Main Course
8665 recipes found
The Real Burger
Here's one way to know you're using great meat in your burger: Grind it yourself, using chuck roast or well-marbled sirloin steaks. “Grinding” may sound ominous, conjuring visions of a big old hand-cranked piece of steel clamped to the kitchen counter, but in fact it’s not that difficult if you use a food processor, which gets the job done in a couple of minutes or less. The flavor difference between this burger and one made with pre-packaged supermarket ground beef is astonishing, and might change your burger-cooking forever.
Eddie’s Remarkable Ribs
Rigatoni al Forno With Cauliflower and Broccoli Rabe
This baked pasta — please don’t call it a “pasta bake” — is a luscious affair, with two sauces. A creamy white béchamel is employed to toss with the pasta and vegetables. When it emerges, bubbly and bronzed and crisp on top, a bright, light tomato sauce adorns each serving. (If preferred, you can layer both sauces instead.) Putting it together is somewhat like building a lasagna — a bit of a fussy project — but once assembled, it's no trouble at all to bake and serve. Prepare it all several hours in advance, then pop it in the oven when you like.
Herbed Pappardelle With Parsley and Garlic
Let the fresh flavor of these herbed noodles — a twist on this basic pasta dough recipe — stand out by tossing them with just a few kitchen staples. Inspired by the classic Roman pasta, aglio, olio, e peperoncino, this simple dish will become a go-to, especially once you develop familiarity and confidence with rolling and cutting pasta. Soon enough, you'll find yourself making it on a weeknight, without a recipe. This recipe also makes more pasta than you need, so freeze the rest for a hearty meal in the days and weeks to come. (And check out Cooking's How to Make Pasta guide for more tips and video.)
Vegan Pizza With Apple, Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onions
This satisfying cold-weather pizza from Chloe Coscarelli, the vegan cookbook author, makes a great main course, or it can be cut into pieces as an appetizer. The creamy white bean purée made by whizzing cannellini beans, oil, lemon juice, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper in a food processor makes this dish seem like a real treat, and the piles of caramelized onions, roasted butternut squash, apple and spinach finish it off beautifully. If you're a half-hearted vegan, consider sprinkling a handful of blue cheese over the top a few minutes before it's done baking. We won't tell.
Bistek
Bistek is steak, but one transformed by its encounter with soy sauce and citrus. My addition is browned butter, an ingredient not so common in Southeast Asian cooking. This was one of my lola’s signature dishes: She’d cut the onions half-an-inch thick, sear them briefly, then add a little water to make the pan flare up, so they’d get extra crisp. She would always plate it in a casserole dish, with enough pan sauce to sop up with rice. The beef fat should coat your lips, and then the citrus cuts through it. It’s worth investing in good olive oil; every ingredient matters, because there are so few, and you can taste them all.
Grilled Sausages and Radicchio
For at least one meal at your summer rental, serve sausages. They come seasoned and self-contained, with no need for condiments or sauces. After a long trip, you just throw them on the grill or under a broiler, and serve with a salad on the side. Or, even better, toss them into your salad (in this case, a lightly grilled radicchio salad), letting their fat flavor the leaves along with the lemon juice and good olive oil you also packed.
Pierogi Ruskie (Potato and Cheese Pierogi)
Pierogi are always on the menu at milk bars, historic Polish restaurants that were once socialist canteens. This recipe for pierogi ruskie, stuffed with potatoes and cheese, comes from the Bar Prasowy, which is one of the most famous milk bars in Warsaw, and a place where fist-size dumplings can be filled with mushrooms and meat, spinach and cheese, or any number of combinations. These pierogi can be made from kitchen staples, though you’d be doing yourself a favor if you sought out the salty quark cheese that would be used in Poland. Be patient with your first few pierogi: Sealing the filling inside the dumpling takes some practice, but the practice itself is enjoyable. You can snack on the pierogi straight after boiling, or pan-fry them with butter until crisp and serve with barszcz, a light Polish borscht.
Pork-and-Green-Chili Stew
Citrusy Brisket With Spring Lettuces
This is a bright, zesty take on braised brisket, in which the meat is cooked with lemon and orange juice, along with plenty of onions and dry white wine. It makes for a lighter-tasting sauce than the standard rich, brown gravy, with a tangy, citrus flavor. For serving, the tender slices of meat are topped with a crisp herb salad, adding even more freshness to the plate. Serve it with mashed or roasted potatoes to soak up all the caramelized, oniony juices.
Braised Brisket With Plums, Star Anise and Port
For this recipe, I added plums to the onions in the sauce for brightness, and port for sweetness. Star anise and bay leaf add depth, but you could leave them out without anyone missing them, or substitute a cinnamon stick and orange zest. And if you don’t want to use port, regular red wine spiked with a few tablespoons of honey or brown sugar is a nice substitute. If you can, track down a second cut, or deckle, brisket for this dish. For lovers of fatty meat, this is brisket nirvana. It’s juicy, it’s succulent, it falls apart under the fork with barely a nudge. It’s also as tasty as short ribs but less expensive, which is what you want when you’re cooking for a large family dinner. You can’t find the second cut in many supermarkets, but butchers have it if you ask.
