Memorial Day
615 recipes found
Blueberry-Rhubarb Slab Pie
This slab pie is perfect for a party because it’s easy to transport, and it serves a crowd. Convenience aside, the true draw of this sheet-pan pie is the flaky, buttery crust and its rhubarb, blueberry and crystallized ginger filling. Cooking the fruit ahead of time results in a filling that is juicy but not soupy — and prevents the crust from absorbing too much liquid. Preparing the pie dough in the food processor is effortless and helps keep the butter cold, which leads to a flakier crust, but be careful not to over-process: Stop when the mixture is moist but still crumbly.
Raspberry Nutter Butter Bars
Reminiscent of a classic, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich minus the bread, these bars hit the spot with a little youthful nostalgia. A glass of cold milk is a great accompaniment. One 16-ounce package of Nutter Butter sandwich cookies pulsed in a food processor makes 4 cups of crumbs, which is exactly enough for one recipe.
Roasted Potato Salad With BBQ Dressing
If barbecue potato chips were a salad, then this would be it. It’s hard to pick which component of this picnic dish is the greater star: the crispy roasted potatoes or the smoky, paprika-tinged barbecue sauce dressing. Bejeweled with crunchy red onions, which are soaked in water to mellow their bite, and showered with fresh dill, this colorful side dish is the savory crowd-pleaser you’ll want to bring to any cookout or potluck.
Juicy Lucy Burger
This Minneapolis staple is smart and simple: Sealing a slice of cheese inside two thin burger patties allows the burger to develop a serious char while the inside stays moist thanks to its molten core. There’s debate over whether the burger originated at 5-8 Club or Matt’s Bar; both have drawn locals and tourists alike since the 1950s. The Juicy Lucy method takes some practice — you’ll need to make sure the edges of the stacked patties are properly sealed so that the melted cheese gushes out with every bite instead of making a mess in the skillet — but the results far outweigh the challenge. Because the ingredient list is short (an unassuming bun, a smattering of pickles and a pile of caramelized onions), you’ll need to season with abandon. You may be tempted to use an expensive craft cheese, but sliced American cheese is the only way to go for tradition and meltability.
Charred Scallion Dip With Lemon and Herbs
This creamy scallion dip could be the cooler cousin of ranch dressing or sour cream and onion dip. Grilled scallions add smokiness, while fresh chives and raw scallions lend brightness to the tangy, herb-flecked dip. If you don’t have a grill or grill pan, you can broil the scallions in your oven. Once assembled, the dip benefits from chilling to round out the flavors. At least an hour works, but it's better after a day. It needs nothing more than potato chips alongside, but it’s also great with crudités, crackers, grilled vegetables, fried chicken or slathered on sandwiches.
Sweet-and-Spicy Grilled Vegetables With Burrata
A colorful platter of soft, grilled vegetables in a sweet-and-spicy sauce can be the centerpiece of a light summery meal; just add some creamy cheese for richness and crusty bread to round things out. This recipe is extremely adaptable. You mix and match the vegetables, increasing the amounts of your favorites (or the ones you can get your hands on), and skipping anything you don’t have. And if your grill is large enough, you can make several different kinds of vegetables at the same time. Just don’t crowd them so they cook evenly.
Honey Ice Cream With a Kick
For this velvety, sweet ice cream with a subtle but throat-tickling kick, the chef Fany Gerson draws inspiration from her favorite honey ice cream recipe, by the cookbook author and pastry chef David Lebovitz, as well as her chile-laden childhood in Mexico. Ms. Gerson serves it as part of a Rosh Hashana feast, but it is a seasonless treat. Her toppings — chunks of creamy Manila mangoes dusted with ground red chiles, plus puffed amaranth for crunch — make it an interesting, almost sundae-like dessert. The ice cream is very soft right out of the machine, like soft serve; freeze it for at least 6 hours for something more scoopable.
Honey Butter Grilled Corn
This technique for grilling corn uses a side pan of honey butter to thoroughly drench the corn in flavor while keeping it hot and juicy until you’re ready to eat. If you are feeling creative, change the ingredients of the liquid bath: Add a couple of tablespoons of Korean gochujang and a few minced garlic cloves to the base mixture, then finish the corn with toasted sesame seeds for a sweet-hot version. Add a half-cup of sake, two tablespoons of light miso paste and two tablespoons of soy sauce for a sake-miso glaze. Blend a couple of canned chipotle chiles with a few tablespoons of lime juice, add it to the bath and finish the corn with freshly minced cilantro or mint. To complete this recipe, you’ll need a disposable aluminum 9-by-13-inch baking pan, or a similarly sized stovetop-safe vessel that you don’t mind getting a bit dirty.
