Lunch
2804 recipes found
Greens and Chayote Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Lightness is not an attribute usually associated with enchiladas, the most comforting of Mexican tortilla foods. But these enchiladas, filled with a mix of blanched seasoned chard and succulent diced chayote and covered with a classic cooked tomatillo salsa, are both light and incredibly satisfying.
Herb Fritters
Inspired by a recipe in Clifford A. Wright’s “The Little Foods of the Mediterranean,” these fritters are light and delicate. You can use a mix of herbs and finely chopped greens – mild ones like spinach and chard, or more robust greens like dandelion or arugula – or all herbs, or all greens. You can also use this batter as a vehicle for other finely chopped or grated vegetables, like cabbage or carrots, onions or leeks. The fritters make a great hors d’oeuvre or side dish.
Mushroom Udon Noodle Bowl
Topping the list of the most satisfying meals, a big steaming bowl of noodles in broth nurtures body and soul. Though many noodle soups rely on long-simmered meat stock, this vegetarian broth is quickly prepared and very flavorful. The recipe calls for thick chewy udon noodles, but use another type of noodle, if you wish.
Collard Greens With Farro
Farro with anything is comfort food, and the combination of farro and collard greens is particularly hearty and nutritious. The time required to cook the farro will depend on how long it has been sitting on your shelf. When it’s less than a year old, farro softens nicely. The older it is, the longer it will need to cook.
Endive, Apple and Kasha Salad
Nutty, earthy grains of kasha go beautifully with crunchy, juicy apples and bitter endive, long a favorite salad combo. Cut the apple into small dice – 1/4 to 1/2 inch – to maximize this marriage of grain, fruit, nut and bitter salad green. The acid to oil quotient in the dressing is on the low side; I use lemon juice only and sweeten the mix with a little honey. You could also use agave nectar, and leave out the Gruyère in the salad for a vegan version; though I love the Gruyère here because it, too, has a nutty flavor. This salad holds up well on a buffet.
Penne With Fennel and Tuna
Rice Noodle Salad With Salted Peanuts and Herbs
This satisfying salad has rice noodles and vegetables in equal measure, making it bright, crisp and light. The peanuts add richness and a salty crunch, along with a dose of protein. And the dressing is a little spicy and a lot tangy, with a pungent kick from fish sauce, garlic and ginger. The recipe makes just enough dressing to lightly coat the vegetables and noodles, but if you’re a fan of heavily dressed salads, consider doubling it. Any leftover will keep in the fridge for up to a week, and you’ll be happy to drizzle it on fish, chicken and all kinds of vegetables.
Potato Cavatelli
These are an easy, homey version of handmade pasta that freeze well. They are sturdier and more toothsome than gnocchi but have more character than dried cavatelli. It takes a little practice to get the flip of the indentation just right, but once you get the feel for it you can turn out enough for dinner quickly. They hold up well under a heavy tomato ragù, but also take well to a simple sauce of butter, a little pasta water and Parmesan or pecorino. This recipe is easy to double, too, which leaves plenty to freeze for another night. Spread in a single layer on a baking sheet dusted in flour, then store in a zippered plastic bag.
Teff Polenta Croutons or Cakes
One of the things I like most about teff is the texture of the tiny grains. This is particularly nice when you cut up stiff teff polenta into rounds or squares and fry them in oil. The surface browns beautifully and the little round grains on the surface become toasty and crunchy while the centers remain soft. I serve thin slices with salads, or in place of a cracker, topped with something. The thicker cakes can be used the same way you would use the softer teff polenta, drizzled with oil, topped with a sauce or a vegetable dish, or sprinkled with Parmesan, feta or blue cheese. They can serve as a side dish or at the center of the plate or bowl.
Spinach and Feta Borek
In Turkey, savory pastries like these are made with hand-rolled yufka sheets, but store-bought phyllo dough makes a fine substitute. Often shaped into bite-size parcels, this large version may be cut into wedges. Serve it with a salad of sliced cucumber and radishes, and a bowl of olives, if desired.
