Labor Day
317 recipes found
Grilled Slaw With Ginger and Sesame
Napa makes an excellent cabbage for grilling. Its elongated shape provides greater surface area to char — and thus smoke — over a hot fire than a round cabbage. Its leaves are less tightly packed than conventional cabbage, allowing for deep penetration of the smoke flavor. Also known as Chinese cabbage, napa cabbage is native to China and pairs well with Asian seasonings, such as sesame oil, rice vinegar and ginger. To notch up the heat, add a spoonful of Asian chile paste.
Homemade Green Bean Casserole
If you think you don’t like green bean casserole, withhold judgment until you’ve tried this entirely from-scratch version. It has all the classic elements of the Thanksgiving favorite, but its base is a mushroom gravy amped up with red-wine vinegar, red-pepper flakes and fresh thyme rather than a can of soup. If you don’t want to fry the onions yourself (we understand), you can always substitute 1 1/2 cups store-bought fried onions or even crispier fried shallots.
Potato Salad With Capers and Anchovies
Serve this zesty room-temperature salad on its own with crisp lettuce or arugula leaves on the side, or to accompany meats from the grill, a roast chicken or any type of fish. The dressing is essentially a well-seasoned vinaigrette, enhanced with Dijon mustard, capers, a little garlic and a few chopped anchovies. Red onion, thyme leaves and chopped parsley complete the picture — in all, a very simple dish. Most important is to dress the potato slices very carefully with your hands, in order to coat them well and to keep them from breaking. It is a potato salad you’ll grow to love, best eaten within hours of assembling (but perfectly serviceable the next day).
Edna Lewis's Corn Pudding
This buttery, fluffy dish comes from Edna Lewis, the African-American chef and cookbook author credited with preserving countless recipes from the old South. It serves as not only a seasonal bridge — a farewell to summer, with winter chill waiting in the wings — but also as a sweetly welcome blurring of the lines between a side dish and a dessert.
Dirty Horchata
Horchata, a sweet cinnamon drink popular throughout Latin America, is typically made by soaking white rice in water, straining through a fine-mesh sieve to eliminate solids, if desired, then sweetening the liquid with sugar and cinnamon. But the horchata at Guisados, a chain of taco restaurants in Los Angeles, is different. It's made with whole milk and is served plain, or “dirty” with a shot of cold brew concentrate — and the chain sells up to 700 a day. This is an adaptation of its caffeinated version, and it serves a crowd. (You can leave out the coffee or halve the recipe, if you like.) Enjoy it with something spicy on a hot summer’s day.
Simplest Grilled Peaches
Grilled peaches may be summer’s greatest joy. Cook them over a medium to low gas grill or a dying charcoal fire, and serve them with ice cream, whipped cream or nothing at all.
Ember-Roasted Slaw With Mint
Inspired by what is undoubtedly the world’s most ancient method of cooking, ember-roasted cabbage is turning up everywhere, from the charred cabbage with muhammara and hazelnuts at the new Safta restaurant in Denver to the cabbage roasted in the embers and served with yogurt, sumac and lemon zest at Charcoal Venice in Los Angeles. This one features a sweet-sour dressing of sugar, vinegar and caraway seeds, with mint leaves stirred in at the end for freshness. Savoy cabbage is an excellent cabbage for grilling: The smoke circulates freely through its crinkled leaves.
Vegan Apple Pie
Dawn Lerman, a New York-based nutrition consultant and Well blog columnist, brought this recipe to The Times in the fall of 2015. It's a delicious sugar-free alternative to the traditional apple pie, and it's a cinch to put together.
Old-Fashioned Chocolate Pudding Pie
This is your grandma’s puddin’ pie, only it’s vegan — a smooth, cool and creamy pudding in a classic graham cracker shell. To make life even easier, you can use a store-bought crust. For added grandma love, serve with vegan whipped cream and shaved chocolate. (This recipe is an adaptation of one found in “Vegan Pie in the Sky: 75 Out-of-This-World Recipes for Pies, Tarts, Cobblers and More” by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.)
