Lemon Juice
491 recipes found
Green Bean and Cherry Tomato Salad
This colorful, full-flavored salad is finished with a black olive dressing, made with Niçoise olives, capers, anchovy and garlic, and similar to a Provençal tapenade. For the best result, choose the smallest green beans and sweetest cherry tomatoes. Add arugula or other salad greens just before serving, if you wish.
Spanakorizo With Jammy Eggs
Bright and soulful, spanakorizo is a beloved Greek dish, with a name that reflects its combination of two key ingredients: spinach and rice. This version is fairly traditional in its essence, relying upon rice, spinach, lemon and herbs, but includes some flourishes. Though the addition of the jammy egg is not traditional, it injects a sunny burst of color, as well as added protein. For ease, this recipe calls for baby spinach (or chopped mature spinach), but frozen spinach can also be used (simply thaw it and squeeze out the water), or try a hardy green like chard or kale. A whole bunch of scallions delivers a richly aromatic base for the rice. Basmati is used here for its quick cooking time and light finish, but if you would like to use more traditional medium-grain rice, simply add an extra ½ cup of stock (2 cups total). As with any recipe, the timing is a guideline, but you should use your senses: Check your rice at the 15-minute mark, as some brands of rice will cook quicker than others.
Sweet Tea-Brined Roast Chicken
Sweet tea has a long history in the South and happens to be the perfect brine for chicken. It tenderizes the meat, helps crisp the skin and lends a deep golden-brown hue when baked. This dish – a simple and stunning party centerpiece or a dinner for a hungry crowd – is sure to become your next go-to recipe.
Miso Roasted Salmon
With this fish, less is more: The salty, umami balm of a miso marinade is lightened with lemon zest, which lends floral bittersweetness, and with lemon juice, which brings electric tang and tenderness. Salmon fillets cut into smaller, thinner portions — as they are for a Japanese breakfast spread — end up more evenly cooked and allow the marinade to flavor the fish more intensely (see Tip). If you can find it, yuzu would be fabulous here in place of the lemon. Serve with white rice, miso soup and goma-ae.
Whitefish Salad
Whitefish salads are most often drenched in mayonnaise, masking the distinctive smoky, salty flavor of the fish and covering up the crispy celery and onion. In this lighter, fresher salad, included in my new cookbook, “My Life in Recipes” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), the celery adds a tiny bit of texture while the herbs complement without overpowering. A minimal amount of mayonnaise adds silkiness as freshly squeezed lemon juice brightens, letting the fish dominate. The only tricky part is to make sure you remove all the bones. Serve this whitefish salad as a dip; a spread for matzo, bread or bagels; or as a topping on leafy greens, cucumber rounds or endive spears.
Hard Lemonade
This recipe is far removed from the spiked six packs of yore. The cocktail’s hard lemon base is a combination of fresh lemon juice, vodka or limoncello, simple syrup and a pinch of flaky sea salt. The salt serves to enhance, balance and brighten, while a final topping of bubbly soda water lengthens and elevates. When choosing between vodka or limoncello, follow your palate. Vodka offers a more straightforward flavor. The limoncello variation is sweeter — though nothing approaching cloying — and a bit more complex.
Asparagus and Golden Beet Salad
The season’s first asparagus pairs with tender butter lettuce and sweet golden beets in this springy salad, which comes together quickly, with a little bit of prep. Red beets are a bit wintry for this particular dish, but fortunately, golden beets are relatively easy to find at most supermarkets and simple to cook (see Tip). Just do so a day in advance, to save yourself some time. Similarly, you can prepare the eggs a day in advance, peeling and quartering them just before serving. A little bit of savvy planning goes a long way here.
Lemon Bars With Pecan Crust
Lemon bars, with their buttery shortbread crust and their tart-as-you-like curd, have become one of the great American desserts ubiquitous to the 20th century cookery canon. These have a little twist with a rich pecan short crust, making them just a bit more well-rounded, the toasty nuttiness serving as a counterbalance to the tart lemon zing. While there are some official notations of its origins in print — most notably in the Chicago Tribune in 1962 — it remains one of those desserts that has seemingly lived in the hearts of modern Americans for as long as we can remember. As a friendly harbinger of spring and a favorite for every summertime cookout or picnic or backyard hang, these bright bites are a great option to make ahead; chilling them overnight makes them easy to cut and sugar right before you plan to serve or carry them to your festivities. For all these reasons and more, lemon bars will likely keep their rightful place as a great American standard for many years to come.