Chicken and Tomato Salad With Sumac and Herbs
Layered flavors are the secret behind this chicken salad, from the chef Sara Kramer of Kismet in Los Angeles. After grilling the chicken and letting it rest, reserve the chicken juice to whisk into a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice. Then add chile crisp, that chile-flake-in-oil condiment some Chinese restaurants have on the table, and augment it with toasted and crushed coriander, fennel seed and cardamom. Kismet makes its own shallot powder with dehydrated shallots, but you could use onion powder instead, or fry up some shallots, garlic or onion, mince them with a chef's knife, and add them to the dressing. Finally, the vinaigrette gets a generous spoonful of sumac for an elegantly tart note. You should use the best-looking herbs and greens at your local greenmarket. If there are several kinds of basil or mint, grab them. This recipe is less a precise formulation than a structure for a dish that you will make your own. If you're tight on time, grill the chicken ahead, even the day before (and, if you can’t grill, poach the chicken in chicken stock with aromatic herbs). When it’s time, assemble the ingredients and serve with grilled bread or a bowl of rice.
Spiced Green Beans and Baby Broccoli Tempura
Deep-frying is not something I do often, but after I’ve eaten well-executed tempura at a restaurant and can’t shake the memory of delicious batter-fried vegetables, I get out my wok. I turn on the hood fan, open the window and start heating up oil. I like to play around with different batters and coatings. This spicy, delicate batter is somewhere between a puffy beignet-type coating and a simpler egg, flour and bread-crumb dusting. It’s mostly cornstarch, with a small amount of cornmeal and whole wheat flour — just enough to hold the batter together. I add dukkah, cilantro and cumin for flavor and texture. Ice-cold sparkling water helps keep the batter light; it fries up crispy rather than bready because there’s very little gluten to toughen it. You can use this batter with all sorts of vegetables, but I particularly love green beans and baby broccoli. The batter wraps itself nicely around the smooth beans and nestles in among the spindly flowers at the end of a baby broccoli stem, resulting in lacy, extra-crispy tempura. A wok is ideal for deep-frying. It can accommodate a lot of vegetables at one time without crowding, and it holds heat well. The oil should hover between 350 and 375 degrees so that the vegetables cook quickly and crisp up without absorbing too much oil. Be sure to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches, and use a thermometer. You will be amazed to find a green bean tender and hot inside its crispy coating in two minutes or less.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Kasha
For years I have had uneven results with buckwheat groats, or kasha, as the dry-roasted grains are called. I have tried different methods, both stovetop and oven, and usually mixed the grains with an egg before cooking. Sometimes my grains cooked up to a mush, other times they held their shape but still seemed rather soft and indistinct. I sort of gave up on kasha for a while, opting for more predictable grains and pseudo-grains like quinoa and spelt. But I love the flavor of buckwheat, so this week I took another stab at buckwheat groats with a box of medium-grain kasha I bought at the supermarket – and everything changed. These grains were cracked, like bulgur, something I hadn’t seen before. I followed the directions on the box, and they turned out perfect -- dry and fluffy, with the wonderful nutty/earthy buckwheat flavor I find so appealing. To see if it was the cut of the grain only or the combination of the cut of the grain and the cooking method that gave me such good results, I used the exact same cooking method using whole toasted buckwheat groats. The whole groats turned out better than any I had made before, but they took three times as long to cook than the cracked groats, yielded a little less, and because all of the egg is not absorbed by the whole grains the way it is by the cracked grains, which have more cut surfaces to absorb the egg, you get some egg flakes floating on the top of the cooked kasha, which is not very attractive (though it’s easy to remove them).
