Labor Day
306 recipes found
Strawberry Pretzel Pie
This is a wonderful but simple summer pie inspired by strawberry pretzel salad, a popular Southern dessert. The classic recipe consists of a crumbled pretzel crust, a whipped cream cheese and Cool Whip filling, and a top layer of strawberry Jell-O. In this fresher adaptation, crushed pretzels form the foundation of an easy shortbread crust, followed by a fluffy cream filling and a pile of fresh strawberries, omitting the use of gelatin. If you’re making this pie in advance — especially with juicy, height-of-season berries — complete Steps 1 to 3, then cloak the filled crust with plastic wrap and chill up to 24 hours. Just before serving, toss the berries in sugar and pile them on top.
Mojito
You can drink a mint mojito without really thinking about it, and that's a pretty good recommendation for a summer cocktail. This version is straightforward and simply perfect for a hot day. Muddle a handful of fresh mint leaves and some lime juice in the bottom of a glass. Then add rum, sugar, ice and a bit of club soda. Shake and serve with other Cuban dishes. The mojito originated in Cuba as a farmers' drink in the late 19th century as Cuba's rum industry modernized, making the mint mojito as common as beer. Only the rich drank it with ice and soda.
Fresh Strawberry Bundt Cake
Strawberries from the farmers' market are tiny, packed with flavor, red all of the way through, and they put their supermarket counterparts to shame. This summery Bundt packs a double dose of strawberry flavor, so use the very best ones you can find. (You'll need 1 pound of strawberries for the cake and glaze.) A couple of tips for Bundt unmolding success: Make sure to butter and flour the pan generously and evenly, and let the cake cool for 15 minutes on a cooling rack, then flip it out on to the rack to cool completely. Don’t worry too much if your cake isn’t perfect: The blanket of pink glaze will cover many mistakes.
Six-Foot Meatless Italian Hero
This sandwich serves many dainty folks or fewer rugged types. Preorder the bread from an Italian bakery or deli counter, and build first, season last. Success here is in achieving a perfect filling-to-bread ratio, a generousness with the seasonings, and the ability to close the sandwich around the filling without finding it woefully over- or under-stuffed when it’s time to slice. It’s a huge help to have on hand 8-inch wooden skewers, disposable gloves, a good serrated knife and an egg-slicer gadget. The assembly instructions here are meant to be helpful but not prescriptive, as I trust that everybody knows how to build a sandwich to their own liking.
Chocolate Caramel Pretzel Bars
Like turtle bars with a twist, these squares are gooey, crunchy and salty in all the right places. If you can, use chopped bar chocolate as called for in the recipe. If you use chocolate chips, they will seize, and the chocolate layer will look uneven and a little chalky. That said, beauty is only skin deep, and these bars taste great either way, so if chips are all you can find, bake away.
Mexican Hot Dogs
If you’ve ever walked through the streets of Los Angeles late at night, you may have been lucky enough to happen upon a street vendor selling bacon-wrapped hot dogs piled high with caramelized onions, sautéed peppers, pico de gallo, avocado, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. This version of Mexican hot dogs, also known as street dogs or Los Angeles hot dogs, is believed to be a riff on a similar recipe that originated in Sonora, Mexico. In Los Angeles, they’re sometimes fried on a mobile D.I.Y. griddle made with a wheeled cart, a large sheet pan and a heat source underneath, but we don’t recommend trying that at home. For this recipe, a standard sheet pan and an oven will do.
Blueberry-Rhubarb Slab Pie
This slab pie is perfect for a party because it’s easy to transport, and it serves a crowd. Convenience aside, the true draw of this sheet-pan pie is the flaky, buttery crust and its rhubarb, blueberry and crystallized ginger filling. Cooking the fruit ahead of time results in a filling that is juicy but not soupy — and prevents the crust from absorbing too much liquid. Preparing the pie dough in the food processor is effortless and helps keep the butter cold, which leads to a flakier crust, but be careful not to over-process: Stop when the mixture is moist but still crumbly.
Raspberry Nutter Butter Bars
Reminiscent of a classic, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich minus the bread, these bars hit the spot with a little youthful nostalgia. A glass of cold milk is a great accompaniment. One 16-ounce package of Nutter Butter sandwich cookies pulsed in a food processor makes 4 cups of crumbs, which is exactly enough for one recipe.