Shawarma-Spiced Grilled Chicken With Tahini-Yogurt Sauce
This beginner-friendly chicken recipe from Lidey Heuck’s cookbook, “Cooking in Real Life” (S&S/Simon Element, 2024), is inspired by spices often used in shawarma, and uses several easy tricks to ensure juicy meat with a nice char. The chicken breasts are pounded slightly, just until they are an even thickness throughout, so they cook quickly and uniformly. (You can skip this step if you’re using thighs.) The yogurt in the marinade does double duty: It tenderizes the chicken and adds a layer of protection between the chicken and the hot grill. The chicken is served with a sprinkle of fresh herbs, a squeeze of lemon juice and a quick, creamy tahini-yogurt sauce that pairs nicely with the warm spices. Should you have any leftover chicken, it would be delicious packed into a wrap with cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and extra tahini-yogurt sauce.
Bourbon-Braised Beef
Bourbon adds a wonderful complexity to budget-friendly boneless beef chuck in this warmly comforting dish. Caramelized tomato paste, maple syrup, thyme and bay leaves provide balance while still highlighting the savory notes. Soy sauce does double duty, adding both salt and flavor. By marinating the meat in acidic lemon juice and cooking it low and slow, this inexpensive cut becomes very tender, proving you don’t need a fancy cut of beef to make an elegant, full-flavored main dish. Leftover braising liquid would make a wonderful base for a French onion soup.
Lemony Pearl Barley Soup
High in comfort, low in fuss, this pearl barley soup answers the question of what to cook when one doesn’t feel like cooking. Made with pantry staples, this simple soup beams with vibrancy. Lemon transforms this hearty soup into a dish that also feels light and restorative, while dill, used generously, reinforces the citrus flavor while bringing an assertive herbaceous edge. Other herbs could step in for dill; consider parsley, cilantro or chives. Spinach is added right at the end, after the heat is turned off, which ensures that the greens maintain a little bite and stay bright. The soup will thicken over time, so if you are making it ahead or have leftovers, simply loosen it up with more stock or water when reheating.
Citrus, Beet and Avocado Salad
This is winter’s caprese: shingled slices of the season’s peak produce dressed simply with olive oil, salt and pepper. The sweet citrus, creamy avocado and earthy beets are really all you need, but trio can serve as a base for salads all year long. Add protein (fresh or tinned seafood, grains, legumes), dairy (burrata, stracciatella, yogurt, feta), more vegetables or fruits (baby greens, chicories, radishes, cucumbers), and flavor boosters like toasted whole spices or nuts, crushed red pepper, herbs, shallots or olives. The beets can be steamed or roasted, or you can purchase them precooked. Any way you make it, this easy-to-assemble salad is a bright, beautiful spot in winter’s shorter, darker days.
Vanilla Cupcakes
This easy recipe makes 12 light, fluffy cupcakes that are packed with vanilla flavor and topped with a classic buttercream frosting. They use the reverse creaming method made popular by author Rose Levy Beranbaum in which the dry ingredients are mixed with a solid fat (butter, in this case), before the liquid ingredients are mixed in, which helps ensure that you don’t overmix your batter. This mixing method, along with the buttermilk and a combination of butter and oil, creates the soft, tender crumb of these cupcakes. The confectioners’ sugar frosting is a simple affair, flavored with lots of vanilla, some lemon juice and a bit of salt to balance out the sweetness. Make sure to whip the frosting until it is completely smooth and soft. This recipe makes enough to frost the cupcakes with a thin layer; for a more generous topping, you’ll want to double it.
Double Celery Salad
This dish employs two kinds of celery: the tender hearts of branch celery and so-called knob celery, also known as celery root or celeriac. It’s a nice salad in winter, for a change of pace. A bed of spicy watercress, arugula or mizuna lends even more of a green hue to this dish.
Green Goddess Chicken Salad Sandwiches
Avocado forms the base of creamy green goddess dressing in this everyday chicken salad recipe. Made with lots of green herbs, capers and scallions, it’s tangy, vinegary and luxuriously creamy without the addition of any dairy or mayonnaise. Feel free to substitute other tender herbs you have on hand — chervil, chives and tarragon would all nod to classic green goddess dressing. For the chicken, you can roast bone-in, skin-on breasts, use leftover chicken or purchase a rotisserie chicken. Breast meat is more traditional for a chicken salad, but if you love thighs, by all means use them here. Pile the chicken salad onto toasted bread with lettuce and tomato for a standout sandwich, or eat it straight from the bowl with salted crackers or pita chips.
Crispy Tuna Cakes
These tuna cakes grow crackly on the outside, but stay velvety on the inside thanks to creamy cannellini beans. They’re served alongside a crisp wedge salad with a briny ranch dressing that is studded with olives. It might seem to produce a lot of dressing, but it’s just enough for smothering the iceberg and dunking the tuna cakes. Best of all, this dish makes use of pantry staples, like canned tuna, beans and olives, so you can make it even when the fridge is looking bare.
