Party
399 recipes found
Roasted Eggplant Salad
In Morocco — and similarly throughout the Middle East — the most delicious salads are made with seasoned, cooked vegetables, not leafy greens. This dish, smoky eggplant salad with cilantro, infused with cumin, hot pepper and a generous amount of olive oil, is a winning combination. For the perfect flavor, you want to seriously blacken the eggplant. Choose very firm eggplants, which will have fewer seeds. The salad will keep, refrigerated, for several days.
Lemon Cheesecake Tart
With a simple, pat-in-the-pan crust and a thin layer of light, lemon-scented cream cheese, this cheesecake tart is a lot easier to make than you might imagine. The base can be baked right away, with no chilling required, and the custardy filling relies upon little more than tangy cream cheese, lemon zest and juice, sugar and eggs. It’s the perfect dessert for a winter or early spring gathering, when there might not be much fresh fruit around but you’re in the mood for a bright dessert.
Mocha Icebox Cake
Icebox cakes gained popularity in the 1920s along with the rise of refrigerators in American homes and the creation of Nabisco chocolate wafers, which featured an icebox cake recipe on their packaging. This nostalgic, no-bake treat makes use of a few simple ingredients to great effect: Billowy, lightly sweetened whipped cream is layered with chocolate wafer cookies and left to sit until cookies and cream become one; this recipe updates the classic with the addition of espresso powder and a bit of spice. Refrigeration is important for icebox cakes, as it allows the cookies time to absorb some of the moisture from the cream, which gives this dessert a soft, sliceable texture. A bit of time in the freezer makes the cake easier to cut into tidy slices, but it tastes just as good scooped straight out of the pan.
Herbed Grain Salad With Mushrooms, Hazelnuts and Pears
Instead of the usual Mediterranean flavors, this grain salad has a whiff of Eastern Europe, with dill, hazelnuts and mushrooms. Ripe pear adds juicy and sweet notes. It's great for fall and winter parties, and can be prepared well ahead of time, but wait till the last minute to stir everything together.
Mushroom-Butternut Squash Strata
This golden-topped strata has a savory mushroom and butternut squash filling, which gives it a complex, earthy flavor. Mozzarella adds mild richness, while the Parmesan gives everything a hit of salt and depth. You’ll need to let the strata sit in the fridge for at least eight hours (and preferably overnight) before baking. This allows the bread to soak up all the custard. Then, run it under the broiler after baking so the edges become crunchy and pleasingly singed. It’s a lovely main dish for a celebratory brunch or meatless supper, or a hearty side dish with roast chicken or fish for dinner.
Caramelized Onion Galette
This rich, autumnal galette takes its inspiration from the flavors of French onion soup. Seasoned with Gruyère and lots of cracked black pepper, the galette dough takes the place of the crostini, and the caramelized onion filling is fortified with beef broth and sherry. The dish is great for entertaining — it can be prepared in advance — but requires a little bit of patience: You’ll need to let the dough rest for at least four hours, which allows the flour to hydrate and will make the dough less crumbly to work with. Let the tart rest for about 10 minutes before slicing and serving. Eat it while it’s hot or serve at room temperature alongside a salad or steak.
Party Wreath
This party-size vegetarian version of a sausage roll takes a bit of inspiration from potato- and pea-filled samosas: The filling is a coarse mash of peas and potato mixed with fresh ginger and green chiles, along with cumin, fennel and sesame seeds. Seasoned with lemon juice and garam masala, it has a tangy, gently spicy flavor that’s even more sumptuous when it’s wrapped in buttery store-bought puff pastry. Be sure to cut the roll almost all the way to the inner edge before sliding it into the oven, so that the baked pieces are easy to tear away. Serve with green chutney, tamarind chutney, a squirt of Maggi ketchup, or just as is, with a few wedges of lemon or lime on the side.
Moroccan Nachos
This Moroccan twist on the much-loved appetizer features kefta, a ground beef (or lamb) mixture seasoned with parsley, cilantro, mint, paprika and cumin, and a spicy-sweet harissa salsa. Both give these nachos an unusual kick that’s as festive as it is comforting. Creamy guacamole, bright with lemon zest and juice, balances everything out. To save time, cook the kefta mixture and prepare the salsa in advance. Using a combination of fresh and canned tomatoes creates a not-too-runny and not-too-chunky consistency that’s ideal for drizzling over a tray of nachos. That said, feel free to swap the fresh tomatoes for half a 14-ounce can crushed tomatoes or vice versa.
