Side Dish
4106 recipes found
A Perfect Hard-Boiled Egg
Master this simple technique and every hard-boiled egg you make from here on out will have a perfectly-cooked, creamy sunshine center. Here are loads of recipes to make with them.
Roasted Carrot Salad With Arugula and Pomegranate
This composed, bright salad of roasted carrots, thinly sliced fennel and arugula gains a fruity depth from a splash of pomegranate molasses in the dressing. You can find pomegranate molasses in Middle Eastern groceries and specialty food shops, and it’s worth seeking out for its complex, sweet-tart acidity. Once opened, it will last for years in your pantry. This salad makes a delightful side dish or light main course, especially if you include the optional toasted walnuts or pita chips, which add a satisfying crunch. If you can find multicolored carrots, this already striking salad becomes even prettier.
Sautéed Brussels Sprouts
This is sort of a no-recipe recipe for brussels sprouts that will have you wanting to make them every day of the week. Once you memorize the proportions, you can vary the fat and seasonings any which way you like. One important tip: Having a large enough skillet is key, so the sprouts have a chance to brown on one side before steaming and turning to mush.
Ratatouille
In this classic Provençal dish, summer vegetables, like eggplant, onions, peppers, tomatoes and zucchini, are covered in olive oil and roasted separately, then all together, until they become a soft, harmonious stew. This recipe calls for seeding and peeling the tomatoes, which is a bit of work. But it’s worth it for the intensity of flavor and the velvety texture. Ratatouille takes some time to make, and tastes better the next day, so plan ahead. The upside is that it’s a perfect make-ahead dish for a party. You can store it in the refrigerator for up to 5 days, then gently reheat it, or bring it to room temperature before serving. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Buckwheat Popovers
These airy, crisp popovers have a rich, nutty flavor, thanks to the combination of buckwheat flour and a little whole-wheat flour stirred into the batter. If you’ve never made popovers, they’re extremely easy to mix up with just a bowl and a whisk, no electric beaters required. Or you can use a blender if you like. The only thing to keep in mind is that you should not open the oven door during baking until the very end, or they might not puff. Use your oven light and window to check on their progress. You can make the batter a few hours or even the night before (store it in the refrigerator). Just give it a quick whisk before pouring it into the pans for baking. Then serve your popovers hot from the oven, with plenty of butter and jam. The recipe makes six popovers, using a popover pan, but you can stretch that to 12 popovers if you use a muffin tin instead.
Farro With Roasted Squash, Feta and Mint
Falling somewhere between a grain bowl and a warm grain salad, this colorful dish is substantial enough to be a meatless main course, or it makes a hearty side dish to simple roasted meat or fish. You can use whatever kind of squash you like here, either peeled or unpeeled. Squash skin is perfectly edible; let anyone who objects cut theirs away at the table (though see if you can get them to try it first). If you don’t have farro, you can substitute brown rice. Just increase the cooking time by about 20 minutes.
Aligot (Mashed Potatoes With Cheese)
Somewhere between buttery mashed potatoes and pure melted cheese lies aligot, the comforting, cheese-enhanced mashed-potato dish from central France. The key to getting a smooth, airy texture is to rice the potatoes while they're still hot, then incorporate cold butter, hot milk and grated cheese over low heat. To build up the stringiness of that melting cheese, Ham El-Waylly, a chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Hail Mary, suggests whipping it with confidence, speed and vigor. This is what will create aligot's characteristic cheese strings: long and sheer, with some elasticity. "They should fight with you," Waylly says. While fresh tomme or Cantal is traditional, Gruyère or Comté work well, too.
Bariis (Somali-Style Rice)
Somali-style rice, when prepared for festive occasions, can be a satisfying meal on its own: The rice is cooked in a rich stock and often jeweled with pieces of meat and vegetables. This version of the dish comes from Ayaan and Idyl Mohallim, twin sisters who make their own xawaash, an aromatic spice mixture that is layered with fenugreek and turmeric. The finished rice is also generously seasoned with saffron, as well as softened peppers and raisins. At Thanksgiving, the rice is a versatile side with roast turkey and vegetables, and the day after, it's a great base for leftovers. You could easily use a vegetable stock in place of a meat stock for a vegetarian version, and add more vegetables to the topping. The Mohallim sisters, on occasion, add blanched green beans to the mix.
Summer Vegetable Gratin
Cooking some of the ingredients beforehand is the key to a rich-tasting, nonsoggy gratin of summer vegetables: It pulls out water and concentrates flavors. The recipe has three layers — aromatics, vegetables and topping — but you can omit the topping to make it just two. Be sure to use fresh bread, nothing hard and stale, in that topping. Fluffy bits, not sandy shards, make the best crust.
Gjelina’s Roasted Yams
These roasted yams are adapted from a recipe that Travis Lett, the chef and an owner of Gjelina in Venice, Calif., published in a 2015 cookbook devoted to the restaurant’s food. They are a marvelous accompaniment to a roast chicken, but they are maybe even better as a platter to accompany a salad of hearty greens, cheese and nuts. What makes them memorable is a technique Lett calls for during the cooking: tossing the tubers in honey before roasting them, which intensifies their caramelizing. The crisp, near-burned sweetness works beautifully against the heat of the pepper and the acidic creaminess of the yogurt you dab onto the dish at the end. It is a simple dish, but it results in fantastic eating.
