Main Course
8665 recipes found
Roasted Mushrooms in Ata Din Din
Earthy mushrooms hold their own among a piquant red pepper relish — a riot of flavors. The relish’s base is known in Yoruba as ata din din, a condiment like sauce common throughout West Africa made from ground bell pepper, onions, chiles and sometimes tomatoes. Roast the mushrooms until lightly browned and crisp, as they absorb a lot more flavor when they've been slightly dehydrated. Pickled onion adds crunch and a hint of acid, and a scattering of fresh herbs gives it all a refreshing lightness, while being a pretty garnish. Serve over steamed rice and fried sweet plantains, or reserve as a vegetable filling for moin moin.
Spinach and Sardine Sandwich
Whenever I fly, I like to go armed with lunch, as the food in airports tends to be both appalling and expensive. Lately I’ve hitting the road with sandwiches that combine produce with canned fish, like sardines, herring, trout or smoked salmon — all of them high in omega-3 fatty acids, packed with protein and delicious. In some of this week’s sandwiches, I used small whole-wheat English muffins that were lightly toasted. The muffins won’t fall apart, even with a juicy filling like Greek salad, and I like the size. This is inspired by the classic Mediterranean combination of sardines and spinach. I like to use lightly smoked sardines in olive oil for it.
Pasta With Mushrooms, Fried Eggs and Herbs
This fall-inspired, earthy pasta uses a combination of mushrooms for depth of flavor and is topped with a runny egg, which silkens up the sauce. Supermarkets these days generally have a good selection of different varieties such as cremini and shiitake, but if your standard white-button mushroom is all that’s available, this dish will still be a winner. If you’re not feeling pasta, the mushrooms are equally good served on top of creamy polenta or on their own. Red wine not optional.
Smashed Chicken Burgers With Cheddar and Parsley
These fresh, flavorful chicken burgers have a crunchy exterior, a tender interior and a healthy slathering of limey Dijon mayonnaise. They’re paired with salad that’s prepared using leftover burger ingredients, and a little avocado and lettuce. Serve the burgers between lightly toasted buns, as the recipe suggests, or skip the bread and enjoy them without for a lighter dinner.
Tomato-Ginger Chicken and Rice Soup
Chicken and rice soup is meant to be gentle, and this one is. But it’s also subtly spicy from fried ginger, and a little sweet from tomatoes used twice: in paste form to build a caramelized base and in fresh, bright bursts. The final additions of fish sauce, lime and sesame or chile oil make the soup reminiscent of sizzling rice soup and tom yum, and allow you to adjust how robust you need the soup to be. Add less for a calming, mild soup and more if you need something powerful and pungent to clear your mind and congestion.
Shrimp and White Beans With Fennel and Pancetta
This quick, one-pan meal relies heavily on pantry staples. Browning pancetta or bacon adds richness to the tomato sauce, but skip it if you like. Anise-flavored fennel and seeds are incorporated into the soffrito, which plays nicely with the sweetness of the shrimp and the creaminess of the beans. But if you don’t like them, leave them out. Serve the dish in deep bowls with thick slices of garlic-rubbed toast, finish the dish with a flurry of fresh herbs, and pair it with a glass of something red, light and bright.
Pasta With Corn, Zucchini And Tomatoes
The two things I love most about this dish of summer vegetables and pasta are the crunch of the corn against the tenderness of the pasta and the fact that I cannot seem to settle on a combination of flavorings that I think is best. Chile powder, a little bit of cayenne, perhaps some cilantro are all excellent choices. But with pasta this seems too heretical even for a culinary atheist like me, so I usually go in a tamer direction: a suspicion of garlic with some fresh tarragon or basil. It is flexible not only in its flavorings but in its ingredients. You can use onions, garlic or shallots, singly or in combination; add string beans (or even fresh limas) to the mix; substitute eggplant for the zucchini. Think of it as a delicious mélange of whatever is on hand.
Tagliatelle With Mushrooms in Red Wine
This hearty, umami-rich pasta dish is easily assembled in less than an hour. For the best texture, use your hands and not the food processor. Chopping the mushrooms and crushing the tomatoes by hand ensures some uniformity. The sauce can be prepared in advance, since you will summon the powers of the cooking water from the tagliatelle. Use more, if needed, to moisten the mixture before serving.
