Nut-Free
1681 recipes found
Chicken Scaloppine With Roasted Apricots
Roasted apricots go well with savory dishes like these chicken breasts, which are called scaloppine when they’re pounded thin, as they are here. When you pound meat thin like this, you can get a lot out of one piece. The scaloppine cook very quickly.
Fried Green Beans, Scallions and Brussels Sprouts With Buttermilk-Cornmeal Coating
This buttermilk batter fries up to a fluffy/crispy coating. When I was deciding what vegetables I wanted to coat and fry with this batter I knew that I would use scallions and green beans. (I used green beans with almost all of my recipe tests this week) Then I found a half-pound of brussels sprouts that had seen better days in my crisper. I trimmed off the yellowing outer leaves, quartered them, gave them a dunk in the batter and eased them into the hot oil. Now I will never throw out old brussels sprouts again. Okra would also be a good choice for this recipe. You can serve these plain or with any number of dips, either spicy (think Sriracha or chipotle aioli) or Japanese.
Beet Greens Bulgur With Carrots and Tomatoes
Bulgur and greens are a classic Greek combo. I have added carrots to brighten up the dish. I love the lemony finish. If you are not committed to a vegan version of the dish I recommend that you top each serving with feta. The bulgur-vegetable mix makes a comforting, satisfying meal – though you could also serve this as a side dish.
Grits Rancheras
Anson Mills pencil cob grits make a great stand-in here for the corn tortillas that traditionally constitute the base for huevos rancheras. The salsa and the egg yolk ooze into the creamy grits, an unforgettable match made in heaven. Since you are working with the highest quality grits here it would be a shame to pair them with ordinary battery eggs; go out and get the best farm-raised eggs you can afford and just see what a difference that ultra-yellow yolk makes. You can make the salsa while the grits are cooking or you can make it before you begin cooking them and keep it warm. You can also use a commercial salsa ranchera, as long as it is a good one. Note that the grits need an overnight soak before cooking.
Wheatberry Salad With Dried Cranberries and Goat Cheese
A wheatberry is the whole wheat kernel. You can grind it to make flour, but if you boil it like a bean, you’re left with a delicious whole grain that has a nutty flavor and pops in your mouth when you eat it. This simple wheatberry salad from Kim Quay, the owner of Comfort Food, a catering and prepared food business in Morrisville, Pa., is made with dried cranberries, sautéed red onion, carrots and celery then tossed with a light mustard vinaigrette. For a vegan version, omit the goat cheese.
French Toasted Apricot Brioche
Farro Pilaf With Balsamic Cherries
The balsamic cherries are great with this pilaf, but they’d also be good as an accompaniment to meats.
Buckwheat Crepes With Roasted Apricots
Apricots are delicious in both sweet and savory dishes. The flavor will deepen with cooking. Roasting apricots intensifies the flavor, and the apricots give up some delicious juice. It blends with the small amount of butter and honey here, and you can use it as a sauce. This dish offers a combination of earthy/nutty from the crepes and sweet and tangy from the apricots.
Garlic Shrimp With Peas
Seek out shrimp in the shell and use the shells for a quick, easy seafood broth. Freeze what broth you don’t use in the dish; it comes in handy when you need a seafood broth for a risotto or a stew.
Polenta or Grits With Beans and Chard
Anson Mills creamy polenta or grits is very inviting for a savory, brothy bean stew with lots of greens stirred in at the end of cooking. I like to use a reddish bean for this – I have used a number of heirloom varieties from Rancho Gordo, but also regular supermarket pintos and red beans. The recipe makes twice as much bean stew as you will need for 4 portions of polenta or grits. So make the polenta (or grits) again the next day and polish them off!
Crepes With Raspberry-Cassis Sauce
These sophisticated crepes can be made ahead of time and reheated in a low-temperature oven. The sauce, made by simmering raspberries in a rose-scented, cassis-spiked syrup, is what makes them special. While most of it is poured over the folded crepes, a bit is added to the yogurt, honey and lime filling, making it just sweet enough.
Greek Bulgur With Brussels Sprouts
I love the way the bulgur swells and fluffs after you let this comforting, nourishing dish sit once it’s cooked. In fact, I liked the leftovers even more than the freshly made dish. I also love the lemony flavor, the result of just a small amount of lemon juice added at the end of cooking. This is one of the few times I am happy to allow brussels sprouts to cook until they are quite soft.
Amaranth Porridge With Grated Apples and Maple Syrup
Amaranth is a tiny seed – it isn’t really a grain, though that is how we treat it – and has both sweet and grassy overtones. I experimented with preparing it as a polenta, like the teff polenta I made earlier in the week, and seasoning it with nut oil or mixing in a little Parmesan. It worked that way, but I still found that the flavor of this food works better with sweet flavors, and the texture did not benefit from the long oven simmer, the way the teff did. So again, I decided that amaranth is best served as a breakfast porridge. I toasted the seeds in the pan before adding water, and this added a wonderful popcorn dimension to the flavor. The aroma of this cereal as it cooked reminded me of the smell of the whole wheat Ralston Hot Cereal that my mother used to make for me. The amaranth will cook in about 20 minutes on top of the stove. I add milk halfway through the cooking, and the amaranth retains a nice grainy texture.
