Lunch
2800 recipes found
Lobster Pasta With Yellow Tomatoes and Basil
This is an uncomplicated dish for warm weather and sunny days. Olive oil, garlic, hot pepper, barely warmed tomatoes and tons of fresh basil are the only ingredients besides lobster and dried pasta, preferably a variety with a bit of texture, like frilly edged reginette, cooked perfectly al dente. The only real work is cooking the lobsters and chopping the meat. Once that’s done, go out and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.
Pasta With Cherry Tomatoes and Arugula
This simple, glorious dish, popular in the southern Italian region of Puglia, is an argument for keeping cherry tomato plants in your garden or on your fire escape. Uncooked tomato sauce is juicy and cool on a summer evening. The recipe asks only that you halve the tomatoes (quarter them if they are particularly large), then combine them with garlic, salt, balsamic vinegar, arugula, basil and olive oil. Toss that with cooked pasta, and shower with salty, firm shavings of ricotta salata. Arugula adds wonderful flavor (all the more if you can find peppery wild arugula) and a nutritional punch.
Citrus Rice Salad With Parmesan
In all of American cooking there is probably no term less meaningful than “salad.” I’m racking my brain for a way to narrow the definition, but the best I can do is a dictionary-like “mixture of food, usually cold or at room temperature, with some kind of dressing.” That’s not saying much, but it opens a world of opportunities, especially when the base ingredient is rice, which offers a far wider variety of flavors and textures than any other grain.
Green Strata With Goat Cheese and Herbs
This herb-infused savory bread pudding makes an excellent brunch dish or a light dinner. It gets its hue from a copious amount of braising greens pureed into the custard — baby kale, mustard greens, chard. Use all of one or a combination. The bread cubes can soak for up to 24 hours before baking, so plan on assembling this in advance. But don’t bake it until just before serving. You want the eggs on top to still have their bright yellow, runny yolks. If you’re not a goat cheese fan, substitute dollops of fresh ricotta instead.
Orange-Cardamom Pancakes
It’s no wonder pancakes are a weekend staple: Their batter comes together in just 5 minutes using ingredients you’re likely to have on hand. Here, ground cardamom and fresh orange zest provide an aromatic boost that is sweet and addictive, but subtle enough that you can still pair your pancakes with any typical accompaniments. The recipe is plentiful enough for 12 full-size pancakes, or twice the number of mini pancakes if preparing brunch for a crowd. (As a bonus, the pancake base also doubles as a waffle batter.) A drizzle of maple syrup and a pat of butter are mandatory; a dollop of warmed orange marmalade or chopped Medjool dates would be rousing.
Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta
Pamela Sherrid’s summer pasta, which The Times ran a recipe for in 1996, is a quintessential crossover dish: part tomatoes and warm pasta, part pasta salad and the best of both. It includes ripe summer tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil and cubes of fresh mozzarella. Ms. Sherrid’s recipe relies on prudent technique and a slacker’s sense of pace. First you combine the garlic, basil and oil and let the mixture macerate. A few hours later you add tomatoes and let it sit some more. Next, you pour the cooked rigatoni over the tomatoes, and cubes of mozzarella over the rigatoni. Then you gently mix the cheese into the pasta, coating it with a buttery veil of fat, before tossing it with the tomatoes at the bottom. If you have great tomatoes and mozzarella and you don’t overcook the pasta, it is a remarkably good dish. A puddle of sweet and salty tomato broth will form at the bottom of your bowl, so make sure you have some bread on hand to soak it up.
Bright Green Pesto and Its Many Uses
I’ve been making pesto forever and have never been able to keep it bright green. It has such promise, such flavor, and I know that the pasta or whatever else I use it in will taste wonderful. But I’ve always been frustrated by how quickly the basil oxidizes and the color goes from bright green to drab. So I decided to try blanching the leaves very briefly to see if that would solve the problem and voilà! It did. You need to blanch the basil for only five seconds, and you don’t want to blanch it for more than 10. Doing this leaches out a wee bit of the basil’s vivid flavor, but not enough to change that of the pesto significantly. The texture and color are wonderful, and the pesto will keep for several days in the refrigerator (but it’s best to wait until you’re ready to use the pesto before adding the garlic and cheese).
