Main Course
8665 recipes found
Beet and Barley Salad With Date-Citrus Vinaigrette
Have fun with this early fall salad, meant for Rosh Hashana but festive throughout the season. Bitter and tart greens, like arugula, crunchy romaine and celery, pair well with shallots or red onion, dates, dried figs, a handful of multicolored olives and crisp, refreshing cucumbers. About a cup of cooked barley adds chew, but you could use lentils or chickpeas instead for more protein. If you can find them, heirloom varieties of barley add wonderful nutty complexity. Beets — used in ancient times more for the leaves than the roots — currants and green grapes lend color and sweetness, as well as a pomegranate, the symbol of fruitfulness by virtue of its many seeds. All these foods are symbolic of fertility, abundance, and prosperity in the New Year.
Spicy White Bean Stew With Broccoli Rabe
Not quite a fridge clean-out situation, this extremely flexible stew can use up much of what you’ve got on hand. It’s vegetarian by nature, but feel free to start the pot with sausage, slab bacon or leftover ham if you’re feeling more omnivorous. If you can’t find harissa, use tomato paste and a pinch of red-pepper flakes for spiciness.
Gingery Fried Rice With Bok Choy, Mushrooms and Basil
An ideal recipe for reducing waste in the kitchen, fried rice is a great way to use up spare tofu, leftover meats or wobbly vegetables. Master Sam Sifton’s fried rice technique, and you’ll have the tools to repurpose leftovers and surplus vegetables. But if it’s a bright, fresh slew of greens and herbs you’re after, this recipe supplies a high ratio of vegetables to rice. Everything cooks quickly, so your mise en place truly counts here: Get everything chopped and prepped before you pick up the pan, and dinner can be ready in 20.
Rice Cake Soup With Bok Choy and Edamame
This fresh soup is a riff on something that a Chinese or Korean mom might make, with rice cakes added to bulk it up. You can find the white, oval disks in most Asian supermarkets; they are made with glutinous rice flour and have a chewy texture. They are precooked, but will rehydrate and soak up more liquid in this soup. If you find that they have soaked up too much, simply add a little more broth or water to thin out the soup. Substituting one to two cups of cooked rice to the soup in place of the rice cakes works well if you don't have access to an Asian grocery store.
Creamy Broccoli Soup
This is one of the best formulas for a creamy, savory broccoli soup — and it doesn’t include any cream. Borrowing from the concept of using coconut water to provide the kind of richness that is reminiscent of bone broth in Yi Jun Loh’s ingeniously vegan Malaysian ABC soup, this simple green elixir starts with a base of umami-loaded vegetables seared in olive oil then braised in coconut water. With silken tofu providing creaminess, this verdant, vegetable-powered soup can be pleasurably contrasted, in flavor and in temperature, with an optional dollop of sweet, cool ricotta. (If you’re keeping this vegan, you’ll still have plenty of creamy richness even if you leave the ricotta out.)
Hot and Sour Dumpling Soup
A Chinese take-out staple, hot and sour soup is super easy to create at home — and comes together in just 15 minutes. This weeknight version bolsters the traditional mushrooms and tofu with the addition of store-bought pork dumplings, but you could just as easily use chicken or vegetable dumplings, depending on your preference. Cornstarch gives the broth its velvety texture, vinegar adds verve, and white pepper adds subtle complexity, though black pepper is a perfectly fine substitute. Adjust the seasoning with extra soy sauce, ginger and vinegar for a more assertive soup.
Stir-Fries With Fresh Vegetables
Over 50 percent of this colorful chicken stir-fry is composed of vegetables. Use chicken tenders or chicken breast.
Creamy Doenjang Pasta
Soybean pastes and noodles make good friends, as in Alexa Weibel’s five-ingredient creamy miso pasta. This version leans into the funkier, saltier flavor of doenjang, a Korean soybean paste whose pungency is an absolute pleasure in jjigaes, sauces and even bread made in a can. Here, doenjang is tempered by the natural sweetness of milk, which stars in many Korean takes on Italian pasta. The milk thickens as it mixes with the starchy noodles and creates a velvety sauce, one that tastes rich but measured, with a rounded cheesy quality. It will seem like a lot of liquid at first, but the milk will reduce. The finished pasta sauce will continue to thicken once it’s off the heat; add more pasta water if it starts to look dry.
