Side Dish
4106 recipes found
Umami Gravy
The last thing you want to do on Thanksgiving Day is rush to make a gravy from the turkey’s hot pan drippings while the rest of the dishes get cold. Instead, this make-ahead gravy, inspired by the one my friend Lauren Kuhn makes at her annual Friendsgiving, relies on a base of caramelized red onion and gets its body from flour, milk and vegetable stock. (Stock concentrate paste is an especially useful pantry staple to keep on hand to make stock quickly.) Nutritional yeast is an optional umami enhancer that adds nuance and a rich, cheesy depth. Keep this covered in the refrigerator until it’s ready to eat, then on Thanksgiving Day, reheat it on the stove or in the microwave. Drizzle it over everything.
Chunky Cranberry Sauce
Of course, you could buy fresh cranberries and clean them carefully, but if you start with canned whole berry cranberry sauce and add some fresh ingredients, it will taste just as good!
Fancy Canned Cranberries
The ultimate high-low condiment your table didn’t know it was missing. These dressed-up canned cranberries become tart, juicy and a little bit savory thanks to some fresh citrus, thinly sliced red onion and a little flaky salt. With or without whole berries suspended in them? That’s dealer’s choice, but the rounds will be much easier to slice without them.
Mushroom and Gruyère Bread Pudding
Bread pudding is my go-to alternative to traditional stuffing, which tends to dry out your turkey. To make bread pudding, you need to dice the bread, season it and bake it until the cubes are nicely toasted. Here, I start with Pepperidge Farm Herb Seasoned cubed stuffing mix — be sure to buy the cubed mix! — and then add lots of fresh ingredients. Delicious bread pudding in half the time!
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.
Roasted Butternut Squash With Brown Butter Vinaigrette
This roasted butternut squash is every bit as caramelized as you’d want it to be, without the prep work that’s usually involved. First, it’s cooked without being peeled: The skin is a crisp counterpart to the jammy interior. (If you do want to get rid of the peel, it tears away easily after roasting.) Then, it’s dressed with a vinaigrette made with brown butter, vinegar and dried chile. Mint is added for freshness and flaky salt for crunch, and you could also throw on some cheese — Parmesan, Gruyère, ricotta — for more richness. Serve the squash over sturdy salad greens, or add nuts or pepitas to the browning butter for more texture.
Cranberry Jelly Salad With Lime-Sugared Nuts
Chopped nuts and fruit bound by a wobbly sweet-tart gelatin, often called Jell-O salad in the Midwest, form a beloved side dish full of potential. Serve this gleaming cranberry variation at Thanksgiving or any holiday meal, and feel free to swap out the apple here for peeled and chopped oranges or canned diced pineapple, or use a mix of your favorite fruits. (Note that certain fruits like fresh pineapple, mango, kiwi and papaya contain enzymes that prevent gelatin from setting.) To make the lime-sugared walnut garnish even more surprising, toss it with a smidge of citric acid to give it an incomparable sourness that citrus juice alone can’t provide.
Will Horowitz’s Watermelon Ham
When Will Horowitz, a chef and an owner of Ducks Eatery in Manhattan, unveiled his watermelon ham in 2018, he sparked an Instagram revolution, inspiring foodies from as far away as Germany and Japan to try incarnadine slabs of his brined, smoked watermelon. It sure looked like ham, right down to the crosshatch scoring on the surface. It sure smelled like ham, fragrant with the smoky scent of hickory. It even had some of the briny umami tang you associate with ham. Though it didn’t really taste like ham, it did firmly establish plant-based charcuterie as a big thing. This watermelon “ham” starts with a tamari-herb brine, is smoked low and slow for the first four hours, then seared. This recipe is adapted from “Salt Smoke Time” by Will Horowitz, Julie Horowitz and with Marisa Dobson (William Morrow, 2018).
Delicata Squash and Corn Fritters
These vegetable-packed fritters are crispy around the edges and tender in the center. Delicata squash has a thin skin that can be left on, adding color and a dose of nuttiness. Corn adds pops of sweetness, while moist zucchini helps bind the patties. Fragrant fried sage leaves do double duty in this dish: First they infuse the oil with herbaceous flavor, then they become a beautiful, crisp garnish. For the best results, fry the fritters and serve immediately; however, they can also be made a few hours ahead and reheated at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes until hot and crisp.
Crispy Mushroom Focaccia
In this recipe, the secret to achieving crispy, not soggy, mushrooms is roasting them twice: first, alone on a sheet pan until they’re just tender and their moisture reduced, then again on top of a soft and fluffy focaccia dough, where they will brown and crisp. For a vegan version, skip the Parmesan and use flaky salt or nutritional yeast instead.
Chili- and Cinnamon-Roasted Butternut Squash
Roasting butternut squash at a high temperature helps the sugars caramelize, bringing out a sweetness that pairs perfectly with fall flavors like cinnamon and cayenne. This recipe plays on the duality of butternut squash – its savory and sweet components. The ground cinnamon complements the caramelization, and the chili powder and cayenne play on the vegetable’s more savory profile. The cayenne also adds a kick, though you can omit it if you prefer to keep this dish’s heat limited to the more subtle chili powder.
Vegan Poblano Macaroni and Cheese
Making this plant-based dish might become a new holiday tradition in your house — and the recipe is fast and easy enough to become part of your weeknight rotation as well. It’s not your average macaroni and cheese as it has no actual cheese, but its creamy cashew sauce, stained green from smoky fire-roasted poblano chiles, is guaranteed to turn heads. The end result is sure to be piled high on everyone’s plates. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.