Peach and Blueberry Cobbler With Hazelnut Biscuits
Cobbler is an irresistible summer treat, with its combination of bubbling fruit and golden biscuits. This version uses sweet, nutty hazelnut flour in the biscuits, which bake up crunchy on the outside and tender in the middle. To swap whole hazelnuts for the meal, start with 1/2 cup (64 grams) hazelnuts, toasted and with skins rubbed off. Grind the cooled nuts in a food processor or coffee grinder with the 1/3 cup (65 grams) granulated sugar until finely ground, and proceed with recipe as written. Tart wild blueberries are best here; use fresh if you can find them, but frozen are widely available and can go straight into the mix, no thawing necessary. Conventional supermarket blueberries work, too, but shouldn’t be the first choice; they are watery and have a weaker flavor.
Roasted Potato Salad With BBQ Dressing
If barbecue potato chips were a salad, then this would be it. It’s hard to pick which component of this picnic dish is the greater star: the crispy roasted potatoes or the smoky, paprika-tinged barbecue sauce dressing. Bejeweled with crunchy red onions, which are soaked in water to mellow their bite, and showered with fresh dill, this colorful side dish is the savory crowd-pleaser you’ll want to bring to any cookout or potluck.
Juicy Lucy Burger
This Minneapolis staple is smart and simple: Sealing a slice of cheese inside two thin burger patties allows the burger to develop a serious char while the inside stays moist thanks to its molten core. There’s debate over whether the burger originated at 5-8 Club or Matt’s Bar; both have drawn locals and tourists alike since the 1950s. The Juicy Lucy method takes some practice — you’ll need to make sure the edges of the stacked patties are properly sealed so that the melted cheese gushes out with every bite instead of making a mess in the skillet — but the results far outweigh the challenge. Because the ingredient list is short (an unassuming bun, a smattering of pickles and a pile of caramelized onions), you’ll need to season with abandon. You may be tempted to use an expensive craft cheese, but sliced American cheese is the only way to go for tradition and meltability.
Charred Scallion Dip With Lemon and Herbs
This creamy scallion dip could be the cooler cousin of ranch dressing or sour cream and onion dip. Grilled scallions add smokiness, while fresh chives and raw scallions lend brightness to the tangy, herb-flecked dip. If you don’t have a grill or grill pan, you can broil the scallions in your oven. Once assembled, the dip benefits from chilling to round out the flavors. At least an hour works, but it's better after a day. It needs nothing more than potato chips alongside, but it’s also great with crudités, crackers, grilled vegetables, fried chicken or slathered on sandwiches.
Sweet-and-Spicy Grilled Vegetables With Burrata
A colorful platter of soft, grilled vegetables in a sweet-and-spicy sauce can be the centerpiece of a light summery meal; just add some creamy cheese for richness and crusty bread to round things out. This recipe is extremely adaptable. You mix and match the vegetables, increasing the amounts of your favorites (or the ones you can get your hands on), and skipping anything you don’t have. And if your grill is large enough, you can make several different kinds of vegetables at the same time. Just don’t crowd them so they cook evenly.
Honey Ice Cream With a Kick
For this velvety, sweet ice cream with a subtle but throat-tickling kick, the chef Fany Gerson draws inspiration from her favorite honey ice cream recipe, by the cookbook author and pastry chef David Lebovitz, as well as her chile-laden childhood in Mexico. Ms. Gerson serves it as part of a Rosh Hashana feast, but it is a seasonless treat. Her toppings — chunks of creamy Manila mangoes dusted with ground red chiles, plus puffed amaranth for crunch — make it an interesting, almost sundae-like dessert. The ice cream is very soft right out of the machine, like soft serve; freeze it for at least 6 hours for something more scoopable.
Honey Butter Grilled Corn
This technique for grilling corn uses a side pan of honey butter to thoroughly drench the corn in flavor while keeping it hot and juicy until you’re ready to eat. If you are feeling creative, change the ingredients of the liquid bath: Add a couple of tablespoons of Korean gochujang and a few minced garlic cloves to the base mixture, then finish the corn with toasted sesame seeds for a sweet-hot version. Add a half-cup of sake, two tablespoons of light miso paste and two tablespoons of soy sauce for a sake-miso glaze. Blend a couple of canned chipotle chiles with a few tablespoons of lime juice, add it to the bath and finish the corn with freshly minced cilantro or mint. To complete this recipe, you’ll need a disposable aluminum 9-by-13-inch baking pan, or a similarly sized stovetop-safe vessel that you don’t mind getting a bit dirty.