Grilled Soy-Basted Chicken Thighs With Spicy Cashews
Here's a hack I performed on a recipe for an appetizer portion of skewered chunked chicken thighs that the great live-fire cooks and cookbook writers Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby wrote many years ago, and that I have slowly altered into a main-course grilled dinner. The skinless chicken browns nicely over a medium flame, and the sugary soy basting sauce lacquers it beautifully in the final few minutes of cooking. It's terrific with rice, or as a topping for a salad of sturdy greens. You may wish to double the recipe for Sriracha-roasted cashews. Those are addictive, and for them you will find many delicious uses.
Gochujang BBQ Ribs With Peanuts and Scallions
The simplest dishes are the hardest to get right, and barbecue ribs are no exception. That is why the chef Joseph Lenn, of J.C. Holdway in Knoxville, Tenn., always quick-cures the ribs with an overnight rub of salt, black pepper and brown sugar. This ensures the meat is seasoned evenly throughout, and is something he recommends for any slow-cooked or braised meat. Mr. Lenn’s mop sauce, a homage to the Dixie Sweet sauce at Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint in Nashville, is fired up with gochujang, a Korean chile paste. It works equally well on bone-in chicken breasts and wings.
Eastern North Carolina-Style BBQ Sauce
Chris Schlesinger is the chef and an owner of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass., which he opened in 1985. He is also the author, with John Willoughby, of six cookbooks that relate somehow to the pleasures of fire. This is an adaptation of his recipe for barbecue sauce meant to be served with his pulled pork.
Gingery Grilled Chicken Thighs With Charred Peaches
Coated in a balsamic vinegar glaze that’s spiked with ginger, garlic and soy sauce, these chicken thighs are sweet-tart and irresistibly sticky. They’re served with grilled thyme and honey butter-basted peaches, which become soft and wonderfully jammy on the fire. The yogurt is optional. It adds a cool and creamy counterpart to the char and smoke, but the dish is just as satisfying without it.
Grilled Baby Back Ribs
We think of ribs as an all-day affair, the meat cooked in smoke and low heat until it begins to pull from the bone. But baby backs are quicker and can be grilled as well, and the result is delicious. This recipe benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and barbecue madman Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his barbecue sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking in coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.
Smoked Chicken Wings
If you have an offset smoker, even a leaky old fellow with rust spots and broken wheels, this recipe will provide one of its finest uses. Smoking chicken wings for 15 minutes or so before grilling or roasting them under thin bastings of barbecue sauce yields meat that is smoky but not aggressively so, deeply flavorful, with a marvelous crust. But you don’t need a smoker! Simply set up your grill for indirect cooking, with a fairly small fire, and use soaked wood chips to create a plume of smoke. Put the wings on the cool side of the grill, then cover it and allow the smoke to perform its magic. You’ll get wings that are pale gold, the color of chamois that you can cook into perfection over the direct heat of the fire.
Pulled Lamb Shoulder
This pulled lamb is an homage to the barbecued mutton of Western Kentucky. Smoke the meat over charcoal and wood, not gas. It’s bonkers delicious. Or at least make the dry rub that covers the meat and use it to cook something else.
Zuni Café’s Hamburger
Made to exacting standards, the hamburger at Zuni Café, in San Francisco, is legendary. First, grass-fed beef is salted well in advance of grinding, which gives the meat its succulence. Grilled over coals and flipped three times to prevent it from overcharring or becoming tough, the patty is rested, like a roast. It is then served on a toasted square of rosemary focaccia, smeared with handmade aioli and accompanied by Zuni’s acclaimed house pickles: fuchsia-red onion rings and turmeric-tinged sliced zucchini. It is wonderful on its own, but toppings like Shelburne Farms Cheddar, Bayley Hazen blue cheese, grilled onions or portobello mushroom are also available, and most customers can’t resist a heaping plate of shoestring potatoes alongside. It’s perfectly possible to make these burgers at home, but know that the full project involves several recipes, so it’s probably best to spread the work out over a few days.