Vegetarian Skillet Chili With Eggs and Cheddar
This soul-warming weeknight chili is made in a skillet because the shorter sides of the pan allow the liquid to evaporate more freely, encouraging it to thicken faster than it would in a traditional pot. Eggs are nestled right into the chili, so the whites cook and the yolks stay molten, in a preparation similar to a shakshuka, another popular eggs-for-dinner dish. Shower the chili with Cheddar, simmer for a few minutes and there you have it: a hearty vegetarian meal. Serve with any toppings you like and something starchy like tortillas to mop everything up.
Lemony Carrot and Cauliflower Soup
The beauty of a soup like this — other than its bone-warming properties — is that you don’t need a recipe. You can pretty much simmer together any combination of vegetables with a little water or broth, purée it, top it with good olive oil and salt, and end up with something good to eat. The addition of miso paste and crushed coriander to the broth, and fresh lemon and cilantro at the end, zips things up without negating the comfort factor.
Pork Chops in Lemon-Caper Sauce
Here’s my favorite recipe in Toni Tipton-Martin’s excellent and invaluable “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking” (2019). It’s a remix of one that the chef Nathaniel Burton collected into his 1978 opus, “Creole Feast: Fifteen Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets,” and one that Tipton-Martin glossed-up with lemon zest, juice and extra butter, a technique she learned from the restaurateur B. Smith’s 2009 collection of recipes, “B. Smith Cooks Southern-Style.” It’s a dish of smothered pork chops, essentially, made into something glorious and elegant. “The food history of Blacks in America has been a story of the food of survival,” she told me in an interview. “We need to start celebrating the food they made at work."
Cod and Corn With Old-Bay Butter
This one-pot seafood dinner is inspired by the New England clambake, a festive meal cooked in a fire pit and enjoyed with melted butter. Here, cod and corn cook in a garlicky broth of bottled clam juice for instant shellfish flavor. A final swirl of paprika-spiked Old-Bay butter adds smoky depth to the dish, usually brought by smoldering logs. Leftover butter can be refrigerated or frozen for later use; it’s great on roasted potatoes and grilled shrimp or steak.
Crispy Pork Chops With Buttered Radishes
These crisp, panko-crusted cutlets are your weeknight answer to tonkatsu or Milanese with a simplified, one-step breading procedure, no eggs or flour required. Thin pork chops, either bone-in or boneless, are seasoned with salt and pepper, then simply pressed into panko bread crumbs before crisping up in a hot, oiled skillet. While any quick-cooking vegetable could be tossed in the brown butter and spooned over the chops, radishes are especially nice for the way they keep their bite even after a trip to the skillet. Whatever you do, don’t forget the lemon.
Pasta With Roast Chicken, Currants and Pine Nuts
Citrus-Glazed Pork Chops With Gingery Bok Choy
Rich pork makes a perfect companion to tart oranges in this tasty weeknight meal. The bold, bright, citrusy sauce demands a robust cut of meat, so pick well-marbled, thick-cut pork chops with a nice fat cap. A dry rub of brown sugar creates a caramelized layer that lends depth to the pan sauce, and the gingery bok choy adds a delightful bit of freshness. This is quite a meal on its own, but you can steam some brown or white rice for a starchy side. Slice the pork to serve, and drizzle the pan sauce over everything.
Vegan Mac and Cheese
Many creamy vegan pasta recipes call for an arsenal of expensive ingredients, but this one relies on more approachable ones, like cashews and almond milk for richness, nutritional yeast for tang and soy sauce for complex saltiness. Sautéed onions do double duty: They serve as a thickener and help offset the sweetness of the cashews. This simple stovetop pasta is wonderful on its own, but feel free to add roasted vegetables, fresh herbs, spices, harissa or hot sauce. For a quick-baked version worthy of Thanksgiving dinner, pile the prepared mac and cheese into a casserole dish, top with panko and more nutritional yeast, and broil for a few minutes until golden brown.
Skillet Pork Chops With Blistered Grapes
Pork chops make a great weeknight dinner, and this dish is no exception. It looks and feels special, but comes together in about 20 minutes with very minimal prep. Selecting bone-in pork chops is beneficial beyond appearance: The bones protect the meat to keep it moist. However, you could also use boneless chops or even chicken breasts, if you’d prefer; just be sure to reduce the cooking time accordingly.