Caesar Salad
Making the dressing for Caesar salad is an exercise in the art of layering salty ingredients to build flavor; there are anchovies, Parmesan and Worcestershire sauce, in addition to the salt itself. (There is also garlic, which is pounded with a pinch of salt using a mortar and pestle to make a smooth paste.) Since a delicious balanced dressing depends on working in the right amounts of each of those ingredients — and the other, unsalted elements — refrain from adding the salt crystals until you’ve added the right amount of everything else. This recipe is adapted from "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" by Samin Nosrat, and it's absolutely worth making the torn croutons — store-bought croutons can’t compete, and you'll have leftovers for another salad.
Chile-Oil Fried Eggs With Greens and Yogurt
This recipe, adapted from a dish served at MeMe’s Diner in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, is a brunch power move. Eggs sit atop wilted greens on a bed of yogurt, all surrounded by seeded chile oil. The fresh yogurt cuts through the chile oil’s heat, and the seed mix adds layers of flavor and crunch. If you’re feeling lazy — it is brunch after all — skip the greens, or use everything spice mix and peanuts, for the seed mix. But don’t skimp on the chile oil: It’s the best part. Scale it up to have extra on hand for future use, or use store-bought if you like. (You’ll need about 1 cup for four servings.) Serve with toast, to sop up the extra oil.
Fruit-Filled Scuffins
The scuffin is a frankenpastry — part scone, part muffin and, like a doughnut, filled with jam — but despite its complex genetics, it is very easy to make. It is even somewhat healthy (for a pastry, that is), using whole grain flour and flaxseeds, and keeping the butter minimal. If you are more of a butter maximalist, feel free to indulge by making a crumb topping for the scuffins: Measure 3 ounces cool butter (instead of 2 ounces melted butter) and use your fingers to rub it into the dry ingredients until coarse crumbs form. The spices can be varied (swap in nutmeg, ginger or allspice for the cinnamon or cardamom), and so can the jams. Do not use jelly, though — only jams, conserves, preserves or fruit butter will do.
Angel Hair Pasta With Peppers and Tomatoes
This simple pasta celebrates the end-of-summer harvest and is perfect for a light lunch or supper, or as part of a buffet. Bell peppers and other sweet peppers — like Corno di Toro and many other varieties of peppers of every hue — ripen in late summer, the same time as long-awaited flavorful (and multicolored) tomatoes, making their pairing seem almost preordained.
Crisp Pork With Scrambled Eggs and Yellow Chives
This recipe came to The Times from Charles Phan, chef at the Slanted Door in San Francisco. You can substitute green Chinese chives for yellow Chinese chives (which are available at Asian markets), but you will lose some of the spiciness.
Breakfast Udon
This bowl of udon is inspired by the delicate noodle dishes often served as the first meal of the day in Japan. A light, savory broth of dashi, soy sauce and mirin provides a gentle kickstart to your morning. Dashi, a simple seaweed-based stock, is foundational to many Japanese dishes, bolstering the umami flavors of the ingredients and providing balance to the overall dish. If you have 10 minutes and a piece of dried kombu in your pantry, make a quick kombu dashi (see Tip), but in a pinch, a lightly seasoned vegetable stock works, too. The jammy seven-minute egg and wilted spinach are enough to make this dish feel substantial, though you could also add slices of pan-fried tofu, tempura vegetable, seaweed or other hearty toppings to transform this into a complete weeknight dinner.
Greek Scrambled Eggs
For a fresh and bright variation on your morning eggs, try strapatsatha, a simple Greek dish of scrambled eggs with tomatoes. It's as simple as can be: The best, freshest tomatoes you can find are grated on a box grater and reduced a bit, then scrambled with eggs, a little olive oil and garlic. A handful of tangy feta crumbles finishes it off.