Chicken Yassa
Popular across West Africa, chicken yassa coaxes deep flavor from a handful of simple ingredients: smoky grilled chicken, sweet caramelized onions, tangy lime, bright ginger and spicy Scotch bonnet chile. This version comes from “The Fonio Cookbook” by chef Pierre Thiam (Lake Isle Press, 2019). Mr. Thiam, who was born and raised in Dakar, is the chef and owner of Teranga, a West African restaurant in Harlem. His recipe calls for bone-in chicken legs, but, in southern Senegal, where the dish originated, you might be served other chicken parts, fish yassa or even lamb yassa. The cooking method is flexible: The chicken develops the best smoky char when grilled, but will still be delicious seared in a grill pan or cast-iron skillet.
Baked Cod With Buttery Cracker Topping
Baked, stuffed fish is an old-school restaurant staple in New England; covered in lemony, butter-soaked cracker crumbs, it’s a wonderful way to eat mild white fish like cod or haddock. The dish has a long history and relies on two ingredients New Englanders have in abundance: fresh seafood and crackers, which are descended from sailors’ hardtack. Fannie Farmer’s 1896 “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” has a recipe for cracker-stuffed halibut, seasoned with butter, salt, pepper and onion juice. Some modern versions use saltines, others use butter crackers like Ritz, and many enrich the crackers with crab meat. This recipe is an easy weeknight variation: Instead of rolling the fish up around the stuffing, which requires long, thin filets, it is generously covered in the stuffing and roasted until the cracker topping is toasted and the fish flakes.
Fresh Egg Pasta
This adaptable pasta recipe will work with whatever flour you’ve got in the pantry. Using the “00” gives the silkiest, softest pasta while bread flour will give you more of a satisfying chew, and all-purpose lands you squarely in the middle. Because flour absorbs liquid differently depending on its age and the humidity in the air, consider these amounts as a guide and not as the law. Use your judgment. If the dough seems too wet and sticky to work with, add a bit more flour; if it seems too dry to come together into a smooth, satiny ball, add a bit more oil. The pasta is wonderful cooked right away, but you could dry it for future use instead. Let it hang in strands over the backs of your kitchen chairs or on a washing line if you have one. Or you can curl handfuls of pasta into loose nests and let them dry out on the sheet trays, uncovered.
Sautéed Greens With Smoked Paprika for Two
Soft slivers of garlic and shallots and a dash of smoked paprika give this verdant side dish its complexity and charm. You can make it with any greens you have on hand. Softer spinach and chard make for a silkier dish, while sturdy kale and collard greens give it more heft. Just adjust the cooking time as needed to make sure your greens are thoroughly tender.
Pad Kee Mao (Drunken Noodles)
The taste of a good pad kee mao relies on fresh garlic, basil and chiles — and a lot of each. (“Kee mao” means, roughly, “drunk-style,” and dishes with that label are associated with late-night cravings and hangover prevention.) The finished dish should be fragrant, pungent and whatever means “hot” to you: Deploy your chiles accordingly. Hong Thaimee, a chef in New York who grew up in Bangkok, employs a heavy Dutch oven, instead of a wok. (She said she was surprised to find that it worked better than a wok for Thai stir-fries on her tiny apartment stovetop, as its wide, flat bottom has more contact with the flame and holds onto more heat.) Fresh lime leaves are a popular addition; they are easy to buy online, along with fragrant Thai basil and, sometimes, holy basil. But in a pinch, Ms. Thaimee said, Italian basil and a garnish of lime zest are fine.
Skillet Greens With Runny Eggs, Peas and Pancetta
Whether you serve it for brunch or supper, this dish of skillet-baked eggs, greens and crunchy bits of pancetta is a light but deeply savory meal. In spring, ramps give the chard a particularly pungent kick, but milder scallions work just as well and are a lot easier to find all year round. If you want to make this vegetarian-friendly, skip the pancetta and add a dusting of cheese right at the end. Serve this with a side of toasted country bread or scoop it out onto a bed of buttery polenta.
Broccoli and Cheddar Soup
A staple of any fast-casual restaurant, broccoli-cheddar soup has somewhat of a cult following on the internet. Thicker than cream of broccoli, this roux-thickened soup can be puréed completely smooth or left chunky and rustic. Either way, be sure to use the sharpest Cheddar available (white or orange work here). It’ll provide richness in addition to a necessary acidity.
