Main Course
8665 recipes found
Roasted Fish With Lemon, Sesame and Herb Bread Crumbs
Trout is an ideal weeknight dinner because its thin fillets cook in minutes. All it really needs is some butter and lemon, but an herb-panko mixture adds freshness and crunch. The breadcrumb mixture is inspired by za’atar, a spice blend that includes sesame seeds, dried herbs and tart-citrusy sumac. Using fresh thyme and oregano instead of dried herbs, and lemon zest in place of dried sumac yields a brighter final dish. If you want to use dried za’atar, swap in 3 tablespoons of the blend for the first four ingredients. Serve the fish alongside rice, a green salad, boiled potatoes or braised chickpeas. The fish roasts in about the same time as string beans, broccolini or snap peas would, so you can also roast vegetables on a second baking sheet while the fish cooks.
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.
Fish Milanese
This fast weeknight dinner features quick-cooking flounder prepared alla Milanese, the style of breading and frying meat cutlets. The fillets are lightly breaded and pan-fried until golden and crisp on the outside and tender in the middle. A lemony, brown-butter pan sauce with capers comes together quickly to add a tangy brininess to the dish. A bit of avocado on the side adds creaminess that balances the crisp fish and peppery arugula. Any leftover fish makes for terrific sandwiches the next day, stacked with lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayo.
Baked Fish and Chips
Baking fish and chips is not only easier and less messy than frying, but it also has the distinct advantage of allowing you to cook both fish and potatoes at the same time in your oven. The key to getting the crunchiest fries is to cut them thin (leave the skin on for extra flavor) and spread them out in one layer onto a preheated sheet pan to jump-start the crisping. (If you want to save a few minutes, start the potatoes in the oven while you prepare the fish.) We’ve paired this dish with a piquant horseradish tartar sauce, but ketchup works well, too, particularly for the grade-school set.
Pasta With Meatballs and Herb Sauce
Before you use herbs as a main ingredient — it helps to know which ones work on a grand scale. Parsley, obviously, works in abundance: it’s clean-tasting, pleasantly grassy and almost never overwhelming. You can add literally a bunch (bunches!) of it to salad, soup, eggs, pasta, grains or beans. The same is largely true of basil, and you can use other mild herbs — chervil, chives, cilantro, dill, shiso — by at least the handful. (Mint is also useful but will easily take over a dish if you add too much of it. But all of these are great for making herb pastes, or pestos, alone or in combination. Use the same technique you use for basil pesto.)
Mexican Scrambled Eggs
I often eat this beloved Mexican breakfast dish for dinner. Serve the eggs with warm corn tortillas.
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.
Fish Larb
Larb, a boldly flavored Thai dish, often combines ground chicken, ground pork or other ground meat with dried chile, scallions, shallots, fish sauce, lime, fresh herbs and nutty toasted rice, which you can make yourself or find at Asian markets. The dish also works with crumbled tofu, mushrooms, cauliflower or fish. In this quick-cooking fish version, fish fillets are pan-seared until cooked through, then broken into bite-sized pieces and tossed with the rest of the ingredients. Serve with sticky rice, small wedges of salted green cabbage, cucumber spears or lettuce leaves.
False Mahshi: Layered Swiss Chard, Beets, Rice and Beef
This is an Iraqi dish for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, with bitter Swiss chard, sweet beets and beef in a sweet and sour sauce. In Amara, a city near Basra in southern Iraq, the dish is called "mahshi" or "stuffed" in Arabic. It is traditionally made by stuffing Swiss chard leaves with beets, onions and sometimes meat. This version is called false mahshi, as the dish is made in layers.
Crispy Salmon With Mixed Seeds
This recipe produces not only silky salmon with a crunchy coating of fragrant seeds, but also a shatteringly crisp skin. That’s all thanks to yogurt, which secures the seeds to the salmon and caramelizes into a crust when cooked. Mix assertive and mild seeds for a balance of textures and flavors, or swap in a ready-made seed mix like everything bagel spice or dukkah. Eat the seared salmon with more yogurt, as well as a squeeze of citrus and tuft of herbs for freshness.
Earlonne’s Chicken and Brown Rice
Layered with savory, satisfying flavors, this one-pan recipe was inspired by a dish Earlonne Woods regularly prepared for himself while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. Mr. Woods, a co-host of the popular Ear Hustle podcast, generally relied on kitchen connections to secure a raw chicken hindquarter. He’d boil it in a hot pot with whatever seasonings he had available, then use the resulting broth to rehydrate some instant brown rice. Offered as a cooking lesson to Mr. Woods, who is now an amateur home cook, this version instead relies on chicken legs browned in butter, a vibrant mix of spices and aromatics, and rich, homemade broth to pack in flavor. And just as the dish did when Mr. Woods served it, it may prompt your diner to compliment the meal: “You put your foot in it!”