Apple, Lime and Chia Smoothie
I love the pale green color of this smoothie. Granny Smith and lime make a great marriage and the yogurt and chia seeds make the sweet and tart smoothie substantial enough to get me through the morning.
Whole Wheat Apple Pecan Scones
As I was playing around with the mixture for these not-too-sweet scones I learned that if I used as much liquid (in the form of buttermilk or yogurt) as I usually do in my scones, they wouldn’t be flaky. That is because the apple provides plenty of liquid. You just need to add enough buttermilk or yogurt to bring the dough together. Otherwise you will have drop biscuits and they will have a consistency more akin to a soft cookie than to a biscuit or scone. Juicy apples like Braeburn, Crispin and Empire work well for these scones.
Corn and Jalapeño Muffins
The flavor of these buttery, miniature muffins is amped up with sautéed corn kernels and jalapeño chiles. They are the perfect accompaniment to a pot of beans, but are tender and delicate enough to serve with an elegant chicken stew.
Date Smoothie With Brown Rice and Almond Milk
This is inspired by Bryant Terry’s recipe for date-sweetened almond milk, which I came across in his wonderful cookbook “Afro-Vegan.” You could use commercial almond milk, but it will taste much richer if you make your own. Blanch and skin almonds (it goes quickly), soak overnight, blend and strain. The smoothie is a simple one, subtly sweetened by the dates, and mildly nutty. If you want to introduce another flavor into the mix add a half banana. I liked it both ways but I think I prefer the simpler version, so I have made the banana optional.
Blueberry Kefir Smoothie With Greens
This green smoothie is really more blue than green, as the color of the blueberries predominates. But the greens are there, so in my mind it’s still a green drink. Half a banana wasn’t quite enough to punch up the flavor of the drink, but I found that a whole banana did the trick. I used a baby greens mix that included baby kale, chard (red and green), and spinach.
Regina’s Butter Biscuits
People travel long distances to eat Regina Charboneau’s biscuits. She built a blues club in San Francisco, called Biscuits and Blues, on their reputation. And in her hometown, Natchez, Miss., her biscuits are considered the best. She mixes traditional French culinary training with tricks passed on through generations of Southern bakers to create a layered, rich biscuit that has to be frozen to be at its flaky best. The dough will seem rough and the fat too chunky at first, but persevere. Using a tea towel as a base to move and manage the dough until it rolls out smoothly is a brilliant technique that makes the whole process easier and neater.
Ham-and-Cheese Brioche Pudding
Bread pudding, an old-fashioned frugal dessert, usually contains day-old bread, milk, eggs and a bit of fruit, fresh or dried, baked in a sweet custard. This savory version, made with ham and cheese, employs tender buttery brioche. It is easier to make than a quiche, but has a similar delicacy, perfect for lunch or a light supper.
Marinated Shaved Fennel with Avocado and Minneola Tangelos
This recipe, from the chef Norman Van Aken, came to The Times in 2001 as part of a story about the raw food movement, in which every element of every dish is raw, organic and vegan -- no meat, fish, eggs or dairy products.
Einkorn Risotto With Fresh Herbs
This risotto is fairly simple; it includes shallots, garlic (which is optional) and a generous mix of fresh marjoram, chives and parsley. It has so much depth of flavor that it’s rich and satisfying even without the Parmesan stirred in at the end, which makes this a perfect main dish or side for vegans as well as omnivores.
Neapolitan Easter Bread (Casatiello)
This recipe is steeped in Neapolitan tradition: It’s made the day after the big Easter feast, as a way to use up leftover cheese and meat. An Easter Monday picnic is also a custom, so the fact that all the goodies are already wrapped up in the bread makes it a very transportable option. The herby pesto and Gruyère, though, are my own nontraditional additions. This can be baked and presented in various ways, but the ring both looks great and has some nice symbolism — the circle of life and renewal associated with spring in general and Easter in particular. A very large (10-inch, or 24-centimeter) tube pan with a flat bottom is perfect, but you can improvise with a cake pan, creating a hole in the middle with an overturned bowl or ball of aluminum foil placed in the middle of the pan.