Thin but Juicy Chargrilled Burgers
The key to cooking a thin, modestly sized burger on the grill is to use the highest heat possible, and to cook the meat most of the way through on one side before flipping it and briefly cooking the second side. This technique allows you to get a nice dark crust on that first side without the risk of overcooking. To form thin patties that hold together on the grill, massage the ground beef briefly — which is a cardinal sin with many other styles of burgers, but a necessity here for cohesion. This allows you to flatten the patty out extra-thin and wide to account for shrinking as the meat cooks.
Peanut Butter Blackberry Bars
The love child of a juicy summer fruit pie and a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, these family-friendly bars are perfect for a backyard picnic or an after-school snack. They’re super fast to make with an electric mixer, but you can also make the dough by hand: Just be sure the butter is very soft before you start, and mix with a sturdy wooden spoon or rubber spatula. To make easy work of pressing the dough into the baking dish, use lightly floured hands or the bottom of a flat measuring cup.
Old-Fashioned Strawberry Cake
If strawberry doughnuts are your thing, then this cake is absolutely your thing. A classic, old-fashioned buttermilk cake with bits of berries strewn throughout, it manages to taste just like your favorite fried treat (without the frying, of course). Be sure to bake the cake all the way through; strawberries have a high water content and tend to make for a soggy cake if not baked properly. The top should be crackly, deeply and perfectly golden brown, and the edges should pull away from the sides of the pan.
Berry Buttermilk Cake
Buttermilk makes this stir-together cake super tender, but you can use any milk you have in its place. Same goes for the fruit: Use your favorite frozen berries, or a combination, but frozen cherries, mango or peaches work as well. Just cut any big fruit pieces into bite-size pieces before folding into the batter. And if you do happen to have fresh summer fruit around, that’ll work, too.
Grilled Corn on the Cob
You can grill corn on the cob with the husks on. You can strip the husks partly off, remove the silks and re-wrap the ears, then grill. You can soak the corn in cool water before grilling. Or blanch it in hot. I blanch, occasionally following the lead of the celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who adds one cup of milk to his blanching liquid. “I have no idea why I do it,” he said. “It’s like adding corks to the liquid when you’re poaching octopus. Who knows if it works?” Serve with butter, as in this recipe, or dab with mayonnaise and sprinkle with cotija cheese.
Fruit Cobbler With Any Fruit
You can use any fruit (or combination) to make this biscuit-topped cobbler. Just be sure to adjust the amount of sugar depending on whether your fruit is more sweet or tart. For example, blueberries, peaches, sweet cherries and pears tend to need less sugar than more acidic raspberries, sour cherries, plums and cranberries. Start with a few tablespoons and go up from there, tasting as you go. For the most tender biscuits, be sure to let the dough chill before baking.
Spumoni Ice Cream Cake
Spumoni is a frozen Italian-American dessert made by layering pistachio, cherry and chocolate (or sometimes vanilla) gelati. This showstopper ice cream cake version looks difficult, but it’s made with store-bought ingredients, so it mostly involves shopping and assembly. The layers can be stacked ahead, and you also don’t have to worry too much about its melting rapidly: The cake’s sheer volume and store-bought ice creams' stabilizers help it stay cold. For a Neapolitan-style cake, you could swap strawberry ice cream for the cherry and vanilla for the pistachio. The only true challenge here is making sure there’s room in your freezer, since this cake is about 4 inches tall.
Red Velvet Cookies With White Chocolate Chunks
As easy to make as your favorite chocolate chip recipe, these cookies pack the fun and flavor of red velvet cake into a simple, and much faster, cookie. Super sweet and tender with a slightly fudgy center, they contain creamy white chocolate chunks that nod to the snowy frosting on the cake version. For particularly pristine cookies, reserve some of the white chocolate chunks to arrange on top of the cookie, as they tend to get tinted pink when mixed into the batter.
