Main Course
8665 recipes found
Fish With Citrus-Chile Sauce
This light yet earthy sauce lends a generous, almost floral warmth to any white, sturdy fish. For heat, there are crushed Calabrian chiles, smoky and sunny; for a mellow sourness, Moscatel vinegar — feel free to substitute apple cider vinegar and a little sugar to approximate the same fruitiness; and for funk, fermented white pepper (although regular white pepper will work too). Other notes include delicate marjoram, cousin to oregano but less forward, with its comforting contour of balsam, and Timur pepper from Nepal, fragrant and bright, calling to mind a just-peeled tangerine. (If you use Sichuan pepper instead, give it a citrus boost with extra orange juice and a shower of orange zest.) The sauce comes out denser than a vinaigrette but still loose and the orange-red of a young sunset.
Soba Noodles With Ginger Broth and Crunchy Ginger
This noodle dish celebrates the pungent, spicy notes of ginger by both infusing it in stock to create a warming broth and frying it with shallots and panko to create crunchy ginger crumbs you’ll want to sprinkle onto everything: eggs, rice or even a savory porridge. Feel free to double the amount of the ginger crumbs, if you like; they’ll keep in an airtight jar at room temperature for up to one week. Serve these noodles with your protein of choice — tofu, fish, leftover roast chicken — or any cooked vegetable for a complete meal.
Roasted Chickpeas and Peppers With Goat Cheese
In this quick, colorful sheet-pan dinner, sweet bell peppers and spicy chiles caramelize as they roast, becoming even more intense under the oven’s high heat. Crunchy chickpeas and soft bits of goat cheese add flavor, texture and protein, rounding out the dish. Most of the work here takes place in the oven, leaving you free to make a salad if you want a cool and crisp accompaniment. Note that this recipe serves two or three; if you want to double it, be sure to use two sheet pans and add a few minutes to the cooking time so everything has a chance to turn golden brown.
Five-Spice Butternut Squash in Cheesy Custard
Orange butternut squash, golden custard and fiery-red pepper and sesame topping reflect the colors of fall in this dish. It’s perfect for a festive brunch, as it’s filling enough to keep you going until the big feast, and special enough to really feel like you’re celebrating. Serve this with some lightly cooked greens, if you like.
Han Oak Galbijjim
This is a home cook’s take on the short-rib stew the chef Peter Cho serves at Han Oak, the beautiful homestyle Korean restaurant in Portland, Ore., that he runs with his wife, Sun Young Park. It is fragrant and sweet, with deep caramelized flavors that come in part from roasting the meat and vegetables separately before combining them in the braising liquid. Cho fries rice cakes before adding them to the stew, but you can just slide them in plain, if you prefer. Either way, the addition of greens at the end gives the dish an exciting brightness, a zip that many galbijjims lack.
Tuna Poke
This is a dish that comes from Long Island, New York, not the Big Island of Hawaii, a Northeastern take on a Pacific classic. I’ve made it with Atlantic bonito caught offshore and yellowfin tuna bought at the market, the meat trimmed, cubed and mixed with sesame oil and soy sauce, a little chile-garlic sauce and lot of chopped scallions. I top the salad with roasted macadamia nuts and a few vigorous shakes of furikake, a Japanese seasoning that is made of sesame seeds, dried fish and seaweed, salt and sugar. It makes for about the most delicious eating in the world.
Lemony Fish and Orzo Soup
This warming, weeknight one-pot meal is inspired by avgolemono, the Greek lemony chicken soup that’s rendered silky from egg whisked into its broth. Here, the technique of adding an egg mixture at the end creates a creamy soup that remains light in body. Mild, flaky fish, such as sea bass or cod, pairs beautifully with the buttery leek-and-garlic broth, which is fortified with clam juice for extra briny flavor. Orzo adds texture, while a final addition of freshly grated ginger brightens the soup. For a thicker, stew-like meal, make the soup an hour ahead and let it rest at room temperature (it will thicken as it sits); gently reheat before serving.
Liège Waffles
These rich Belgian yeast waffles take a bit of planning (an overnight rise), but one bite and you'll forgive the extra time they take and the giant mess they leave on your waffle iron. With their buttery brioche consistency and pockets of sweet sticky sugar throughout, they're decidedly more dessert than breakfast. Don’t worry if you can’t find pearl sugar. Granulated sugar and water are all you need for a D.I.Y. version that yields excellent results.
