Lunch
2800 recipes found
Farro With Salmon, Cucumber, Radicchio and Dill
Salmon steams right over toasty farro, saving you from having to wash an extra pan. The silky fish and chewy grains get a refreshing lemony salad of cucumbers and radicchio on top, which is prepared while the farro cooks. Each bite goes from crunchy cool to warm and comforting, though the salad is also good room temperature or cold. If you don't like the bitter edge of radicchio, try thinly sliced endive or fennel instead. For a salty, creamy hit of flavor, sprinkle the top of the salad with crumbled feta.
Smashed Potatoes With Bacon, Cheese and Greens
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Get some nice baseball-sized, yellow-fleshed potatoes, one per person, and cut them into quarters. Toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper on a sheet pan, and slide them into a hot oven to roast, say 425 degrees. While they’re cooking, make yourself useful: Fry some bacon; grate some Cheddar; toss a few large handfuls of spinach or baby kale with olive oil, just enough to lightly coat the leaves; slice some avocados; and see if you have some sour cream in the refrigerator. When the potatoes are soft, pull them from the oven and smash the pieces down with the bottom of a coffee cup or drinking glass. Arrange the smashed potatoes on the sheet pan, and top each portion with greens, a chopped slice of cooked bacon, and plenty of cheese. Return to the oven to melt the cheese, then garnish with avocado and dots of sour cream. Or yogurt! It’s a no-recipe recipe. There are no rules! 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.
Gobi Taka Tin: Vegan Stir-Fried Cauliflower With Peppers and Tomatoes
Irish Stew
The epitome of comfort food, traditional Irish stew has only a few ingredients: mutton, onions and potatoes. In southern Ireland carrots are added, and some cooks venture so far as to add turnips. These days, young lamb often replaces mutton for a more delicate version. Irish stew may be served brothy, or slightly thickened with mashed potato or flour. Find more St. Patrick's Day recipes.
Vegan Vegetable Tempura
Baby Greens With Balsamic-Roasted Turnips and Walnuts
In spring I welcome tender raw turnips into my salads, but I use another approach in the winter. I took some medium-size turnips that had been lingering in my crisper for some weeks, tossed them with balsamic vinegar and olive oil and roasted them. They would make a fine side dish, but I had a salad in mind. I paired the roasted turnips with tender baby greens, walnuts and blue cheese. I have served the turnips warm with the salad and also after they cooled; I liked them best warm.
Roasted Salmon With Miso Rice and Ginger-Scallion Vinaigrette
This simple weeknight meal makes great use of pantry staples to create complex flavors with minimal work. Miso is often used to flavor soups or sauces, and here, it is added to raw rice before cooking, which results in a delightfully sticky, savory steamed rice. Fragrant and nutty basmati is called for, but any long-grain rice will work. Shredded cabbage brings freshness and crunch to the finished dish, but use whatever crispy vegetable you have on hand: shredded brussels sprouts, carrots, snap peas, radishes and iceberg lettuce are all great options. For a heftier meal, add some canned chickpeas, white beans or black beans. To finish, the vibrant tang of the bright ginger-scallion vinaigrette balances the richness of the roasted salmon.
Vegan Pumpkin Soup
Straight from the rum bottle … I mean, pumpkin patch, this curried soup is autumn in a bowl.
Fried Fish Sandwich
This fried fish sandwich doesn’t stray far from the classic fast-food staple: breaded fish, a soft bun, a slice of cheese and tangy tartar sauce. The best part is you can put it together in just about the amount of time it would take to stand in line and order it at the counter. Capers, shallots and fresh dill make this tartar sauce feel a little fancy, but a splash of soy sauce adds the umami that takes it to a very familiar place. Flounder is an affordable choice for the recipe, but if you can’t find it, substitute with sole or any mild flat fish.
Curried Lentil, Squash and Apple Stew
Infused with curry spices and chock-full of wilted spinach, butternut squash and sweet chunks of apple, this unique lentil stew is fragrant and flavorful beyond belief.
Ham and Cheese Pasta With a Handful of Peas
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Pick up a box of large shells — the ones the size of a knuckle, so they hold a little pasta water in them. Pick up a ham steak from the butcher or the corner of the supermarket meat display, and dice it. Pick up a bag of frozen organic peas as well — they’re sweeter. You’ll need a block of good Swiss if you can find it, or some Jarlsberg if you can’t. (Hey, it melts like a dream.) Set a large pot of salted water to boil, and prepare your pasta. While it cooks, get to work on the next burner, browning the ham in a pat of good unsalted butter in a skillet. Offstage, grate about a cup of cheese into a large serving bowl. When the pasta has been cooked for just shy of the time called for on its packaging, throw in a handful of peas, cook another minute, then drain, reserving a little cooking water. Toss the whole mess into the cheese, along with the hot ham, another pat or two of butter and a splash of the pasta water. Watch as the cheese goes soft and ribbony in the heat, and the fat of the ham mingles with the butter and the pasta water, and the shells pick up some of it and grab peas in their valves. Shave some Parmesan over the top. Don’t you want to eat that right now? 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.
Creamy Pasta With Smoked Salmon, Arugula and Lemon
One selling point of smoked salmon is that you don't need to do much to it to get it on the table. Fold it on top of toast and dab it with sour cream and you have the lazy man's cocktail party. But take the salmon one or two steps further and you break out of the cliché. Salmon's buttery fat and smoke serve as useful flavoring elements. In this easy 15-minute meal, it's chopped up and used as a counterweight in pasta tossed with full-fat Greek yogurt, arugula, fresh dill, lemon zest and juice. It is, at once, lively and comforting.