Baked Orzo With Artichokes and Peas
This is a Greek-inspired pastitsio, a comforting béchamel-enriched mix of orzo, artichokes and peas. Rather than butter, the béchamel in this dish is made with a couple of glugs of good extra virgin olive oil.
Venison and Trotter Pie
This lavish, British-style meat pie is a delicious, time-consuming project. It comes together over many hours, layering the flavors and textures of many different meats, and seals it all in a buttery homemade dough. The recipe belongs to the chef Angie Mar of the Beatrice Inn in New York, who makes the pie at her restaurant in smaller ramekins, so that each person gets her own marrow bone. This family-style version serves several people, but a single bone works beautifully: As the pie bakes in the oven, most of the marrow melts out, bubbling into the sauce, making it even richer. The pie filling, made from potatoes and venison braised in trotter stock, is thickened with a little flour, but it should be slightly loose when you're putting the pie together. The crust requires suet, and though you could make it all-butter if you wanted to, it seems that if you've come this far, and located the marrow bone, the trotters and the venison meat, you may as well go all the way. The finished pie is certainly worth it.
Baked Orzo With Tomatoes, Roasted Peppers and Zucchini
Orzo is a type of pasta that looks like rice. It’s popular in Greece, where it is baked in casseroles like this one. If you like comforting dishes like macaroni and cheese, you’ll like this.
Greens and Chayote Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Lightness is not an attribute usually associated with enchiladas, the most comforting of Mexican tortilla foods. But these enchiladas, filled with a mix of blanched seasoned chard and succulent diced chayote and covered with a classic cooked tomatillo salsa, are both light and incredibly satisfying.
Herb Fritters
Inspired by a recipe in Clifford A. Wright’s “The Little Foods of the Mediterranean,” these fritters are light and delicate. You can use a mix of herbs and finely chopped greens – mild ones like spinach and chard, or more robust greens like dandelion or arugula – or all herbs, or all greens. You can also use this batter as a vehicle for other finely chopped or grated vegetables, like cabbage or carrots, onions or leeks. The fritters make a great hors d’oeuvre or side dish.
Teff Polenta With Toasted Hazelnut Oil
Teff is a challenging grain to work with. The flavor is strong, the grains tiny, and the mixture stiffens up very quickly once the grains are cooked. The chef Jason Bond makes a comforting teff polenta at his Bondir restaurants in Cambridge and Concord, Mass. He cooks the teff on top of the stove, in milk, and adds a finely chopped chipotle chile to the mix, which contributes a nice smoky/hot flavor. I liked the idea of teff polenta, and tried a few different methods for it. Teff will cook up in about 20 minutes on top of the stove, but if you use the oven-baked method outlined here, modeled on the method I often use for cornmeal polenta, you will get a creamier result. The oven method takes much longer, but the time is unsupervised – no frequent stirring as you must do on the top of the stove. This method doesn’t work so well if you use milk, however, because the milk forms too much skin in the oven, which forms curds when you stir the mixture (though I do like the flavor of the teff cooked in milk a lot). I tested the recipe using both stock and water, and liked both results equally. The chipotle adds a nice smoky/spicy flavor to the teff, but you can leave it out and just focus on the nutty flavor of the teff alone, with the hazelnut oil. I love the toasted hazelnut oil finish; it harmonizes with the nutty/earthy flavor of this grain. Serve the teff as a side dish or top with roasted vegetables or a vegetable or bean stew. You can also allow the teff to stiffen, then cut into squares and fry in the squares oil or grill them. You will get best results if you soak the teff for a few hours or overnight.
Collard Greens With Farro
Farro with anything is comfort food, and the combination of farro and collard greens is particularly hearty and nutritious. The time required to cook the farro will depend on how long it has been sitting on your shelf. When it’s less than a year old, farro softens nicely. The older it is, the longer it will need to cook.
Orzo With Peas and Parsley Pesto
This is like a pasta version of the classic rice and peas risotto, risi e bisi. It’s a beautiful springtime dish. You can make a whole batch of pesto so that you have it on hand for other uses (like sandwiches), but for this dish you’ll need only a half batch.
Moussaka With Roasted Mushrooms
In this Balkan style Moussaka I have substituted the roasted mushroom mix for half the meat. But you can also make a vegetarian version with no meat at all. It is delicious either way, with a complex, slightly sweet Eastern Mediterranean sauce spiced with a little cinnamon, a pinch of allspice and a few cloves. Greek moussaka is topped with béchamel, which can be heavy, even gummy. But this one has a light, fluffy topping made with yogurt and eggs. There are a few steps involved here and the sauce is a long-cooking one, but you can get that started while the eggplant is roasting in the oven to speed things along or make the sauce the day before.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Roasted Brussels Sprouts With a Pomegranate Reduction
If you thought you did not like brussels sprouts, this recipe will definitely change your mind. The first time my grandmother served roasted brussels sprouts to me, I could not stop eating them. When brussels sprouts are roasted, they become crispy on the outside and sweet and delicate on the inside. The addition of a warm pomegranate glaze, and the cool, sweet pomegranate seeds, makes these brussels sprouts a festive delight.