Memorial Day
605 recipes found
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.)
Strawberry Chiffon Pie
This airy retro icebox dessert first appeared in “Fruit Pies: Delightful Confections Starring Fresh Fruit,” a booklet published by The New York Times Food News department in 1952, and it’s an excellent way to make use of summer’s strawberry bounty. Chiffons achieve their light consistency from meringue that is carefully folded into fruit custard.
Frosty Lime Pie
This frozen dessert delivers cold, tart relief on a hot summer day. Pearl Byrd Foster served this pie on her menu at Mr. and Mrs. Foster’s Place, her 15-table restaurant on the Upper East Side. Ms. Foster opened the restaurant after a 30-year career in hotel, department store and food magazine kitchens. Raymond Sokolov, a former food editor of The New York Times, wrote about this recipe in 1971. The real secret to making this pie, he said, is in how you handle the egg yolks. Heat them too much and they scramble, or too little and they won’t thicken. When the yolks get too hot for your finger, around 165 degrees, they’re hot enough.
Potato Salad With Tartar Sauce and Fresh Herbs
Most potato salad recipes call for tossing together all the components, but this one calls for assembling the dish in layers, and for brightening — and loosening — the traditional mayonnaise dressing with pickles and their brine. The steps are simple, and the key is in the potato treatment: Boil the potatoes and slice them into rounds, then immediately douse them with fragrant pickle brine and olive oil, so they soak up flavor and retain moisture. Prepare your potatoes and tartar sauce in advance, then assemble before serving, draping your seasoned potatoes on a platter, drizzling them with the loose tartar sauce and sprinkling with herbs and lemon zest for a modern update on a classic.
Blueberry, Almond and Lemon Cake
A slice of this berry-dotted cake is perfect late in the morning, for afternoon tea or after dinner, with coffee. It keeps for up to three days in a sealed container, but is at its absolute best on the day it's made.
Radish Salad
Radish salad is something you see in places around the world (in the last couple of years, I have been served it in similar guises in both Mexico and Turkey), but almost never in this country. Salting the radishes first reduces their harshness while accenting their crispness. At that point, they can be dressed with a traditional vinaigrette or the more tropical (and oil-less) version here. The only trick is to slice the radishes thinly. For this, a mandoline is best.
Grilled Flounder
A Montauk fishing guide named Bryan Goulart was the first person I saw brine thin fillets of porgy and sea bass, and the Brooklyn chef Josh Cohen taught me how to do it with flounder, though the recipe would work on any flat fish. A mere 10 minutes in the bath will tighten the flesh nicely, and then three or four minutes of cooking the fish need follow, over a medium flame. Cook only that one side, then flip the fish onto a serving platter or plate, and top with a little bit of butter, chopped parsley and a spray of lemon.
Grilled Swordfish Kebabs With Golden Raisin Chimichurri
Swordfish is the perfect seafood for grilling — the flesh is sturdy and firm, with a mild flavor that readily absorbs the aroma of smoke without losing its own. Most people grill swordfish as steaks; the Miami chef Michael Schwartz cuts it into chunks for kebabs, a format that allows him to intersperse the chunks of fish with lemon slices and bay leaves, and grills them over wood (though you could use charcoal or, if necessary, grill over gas). The tips of the bay leaves char, imparting a fragrant herbal smoke. By way of a sauce, Mr. Schwartz serves a classic Argentine chimichurri with a not-so-classic twist — the addition of yellow raisins, which counter the traditional garlic and vinegar with an unexpected note of sweetness. If swordfish is unavailable, use another sturdy fish, like tuna or mako shark.
Spicy Corn on the Cob With Miso Butter and Chives
Corn slathered in miso butter is special enough, so you’re within your rights to ignore any other ingredients in this recipe. But for lovers of spice, the Japanese spice blend shichimi togarashi is worth seeking out. In English, it translates to “seven-flavor chile pepper,” though not all of those seven flavors are chile: There’s also roasted orange peel, sesame seeds, ground ginger and seaweed in the mix. Add it gradually, so as not to overpower the subtle flavor of the miso butter (and because everyone likes a different amount of spice). If you can’t find shichimi togarashi, substitute crushed red-pepper flakes.
Buffalo Corn on the Cob
This recipe delivers a hot wings moment minus the meat: Melt some blue cheese into warm Buffalo sauce and slather it on corn, then sprinkle with even more blue cheese crumbles. There are people in this world who think Buffalo sauce pairs better with ranch dressing than blue cheese, and even some people who detest blue cheese. For them, leave out the blue cheese altogether and drizzle ranch (or our recipe for yogurt ranch sauce) over the Buffalo’d cobs.
Corn on the Cob With Lime, Fish Sauce and Peanuts
As this recipe proves, lime juice, fish sauce and sugar is a powerful combination you should commit to memory. Traditionally, those three ingredients form the base of several classic Thai and Vietnamese sauces like nuoc cham and nam pla prik. The mayonnaise here is barely noticeable, but it serves an important role in helping the flavors adhere to the corn. The cilantro is optional so no one will throw a fit.