Labor Day
317 recipes found
Chocolate Zucchini Loaf Cake
This simple, one-bowl loaf cake is a sweet way to make the most of zucchini season. Chocolate cake batter is flecked with shreds of raw zucchini and studded with bittersweet chocolate chips for a summertime cake that’s fit for either breakfast or dessert. While some recipes call for squeezing the excess water out of the shredded zucchini, this loaf cake takes full advantage of the summer vegetable: The zucchini is taken directly from the grater to the bowl for additional moisture. The resulting cake strikes the perfect balance; it's rich and fudgy, but still maintains a tender crumb. The cake will keep on the counter for 4 to 5 days, loosely covered, and only gets better with age.
Vegan Frozen Coconut Lime Bars
Inspired by frozen Key lime pie, this simple summertime treat is for vegans and dairy-lovers alike. The no-bake graham cracker crust gets topped with softened store-bought, dairy-free ice cream mixed with shredded coconut and fresh lime juice for a dessert that’s as easy to put together as it is delicious. Be sure to use unsweetened, finely shredded (also called desiccated) coconut for this recipe; regular shredded or flaked coconut will be too coarse.
Pressure Cooker Classic Beef Chili
Chili in the electric pressure cooker is super fast and extremely convenient. This version is on the gently spiced side, so if you're looking for more heat, feel free to increase the chili powder or add a big pinch of cayenne – or throw a couple of extra jalapeños into the pot. Keep in mind that the leaner the beef, the less flavorful the chili. Eighty percent is a good bet here. You can also substitute ground pork or dark meat turkey. Leftover chili freezes like a dream.
Italian Subs With Sausage and Peppers
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. For these subs, you'll start with the onions, slicing two big sweet ones and setting them in a hot pan with a couple of gurgles of olive oil. Season with salt, black pepper and a shake of red-pepper flakes, then cook over medium heat, stirring and tossing occasionally so that they go golden and soft. This’ll take a while. Add a couple of sliced bell peppers to the pan, and continue cooking, still stirring and tossing, until they begin to wilt. Set the vegetables aside. About halfway through, set some sweet Italian sausages in another hot, oil-slicked pan, and cook them through until crisp and brown on the exterior, turning often. Split your sub rolls (I like the sesame-seeded variety here) and scrape out a little of the interior from each. Load one side of each roll with some of the onions and peppers, the other with a sausage. Top with mozzarella, put the open sandwiches on a sheet pan and slide them all into a hot oven for five minutes or so, until the cheese is melted and the bread is lightly toasted. Fold together and serve. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Chickpea Salad With Fresh Herbs and Scallions
A lighter, easier take on classic American potato salad, this version uses canned chickpeas in place of potatoes and favors Greek yogurt over mayonnaise. The trick to achieving the creamy texture of traditional potato salad is to mash some of the chickpeas lightly with a fork. It travels well, so it deserves a spot at your next picnic or desk lunch.
Strawberry Gingersnap Icebox Cake
Fluffy swirls of strawberry cream are layered with spicy gingersnaps in this summery, no-bake confection. The deep strawberry flavor comes through twice here: once in the mascarpone cream, which is whipped with berry purée, and in a scarlet topping spiked with lime zest and grated fresh ginger. We used Nabisco gingersnaps, but any brand should work, as could vanilla wafers. This cake is best made the day before you want to serve it, giving the gingersnaps a chance to soften into a luscious, soft cake.
Mississippi Mud Pie
Mississippi mud pies come in all shapes and sizes: No two are exactly alike. They can have one layer, or five, and include ice cream or meringue, a flourless cake, nuts, fudge sauce and even brownie. This version, inspired by the towering beauty made by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito of Baked in Brooklyn and written about in their book, "Baked Explorations," features a graham cracker base, a dense brownie, chocolate custard and whipped cream. Needless to say, a little goes a long way. Share it with 16 to 32 of your closest friends. And a tip for serving: To ensure a clean release, give the underside and sides of the cake pan a 10-second blast with a hairdryer.
