Memorial Day
605 recipes found

Arugula Salad With Peaches, Goat Cheese and Basil
This simple, quintessential summer salad is a reminder that seasonal ingredients at their very best don’t need much fussing (or much cooking at all, in this case). Here, peppery arugula and earthy goat cheese get brightened with juicy summer peaches, but the recipe can be tweaked to suit all seasons: If you can’t find ripe peaches, you can use cherries, strawberries, plums, raspberries or even cherry tomatoes in their place.

Peach Upside-Down Skillet Cake With Bourbon Whipped Cream
A lush combination of a Southern upside-down cake and a French tarte tatin, this cake is deeply caramelized on top and light and fluffy beneath. The chef Virginia Willis, who put the recipe together, uses a whole vanilla bean, but if you don't feel like making that investment, a teaspoon of strong pure vanilla extract is fine. She uses a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, but a heavy nonstick one would work too. The whipped cream is optional, as is the bourbon that brightens it; you can add vanilla, confectioners' sugar or both if you prefer.

Pickled Deviled Eggs
Before they are deviled, these hard-cooked eggs are pickled in rice vinegar, brown sugar and garlic, along with slivered red onions. The pickling brine dyes the egg whites deep pink, and the onions turn pungently sweet and sour, making a terrific garnish for the deviled eggs. And after the eggs are gone, you’ll still be left with plenty of pickled onions that will last for weeks in the refrigerator. Add them to salads, tacos, grilled meats and sandwiches. You won’t be sorry to have them on hand.

Tomato And Tapenade Salad

Grilled Eggplant, Peppers and Onions
The happy mix of eggplant, peppers and onions is found throughout the Mediterranean. Cooking the vegetables over hot coals adds a welcome smokiness, but even a stovetop grill gives a hint of smoky flavor, so don’t fret if you can’t grill outside. This salad is meant to be served at room temperature. Feel free to make it up to 2 hours ahead.

Spicy Grilled Pork With Fennel, Cumin and Red Onion
Imbued with spices that char at high heat, this aromatic pork recipe is a snap to throw together — exactly what you want for a night of summer grilling. If you’re got wooden skewers, don’t forget to soak them in water for an hour before grilling, so they don’t flare up. And if you’re broiling and you don’t want to bother with skewers at all, just spread the pork cubes out on a rimmed sheet pan, turning them halfway through cooking with tongs or a spatula. The pork is excellent served with pita or crusty bread or a rice pilaf, or simple grilled corn on the cob.

Salty Peanut-Pretzel Ice Cream Cake
Grab a couple quarts of your favorite vanilla ice cream, crush up some peanuts and pretzels, and invite the neighborhood over for this sweet, salty, satisfying summer treat. For the most robust peanut flavor, use well-stirred natural, unsweetened peanut butter. You can also use a sweetened variety, if that’s what you have on hand, but bear in mind that the ice cream and honey lend this cake enough sweetness. The savory dry-roasted peanuts add a wonderful depth of flavor, but make sure to look for a brand without onion or garlic powder listed among the ingredients.

Berry Blitz Torte
Blitz means “lightning” in German, referring to the lightning-quick way this old-fashioned cake comes together, at least compared with the more ornately frosted tortes popular a century ago. Buttery, nutmeg-scented batter is swirled with meringue and sprinkled with pecans before baking. The meringue, which browns on top but stays soft inside, takes the place of icing while the nuts add flavor and crunch. A whipped cream and berry filling makes the whole thing incredibly soft and rich. You can bake the cake layers up to 12 hours ahead, but it’s best to fill them with cream and berries within 3 hours of serving so they don’t get soggy. This recipe is adapted from my friend’s mother, Patricia O’Neal, who got it from her mother, Genevieve Lehmont.

Berry Apple-Butter Pie
The deliciously tart apple butter filling in this pie has a deep rosy color, bolstered by raspberries and blackberries. Apples with darker red skins will produce a filling that contrasts beautifully with the decorative golden brown crust: We opted to top the pie with triangle cutouts, but you could use any shape, or even substitute a woven lattice. You can make the apple butter up to 5 days ahead and refrigerate it in an airtight container, but the pie itself is best the day it is made. Store leftovers at room temperature, tightly covered with plastic wrap.

Smoky Lobster Salad With Potatoes
This salad is a riff on a traditional Spanish dish, pulpo a la gallega, a favorite item on tapas bar menus all over the country. It is essentially boiled octopus and potatoes, sliced and served with a good drizzle of olive oil and a dusting of smoky pimentón. This version uses lobster instead, and adds strips of roasted pepper and cherry tomatoes.