Warak Dawali (Stuffed Grape Leaves)
Stuffed grape leaves are so prevalent across the Arab world and the Mediterranean that it can seem like there are as many variations as there are families. This recipe is for traditional Levantine versions existing in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which generally have a warmly spiced beef and rice filling, are rich from being cooked with either meat at the bottom of the pot or chicken broth, and involve stuffed grape leaves that are rolled fairly thin and long. It’s a hallmark of any celebratory or holiday table, and perfect served with a side of plain yogurt. Though they are time-consuming, warak dawali are a very fun project to embark on with family or friends, and leftovers store wonderfully, up to 3 days in the fridge or a couple of months in the freezer.
Grilled Corn and Avocado Salad With Feta Dressing
This lively salad of corn, scallions, jalapeño and avocado tossed with a tangy buttermilk-feta dressing is like summer on a plate. The sweetness of peak-summer corn and the richness of creamy avocado balance out the tartness of the dressing. To choose the perfect corn, make sure that the corn husk is bright green and slightly dewy to the touch, and that the silks peeking out at the top are yellow, not browned. Finally, the corn should be heavy for its size: the heavier the corn, the plumper the kernels.
White Bean Caprese Salad
Beloved pantry white beans add substance to this take on caprese salad, which comes together in no time. It’s a perfect side for grilled chicken or fish, and can be easily doubled to work as a main course when it’s too hot to turn on the oven. If you’re so inclined, a handful of spicy arugula, thinly sliced roasted red peppers or ribbons of prosciutto — or all three — would also be nice additions. This dish is easily transportable and tastier when eaten while sitting in a lawn chair.
Jessica B. Harris’s Summer Succotash
The food historian and writer Jessica B. Harris wrote a whole cookbook, “The Martha’s Vineyard Table” (Chronicle Books, 2013), paying tribute to the Massachusetts resort island where lobsters, oysters and farm-fresh vegetables are abundant. This dish is ideal for summer, when the tomatoes are overflowing. Dr. Harris loves to use okra in the place of beans, which are often an ingredient in succotash dishes. If you can’t find a habanero chile but still want to add heat, a small jalapeño will work.
Matar Kachori (Fried Pea-Filled Pastries)
Kachori started as street food in Rajasthan, where Marwari cooks sealed food in pastry and deep-fried it, making it ideal for the hungry traders doing business at outdoor markets. Kachori can be filled with potatoes, dal and vegetables, but when peas are in season, they make what I consider the pinnacle of the genre. The filling is fresh, green, bright, juicy and lightly seasoned with herbs and lemon, all tucked inside a thin, flaky crust. The dough behaves nothing like pie dough, but somehow achieves the same effect after it’s deep-fried. Though the snack was originally made to be portable and to keep for a long time, these kachori are best the day they’re made.
Chicken Congee
Congee is regarded as the ultimate Chinese comfort food, according to the author Fuchsia Dunlop. This recipe for ji zhou or chicken congee, from her book on Jiangnan regional cuisine, is dead simple and satisfying. Serve it with chicken and soy sauce for a late-night Shanghai-style snack.
Small-Batch Blueberry Muffins
Michelle Lopez, the author of “Weeknight Baking: Recipes to Fit Your Schedule” (Simon & Schuster, 2019), was inspired by the oversize muffins at Levain Bakery when she developed this recipe. The keys to the loftiest muffins? Plenty of batter and a high oven temperature, which ensures that they rise quickly and bake with a beautiful top and a tender interior. For the best results, rest your batter before baking. One very important tip: Spray the muffin pan and its edges generously with nonstick cooking spray. When the muffins come out of the oven, immediately use a small offset spatula to gently release their edges from the pan, then let them cool completely before removing them. You can use frozen blueberries instead of fresh, but be sure to thaw and drain them, then let them come to room temperature before adding them to the batter.
Broccoli Salad With Cheddar and Warm Bacon Vinaigrette
Broccoli salads are a dime a dozen, but this one, which is adapted from Ashley Christensen's cookbook, "Poole's: Recipes From a Modern Diner," is a game-changing celebration of flavors, colors and textures: broccoli, toasted pecans and red grapes are cloaked in a warm bacon-scallion vinaigrette, then sprinkled with small chunks of sharp white Cheddar. Ms. Christensen's recipe, which uses the florets as well as the stalks, asks you to blanch the broccoli (cooking it for a few minutes in generously salted boiling water, then shocking it with salted iced water). It takes a little extra time, but the crisp-tender, bright green broccoli, seasoned inside and out, is your just reward. Try not to eat the entire bowl yourself.
White Bean Hummus With Tahini and Coriander
Coriander seeds add a welcome aroma to this white bean dip, rich with tahini and bright with lemon juice. The miso paste is optional, but it gives the mellow white beans a nice savory depth.
Coconut Basmati Pilaf
Adapted from a recipe by the Indian chef, cooking teacher and cookbook author Julie Sahni, this pilaf is an excellent accompaniment to a vindaloo or other Indian main dish. In addition to the coconut milk, it’s flavored with cardamom and ginger.
Aloo Masala (Spiced Potatoes)
A little bowl of simply spiced half-mashed potatoes and onion, glistening with fat, is a standard side dish at bustling restaurants that serve dosas. It’s also one of the best vegetable dishes — inexpensive, quick and delicious — to add to your repertoire as a home cook. The key to these potatoes is water, not fat. Overcooking them just slightly ensures that they’re tender, and that they hold enough moisture so when you drop them into the hot pan, they break up and meld into the sautéed onion mix, becoming almost indistinguishable from it. Though aloo masala is great with a hot dosa, it’s a versatile dish that can also work as a side with other meals.
