka I have substituted the roasted mushroom mix for half the meat. But you can also make a vegetarian version with no meat at all. It is delicious either way, with a complex, slightly sweet Eastern Mediterranean sauce spiced with a little cinnamon, a pinch of allspice and a few cloves. Greek moussaka is topped with béchamel, which can be heavy, even gummy. But this one has a light, fluffy topping made with yogurt and eggs. There are a few steps involved here and the sauce is a long-cooking one, but you can get that started while the eggplant is roasting in the oven to speed things along or make the sauce the day before.
Spiced Green Beans and Baby Broccoli Tempura
Deep-frying is not something I do often, but after I’ve eaten well-executed tempura at a restaurant and can’t shake the memory of delicious batter-fried vegetables, I get out my wok. I turn on the hood fan, open the window and start heating up oil. I like to play around with different batters and coatings. This spicy, delicate batter is somewhere between a puffy beignet-type coating and a simpler egg, flour and bread-crumb dusting. It’s mostly cornstarch, with a small amount of cornmeal and whole wheat flour — just enough to hold the batter together. I add dukkah, cilantro and cumin for flavor and texture. Ice-cold sparkling water helps keep the batter light; it fries up crispy rather than bready because there’s very little gluten to toughen it. You can use this batter with all sorts of vegetables, but I particularly love green beans and baby broccoli. The batter wraps itself nicely around the smooth beans and nestles in among the spindly flowers at the end of a baby broccoli stem, resulting in lacy, extra-crispy tempura. A wok is ideal for deep-frying. It can accommodate a lot of vegetables at one time without crowding, and it holds heat well. The oil should hover between 350 and 375 degrees so that the vegetables cook quickly and crisp up without absorbing too much oil. Be sure to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches, and use a thermometer. You will be amazed to find a green bean tender and hot inside its crispy coating in two minutes or less.
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.
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).
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This frittata is just one good reason to stock peas in your freezer. My favorite herbs to use are tarragon and chives.
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.
Simple Pencil Cob Breakfast Grits
Sometimes the taste of a humble, simple food can be a life-changing event. This recipe, courtesy of Kay Rentschler, creative director of Anson Mills, is a fail-safe method for making the mill’s luxuriously flavored heirloom grits. When properly cooked – over very low heat after an overnight soak – the resulting grits are incredibly creamy and almost as sweet as fresh corn. It is important to understand why you must cook these grits over the lowest possible heat: these are coarse grits, and if they are over-hydrated or boiled after they begin to thicken they will take forever to cook. (In technical terms, thickening is the point at which the first starch takes hold, or the point after continuous gentle stirring when the grits particles remain suspended in the liquid and you no longer have to stir continuously). Moreover, as Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts explained to me, if the heat is too high the new crop flavors of the corn will be blown out, in the same way that the flavor of fresh herbs is diminished by high heat.
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.
Penne With Peas, Pea Greens and Parmesan
Many farmers who sell peas also sell the shoots and tendrils that grow with them. They’re sweet, light and nourishing, especially when you serve them along with peas.
Strata With Mushrooms and Chard
I make stratas — savory bread puddings — when I find myself with a stale baguette on hand, even if it’s so hard that the only way to slice it is to saw it. A strata is as comforting as macaroni and cheese, and it makes a great one-dish meal.
Long-Simmered Eggplant Stuffed with Farro or Spelt
This is a riff on imam bayildi, the long-cooking eggplant dish bathed in tomatoes and onions that is one of the great achievements of Turkish cuisine. I added cooked farro to the tomato-onion mix, making this more like a stuffed eggplant dish. The active cooking time is minimal, but the smothered eggplant must simmer for about 1 1/2 hours to achieve the intense, syrupy sauce and deep, rich flavor that make this dish such a wonder. Make it a day ahead for best results, and serve at room temperature on a hot night.