Epis Braised Beef Short Ribs
Haitian-American chef Gregory Gourdet developed this dish for Kann Winter Village, the pop-up restaurant he ran in Portland, Ore., in 2021. The temporary restaurant served as a preview of Kann, the Haitian restaurant he opened in August 2022, which landed on The New York Times’ list of America’s Best Restaurants. Beef is not nearly as prevalent in Haitian cuisine as chicken, pork and seafood, said Mr. Gourdet, whose family is Haitian, but the flavors in the dish — including the Haitian epis seasoning — are “very Haitian. It tastes like my family’s food.”
Citrus Salad With Fennel and Olives
An orange salad can be a simple affair. Add sliced oranges, a few black olives and a drizzle of oil, and it’s a winning combination, known throughout the eastern Mediterranean, southern Italy and perhaps especially in Morocco. You can up the interest factor in any number of ways. Add thinly sliced fennel and red onion, some arugula, mint or basil leaves, a sprinkling of red pepper, a pinch of wild oregano or a little flaky salt. The salad needn’t be restricted to only navel oranges. In season, blood oranges, Cara Cara oranges or grapefruit are welcome to join.
Pineapple Fried Rice
“It’s a whole balanced meal inside a tropical fruit,” writes Pepper Teigen about this pineapple fried rice recipe in her book “The Pepper Thai Cookbook” (Clarkson Potter, 2021). This is fried rice, which means in place of the bacon and chicken, you can use shrimp, beef or whatever vegetables you have languishing in your crisper drawer. The one thing you shouldn’t skip are the assertive seasonings, which merit a party: The full 2 tablespoons of curry powder and 1 teaspoon of ground white pepper are what make this dish tingle and trot with a hot, addictive savoriness.
Chocolate-Chip Cookie Pizza
You like chocolate chip cookies. You like pizza. What could be better than a giant chocolate chip pizza cookie? If your answer is, “pretty much nothing,” we’d say you’re 100% right. This Instagram-worthy treat starts with a batch of our famous chocolate chip cookie dough (with a smidge of cornstarch to keep the cookie soft and gooey in the center), but from there, it’s all yours. When we took it out of the oven, we spread on cherry jam “pizza sauce,” drizzled on melted white chocolate “mozzarella,” and added rounds of raspberry fruit leather “pepperoni.” But warmed Nutella and blobs of marshmallow fluff are a pretty awesome combination, too. We developed this recipe for a special print-only edition of The New York Times for Kids, but our sources tell us grown-up sweet tooths can't resist this oversized treat either. For a more sophisticated dinner party-worthy variation, leave off the toppings and serve generous wedges with scoops of vanilla ice cream and salted caramel sauce.
Braised Pork With Prunes and Orange
This tart-sweet braise is inspired by porc aux pruneaux, a classic French dish, which usually involves soaking prunes in tawny port before adding them to a sauce for pork. Here, the prunes are soaked in a mix of vinegar and brown sugar, a more economical way to amplify their mellow sweet-sour flavor. (But by all means use tawny port instead of the vinegar-sugar combo if you like!) This one-pot version is fragrant with orange and contains an assertive amount of sherry vinegar to balance the richness of the pork and dried fruit. Serve the pork and sauce over polenta or with seeded bread.
Moroccan Chicken Salad
Just as a little saffron, garlic and paprika can conjure the flavors of Spain, so too will preserved lemons, cumin, mint and olives evoke Morocco. This salad and the accompanying couscous can be doubled or tripled to anchor a generous buffet. Both can be assembled a couple of hours in advance and set aside on a kitchen counter. Serve them at room temperature.
Baked Apples With Honey and Apricot
Baked apples are a humble dessert, but these have a certain elegance. Stuffed with dried apricots and raisins, glazed with honey and apricot jam, and served with crème fraîche, they are delicious warm or at room temperature.
Salt and Pepper Lassi with Mint
This savory lassi variation includes salt and mint leaves, which are traditional, and black pepper and lime zest, which are not. It’s the kind of thing to serve with juicy ripe melon and prosciutto for a light hot weather lunch, or to offer as a nonalcoholic alternative at a cocktail party. Sheeps’ milk yogurt lends a lovely earthiness to the mix but plain cows’ milk yogurt is a perfectly fine alternative. Feel free to adjust the salt and sugar levels to suit your taste. You want this on the savory side, but a little more sweetness works nicely with the pepper and mint.
