Main Course
8665 recipes found

Quail With Grits, Apple and Celery Root

Roasted Pork With Carrot Glaze, Polenta And Green Beans

Sameh Wadi’s Wheat Berries With Carrots, Harissa Yogurt and Dates
The Arab-American chef Sameh Wadi built this very modern dish from some very traditional components of Middle Eastern cooking: yogurt, harissa, carrots and whole grains of wheat. It works equally well as a centerpiece for a vegetarian meal, or alongside a lamb tagine or stew such as Lamb Shanks with Pomegranate and Saffron. To produce the grain called freekeh, wheat berries are harvested green, cracked and roasted over open fires to produce a smoky, earthy-tasting result. “You can smell it in the market when the freekeh is in season,” Mr. Wadi said.

Braised Stuffed Artichoke A la Barigoule

Polenta With Vegetables And Tomato Sauce

Leek Bread Pudding

Mediterranean Artichoke and Fresh Fava Stew
Favas, artichokes, spring onions and green garlic are all fleetingly in season at the same time. Here’s a way to use them all together. This dish is based on a Greek olive oil recipe, meaning that the vegetables are traditionally stewed in two or three times as much oil as I use here. I substitute water for some of the oil.

Grandma Salazar's Tortillas
This recipe for flour tortillas came to The Times in 2005 from Traci Des Jardins, a San Francisco chef whose heritage is Cajun on one side and Mexican on the other, via her maternal grandmother, Angela Salazar. You’ll see “bacon drippings” in the ingredients. These make for really delicious tortillas.

Artichoke, Lobster And Sausage Gratin

Caviar and Lobster in Brioche Cups

Twice-Cooked Duck With Pea Shoots
The duck meat is meant to be simmered well ahead of the final cooking, so this recipe can be prepared several days ahead. (In the process, a bonus broth is achieved, some of which is used to make the sauce. Leftover broth can be saved for a little noodle soup.) Then, at the last minute, the chopped, cooked meat is briefly stir-fried; showered with aromatics like ginger, orange zest, garlic, cumin and hot pepper; splashed with rice wine; and finished with just-wilted pea shoots.

Baku Fish Kebabs
In her new cookbook, "Taste of Persia," Naomi Duguid gives this simple recipe from Azerbaijan for fish kebabs marinated with lemon juice and dill. To serve, the fish is sprinkled with tart sumac powder, available in most spice shops or online, and served with a fresh pomegranate relish. Cooking the fish mostly on the skin side keeps it moist.

Polenta With Corn And Cheese

Polenta With Fennel, Peppers, Tomatoes And Cheese

Baked Polenta With Crispy Leeks and Blue Cheese
Baking polenta in the oven means you don’t have to stand over the pot, stirring the extremely hot, bubbling mass. Here, the polenta is cooked in stock for the deepest flavor. Then it’s topped with piquant crumbles of Gorgonzola dolce and crisp fried leeks, which add sweetness and crunch. You can serve this as a warming main course along with a crisp green salad, or as a rich and flavorful side dish to simple roasted meats or fish.

Chicken Liver Tacos With Rhubarb Salsa
Tart rhubarb meets earthy chicken livers in this unlikely savory pairing. The chicken livers cook quickly, in minutes, in fact. Keep an eye on them to make sure the insides stay pink, then tuck them into warm corn tortillas. Serve with a fresh red like a Lagrein to round out a sophisticated, bold meal you can make on a hot day or a weeknight when you’re looking to impress guests.

Baked Stuffed Artichokes

Braised Fresh Black-Eyed Peas With Baby Turnips
Fresh black-eyed peas, still in their pods, are a pretty pale green, with a gorgeous purple-black O-ring on each tiny pea. They’re tender and creamy and snappy — with an earthy flavor that goes well with the mint, pepper and turnips in this shallow braise — and they cook in just minutes unlike their wintered-over chalky, drab dried counterparts. I love them when they come in fresh at the market, and also love the so-called chore of shucking them. The chance to sit for a minute and watch the world go by while shelling a big pile of fresh peas will always leave you feeling glad you did.

Eggs Sardou

Game Day Nachos
Here is a heavily-loaded platter of shredded pork inflected with the flavors of cumin, coriander and lime, layered with tortilla chips and sliced radishes, flecks of scallion and leaves of cilantro, drifts of shredded cheddar and lime-scented sour cream, to be accompanied by hot sauce, napkins and beer. It is football-watching food, but doubles nicely as dinner for teens, young adults, anyone interested in the inhaling of the delicious. The pork is an all-day affair, requiring five to seven hours of roasting in a low oven so that the meat achieves a collapsing sweetness beneath a burnished crust. But the rest of the recipe is easy work indeed: bowls of the condiments may be combined on a platter with the shredded meat and diced skin in any manner you deem appetizing.

Polenta With Hot Tomato-Eggplant Sauce

Roasted Chicken With Lemon-Glazed Rhubarb
A tangy rhubarb-lemon glaze gives roasted chicken a touch of sweetness and a deeply golden, crunchy skin. The rhubarb, which is cooked in the oven along with the chicken (but in a separate pan), becomes syrupy and soft, scented with thyme, coriander and fresh ginger. Some of the rhubarb mixture is brushed over the bird to help bronze its skin, while the rest makes a chutney-like condiment to serve alongside. If you have thin-skinned, mildly sweet Meyer lemons, you can skip the blanching in Step 3 and add the slices straight from the rhubarb pan. Regular lemons, especially those with a lot of the bitter white pith, really benefit from a brief blanch. This dish is wonderful over polenta or rice, which can absorb both chicken and rhubarb juices. Add a simple green salad (spinach is especially nice here), and dinner is done.

Grilled Lamb on Rosemary Skewers
Lamb on rosemary skewers has to be one of the oldest recipes in the world. In ancient times, the meat could just as easily have been goat, or something wilder, and fish was no doubt also a candidate. The idea of cutting branches of rosemary and using them as skewers must certainly have occurred to humans soon after they figured out how to build fires. You want rosemary branches with woody stalks, if possible. But if the stalks are too flimsy to poke through the lamb, run a pilot hole through with a skewer, and be sure to grill the lamb and figs separately because they'll cook at different rates. You might throw together a little basting sauce of lemon, garlic and a little more rosemary, but the skewers are just fine without it, and have been for thousands of years.