Spoonbread
Popular in Virginia, the Carolinas and elsewhere in North America, spoonbread has a long history thought to date back to the Sewee tribe of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Somewhat closer to soufflé than cornbread, its tender texture comes from eggs and the creamed corn. It’s slightly sweet from the kernels, a bit of sugar and vanilla extract, but gently tangy from sour cream, relying upon simple ingredients that come together into something great. This version uses fresh or frozen crawfish, but don’t worry if crawfish isn’t available to you: Spoonbread is still wonderful without it.
Cheesy Baked Pasta With Sausage and Ricotta
Like a cross between baked ziti and sausage lasagna, this mozzarella-topped pasta is rich with ricotta and crushed tomatoes — and cooks entirely in one pan, including the pasta. The Italian sausage adds meaty depth to the sauce, but vegetarians can leave it out or use their favorite plant-based sausage instead.
El Cholo’s Sonora-Style Enchiladas
These chicken-filled, Sonora-style enchiladas have been offered at El Cholo in Los Angeles since it began as the Sonora Café in 1923. They are based on the recipe of Rosa Borquez, who started the restaurant with her husband, Alejandro. Both were born in the Mexican state of Sonora. This dish, with stacked tortillas rather than rolled, is known in Sonora as “enchiladas chatas,” flat enchiladas. Adapted from “A Taste of History: With Authentic El Cholo Recipes” by Ron Salisbury (2020), this recipe includes a chicken stew base with tomatoes, poblano and white pepper, plus a classic red enchilada sauce with smoky dried chiles and a green enchilada sauce with verdant notes from tomatillos, fresh chiles and spinach. A fried egg crowns the top.
Escovitch Fish
In Jamaica, escovitch is fish rubbed with garlic and allspice, shallow-fried until the skin crisps, then doused with hot vinegar, carrots, onions and wicked Scotch bonnets, all swirled together and bubbling. Leave the dish out at room temperature, the better for the vinegar to work its alchemy, creating not so much a sauce as sheer lushness. Francine Turone’s mother would make escovitch in the morning and let it sit all day on the counter, the flavors intensifying with each hour. Come dinnertime, little effort was required beyond putting out plates — which makes it ideal, Ms. Turone says, when cooking for friends: “You can make it and then go away.” Her version allows for boneless fillets instead of the traditional whole fish, and includes an unexpected ingredient, raisins, inspired by travels with her Italian husband and transposed from a Venetian snack of deep-fried sardines in vinegar.
Fluke au Gratin
This is a very old recipe, taken from the kitchen of Henri’s in Lynbrook, N.Y., opened by an extravagant French restaurateur named Henri Charpentier in 1910. It asks for flounder, known on Long Island as fluke, but you could make it with cod or haddock or halibut, with freshwater trout or catfish, with any mild-flavored fish. It’s an elegant and really quite simple preparation, the fish fillets baked on top of and beneath a butter sauce cooked with chopped shallots, garlic, chives, parsley and minced mushrooms, brightened with lemon juice and white wine, and with bread crumbs, sliced mushrooms and dots of butter strewn across the top. You can make the sauce in the morning, if you like, and assemble the dish for the oven just before dinner, making it a breeze for weeknight entertaining. But it’s no stretch to do it all, as Charpentier might have said, “à la minute.”
BBQ Chicken Pizza
This simple recipe celebrates a 1980s classic invented by the American pizza genius Ed LaDou (whose fingerprints are also on Wolfgang Puck’s famous smoked-salmon pizza). The pizza matches the flavors of chicken with barbecue sauce, red onion, two kinds of cheese and a little cilantro. Use homemade dough and barbecue sauce, cook it in the hottest setting of your oven, and the classic pie goes from good to great. Want to make the recipe vegetarian? Simply substitute mushrooms for the chicken and sauté until most of their moisture is evaporated.
Roasted White Bean and Tomato Pasta
With a flavor profile inspired by pasta e fagioli, this weeknight pasta recipe coaxes rich flavor out of simple ingredients while enlisting the oven to create a luscious sauce from roasted tomatoes and white beans. Essentially, the dish requires just three steps: Boil pasta, roast your sauce ingredients, then stir together until the pasta is glossy. When roasted in the oven, the beans become crispy, like croutons, and break down in a way that helps thicken the sauce. Though a flurry of freshly grated cheese would be welcome on top, this otherwise-vegan dish doesn’t need it: The roasted tomato sauce is rich and luscious, fortified by starchy pasta water, roasted beans and a good glug of extra-virgin olive oil.
Yogurty Butter Beans With Pistachio Dukkah
This is the kind of mezze you’d want to serve at the first sign of spring, when the days are a little brighter, the air a little lighter and the cooler temperatures are finally behind us (we made it!). Of course, it’s delicious all year round. This dish is all about the layering of crunchy dukkah over tender butter beans with peas and herbs coated in a creamy, garlicky yogurt dressing for the perfect bite. Serve with crisp lettuce, or bread if you like, as a light lunch or as part of a mezze spread.