Spicy Chorizo Pasta
Macaroni and chorizo is classic Spanish comfort food. While iterations abound, it typically starts by frying smoked chorizo with a little onion, adding canned or fresh tomato and maybe some oregano, then letting it simmer into a thick tomato sauce. It’s often topped with cheese and baked like a mac and cheese. Instead of fresh tomatoes, this recipe uses highly concentrated tomato paste, which is made by cooking down tomatoes for ages so you don’t have to. The paste fries in the chorizo’s rendered drippings for a very fast, silky, smoky and spicy sauce. When shopping for this recipe, look for Spanish chorizo, a shelf-stable sausage usually found near salami and other cured meats in the grocery store. Mexican chorizo is sold fresh and is made with different chiles and spices.
Opor Ayam (Indonesian Chicken Curry)
This luxurious chicken stew from Java is a staple of the Indonesian kitchen, made by simmering the meat in coconut milk with curry paste and lemongrass. The chef Retno Pratiwi grew up eating the dish on special occasions in West Java, and continues to make it at her pop-up restaurant in Boston, always opting for drumsticks over white meat. Though the shallots are traditionally incorporated raw into the curry paste, Pratiwi prefers to caramelize them first to bring out their sweetness. It adds a little time to the process, but the final result is worth it.
Salmon With Potatoes and Horseradish-Tarragon Sauce
Adapted from an 18th-century recipe by George Lang for his 1971 cookbook, “The Cuisine of Hungary,” this recipe layers roast potatoes with just-tender baked salmon and a fresh swipe of horseradish sauce. You could substitute the potatoes with carrots, beets or other root vegetables, or you could play around with more tender vegetables like zucchini or fennel, though you’d need to slice them more thickly and reduce the cook time in Step 1. Likewise, halibut, cod or another white fish can be used instead of salmon. The bright horseradish sauce keeps the salmon moist and gives this dish verve, pairing horseradish’s peppery punch with tangy sour cream and fresh herbs.
Zibdiyit Gambari (Spicy Shrimp and Tomato Stew)
This astonishingly simple stew, adapted from Yasmin Khan’s “Zaitoun: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen,” is bursting with the fierce, passionate flavors that are emblematic of the cooking of the Gaza Strip. You’ll mash together garlic, dill and jalapeños using a mortar and pestle and cook them in tomato sauce to add depth. Once the stew thickens, stir in the shrimp until they turn flushed and tender. To serve, drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil and dot with toasted sesame seeds and verdant flecks of parsley.
Chicken Stir-Fry With Mixed Peppers
I used green peppers only for this stir-fry. Try to use a mix of hot and sweet peppers, and feel free to use red, yellow or orange ones if you want to introduce some color. The chicken is “velveted” before stir-frying; a good name for this technique as the texture of the chicken remains velvety and moist after stir-frying.
Korean Cod Jeon Sliders (Pan-Fried Cod Sliders)
Jeon is the Korean name for small savory pancakes made with fish or vegetables, which are sliced, egg battered, then pan-fried until golden. The egg batter creates a delicate, tender coating, rather than a super crispy one. Typically served as a side dish with a soy dipping sauce, these cod pancakes are instead tucked into Hawaiian sweet rolls for kid-friendly fish sliders. They’re great for entertaining, as the jeon can be cooked ahead and enjoyed at room temperature — just assemble the sandwiches right before serving.
Swiss Chard and Lamb Torte With Fennel-Pomegranate Relish
Festive dishes in Israel and throughout the Middle East often include rice and lamb. This magnificent recipe, topped with a bright pomegranate and fennel relish, is the Israeli chef Erez Komarovsky's twist on an ancient, labor-intensive classic of individual stuffed chard, cabbage or grape leaves, symbolizing the plenty of the fall harvest. It is perfect for Rosh Hashana or any seasonal holiday gathering. Make it with blanched Swiss chard, grape leaves or even cabbage or kale as the outer crust, and assemble it a day in advance. Then bake it and revel in the heightened flavors from the cardamom, cinnamon, fennel and mint; the crunch of pistachio; and the slight kick you get from the Mexican Serrano pepper now planted in Israel.