Sheet-Pan Turmeric Chicken and Crispy Rice
A layer of crunchy, golden rice at the bottom of a pan is revered across many cultures, be it a Persian tahdig, Korean nurungji or Spanish socarrat, and you can get a similar result by baking oiled rice at high heat on a sheet pan. Here, bone-in chicken legs are coated in a mix of turmeric, ginger and garlic and nestled into a pan of scallion-flecked short-grain rice. As it all roasts, the spiced chicken fat seasons the rice, which turns especially crisp where it meets the edges and bottom of the pan while staying soft and chewy on top. Dabbed with more turmeric-ginger mixture at the end, it’s a richly flavored and textured chicken and rice dish all made in one pan.
Chicken Marinade
Introducing your new go-to chicken marinade. Made from just a handful of pantry ingredients, this simple marinade adds serious flavor to grilled, seared or baked chicken. The acid in the lemon juice and Dijon help tenderize the chicken, the soy sauce adds a salty, savory note and the honey lends a bit of sweetness and encourages the chicken to brown. When using a marinade for chicken, aim for several hours in the refrigerator — too long, and it will begin to break down the meat, resulting in a rubbery texture. For this recipe, anywhere from 2 to 8 hours of marinating is ideal.
Maple Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies
These soft, lightly spiced oatmeal cookies have a sweet surprise in the middle: a pocket of syrupy blueberry-maple jam.The jam helps keep the cookies soft and tender for days when stored in an airtight container at room temperature, so you can bake a batch over the weekend and snack on them all week long. If you can find frozen wild blueberries to make the compote, these will have an even more intense berry flavor, but any blueberries will work in these homey treats.
Habanero Chicken and Broccoli
In this bright, tangy sheet-pan dish, the chicken gets a quick first roast covered in a light oregano and garlic marinade. That quick warmup is followed by a stellar run: The chicken is flipped, broccoli florets get tucked all around and a sweet citrus sauce with the slightest habanero kick drenches the mix. The sauce adds flavor and moisture to the chicken as it roasts and browns, and soaks the broccoli, which chars and tenderizes. Although this can be a complete meal on its own, the ample sauce is so flavorful that you may find yourself craving for something else to soak in it. Rice is the perfect cheerleader to round up the race. The habanero’s heat is tamed by citrus, allowing its zesty and flowery flavors to shine.
Hamachi Sashimi With Ginger Ponzu
At Tiffany’s in the small town of Wailuku in central Maui, hamachi sashimi comes with a sauce so good, diners keep spooning it up long after the fish is gone. Bright and briny at once, it draws from the cuisines of island nations across the Pacific, combining elements of Japanese ponzu and fina’denne’, a CHamoru condiment from Guam that is a blend of shoyu (soy sauce), vinegar or citrus, onions and chiles. The chef Sheldon Simeon adds sweet local onions and ginger in lieu of chiles, for a gentler kick, plus shiso for “effervescence,” he says. To finish, he simmers lemon peel and olive oil over low heat, then strains out the peel so just the olive oil is left, only now sun-possessed. Drizzled at the very end, it gives the fish the vividness of lemon without curing it.
Lemon Drop Martini
Named for the old-fashioned hard candy of the same name, this lemony twist on a classic martini packs a refreshing sweet and sour punch. Vodka and freshly squeezed lemon juice give the drink its tart edge, and a little simple syrup and the orange liqueur Cointreau add sweetness for a well-balanced drink. Served in a chilled martini glass with a lightly sugared rim, the lemon drop makes a festive holiday cocktail.
Berry Jam Buns
A filling made from berry preserves and fresh berries replaces the buttery cinnamon sugar you might expect in a cinnamon roll, for a colorful twist on a favorite. You can use any berry jam you like, but a low-sugar variety will provide the most vibrant fruit flavor. The cream cheese icing is the perfect gooey, creamy topping that gently melts into the tops of the rolls. This dough is adaptable: You can let it rise overnight in the refrigerator, instead of at room temperature, so you can serve fresh, warm rolls for breakfast without getting up at the crack of dawn to make them. If you let the dough rise at room temperature, don’t skip the refrigeration time after the dough rises, as the dough is much, much easier to work with when cold. For the very best texture, these rolls are best served warm, on the day they are baked.
Lemony Skillet Chicken and Brioche
In this comforting one-pan meal, salt-and-pepper chicken thighs roast atop sweet, buttery brioche, which conforms to the chicken like memory foam. The parts cushioning the chicken become soft and tender from the juices, and the bottoms and exposed portions turn golden and toasty. To marry it all, a simple, savory and bright pan sauce is made with shallots, butter, lemon and a touch of miso. Chopped dill lightens the mood. Serve with roasted green beans, or mixed greens tossed with a little lemon and olive oil.