Pesto Pasta With White Beans and Halloumi
This vegetarian weeknight dinner comes together in half an hour and is made super special with the addition of halloumi. It looks like a fluffy cloud when grated, and it gives the pasta just the right amount of salty tang. Be sure to use a very fine grater, like a Microplane, when you prepare the halloumi, as it will only add to the fluffy effect (which is what you’re after). This is a full meal in its own right, but you can also serve it alongside a big green salad.
Vegan Creamy Leek Pasta
This four-ingredient leek pasta coaxes as much flavor and texture as possible out of a few leeks, a box of pasta, some olive oil and lemon (plus salt and pepper). Though it doesn’t take long, this recipe is not fast — it’s even a little bit fussy. You’ll julienne and fry the leek whites to create a crispy garnish, then blend the resulting leek oil with boiled leek greens to create a silky sauce. You could absolutely make this dish on a weeknight, but since the recipe revolves around technique, it’s best not to rush. It’s about enjoying the process as much as the results.
Lamb Meatball and Semolina Dumpling Soup With Collard Greens
This hearty soup is a meal in a bowl. It is very much inspired by Iraqi kubba hamuth. “Hamuth” means sour in Arabic, which refers to the soup’s sour tomato and lemon broth. Traditionally, the soup contains lamb-stuffed semolina dumplings called “kubba.” The divergence here is that they exist as two separate components — meatballs and semolina dumplings — and add a wonderful textural contrast. If you can’t find collard greens, feel free to swap these out for an equal amount of Tuscan kale.
Beans Marbella
This recipe started as a wisp of an idea in The Veggie, our weekly newsletter about vegetarian home cooking, inspired by that iconic dish chicken Marbella, made famous in “The Silver Palate Cookbook.” Instead of chicken, a pot of thin-skinned, creamy beans and their rich cooking liquid form the base, which are then added to a pan of fried garlic and reduced red wine with plenty of olive oil, prunes and olives. They’re then topped with a simple roasted potato salad, dressed with vinegar-soaked shallots, capers and parsley. It’s not an exact replica of chicken Marbella, but it’s a beautiful and satisfying way to enjoy its familiar flavors — the tangy, briny sharpness of vinegar, capers and olives, set against the sweetness of prunes. You can serve the dish as is, but it’s even more luxurious with some thickly sliced and toasted bread, brushed with olive oil and garlic.
James Beard’s Farmer’s Chicken
This recipe from the eminent American food writer came to The Times through the chef Andrew Zimmern, who was a frequent guest at James Beard’s legendary Sunday and holiday open houses when he was a child. The savory combination of red peppers, onions, raisins, almonds and green olives was new and exciting to him in the 1970s, and still tastes fresh today.
Spinach and Chermoula Pie
This pie is a great way to use up your freezer staples: that one bag of frozen spinach and that packet of puff pastry sitting in the back. Feel free to make this pie your own by playing around with the herbs and spices. You can also veganize it by leaving out the feta and using a vegan-friendly puff pastry. Typically used as a marinade or condiment, chermoula is a North African spice paste with a multitude of variations. Here, it is used twice, once to flavor the base and then again as a sauce to drizzle alongside.
Southern Macaroni and Cheese
There is macaroni and cheese, and then there is special occasion macaroni and cheese like this one. Unlike most recipes, which start with a roux, this one begins with a milk-and-egg base, which gives the dish an incredibly rich, silky taste. It’s adapted from Millie Peartree, the owner of Millie Peartree Fish Fry & Soul Food restaurant in the Bronx, who has been making this dish since she was a little girl. The recipe was passed down in her family for generations, but because of the generous amount of cheese used, the dish was only made for events like Christmas and Thanksgiving. Extra-sharp Cheddar adds tartness and a layer of Colby Jack creates a gooey, molten center. If you can’t find a Colby Jack blend, shredded mozzarella or a Mexican-style blend will work in its place.
Leek and Cod Tortilla
Inspired by tortilla Española, this version of the classic Spanish dish uses mild, sweet leeks instead of onions. The addition of paprika-seasoned cod adds unexpected bites of smoky flavor, and cutting the potatoes into small cubes allows the tortilla to cook faster. The leek- and garlic-infused cooking oil is used to make a flavorful aioli to accompany the omelet. Store leftover flavored oil in the fridge and use it to make salad dressings, to sauté greens or fry eggs.