Toad-in-the-Hole
Among the breakfast options at SingleThread is an English menu, with toad-in-the-hole as its centerpiece. Mr. Connaughton calls it an homage to Heston Blumenthal — the innovative English chef and owner of The Fat Duck — for whom he worked for several years. For the eggs, Mr. Connaughton uses sous-vide techniques: vacuum-sealing the eggs, processing them in a water bath and using a siphon canister. Lacking such equipment in your kitchen, you can still approximate the result by gently and softly scrambling the egg mixture. And if you prefer, even a well-trimmed poached egg can be centered on the toast and cheese.
Pasta, Green Beans and Potatoes With Pesto
The most elegant pasta dish that Italian cooks have ever invented is astonishingly simple to make. Here, the magical green sauce is tossed with trenette (or any long pasta you can twirl around a fork), tender slices of potato and barely blanched green beans.
Neapolitan Pasta With Swordfish
The lusty foods and intense wines of southern Italy provide inspiration to spare for cooks and connoisseurs. San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, succulent olives, tender pastas and fragrant olive oils, alone or combined, spell sheer enjoyment. The roots of red-sauce Italian, ever popular in the United States, are in the south — in Campania and Naples (its capital city) as well as in Puglia and Basilicata. This recipe is a riff on the traditional pasta alla puttanesca, with tomato, capers, olives and garlic, but without the anchovies. The recipe goes bigger on the fish front, with chunks of seared swordfish to bolster the mixture with meaty, briny notes.
Roasted Butternut Squash Bread Salad
This sheet-pan recipe is an easy way to get a hearty vegetarian meal on the table in under an hour. Inspired by panzanella, which traditionally provides new life for stale bread by tossing it with juicy tomatoes, this bread salad instead gets its moisture from an earthy tahini dressing. The creamy tahini is lightly sweetened with honey, which plays well with the buttery squash, while a flourish of fresh herbs adds a light, springy finish. This makes for a nice supper on its own, but it would also work well as a side to roasted chicken or fish.
Vegan Matzo Ball Soup
The actress Natalie Portman was seeking a good vegan matzo ball soup, and the result is this recipe: soft matzo balls that hold together thanks to a little help from chickpeas. Matzo meal, potato starch, a little olive oil and lots of ginger, dill and cilantro lend plenty of flavor, while chickpea water (known as aquafaba) provides binding that would otherwise come from eggs. You can use the liquid from canned chickpeas, but the liquid from dry chickpeas soaked, then cooked in water works best. Ginger and nutmeg are characteristics of German-Jewish matzo balls, while the Yemenite addition of cilantro and dill adds even more brightness and flavor. Natalie is right: “It’s a very sad world without good matzo balls.”
Pineapple Pork
Seared Scallop Pasta With Burst Tomatoes and Herbs
Although usually designated as a “something special” ingredient, scallops make a perfect weeknight dinner because they cook in minutes. To get a good, crisp sear, be patient (it's hard for us, too) and let the pan get quite hot before adding the scallops. Once you do, leave them alone to ensure a deeply golden crust. Toss them with pasta and candy-colored cherry tomatoes that burst and get coaxed into a jammy sauce. Finish with a showering of fresh, tender herbs and a drizzle of olive oil.
Vermicelli Sweet Corn Usli
This is a take on vermicelli usli, also known as upma — an ideal South Indian breakfast, savory and satisfying, full of vegetables and delicate fried noodles, and seasoned with coconut and cashews. Though commonly made with carrots and peas, you can toss in whatever vegetables you have on hand. In summer, fresh corn adds plenty of crunch and sweetness, and the dish works for lunch and dinner, just as it is.
Pork Chops With Jammy-Mustard Glaze
Fruit and mustard are two classic accompaniments to pork, and really, a juicy chop doesn’t need much more than that for a sweet and tangy sauce. Mix together water, grainy mustard and any fruit preserve that’s good with pork like cherry, fig, peach or apricot. Sear bone-in pork chops mostly on one side to prevent overcooking, then pour the fruit-mustard mixture into the skillet while they rest. The pork will stay moist, and its juices will have time to mingle with the sauce. Then just slice the pork and drape it in the velvety two-ingredient glaze. Eat with mashed or roasted potatoes and a green salad.