Brown Sugar Frozen Yogurt And Berries

Smoky Chimichurri
You'll need a medium-hot charcoal fire to make this Argentine sauce. Either start cooking when your main grilled item comes off the fire or, if making this sauce separately, light a charcoal fire in your grill, putting all the coals on one side, and wait until it has died down to medium. Remove some or all of the pith and seeds from the jalapeños if you prefer a milder sauce. This relish is particularly good with beef.

Blueberry Rhubarb Pie
The baker and pie coach Kate McDermott has many tricks to figure out when a pie is done, but her favorite is what she calls “the heartbeat of the pie.” She listens for a sizzle that tells her that the fat in the crust is cooking the flour, and for a thumping sound that indicates that the simmering liquid is bumping up against the top crust. Also, watch for bubbling: This will tell you that the temperature is high enough that the thickeners have dissolved into the filling. All-berry pies can be too sweet and soft, so the tart crunch of rhubarb makes an ideal complement, especially in early spring. This glowing purple-magenta filling is quite spectacular.

Rhubarb Oat Shortcakes
Roasting rhubarb with Demarara sugar until the stalks caramelize and soften enough to collapse gives you a heady and intense jamlike compote with a molasses edge. Here, it’s paired with tender, biscuitlike shortcakes made with a little oat flour for complexity and plenty of whipped cream. It’s important to let the rhubarb juices truly caramelize at the edges of the pan; they should turn deep mahogany brown before you pull it from the oven. Then mix those syrupy juices with the rest of the rhubarb for the deepest flavor. You can make the biscuits and rhubarb up to eight hours in advance. Store them at room temperature until ready to serve.

Grilled Swordfish With Smoky Tomato-Anchovy Salsa
This is a simple summer fish dish with robust flavors. Swordfish would be the first choice, for its meatiness and ease of grilling, but any firm-fleshed white fish, such as halibut, monkfish, corvina or snapper, is a suitable option. Tuna would also work, but for that matter, so would chicken breast, for those at your gathering who don’t eat fish. Topped with an easily made salsa of cherry tomatoes, anchovy, hot pepper and smoky pimentón, the whole affair is rather salad-like, best accompanied by arugula or lettuce leaves. Serve with roasted potatoes or garlic toast for a casual picnic-style summer supper.

Green Beans With Herbs and Olives
A salad of freshly picked green beans is a true treat. Whatever the color — green, purple or pale yellow — choose smaller beans, which are naturally more tender.

Beef Tenderloin Stuffed With Herb Pesto
Stuffed beef tenderloin is always an impressive main course. This one is summery, with a zesty, garlicky herb pesto, ideal for grilling over coals. It is delicious served at room temperature for an elegant summer buffet. Ask your butcher for a nice center-cut piece of tenderloin. If you aren’t comfortable with butterflying the meat yourself, ask the butcher to do that too, but it’s really not very difficult.

Grilled Pork Loin With Herbs, Cumin and Garlic
Pork loin is an excellent cut to grill for a crowd. The cut is larger and more marbled with fat than a lean tenderloin, which is entirely different and should not be used as a substitute in this recipe. The pork loin has a richer flavor and meatier texture. Butterflying a loin helps it cook quickly and relatively evenly over direct heat, which is the easiest way to go on the grill. If you’d rather cook this in the oven, you can broil the meat: Place the pork, opened and flat, on a rimmed baking sheet, and broil it on low for 7 to 12 minutes per side, until done to taste.

The Perfect Burger

Tangerine, Ginger and Chocolate Tart
This elegant tart has a tangy citrus curd nestled in a ginger shortbread crust coated with bittersweet chocolate. The chocolate not only adds flavor, it also helps the pastry stay crisp by creating a barrier between the liquid curd and the pre-baked crust. This tart is best served the day it’s made, but can be stored for 24 hours in the refrigerator; after that, it starts to wilt. If you want to turn the leftover dough scraps into buttery cookies, see the note.

Strawberry and Pistachio Galette
With a double filling of homemade strawberry compote sitting on top of a layer pistachio frangipane, this elegant galette is a perfect way to showcase ripe summer berries. It is a bit more demanding to make than many other galettes, but you can do it in stages, making the dough, the compote and the frangipane a few days ahead, then bake on the same day as you plan to serve it so the pastry stays delightfully crisp. And if you miss strawberry season, make this with raspberries, blackberries or blueberries, adjusting the sugar in the compote to match the sweetness of the fruit (taste and add more sugar for sour fruit, less sugar for sweeter fruit).

Roast Chicken With Olive-Coriander Juice And Chickpea Fries

Coconut Creamed Corn With Ginger

Fresh Corn Summer Salad
Here is a bright bowl of summer offered up by Betty Fussell, the cookbook writer and observer of American life. She tells us to organize the vegetables in rows across a platter, which provides a lovely presentation — but there’s nothing wrong with piling them in a bowl willy-nilly, a crisp riot of color and flavor.