Banana Cream Pie No-Churn Ice Cream
This no-churn ice cream doesn’t require any cooking or special equipment. All you have to do is mash up some bananas and whip some heavy cream. The whipped cream mimics the air that’s incorporated into traditional ice cream when it’s churning in an ice cream machine. For the strongest flavor, use really, really ripe bananas; mushy, bruised ones with black peels will work well. Large crumbles of vanilla wafers stirred into the ice cream and sprinkled on top add crunch.
Blueberry Streusel Loaf Cake
Everything you love about a sweet, juicy blueberry muffin exists in this sliceable, streusel-topped loaf. Baking it at a higher temperature for the first 20 to 25 minutes helps achieve a crisp topping, while finishing it at a lower temperature helps ensure a moist center. This recipe calls for fresh blueberries, but frozen work, too. If you use frozen, don’t thaw them first, and keep in mind that they may release additional liquid during baking, which will add more color to the loaf. One final tip: Tossing the fresh or frozen berries in a little flour before stirring them into the batter helps keep them suspended so that each and every slice is evenly studded with blueberries.
Striped Berry Pie
You can use three jammy berry fillings — strawberry, raspberry and blackberry — to create a beautiful, naturally colored ombré effect in a pie. Pre-cooking the fillings helps ensure that they’re thick enough to easily slice once they’re baked. You need to keep a close eye on the fruit here, so don’t be tempted to make more than one filling at a time. Berries can vary in juiciness, so it’s very important to make sure you have the right amount of each filling before assembling the pie (see the Note at the bottom of the recipe for how to adjust your filling if it’s too thin or too thick). The pie is best the day it’s baked, but the fillings can be made up to 2 days ahead; stir well before using.
Roasted Tomato and Corn Pie With Cheddar Crust
In this large-scale galette, cherry tomatoes, fresh corn and scallions are wrapped in a flaky Cheddar crust. The extra step of roasting the tomatoes first yields a pie that’s on the just-right side of juicy. Make sure you bake it long enough, and don’t be afraid to let the crust get deeply golden brown and allow the base to cook through. A good way to test for doneness is to gently shake the baking sheet: A crust that’s not fully baked will stay in place on the baking sheet, whereas a well-baked crust will easily slide from one end to the other. Feel free to substitute another kind of grated cheese for the Cheddar; Gruyère, Monterey jack and Parmesan are all delicious options.
Skirt Steak With Salsa Verde Salad
Salsa verde made with scallions, mint, parsley, capers and garlic becomes both the marinade for the steak and the dressing for the greens in this summery dinner salad. For extra smoky flavor, try grilling the romaine hearts (drizzle with olive oil and grill, cut side down, until lightly charred). Or, if you love bitter greens, substitute roughly chopped escarole leaves for the romaine.
Roasted Chicken Thighs With Peanut Butter BBQ Sauce
Peanut butter is the surprise guest in this spicy-sweet barbecue sauce, which cooks up in just 10 minutes. This versatile sauce, which adds nutty richness and depth, keeps for 2 weeks in the fridge and also freezes well. You'll have quite a bit: This recipe yields 2 cups of sauce. It's great to have on hand, doing double-duty as a sauce or a fantastic marinade for chicken or baby back ribs. (If allergies are a concern, substitute in almond butter for the peanut butter.) Serve with sautéed green beans, roasted broccoli or coleslaw.
Dolester Miles’s Lemon Meringue Tart
The celebrated pastry chef Dolester Miles learned to bake in a small town called Bessemer, outside Birmingham, Ala. She took the tastes of desserts passed down from her mother and her aunt, and re-worked them with the techniques she has picked up in her more than 30 years at the Birmingham restaurants Highlands Bar & Grill, Chez Fonfon and Bottega. This lemon meringue tart, reminiscent of a Southern icebox cake but with a French feel, is a perfect example. She stirs in white chocolate to give the curd a luscious mouth feel, and finishes it with a drift of soft Swiss meringue toasted with a blowtorch. A few seconds under the broiler will work, too. She cautions cooks never to take their eyes off the tart during that final step. “It’ll get away from you fast,” she said.
Frozen Melon With Crushed Raspberries and Lime
Inspired by packed cups of Italian ice, this frozen melon dessert is the best way to enjoy melon (besides eating it fresh). Be sure to season it with enough citrus juice to give some dimension to the melon, which tends to read as simply sweet. Frozen melon can be made two weeks ahead, either scraped or unscraped. (If scraped, store in a resealable plastic container and re-fluff before serving.)