Quinoa Pancakes
The addition of cooked quinoa to my regular buttermilk pancake batter results in a thick, moist pancake that’s hefty but not heavy.
Fish Skewers With Herbs and Lime
In this simple, speedy recipe, meaty cubes of fish are marinated with fish sauce and red-pepper flakes, then lined up on skewers and grilled until seared at their corners, but still juicy and tender inside. Topped with herbs and lime juice, it’s a minimalist take that lets the flavors of good, fresh fish shine through. If you have a fish basket and would rather line up the cubes inside that, go right ahead. Just watch it carefully and adjust the cooking time if needed. If you’re looking to add a sauce, this is lovely served with some garlic-spiked yogurt on the side.
Light, Fluffy and Rich Pancakes
Basic pancakes are simple to throw together and are guaranteed to delight a crowd. But go one step further, separating the eggs and beating the whites, and you turn the ordinary pancake into something almost soufflé-like. These also contain ricotta, for extra richness that doesn't weigh the pancakes down.
Spiced Irish Oatmeal With Cream and Crunchy Sugar
A shower of heavy cream and plenty of caramelized Demerara sugar may make these Irish oats seem more like dessert than something you’d serve first thing in the morning, but that’s all the more reason to bake them up for a special occasion breakfast or brunch. Cardamom and cinnamon give them an especially earthy, perfumed aroma, and toasting the oats in butter before baking them lends nuttiness and depth. They’re also extremely easy, and you can assemble the dish the night before, then bake them in the morning. Just add about 10 minutes to the baking time if you’re starting them cold from the fridge.
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.
One-Pot Smoky Fish With Tomato, Olives and Couscous
Flaky white fish and pearl couscous simmer together in a rich, smoky tomato sauce for a punchy one-pot dinner that comes together in just half an hour. The sauce relies heavily on pantry ingredients (think anchovies, roasted red peppers, crushed tomatoes and paprika); if you like more green on your dinner plate, a lemony arugula salad is a nice complement to the smoky flavors in this dish.
Pasta With Sardines and Fennel
This traditional Sicilian dish makes a festive main course, especially when served from a giant platter. Sweet and savory flavors mingle beautifully here, with currants, raisins, saffron and pine nuts. Aromatic wild fennel fronds and fresh sardines are preferred, but even if made with cultivated fennel and canned sardines, this is a magnificent dish.
Kimchi and Potato Hash With Eggs
Kimchi is punchy and potatoes are mellow, but together, they play off one another like the characters in an opposites-attract love story. Though universally adored for their comforting, creamy texture, potatoes often feel stodgy as the main ingredient of a meal, but pairing them with tangy, spicy kimchi lightens them up. Cut your potatoes into small cubes to ensure they don’t take too long to cook. Hash just does not feel complete without eggs, which make this a handy one-pan meal. Finishing the dish with a drizzle of mayonnaise (preferably Kewpie, but other brands are fine, too) and a sprinkle of furikake lends a playful edge, or you can make it even more fun to eat by wrapping up piles of the hash in nori, which adds a nice crunch and will remind you of a sushi roll.
Fried Snapper With Creole Sauce
Best enjoyed using local snapper, this bright dish represents the protein part of fish and fungi, a classic duo on dinner tables in the Virgin Islands. The fish is topped with plenty of thyme-laced, tomato-based Creole sauce and is typically served over a bed of fungi, the classic Virgin Islands side dish of buttery cooked cornmeal with sliced, boiled okra. Michael Anthony Watson and Judy Watson, husband-and-wife owners of Petite Pump Room in St. Thomas, traditionally use whole fried snapper for this recipe, but you can use fish fillets. For authenticity, serve them with plenty of hot sauce on the side for a little extra heat.
Pasta With Fresh Herbs, Lemon and Peas
Buy a bunch of parsley along with basil or chives to keep on hand in your refrigerator. The herbs will keep for a week if properly stored. Produce departments often use misters, but greens don’t keep well once wet. When you get home, spin the herbs in salad spinner if they’re wet, wrap them in a paper towel and then bag them.
Cornmeal Waffles With Smoked Salmon
A touch of fine cornmeal in the batter gives these waffles a delicious crispness. For a savory approach, they are embellished with smoked salmon, crème fraîche and caviar, perfect for a celebratory soiree, midnight supper or brunch. Serve a whole waffle or cut in quarters for appetizers. If you don’t have a waffle iron, the batter can also be used to make pancakes or blini. Of course, if preferred, serve these corn-perfumed waffles with sweet toppings instead.
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).
Breakfast Carbonara
Alton Brown developed this recipe for his book "EveryDayCook" because it hits all of the best notes of breakfast in a way that is much more appealing than just eggs, sausage and toast. If you eat pasta early in the day, he reasons, that leaves plenty of time to work it off. He’s a fan of cooking in cast iron, and calls for it here. But any good 12-inch sauté pan will do.