BBQ Country-Style Pork Ribs
This basic barbecue has big flavor and no ketchup or Coca-Cola (no disrespect meant to those who favor that type of seasoning). There’s no fire involved; you use a standard oven. The spicing trends toward Caribbean, with plenty of sweet spice and as much Scotch bonnet or habanero chile heat as you wish. County-style ribs are meaty bone-in pork chops cut from the shoulder end of the loin, so use those or a whole bone-in pork shoulder roast. Cooked until it’s ultratender, it can be cut in chunky pieces and served in its juices with beans, rice and cornbread. Or shred the cooked meat to make pulled pork sandwiches or tacos. It’s quite good accompanied with a crisp slawlike cabbage salad or your favorite version of coleslaw.
Grilled Flank Steak With Worcestershire Butter
Grilled steak covered in melting herb butter is a cornerstone of summer cooking. Here, both the steak and the compound butter are spiked with Worcestershire sauce, fresh thyme and garlic for an intensely brawny flavor. Then, the steak is garnished with a mix of charred tomatoes, scallions and basil, which gives everything a juicy sweetness brightened with lemon. You can use any cut of beef here; the flank steak has a deeply mineral taste and chewy texture that’s at its best sliced thin. But rib-eye, skirt steak and sirloin also work; just be sure to adjust the cooking time for thinner or thicker pieces.
Inside-Out Lamb Cheeseburgers
Grind the lamb for these smoked mozzarella-stuffed patties yourself and you'll be rewarded with burgers that are full of flavor. "Grinding" may sound intimidating, but it's easy and quick to do it at home with a food processor. Then be sure to handle the meat gently. Make the patties with a light hand, and resist the urge to press on them with a spatula as they cook.
Reverse-Seared Steak
Reverse-searing is a grilling technique for steak that ensures a dark, sizzling crust and a rosy center that is perfectly cooked to your desired degree of doneness. This brilliant grilling method combines the low and slow cooking of traditional barbecue with the high heat charring practiced at steakhouses. Though it works well with any thick steak, from picanha to porterhouse, this recipe calls for a cut of steak popularized in Santa Maria, Calif., and is today known and loved across the U.S. as tri-tip. As the name suggests, it’s a triangular or boomerang-shaped steak cut from the tip of the sirloin, blessed with a robust beefy flavor.
Grilled Pork With Whole Spices and Garlic Bread
Deeply flavored from a rub of fennel, coriander, caraway and cumin, and crisp-edged from the grill, this pork feeds a crowd, and most of the work can be done in advance. You can use either boneless loin or shoulder here: The shoulder is chewier, brawnier and more irregular in shape, while the loin is neater to slice and softer to eat. But both are delicious, especially when showered with fresh lemon or lime juice at the end to cut the richness. You don’t have to make the buttery garlic bread, but its herbal flavors go well with the smoke and char of the meat. If you do skip it (your loss), serve the pork strewn with plenty of fresh, bright herbs. If you’re not grilling, you can roast the pork in a 500-degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes, flipping it halfway. Then run it under the broiler at the end to sear the fat.
Grilled Lamb Chops With Lettuce and Ranch Dressing
Cooking lamb chops hot and fast keeps them juicy and perfectly pink inside. Here, they’re first marinated in an herby garlic paste, then grilled or broiled and served with crisp lettuce hearts and a tangy ranch dressing (made from more of that same herb garlic paste). Quick and easy enough for a weeknight, these chops are also always an impressive meal to serve to guests. You’ll probably have some ranch dressing left over. It will keep for a week in the fridge and is also excellent as a sauce for grilled chicken, or as a dip for vegetables and crackers.
Cocotte Burger
Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to eggs that opened in St.-Germain in 2007, and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard, invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant’s egg theme and recalling the time-honored steak à cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.