Labor Day
317 recipes found
Okra Salad With Toasted Cumin
Even avowed okra-phobes love this salad, which is seasoned with a warm and earthy Moroccan spice blend. The okra cooks for only 2 minutes in salted water, and the resulting flavor and texture are somewhat reminiscent of asparagus. The salad tastes best at room temperature.
Arugula Salad With Peaches, Goat Cheese and Basil
This simple, quintessential summer salad is a reminder that seasonal ingredients at their very best don’t need much fussing (or much cooking at all, in this case). Here, peppery arugula and earthy goat cheese get brightened with juicy summer peaches, but the recipe can be tweaked to suit all seasons: If you can’t find ripe peaches, you can use cherries, strawberries, plums, raspberries or even cherry tomatoes in their place.
Nectarine-Raspberry Cobbler With Ginger Biscuits
A cobbler is a traditional baked dish of sweetened fruit with a biscuit-dough topping. It’s best to bake the fruit untopped for a half-hour or more before adding the raw disks of dough — some say they look like cobblestones — and baking them for another 15 minutes. It is the ideal home dessert, all bubbly fruit and golden crisp. This particular biscuit dough is studded with pistachios and candied ginger. Let it cool a bit before serving, with whipped cream, crème fraîche or ice cream.
Peach Upside-Down Skillet Cake With Bourbon Whipped Cream
A lush combination of a Southern upside-down cake and a French tarte tatin, this cake is deeply caramelized on top and light and fluffy beneath. The chef Virginia Willis, who put the recipe together, uses a whole vanilla bean, but if you don't feel like making that investment, a teaspoon of strong pure vanilla extract is fine. She uses a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, but a heavy nonstick one would work too. The whipped cream is optional, as is the bourbon that brightens it; you can add vanilla, confectioners' sugar or both if you prefer.
Peach Polenta Cake
This simple, summery cake gets its rustic texture from polenta and ground almonds. Most of its sweetness comes from cut peaches that bubble in a light caramel at the bottom of the cake, then decorate the top when you flip it over. The recipe is from King, a small restaurant in Manhattan where the chefs Clare de Boer and Jess Shadbolt swap the stone fruit out to use whatever is sweet, juicy and in season. Try the cake with peaches, nectarines, plums or even a mix of all three, but make sure to give the cake the time it needs to turn golden brown and firm to the touch. At King, the chefs use the Italian brand Moretti's stone-ground polenta bramata. For a more rustic cake, with a little bite, use coarse polenta. For a more tender crumb, use finely ground polenta.
Café Salle Pleyel Burger
Sonia Ezgulian, the guest chef at Café Salle Pleyel in Paris in 2008, created this burger, a riff on steak tartare. She’s kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.
Pickled Deviled Eggs
Before they are deviled, these hard-cooked eggs are pickled in rice vinegar, brown sugar and garlic, along with slivered red onions. The pickling brine dyes the egg whites deep pink, and the onions turn pungently sweet and sour, making a terrific garnish for the deviled eggs. And after the eggs are gone, you’ll still be left with plenty of pickled onions that will last for weeks in the refrigerator. Add them to salads, tacos, grilled meats and sandwiches. You won’t be sorry to have them on hand.
Tomato Pie With Pimento Cheese Topping
Tomato pie is just the kind of supper a Southern cook might serve in the summer: savory and rich, but vibrant with super-fresh vegetables and herbs. Virginia Willis, a Georgia native and food writer, had the inspired idea to add a topping of pimento cheese, another Southern classic. There are multiple steps here because of the scratch-made crust, but everything can be baked in the cooler parts of the day, and the pie can be served warm or at room temperature.
Tomato And Tapenade Salad
Grilled Eggplant, Peppers and Onions
The happy mix of eggplant, peppers and onions is found throughout the Mediterranean. Cooking the vegetables over hot coals adds a welcome smokiness, but even a stovetop grill gives a hint of smoky flavor, so don’t fret if you can’t grill outside. This salad is meant to be served at room temperature. Feel free to make it up to 2 hours ahead.
Spicy Grilled Pork With Fennel, Cumin and Red Onion
Imbued with spices that char at high heat, this aromatic pork recipe is a snap to throw together — exactly what you want for a night of summer grilling. If you’re got wooden skewers, don’t forget to soak them in water for an hour before grilling, so they don’t flare up. And if you’re broiling and you don’t want to bother with skewers at all, just spread the pork cubes out on a rimmed sheet pan, turning them halfway through cooking with tongs or a spatula. The pork is excellent served with pita or crusty bread or a rice pilaf, or simple grilled corn on the cob.
Salty Peanut-Pretzel Ice Cream Cake
Grab a couple quarts of your favorite vanilla ice cream, crush up some peanuts and pretzels, and invite the neighborhood over for this sweet, salty, satisfying summer treat. For the most robust peanut flavor, use well-stirred natural, unsweetened peanut butter. You can also use a sweetened variety, if that’s what you have on hand, but bear in mind that the ice cream and honey lend this cake enough sweetness. The savory dry-roasted peanuts add a wonderful depth of flavor, but make sure to look for a brand without onion or garlic powder listed among the ingredients.