Winter Citrus Salad With Belgian Endive
Late winter really is the time for the best citrus. Produce markets have piles of blood oranges, as well as navel and cara cara oranges and grapefruit, the flesh of each in different vivid brilliant colors. For this salad, use as many kinds of citrus as possible. If you can find pomelos, they add their own kind of sweet tanginess. The combined flavor of sweet and sour citrus, fruity olive oil and coarse salt is seductive.
Roasted Squash and Radicchio Salad With Buttermilk Dressing
Roasted delicata squash brings sweetness and a velvety texture to the bitter radicchio and arugula in this colorful salad. A light buttermilk dressing adds creaminess and brightness. It’s satisfying enough for a light dinner, or serve it before or alongside roasted or grilled meat or fish.
Twice-Baked Butternut Squash With Cashew Cheese, Walnuts and Cranberries
The dish from Caitlin Galer-Unti, a vegan food blogger, is stuffed with cashew cheese, nuts and cranberries. It would make a great main or side.
Kasha Caliente
It was a love of kasha and memories of family that inspired Nancy Jane Richer of Knoxville, Tenn., to create this holiday recipe. Ms. Richer’s father loved kasha and died on Thanksgiving more than a decade ago. Recently, Ms. Richer spotted wild turkeys in her winter vegetable garden. For her, it felt like a message. “It was a magical omen,” Ms. Richer said. The result is this spicy take on kasha, created in memory of Ms. Richer’s parents. The dish is robust enough to eat as a vegetarian main course, but also tempting as a side dish for everyone at the table.
Mashed Potatoes
Mashed potatoes are very forgiving, and with a good masher, hot potatoes and enough butter and salt, cooks can accommodate religionists of the fluffy style and partisans of the creamy and dense. Be openhanded with salt and butter but stingy with milk, which will flatten out the bright, earthy potato taste. You might also enjoy this video of the recipe that walks through a few variations. (And for everything you need to know to make perfect potatoes, visit our potato guide.)
Meera Sodha’s Naan
The British cookbook author learned this recipe from her aunt Harsha, and included it in her “Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen” in 2015. It is simple to make, and results in crackly-soft flatbreads singed by heat and yielding to tenderness within, with a faint tang of yogurt. It is exactly the sort of thing you’d love to dip in a pool of curry again and again. Just set up an assembly line to roll out the dough and cook it in a hot pan. Once you make the recipe two or three times you’ll never buy naan again.
Chinese Smashed Cucumbers With Sesame Oil and Garlic
In China, cucumbers are considered the ideal foil for hot weather and hot food. Versions of this salad, pai huang gua, are served all over the country, sometimes spiked with dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns for more dimensions of flavor. In Beijing, people buy whole chilled cucumbers from street vendors and munch them on the go, much as Americans become attached to their cups of iced coffee in summer. The smashing process, a classic Chinese technique, cracks the skin, helps release the seeds and splits the flesh into appealing craggy pieces. Salting and chilling the cracked cucumbers give them the perfect cool, crunchy, watery mouth feel.
Panzanella
At the height of tomato season, for every perfectly ripe, taut and juicy specimen there’s an overripe, oozing counterpart not far away. The Tuscan bread salad called panzanella is the perfect place to use those sad, soft tomatoes that are still rich in flavor. Traditional panzanella is made with stale, dried bread that’s rehydrated with a dressing of sweet tomato juices, vinegar and plenty of olive oil. This version includes mozzarella for richness and cucumber for crunch. It’s an ideal do-ahead dish; the longer the mixture sits (up to 6 or so hours), the better it tastes. Just be sure to dry your bread out thoroughly in the oven so it won’t turn to mush. For a make-ahead summer party, serve alongside crunchy fried chicken and round out the meal with a luscious coconut cake accented with peaches.
Lemon Potato Salad With Mint
This light and refreshing potato salad is the antithesis of the usual, creamy, mayonnaise-based recipes. The mint and scallion add a bright, herbal flavor while the sprinkle of chile lends a kick. Make this the morning you plan to serve it and let it marinate at room temperature all day long. Or refrigerate for longer storage but be sure to bring it to room temperature before serving. Other herbs like cilantro, parsley, tarragon and sage can be substituted for the mint; adjust the quantity to taste.
Radish and Herb Salad with Meyer Lemon Dressing
Thinly slicing radishes, celery and fennel, preferably on a mandoline, makes for a salad as ethereally light as the usual baby lettuce, but with a more interesting mix of colors and textures. If you can find watermelon radishes, use them here — they turn a good-looking mix into something truly stunning, with a piquant bite. If you can’t find Meyer lemons, substitute regular lemon juice spiked with a touch of orange or tangerine to compensate for the missing sweetness.
Billi Bi
Craig Claiborne, who brought this amazing cream of mussels soup to The Times in the 1960s and refined it over the years with his longtime kitchen collaborator Pierre Franey, once called it "the most elegant and delicious soup ever created." It is also one of the easiest to make. Use wine to steam open some mussels beneath a blanket of aromatics and use the resulting stock as a base for cream. Add the mussels and perhaps a grind of pepper. "One of the sublime creations on Earth," Claiborne wrote. Find more Times classic recipes.
Ed Levine’s Matzo Ball Soup
A recipe for the classic Jewish dish.
Cauliflower Parmesan
Think of cauliflower Parmesan as the winter analogue to eggplant Parmesan. This fried cauliflower is worth making all on its own, with golden, crisp florets that are impossible to stop eating. But they’re even better when given the parm treatment — baked with marinara sauce, mozzarella and grated Parmesan cheese until bubbling and browned. If you’re not a cauliflower fan, this recipe also works with broccoli.