Spring Onion and Cheese Potato Cake, Two Ways
This potato cake is a great recipe to build on when seeking to feed a hungry crowd resourcefully, pulling whatever cheese, vegetables or spices might need using up. Here, I’ve included two variations, one using frozen peas and thyme, and the other using jarred peppers and harissa. You can get as thrifty as you like by making use of what you have: frozen spinach instead of the peas, for example, or some shredded mozzarella to replace the Parmesan. The recipe is yours: Make what you want of it! Serve this potato cake warm with crème fraîche, a squeeze of lemon and a side salad, if you like.
Irish Tacos
You can certainly eat corned beef with boiled cabbage and carrots, but it can be a great deal more exciting to pile the shredded meat — ruddy pink, salty, fatty and meltingly sweet — into warm flour tortillas, then top it with a bright, crunchy, slightly fiery cabbage slaw. The contrast between the soft and the crisp, the salt and the sweet, is fantastic — particularly if you adorn each taco with a few pickled jalapeños and, perhaps, an additional swipe of mayonnaise. It’s not fusion cooking, nor appropriation. It’s just the fact that everything tastes good on a warm tortilla.
Cider-Spiked Fish Pie
This recipe for a smoky fish pie comes from the British food writer Ruby Tandoh. The filling is a simple mix of peas, cod and smoked haddock, gently poached in milk, thickened with roux and spiked with dry cider. Don't worry if the fish isn't completely cooked when you're putting together the pie; it will finish up in the oven, where it bubbles under a thick layer of mashed potato and grated cheese. The result is tender and luxuriously creamy comfort food.
Kuku Sabzi (Persian Herb Frittata)
Kuku, which is like a Persian frittata, comes in many forms, but this one, packed to the brim with herbs, is my favorite. Washing and picking through the piles of herbs can be overwhelming if you’re not used to staring down a mountain of produce, so feel free to prepare them in advance. I particularly love kuku sabzi for the contrast between its vivid-green herbaceous interior and its dark, sweet crust. Kuku is traditionally served with flatbread and a selection of crunchy and acidic condiments to balance the sweetness of the herbs; my favorites are fresh radishes, the chopped eggplant pickles called liteh and chunks of soft, salty feta cheese. Leftover kuku slathered with mast-o khiar makes for a wonderful sandwich.
Roasted Salmon With Toasted Sesame Slaw
Raw bean sprouts are the unexpected star in this version of coleslaw. The toasted sesame-seed vinaigrette brings out the natural earthiness in the crisp sprouts and shredded cabbage. This slaw, beaming with bright ginger, lemon and scallion, is the perfect accompaniment to silky, rich salmon. For a more filling meal, serve with white or brown rice on the side.
Pasta With Prosciutto and Whole Garlic
This pasta dish, known as maccheroni alla San Giovanniello in Italy, is amazing in the summer months, when there are good fresh tomatoes around. But you can make it any time of year with canned tomatoes. You could also make it with much less prosciutto, really just enough to season the oil — a quarter cup or so. No matter how much you use, start with a hunk of prosciutto so you can dice chunks; you don’t want little thin slices. If you've got great basil, you can even skip the cheese. If you use fresh tomatoes, you can blanch and peel the tomatoes if you don't like the skins, but it's not really necessary.
Simple Marinara Sauce
Recipes hardly come easier. This marinara sauce is similar to our fresh tomato sauce recipe, but canned tomatoes stand in for the fresh ones so you won’t have to peel the tomatoes or put them through a food mill. If you buy chopped tomatoes in juice, you won’t even have to dice them.
Wintertime Tomato Soup
Though canned tomatoes are not exactly heirloom, they often are older varieties bred for flavor, not for sturdiness in shipping. Roasting them intensifies their flavor and adds a layer of complexity. Stop cooking them in the oven when the edges of the tomatoes begin to blacken.
Potato Gratin With Swiss Chard and Sumac Onions
This is not your typical potato gratin: The Cheddar and brown-butter pine nuts make it rich but not overly so, as the sumac onions and lemon juice lift the gratin to vibrant heights. Sumac is a tart and astringent spice used heavily in Middle Eastern cooking, adding sharpness to food where needed. These onions are great thrown into pasta and salads, or served with roasted chicken. The gratin can stand as a veggie main with a zesty salad alongside, as an accompaniment to your protein of choice or as part of a larger spread. Get ahead by making the onions and preparing all your ingredients (except the potatoes) well in advance, so they’re ready to be assembled together before baking. Once the whole thing goes in the oven, you’ll have ample time to get any accompaniments ready. You can serve this warm, but it also sits well to be served at room temperature.
Classic Pasta Alla Norma
This is down-home, primal Sicilian cooking, using inexpensive and commonly available ingredients: olive oil, eggplant, tomato and pasta. A showering of grated ricotta salata and toasted bread crumbs adorns this humble yet justly famous dish. The Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini adored it with such a passion that it was eventually named after his 19th-century opera "Norma" — or so goes the story.
Salmon in Fig Leaves
While this salmon dish evokes pure summer in California, it’s easily done almost anywhere. The salmon is king salmon, and its season is summer, which coincides perfectly with the ripening of figs in all but the northernmost parts of the country. There is nothing better than a good fig, but for this recipe, incorporate the underused leaves, which make a perfect package for the fish, contributing a kind of nutty flavor to it.
Grilled Corn and Tomato Salsa Salad
At our farmers’ market we picked up a dozen ears of corn for a weekend barbecue. With several ears left over, I repurposed the corn as the starting point for two salads. One emphasized cherry tomatoes, the other Italian parsley, both in plentiful supply at the farmers’ market.