Thin but Juicy Chargrilled Burgers
The key to cooking a thin, modestly sized burger on the grill is to use the highest heat possible, and to cook the meat most of the way through on one side before flipping it and briefly cooking the second side. This technique allows you to get a nice dark crust on that first side without the risk of overcooking. To form thin patties that hold together on the grill, massage the ground beef briefly — which is a cardinal sin with many other styles of burgers, but a necessity here for cohesion. This allows you to flatten the patty out extra-thin and wide to account for shrinking as the meat cooks.
Peanut Butter Blackberry Bars
The love child of a juicy summer fruit pie and a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, these family-friendly bars are perfect for a backyard picnic or an after-school snack. They’re super fast to make with an electric mixer, but you can also make the dough by hand: Just be sure the butter is very soft before you start, and mix with a sturdy wooden spoon or rubber spatula. To make easy work of pressing the dough into the baking dish, use lightly floured hands or the bottom of a flat measuring cup.
Sloppy Joes
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Put a Dutch oven over medium-high heat on your stove, then add a glug of olive oil and sauté in it a handful of chopped onions, a couple diced ribs of celery, a diced jalapeño and a small diced red pepper. When the mixture is supersoft, add a few cloves of minced garlic and cook for a couple more minutes, then dump a pound and a half of ground beef into the pot — ideally the sort that is 20 percent fat — and stir and sizzle until it is well browned, about 10 minutes. Bring the heat down a bit and add a lot of tomato paste — say 3 tablespoons, maybe 4 — and let it get a little toasty before adding a cup or more of puréed canned tomatoes. Cook that down for a few minutes, then add quite a few glugs of Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce to taste, and continue cooking until the mixture is quite thick, another 15 or 20 minutes. Season to taste and serve on toasted potato buns. I like steamed broccoli on the side, a walk for the dog and bed. 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.
Old-Fashioned Strawberry Cake
If strawberry doughnuts are your thing, then this cake is absolutely your thing. A classic, old-fashioned buttermilk cake with bits of berries strewn throughout, it manages to taste just like your favorite fried treat (without the frying, of course). Be sure to bake the cake all the way through; strawberries have a high water content and tend to make for a soggy cake if not baked properly. The top should be crackly, deeply and perfectly golden brown, and the edges should pull away from the sides of the pan.
Berry Buttermilk Cake
Buttermilk makes this stir-together cake super tender, but you can use any milk you have in its place. Same goes for the fruit: Use your favorite frozen berries, or a combination, but frozen cherries, mango or peaches work as well. Just cut any big fruit pieces into bite-size pieces before folding into the batter. And if you do happen to have fresh summer fruit around, that’ll work, too.
Grilled Corn on the Cob
You can grill corn on the cob with the husks on. You can strip the husks partly off, remove the silks and re-wrap the ears, then grill. You can soak the corn in cool water before grilling. Or blanch it in hot. I blanch, occasionally following the lead of the celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who adds one cup of milk to his blanching liquid. “I have no idea why I do it,” he said. “It’s like adding corks to the liquid when you’re poaching octopus. Who knows if it works?” Serve with butter, as in this recipe, or dab with mayonnaise and sprinkle with cotija cheese.
Summer Pudding With Blackberries and Peaches
Constructed from layers of soft, spongy sliced bread and tons of juicy, just-cooked fruit, this British dessert gets an update with a layer of barely sweetened whipped cream. It is the best thing since, well, sliced bread. Think of it as somewhere between a layer cake (where you don’t have to bake any cake) and a tiramisù (where the coffee and chocolate is replaced by burst berries and juicy peaches). While the assembly should be a relaxed, messy affair, just be sure to adequately soak the bread so it reads as custardy, not dry.
Fruit Cobbler With Any Fruit
You can use any fruit (or combination) to make this biscuit-topped cobbler. Just be sure to adjust the amount of sugar depending on whether your fruit is more sweet or tart. For example, blueberries, peaches, sweet cherries and pears tend to need less sugar than more acidic raspberries, sour cherries, plums and cranberries. Start with a few tablespoons and go up from there, tasting as you go. For the most tender biscuits, be sure to let the dough chill before baking.
Spumoni Ice Cream Cake
Spumoni is a frozen Italian-American dessert made by layering pistachio, cherry and chocolate (or sometimes vanilla) gelati. This showstopper ice cream cake version looks difficult, but it’s made with store-bought ingredients, so it mostly involves shopping and assembly. The layers can be stacked ahead, and you also don’t have to worry too much about its melting rapidly: The cake’s sheer volume and store-bought ice creams' stabilizers help it stay cold. For a Neapolitan-style cake, you could swap strawberry ice cream for the cherry and vanilla for the pistachio. The only true challenge here is making sure there’s room in your freezer, since this cake is about 4 inches tall.