Embutido
There’s a perception that Filipino food is rustic and uncomplicated, but when my lola taught me to make chicken relleno — chicken stuffed with embutido, a kind of meatloaf — I realized that she was using the same techniques I’d learned in professional kitchens cooking French food. She was very particular about ingredients. Even when her memory started fading, her first question when she saw me was always “Are you using chorizo de Bilbao?” (Yes, Lola.) Here, embutido is a centerpiece dish in its own right. I tried chopping the meat for texture, but whipping the ingredients in a food processor, the way my lola did it, integrates everything better.
Shu Mai-Style Burgers
These burgers are inspired by the pork and shrimp filling of a shu mai dumpling. This gives you uncommon flavor in a burger — not only from the shrimp, but also from the combination of Asian ingredients — with adequate fat.
Curried Egg Salad
Here is a recipe our colleague Jeff Gordinier got from the New York chef Jesse Schenker in the process of writing an article about Mr. Schenker’s efforts to lose weight. It is for a much lighter version of the egg salad you may ordinarily make, with Greek yogurt standing in for mayonnaise and a number of egg yolks held back from the finished dish. But it is important to note that you don’t have to do that. You can make this dish with all the yolks if you like, and pile the result into the midst of a green salad or on top of a roll, and you’ll have a fine meal indeed.
Corned Beef
Molly O'Neill brought this recipe to The Times in 2000. It calls for brining the meat for 8 to 12 days, but you can cheat. Even a few days will yield tender results.
Shrimp in Yellow Curry
Many Thai dishes are not unlike what we call curries, but although they may contain curry powder, they are more often based on a combination of herbs and aromatic vegetables, rather than dried spices. A typical curry might feature a mixture of garlic, shallots, chiles, lime leaf, sugar and galangal (or ginger). This simplified version leaves out the lime leaf and sugar, but benefits from the addition of a couple spoonfuls of fish sauce at the end of cooking. It is brightly flavored, but blessedly easy to toss together on a weeknight.
Brisket in Coffee-Barbecue Sauce
Brown Stew Chicken
Popular in many Caribbean households, this chicken dish gets its deep rich color from store-bought browning sauce, like Grace, which is made from a combination of concentrated vegetables, seasonings and caramelized sugar. The browning sauce is used in the marinade, where it’s bolstered by brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce and warm spices. The chicken is braised and cooked low with sweet vegetables, like carrots and onions, and yields a thick gravy that’s just as delicious spooned over rice or paired with cabbage.
Creamy White Bean and Seaweed Stew With Parmesan
Cooking dried beans with seaweed is a traditional method of adding flavor that’s also thought to mitigate some of the gas-inducing enzymes present in the legumes. Here, white beans are simmered with briny dried kombu to add depth, then mixed with slivered kelp for freshness and a slight crunch. It’s a play on white beans with escarole, but with the flavor of the sea.
Three Sisters Stew
Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, recalls being taken out by his grandfather on the family ranch to shoot his first duck for Thanksgiving at age 9, when he was so small that his grandfather had to brace him from behind to help absorb the kick from the shotgun. Game is found on many Thanksgiving tables in the state, but other traditions predate the hunt. The trinity of corn, beans and squash was central to the agriculture of the Plains Indians in what would later become Wyoming, and some cooks honor that history each Thanksgiving with a dish called Three Sisters stew. The writer Pamela Sinclair’s version is a highlight of her 2008 cookbook, “A Taste of Wyoming: Favorite Recipes From the Cowboy State.” The stew works nicely as a rich side dish for turkey, and can easily be adapted to vegetarian tastes by omitting the pork and adding a pound of cubed butternut squash instead.
Buckwheat Crepes With Asparagus, Ham and Gruyère
In Brittany, large buckwheat crepes are known as galettes and are filled with all sorts of savory ingredients. A classic one is made with ham and cheese. This scaled-down rendition adds sweet asparagus, which goes well with the nutty flavor of buckwheat flour. Traditionally they are served with a glass of sparkling cider. Have them as a first course or alongside fried eggs for a more substantial meal.
Antipasto Salad With Marinated Black Walnuts
Spicy Lamb Sausage With Grilled Onions and Zucchini
This is modeled after North African merguez, which is sometimes served as part of an elaborate couscous meal, but good on a bun, too. For its deep rust-red color, merguez relies on lots of dried sweet red pepper (paprika) and a goodly amount of hot red pepper (cayenne). Garlic, cumin and coriander are strong supporting players.