Crunchy Coconut Twists
At first glance, these long, skinny cookies look a lot like savory cheese straws, the kind of thing you’d nibble with cocktails. But those golden shreds are coconut, not Cheddar, embedded in store-bought puff pastry and coated with sugar. They’re crunchy, caramelized, and look dramatic on a cookie plate. Try to seek out all-butter pastry for the richest flavor. And if you come across chocolate puff pastry, even better!
Gâteau d’Hélène (Coconut Cake)
This coconut cake was adapted from a recipe by Simone (Simca) Beck, best known as Julia Child’s co-author on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She called it “Gâteau d’Hélène: a white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot.” The recipe, published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, “Simca’s Cuisine” (Lyons Press, 1998), capped what she called a “carefree lunch” because it could be made ahead. Indeed, this cake is best baked, filled, frosted and refrigerated for at least an hour (or up to two days). Kind of like a madeleine, its layers are purposefully a bit dry, as they need to hold a dousing of orange juice and rum. The whipped cream filling and frosting is soft and dreamy. It’s an elegant celebration cake.
Roasted Chicken Provençal
This is a recipe I picked up from Steven Stolman, a clothing and interior designer whose “Confessions of a Serial Entertainer” is a useful guide to the business and culture of dinner parties and general hospitality. It is a perfect dinner-party meal: chicken thighs or legs dusted in flour and roasted with shallots, lemons and garlic in a bath of vermouth and under a shower of herbes de Provence. They go crisp in the heat above the fat, while the shallots and garlic melt into sweetness below. You could serve with rice, but I prefer a green salad and a lot of baguette to mop up the sauce.
Slow-Roasted Turkish Lamb
This lamb must be cooked until completely tender and succulent, but if time is a concern, it may also be prepared well in advance and reheated in the pan juices to serve. Shoulder is the best cut to use, or lamb shanks. It’s finished with a bright garnish of pomegranate seeds and sliced persimmons. Small Fuyu persimmons are delicious eaten firm and raw, like an apple, unlike the larger Hachiya type, which must be ripe and soft to be palatable (and would not be suitable here). Lacking persimmons, use more pomegranate. Serve it with rice pilaf, if desired.
Rice Pilaf With Pumpkin, Currants and Pine Nuts
A well-made rice pilaf may be prepared in advance and reheated, covered, in a medium-hot oven. In Turkey, short-grain Bomba rice is preferred, but you may substitute Arborio, or long-grained white rice if you wish. Be sure to rinse the rice well, which will help the grains to remain separate, not clumped together.
Momofuku’s Bo Ssam
This is a recipe to win the dinner party sweepstakes, and at very low stakes: slow-roasted pork shoulder served with lettuce, rice and a raft of condiments. The chef David Chang serves the dish, known by its Korean name, bo ssam, at his Momofuku restaurant in the East Village and elsewhere. He shared the recipe with The Times in 2012. Mr. Chang is known as a kitchen innovator, but his bo ssam is a remarkably straightforward way to achieve high-level excellence with little more than ingredients and time. Simply cure the pork overnight beneath a shower of salt and some sugar, then roast it in a low oven until it collapses. Apply some brown sugar and a little more salt, then roast the skin a while longer until it takes on the quality of glistening bark. Meanwhile, make condiments – hot sauces and kimchi, rice, some oysters if you wish. Then tear meat off the bone and wrap it in lettuce, and keep at that until everything’s gone.
Pulled Pork Sandwiches
This recipe takes a good deal of time, but it yields a lot of sandwiches, more than enough for a sloppy, spicy dinner party feast. You’ll roast a dry-rubbed pork shoulder in the oven until it’s pull-apart tender, 3 or 4 hours that you can spend doing other things while your kitchen fills with the aroma of the cooking meat. Then you’ll assemble a quick slaw and simmer a tangy barbecue sauce for about 10 minutes before putting it all out on the table with soft rolls. Serve the combination warm, at any time of the year, for a weekend project well worth an afternoon’s work.
Baby Back Ribs With Sweet and Sour Glaze
This sticky baby back ribs recipe needs just two things: time in the oven and a jammy, savory sauce. Inspired by old-fashioned cocktail meatball recipes from the 1960s and ’70s, this sweet and sour glaze — a shellac of Concord grape jelly, soy sauce and rice vinegar — lacquers tender baby back ribs that cook from start to finish in the oven. Whether you serve these with beer at a party or with white rice as a fun dinner, you’ll probably need napkins.