Main Course
8665 recipes found
Brown-Butter Salmon With Scallions and Lemon
This dish is a celebration of soft food and subtle flavors. To prevent overcooking, the salmon bakes in a light yet comforting sauce that’s made with just three simple ingredients: butter, scallions and lemon peel. The salmon comes out silky, and the sauce is nutty from the browned butter and slightly sweet from the roasted scallions and lemon peel. Serve with a squeeze of lemon for freshness and a simple side like broccolini, green beans, grains or pasta. This technique also works for other fish like cod, halibut or arctic char.
Sesame-Glazed Duck Legs With Spicy Persimmon Salad
Some Chinese cookbooks recommend steaming duck to tender perfection before roasting it to crisp the skin. It is a good technique to master, and works especially well with large moulard duck legs. You get moist tender duck, and a bonus pot full of rendered duck fat. (You can steam the duck up to 6 hours in advance of roasting it.) The accompanying salad of persimmons, oranges, pomegranate and daikon radish gets a kick from Serrano chile, lime juice, freshly grated ginger and sesame oil. Be sure to use Fuyu persimmons, which can be eaten unripe. (The long, pointy Hachiya persimmon must be completely ripe to be palatable.) It’s worth mixing up a batch of fragrant, flavorful Sichuan pepper salt, both for this recipe and to have a little extra on hand to use as an all-purpose seasoning; if you can’t find Sichuan peppercorns in a store, online spice merchants will have them.
Lamb With Sichuan Pepper And Orange
Chiles en Nogada
Considered by many to be the national dish of Mexico, chiles en nogada showcases the colors of the country’s flag: green, white and red. Created by nuns in Puebla in 1821, the dish was presented to the general of the Mexican Army, Agustín de Iturbide, after he signed the treaty that recognized Mexico’s independence from Spain. The nuns used the best of the late-season harvest in the dish, including poblano chiles, peaches, pears, apples and walnuts grown in farms near Puebla. The original dish was stuffed, battered and fried, and significantly heartier than this version. Here, fresh poblanos are fried until lightly cooked, peeled, stuffed, topped with creamy walnut sauce, then eaten at room temperature. It’s served throughout the country every September, in honor of Mexico’s Independence Day.
Pork and Apple Hot Pot
Pork Chops in Pipian
This is a recipe built on my memory of a dish I ate in a sticky-tabled Mexican restaurant in pregentrification Park Slope, Brooklyn: fried pork chops served over a thick, spicy sauce of seeds and nuts and chiles — what the cookbooks and histories of Mexican food call pipian, for the pepitas, or pumpkin seeds, used in its creation. It is hardly authentic, but it is simple to make and hugely delicious. Make sure to get a good hard sear on the pork chops before nestling them into the sauce, then serve with tortillas.
Vanilla Roast Chicken With Fennel
Zarela Martinez's Ropa Vieja
Sometimes the most humble ingredients make for the finest of meals, as Regina Schrambling wrote in 1988. Growing up in a tiny Arizona town among many Mexican neighbors, Ms. Schrambling learned early on of the rich flavors that can be coaxed from the simplest food. This ropa vieja, from the chef Zarela Martinez, embodies that philosophy. Garlic and peppercorns infuse a flank steak with flavor, which is then cooked shortly with a mixture of sautéed garlic, onions and poblano peppers. Hot, tucked into a tortilla, it’s a testament to the power of a long cook.
Black Bean and Poblano Tacos
There are many kinds of tacos, some piled high and overstuffed and some more minimal, meant to be more a snack than a meal. These little tacos are in the second category, similar to what you might find in a Mexican market for a quick bite. Savory black beans and roasted poblano chiles make a satisfying vegetarian version. Fresh soft corn tortillas, hot off the griddle, are essential.
Roast Loin Of Pork With Southwestern Sauce
Fettuccine with Sunchokes and Herbs
Roasted Potatoes With Anchovies and Tuna
In this pantry-friendly recipe, golden, crackling-skinned potatoes move from side dish to main course after being tossed with tuna, capers and a pungent sauce of anchovies melted in brown butter. It’s extremely adaptable. If you don’t have (or like) tuna, use chickpeas or white beans instead. Just don’t skimp on the onion, which adds a crisp sweetness to the potatoes. With their slightly thicker skins, fingerlings work especially well here, but use whatever you’ve got.
Roasted Squab With Sichuan-Peppercorn Marinade
Fettuccine, Smoked Trout And Asparagus
Fettuccine With Mussels
Five-Peppercorn Fish Fillets
Firm white-fleshed fish fillets, like halibut, striped bass or grouper, take well to this simple, peppery butter sauce. A mix of different peppercorns — black, green, rose, Sichuan and Timut (from Nepal) — crushed to release their flavor and aroma, creates a seasoning that is sweet and spicy, but not "hot." The Sichuan and Timut pepper are quite floral and have a somewhat tongue-numbing quality. Most spice merchants will offer many kinds; feel free to use just one or two, or to refine the mixture to your own taste.
Grated Squash, Corn and Tomatillo Tacos
Once you’ve made the tomatillo salsa, this light filling is very quick to put together.
Five-Spice Salmon With Sherry Vinegar and Roasted Chicken Sauce
Diana Dávila’s Chiles Rellenos
In her singular take on chiles rellenos, Diana Dávila crosses two classic Mexican preparations of the dish — chiles rellenos ahogados and chiles en nogada — to come up with her own remarkable variation. Roasted, peeled poblanos are stuffed with a ground meat picadillo spiked with apples, raisins, cider vinegar and brown sugar, then dunked in a feathery egg batter and fried until golden. Just before serving, those stuffed, fried chiles are bathed in a brothy tomato sauce lightened with carrot juice. It does take time to put all the elements together, but you won’t regret a minute of it when you taste what might be the best chiles rellenos you’ve ever had: complex, sweet and spicy, and deeply brawny. At Mi Tocaya Antojería, her restaurant in Chicago, Ms. Dávila uses a combination of chopped duck confit and ground pork for the picadillo. But using all ground pork works equally well.
Linguine with Crab Meat
At All’onda in Greenwich Village, the chef Chris Jaeckle channels Venice by way of Japan. This pasta dish, which I enjoyed in his restaurant a few weeks ago, sums it up. Fresh pasta with crab meat and a smidgen of tomato is brightened with yuzu, lemon’s racy Japanese cousin. I remembered the dish as I savored the food-friendly, energetic white Bordeaux. The good acidity and citric notes of these wines welcome seafood. Though Mr. Jaeckle’s version calls for peekytoe crab, it is all but impossible to find in most retail fish markets, so he allowed for regular lump crab meat. As for the yuzu juice, it’s sold in Japanese markets. Look for a refrigerated brand that has no preservatives. You’ll have plenty left over, enough to test your cocktail-making chops before dinner.
Fettuccine With Morels
Broiled Lobsters With Sichuan Peppercorns
Mussels With Linguine
Stir-Fried Green Beans With Pork and Chiles
In this fast, piquant weeknight meal, ground pork and green beans are stir-fried with plenty of ginger, garlic and chiles, and seasoned with soy sauce and coriander seeds. A big splash of rice-wine vinegar right at the end adds a hit of acidity, which balances the pork's richness. Serve this over rice or rice noodles to help absorb all the salty, spicy sauce. Slices of fresh tomato add a sweet juiciness that works well here. But if you don't have a ripe tomato, feel free to leave it out.