Classic Potato Salad
The recipe for this Southern classic came from the chef Millie Peartree’s mother, Millie Bell. The sweet relish melds with the creamy potatoes for a deep, balanced flavor. Onion powder adds savory notes without the texture of diced onion, which could overpower the dish. Make sure that your eggs are rinsed thoroughly, so no pieces of shell remain, and that your potatoes are uniformly cut in roughly 1-inch cubes so they all finish cooking at the same time. (Millie Bell used her thumb as a measure.) And, most important of all, don’t overcook the potatoes — they take only 15 to 20 minutes to boil. You want potato salad, not mashed potatoes. You can prepare potato salad ahead of time and refrigerate it for up to 4 days.
Vegan Potato Salad With Tahini
This robustly seasoned vegan potato salad is lively and earthy from a dressing of cumin, charred scallion and loads of tahini, which gives it a rich and creamy texture. This is a good one to make a day before you want to serve it as the flavors get better as they sit. Just be sure to let it come to room temperature so everything is at its brightest and most supple.
Watermelon Margarita
Mixing cocktails may seem intimidating, but it’s actually quite intuitive once you understand how to balance the alcohol, sweetness and acidity. In “3-Ingredient Cocktails” (Ten Speed Press, 2017), Robert Simonson presents the formula for a perfect margarita: 1½ ounces tequila, 1 ounce Cointreau and 3/4 ounce lime juice, shaken and served. Even easier to memorize, this version uses 6 ounces fresh watermelon juice — a sweet but subtle nod to summer — and 2 ounces each tequila, Cointreau and lime juice. Be sure to taste and add more watermelon juice if your margarita is too boozy, and extra lime juice or even a pinch of salt if it’s too sweet.
Black Bean Burger With an Egg on Top
This is a vegetarian burger that does not mimic the texture or look of ground meat, but it isn’t meant to. It’s more like the most excellent refried beans. Though you can serve this well-seasoned patty like a traditional burger, on a bun with the usual condiments, it is at its best topped with a fried egg. Dusted with fine cornmeal, the burgers are pan-fried as the mixture is too soft to grill. After frying, they are baked until crisp. For convenience, they may be fried in advance and reheated.
BBQ Pulled Chicken
Almost nothing beats a barbecue pulled pork sandwich, but this faster and leaner spin, which is made with roasted chicken thighs and breasts and a quick barbecue sauce, is a delicious alternative that only tastes like it took all day to cook. Serve on buns with a vinegary slaw and ranch or buttermilk dressing, if you like. For a smokier flavor, use a combination of sweet and smoked paprika. Like most barbecue recipes, this is even better reheated the next day.
Pressure Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork
A pressure cooker provides a nifty shortcut to perfect pulled pork. This recipe calls for braising the meat in a dark soda like Dr Pepper or Coca-Cola, and the results are lush and tender — savory, slightly sweet and tangy. Once the pork is done, you can customize it to your taste using your favorite barbecue and hot sauces. Adding lots of black pepper and a few dashes of Southern-style hot sauce, like Crystal, Louisiana or Tabasco, is a very good idea. Like many braises, the pork improves overnight and can be cooked up to three days in advance; shred and warm it gently on the stovetop before tossing it with sauce and serving. The pork makes satisfying sandwiches on soft rolls (try coleslaw as a topping), but it could also be used in tacos or served over grits. (You can find the slow-cooker version of this recipe here.)
Slow Cooker Chili
A great chili should be richly spiced, with layers of deep, savory flavor. Here, that big flavor comes from the usual contenders, but also from the unexpected additions of unsweetened cocoa, soy sauce and Worcestershire, which provide complexity. This recipe makes a thick, comforting chili that can be prepared in a slow cooker or in a Dutch oven on the stovetop. Chili is perhaps the ideal slow-cooker dish because its flavor improves with a long, slow simmer. This makes a big batch, perfect for a cold-weather get-together, but if you’re making it for a smaller group, the leftovers freeze well.