Berry Blitz Torte
Blitz means “lightning” in German, referring to the lightning-quick way this old-fashioned cake comes together, at least compared with the more ornately frosted tortes popular a century ago. Buttery, nutmeg-scented batter is swirled with meringue and sprinkled with pecans before baking. The meringue, which browns on top but stays soft inside, takes the place of icing while the nuts add flavor and crunch. A whipped cream and berry filling makes the whole thing incredibly soft and rich. You can bake the cake layers up to 12 hours ahead, but it’s best to fill them with cream and berries within 3 hours of serving so they don’t get soggy. This recipe is adapted from my friend’s mother, Patricia O’Neal, who got it from her mother, Genevieve Lehmont.
Berry Apple-Butter Pie
The deliciously tart apple butter filling in this pie has a deep rosy color, bolstered by raspberries and blackberries. Apples with darker red skins will produce a filling that contrasts beautifully with the decorative golden brown crust: We opted to top the pie with triangle cutouts, but you could use any shape, or even substitute a woven lattice. You can make the apple butter up to 5 days ahead and refrigerate it in an airtight container, but the pie itself is best the day it is made. Store leftovers at room temperature, tightly covered with plastic wrap.
Black-and-White Cookies
There is no reason to settle for a stale shrink-wrapped cookie from the produce market. This classic New York cookie is easy to make.
Smoky Lobster Salad With Potatoes
This salad is a riff on a traditional Spanish dish, pulpo a la gallega, a favorite item on tapas bar menus all over the country. It is essentially boiled octopus and potatoes, sliced and served with a good drizzle of olive oil and a dusting of smoky pimentón. This version uses lobster instead, and adds strips of roasted pepper and cherry tomatoes.
Mustard-Glazed Pork Tenderloin
This savory-sweet treatment for pork tenderloin was brought to The Times in 1989 by the inimitable Marian Burros. With just five ingredients — pork, brown sugar, whole-grain mustard, rosemary and sherry — you have an extremely simple though supremely satisfying dish. We like ours served with mashed sweet potatoes and a pile of sautéed greens, and the leftovers make great sandwiches.
Chocolate Extremes (Double Chocolate Cookies)
These provocatively named cookies came to The Times in a 1999 Sunday Magazine article about Mrs. London's Bake Shop, a husband and wife owned bakery in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., known for their sweets. While the name suggests these cookies might veer into the too sweet and too rich category, they do not. Shiny and crackly on top while tender and deeply chocolaty in the center, they're like an ideal brownie in cookie form. They're kind of perfect. (One note: The recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate, but feel free to use semisweet or a combination of the two. Also, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt before baking would not be a bad idea.)
Smoky Chimichurri
You'll need a medium-hot charcoal fire to make this Argentine sauce. Either start cooking when your main grilled item comes off the fire or, if making this sauce separately, light a charcoal fire in your grill, putting all the coals on one side, and wait until it has died down to medium. Remove some or all of the pith and seeds from the jalapeños if you prefer a milder sauce. This relish is particularly good with beef.
Blueberry Rhubarb Pie
The baker and pie coach Kate McDermott has many tricks to figure out when a pie is done, but her favorite is what she calls “the heartbeat of the pie.” She listens for a sizzle that tells her that the fat in the crust is cooking the flour, and for a thumping sound that indicates that the simmering liquid is bumping up against the top crust. Also, watch for bubbling: This will tell you that the temperature is high enough that the thickeners have dissolved into the filling. All-berry pies can be too sweet and soft, so the tart crunch of rhubarb makes an ideal complement, especially in early spring. This glowing purple-magenta filling is quite spectacular.
Marcella Hazan’s Semifreddo di Cioccolato
Semifreddo, which means "half-cold" in Italian, is a more elegant version of the traditional ice cream cake (think frozen mousse), and it's the ideal dessert for a summer party as it can be done in advance, then sliced and plated at the table. This recipe, an adaptation of one found in Marcella Hazan's "Marcella's Italian Kitchen," is light yet luxurious. It calls for just four ingredients – heavy cream, confectioners' sugar, grated chocolate and egg whites – and it's dead simple to make. Just whip the cream, add the sugar, fold in the beaten egg whites and chocolate, and then freeze. Unmold, slice and serve. To gild the lily, garnish with fresh summer berries.
Rhubarb Oat Shortcakes
Roasting rhubarb with Demarara sugar until the stalks caramelize and soften enough to collapse gives you a heady and intense jamlike compote with a molasses edge. Here, it’s paired with tender, biscuitlike shortcakes made with a little oat flour for complexity and plenty of whipped cream. It’s important to let the rhubarb juices truly caramelize at the edges of the pan; they should turn deep mahogany brown before you pull it from the oven. Then mix those syrupy juices with the rest of the rhubarb for the deepest flavor. You can make the biscuits and rhubarb up to eight hours in advance. Store them at room temperature until ready to serve.
Chicken With Nectarine-Tomato Salsa
Creamy Coconut Popsicles
Cream of coconut, not to be confused with coconut milk or coconut cream, is a thick syrupy confection made by blending coconut and sugar and is most often used in piña coladas. Mixed with cream, coconut milk and shredded coconut, it gives these pops that classic tropical flair. One note: Coconut milk and cream of coconut naturally separate, so be sure to stir well before measuring.