Penne With Spicy Cauliflower Sauce
Chicken and Escarole Salad With Anchovy Croutons
Think of this salad as an umami-charged version of a classic Caesar. The central difference is that the egg yolk, which is typically emulsified into a creamy dressing, is plopped directly onto the lettuces, leaving you to break it and let it mingle with the salty, garlicky, lemony dressing, which is bolstered with a bit of soy sauce. (If the whole, raw egg yolks freak you out, swap them for jammy soft-boiled eggs or crispy fried eggs.) The true reason to make this salad, though, is that it’s adorned with chicken-fat-laced anchovy croutons, made in the oven while the chicken finishes cooking. They are worth the price of admission.
Penne Strascinata
Taralli
Taralli are delicious ring shaped rusk-like Italian snacks from Apulia and Campania. Now that I know how easy they are to make I could be in big trouble, as whenever I’ve bought them from one of my favorite Italian delis I have a hard time resisting them. It’s the olive oil, I now know, that makes them special and different from other twice-baked breads. They are crisp but not hard, and this whole wheat version is as good as any traditional taralli I’ve tasted. I particularly like the version with black pepper. But I like them plain, without any embellishment, as well. The olive oil gives them so much flavor on its own. This recipe is based on a recipe in Carol Field’s “Italy In Small Bites.”
Braised Endives With Blood Oranges, Pistachios, and Ricotta Salata
Herb and Radish Salad With Feta and Walnuts
This light, crunchy salad is inspired by sabzi khordan, the heaping platter of fresh herbs, radishes, walnuts and feta cheese that accompanies nearly every Persian meal.
Roasted Pumpkin Salad
Italian Meat Sauce With Half the Meat
It’s been a long time since I have made tomato sauce with meat, and this one transported me back to the first recipe I learned to make. I called it spaghetti sauce, and it was a simple tomato sauce with ground beef. It didn’t taste that much different from this sauce, which has only a quarter pound of meat in it – but that is all it needs to have a rich flavor and a meaty texture. The mushroom base is a perfect stand-in for half the meat; you could double the amount for a vegetarian sauce.
Peter Reinhart’s Whole Wheat Bagels
When I order a whole wheat bagel in a coffee shop what I get is a white bagel with a little bit of whole wheat flour thrown in. These bagels are different; they are truly whole grain. I’ve been enthralled lately with Peter Reinhart’s new cookbook, Bread Revolution. Reinhart, a baking teacher and cookbook author whom I have long admired, has discovered the magic of sprouted whole grain flours, which he uses in the recipes in this book (you can get sprouted whole wheat flour in whole foods stores and from several online sources). He also illuminates many of the mysteries of baking with whole grain flours in general. The recipes that I have tried work with regular whole wheat flour as well; I have Community Grains whole wheat flour on hand but did not have sprouted whole wheat flour when I was developing this week’s Recipes for Health, so that is what I used. One of the important things I learned – relearned really – from Peter is that when you make dough with whole wheat flour, which absorbs liquid more readily than white flour, it is important to give the dough a little time to absorb the water so that it will be workable. So there is a rest after you add the liquid to the flour; you’ll think the dough is going to be way too wet, then it miraculously firms up, in very little time. Reinhart has two methods for bagels in his cookbook; one requires an overnight rest in the refrigerator after shaping (that is the method I have used in the past), the other, made with sprouted wheat flour, can be boiled and baked after rising and shaping. If you use sprouted whole wheat flour Reinhart says the overnight rise isn’t required because the sprouted wheat allows the bagels to develop optimum flavor in a shorter time. I couldn’t discern much of a difference between the flavor of my overnight regular whole wheat bagels and those I made with the shorter rise; and the ones I made with the shorter rise were prettier. Barley malt is the traditional sweetener used in bagel dough and in the water bath, but either honey or agave syrup can be substituted.
Watermelon and Pancetta Risotto
The important thing for this dish is to have good, sweet, ripe watermelon that is firm enough to retain its shape once cubed, as well as good-quality pancetta, cut thick enough so that you can cube it to match the shape of the melon. Don’t use prepackaged pancetta or have it sliced into paper-thin wisps. Also important is to use good chicken stock. The best, obviously, is to make it yourself. But if that’s not available, good, organic, low-sodium stock will work, too.