Elotes (Grilled Corn With Cheese, Lime and Chile)
Whole ears of corn are a classic street food in Mexico, where they are either grilled or boiled, then often dressed with some combination of lime, chile, mayonnaise and grated cheese. This grilled version calls for all of the above, which get mixed together into a creamy, bracing topping, and slathered all over the hot, sweet ears. It's not strictly traditional, but it does make it easier to assemble the corn and its dressing before serving. Or place the various topping in small bowls and let guests have the fun of garnishing their own. And if you don’t have a grill, the broiler works too though watch the ears carefully so they don’t burn.
Guacamole With Grilled Corn
This simple summer dip combines guacamole with sweet grilled corn and tangy Cotija cheese. The key to great guacamole is to pound the aromatics in a mortar and pestle or molcajete with salt, producing a guacamole with deep flavor from minimal ingredients.
BBQ Chicken
Barbecued chicken isn’t, really: It’s grilled rather than smoke-roasted at low temperature. But it requires a similar attention to technique. You’ll want to move the pieces around on the grill to keep them from burning, and flip them often as well. Cooking barbecued chicken benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and outdoor cooking maven Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.
Smoked Cabbage Slaw With Creamy Horseradish
This slaw acquires its smoke flavor not through grilling the greens, but by cold smoking. The advantage is that you flavor the leaves with smoke without cooking them, so the cabbage remains audibly crisp. Cold smoking can be done on a grill or in a smoker, or even in your kitchen using a stove-top smoker or hand-held smoker. The secret is to smoke the shredded cabbage over a pan of ice to keep it from cooking. Horseradish and mustard fire up the traditional creamy mayonnaise dressing.
Corn on the Cob With Old Bay and Lemon
If you’ve had the pleasure of eating your way through a bucket of Maryland blue crabs poured out onto newspaper, you’ve probably had Old Bay seasoning. It’s a blend of celery salt, black pepper, crushed red-pepper flakes and paprika, and any member of its fiercely loyal Mid-Atlantic fan base will tell you that it should be present at any proper crab or shrimp boil. In this recipe, you get lots of that seaside flavor without having to source fresh blue crab.
Tomato and Zucchini Casserole With Crisp Cheddar Topping
This casserole is a modern twist on an old favorite, the tomato-zucchini bake. But instead of a Parmesan and bread-crumb topping, this one is covered in a savory oat and Cheddar crumble that crisps and browns in the oven. Dollops of garlicky, herbed ricotta make the casserole wonderfully rich and creamy, while olives liven it up with their salty tang. This is equally good warm or at room temperature, preferably served within four hours of baking so the topping stays crunchy. Or you could make it the night before and reheat it in a 375-degree oven until bubbling. It makes an excellent side dish or meatless main course.
Lemony Zucchini Slaw
This salad of julienned zucchini is dressed in yogurt and tossed with a generous amount of lemon juice and zest. Use as many bright herbs as possible, or a single herb if you prefer, and chop them at the last minute.
Vegan Chocolate Pudding Pie
This vegan pie pairs a thick, creamy, chile- and cinnamon-laced pudding from Mark Bittman with a graham cracker crust adapted from the cookbook "Vegan Pie in the Sky." The pudding, whose flavors recall Mexican hot chocolate, can also stand alone. It's made with silken tofu, and it comes together in 10 minutes in the blender, which whips in air for a mousse-like texture. The chocolate is of the utmost importance here; its flavor will be the one that dominates, so be sure to buy the highest quality you can. Top with shaved chocolate if you'd like.
Seven-Layer Dip
For this recipe, the traditional 7-layer dip has been revisited so that each layer is good enough to eat on its own, but isn’t so much effort that the whole thing can’t be finished in 20 minutes. The order of the layers offers some delightful moments, like where the cheese melts into the warm refried beans or where the cool sour cream meets the fiery salsa. Cilantro and scallions serve as a refreshing counterpoint, and Fritos lend added crunch. No need to dig out your trifle bowl: A platter with a lip is preferred here for easier scooping.
Sour Cream and Onion Dip
Take plenty of time to properly caramelize a mixture of onions and shallots and you’ll be greatly rewarded with a depth of flavor that you would never get from a powdered packet. Resist the urge to cook them at a higher temperature in order to rush the process – they’ll burn before they brown and soften. The addition of Greek yogurt might seem unusual, but it provides a lightness and tang that sour cream can’t deliver by itself.