Side Dish
4106 recipes found
Cheesy Cornbread Muffins With Hot Honey Butter
Smoky chipotle takes these muffins into savory territory, but this recipe can be used purely as a blueprint: Want them a bit sweeter? Lose the minced chipotle chiles, and increase the sugar by a couple of tablespoons. Need them to hold up to a heavily spiced pot of chili? Double the chipotles en adobo, add 1/4 cup minced red onion and a dash of ground cumin, onion powder or garlic, perhaps. Whatever you add, don’t overmix: Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until just combined (a few lumps are O.K.) before folding in the cheese for muffins that are rich but not dense.
Soft White Dinner Rolls
Getting supper on the table quickly makes you feel efficient. Baking a batch of soft dinner rolls makes you feel cozily competent. This may be an unfashionable virtue, but it is also a deeply satisfying one.
Grilled Corn With Chile Butter
In South Africa, charred ears of corn (called braai mielies) are year-round, smoky-sweet roadside snacks. This version is a side dish for the American summer, when corn and grilling are both in season. The cobs are slicked with butter and sparked with chile heat; in South Africa, they would be served alongside a pile of charcoal-grilled lamb chops or steak or giant prawns, or all of the above. For a more rustic effect (and more effort), use the corn husks as a wrapper instead of aluminum foil. Soak the unshucked cobs in cold water for at least 15 minutes. Peel back the husks but do not detach them from the cobs; remove all the cornsilk. After rubbing on the butter, rearrange the husks around each cob and tie in place with twine.
Caramelized Onion and Poppy Seed Hamantaschen
Traditionally filled with apricot, prune or poppy seed jam, triangular hamantaschen cookies are a prized treat for the Jewish holiday of Purim. This dessert serves as a reminder of the Jewish people’s deliverance from Haman, who sought to exterminate Persia’s Jews in the fifth century B.C. This recipe is fully savory, tucking crumbled feta under thyme-scented caramelized onions, but you could just as easily fill the buttery dough with sweet jam to please traditionalists. When forming hamantaschen pastries, make sure to leave an opening wide enough for the filling to be visible but small enough to retain moisture.
Granola Muffins
These substantial breakfast muffins are sort of like bran muffins, but they have a little crunch. When I make a batch, I freeze what doesn’t get eaten the first day and thaw them in the microwave.
Whole-Wheat Buttermilk Scones With Raisins and Oatmeal
You may be accustomed to the gigantic, sweet scones in coffee shops in this country. They are nothing like the diminutive, light scones that originated in Britain and Ireland. This is a whole-wheat version, only moderately sweet -- the way I think scones should be. You can always top them with jam or honey if you want more sugar. The whole-wheat flour brings a rich, nutty flavor to the scones.
Whole Wheat Apple Pecan Scones
As I was playing around with the mixture for these not-too-sweet scones I learned that if I used as much liquid (in the form of buttermilk or yogurt) as I usually do in my scones, they wouldn’t be flaky. That is because the apple provides plenty of liquid. You just need to add enough buttermilk or yogurt to bring the dough together. Otherwise you will have drop biscuits and they will have a consistency more akin to a soft cookie than to a biscuit or scone. Juicy apples like Braeburn, Crispin and Empire work well for these scones.
Whole-Wheat Ginger Scones
Coconut oil should really be called butter, but then we’d confuse it with a skin cream. It is the perfect nondairy fat to use for scones and other baked goods. These have the same rich, flaky texture that scones made with butter have, along with a subtle and pleasing coconut flavor.
Corn and Jalapeño Muffins
The flavor of these buttery, miniature muffins is amped up with sautéed corn kernels and jalapeño chiles. They are the perfect accompaniment to a pot of beans, but are tender and delicate enough to serve with an elegant chicken stew.
Spoonbread With Cheese and Scallions
Spoonbread, a sort of cornmeal soufflé, is far more popular in places like Virginia and the Carolinas than in Tennessee and Mississippi, where I did my formative eating. I love it, but I never understood why nobody ever made it with cheese (cheese grits being one of the world's great creations), so I did. Purists will likely curse me, but I have to say that cheese spoonbread is possibly the most inspired idea I've ever had. It's great with sausage, but it would also pair well with country ham or any kind of stew or daube.
Edna Lewis’s Biscuits
Edna Lewis mastered dozens of bread and biscuit recipes over the years, and in “The Taste of Country Cooking,” she offers two for biscuits; this is the flannel-soft version. Be sure to use homemade baking powder, which you can make easily by sifting together 2 parts cream of tartar with 1 part baking soda. It leaves no chemical or metallic taste.
Cornmeal Plum Scones
Scones with jam is classic. But in most cases the jam is served alongside; here, we’ve baked it right into the pastry. This recipe calls for a whipping up a quickly made plum and honey jam scented with bay leaf (you can substitute a rosemary sprig or cinnamon stick if you’d rather). If that seems like one step too many, use any prepared jam you like, though something on the less sweet side works best. Or bake the cornmeal scones unfilled. They are moist, lightly sweet and perfectly satisfying all on their own.
Savory Scones With Onion, Currants and Caraway
Regina’s Butter Biscuits
People travel long distances to eat Regina Charboneau’s biscuits. She built a blues club in San Francisco, called Biscuits and Blues, on their reputation. And in her hometown, Natchez, Miss., her biscuits are considered the best. She mixes traditional French culinary training with tricks passed on through generations of Southern bakers to create a layered, rich biscuit that has to be frozen to be at its flaky best. The dough will seem rough and the fat too chunky at first, but persevere. Using a tea towel as a base to move and manage the dough until it rolls out smoothly is a brilliant technique that makes the whole process easier and neater.
Neapolitan Easter Bread (Casatiello)
This recipe is steeped in Neapolitan tradition: It’s made the day after the big Easter feast, as a way to use up leftover cheese and meat. An Easter Monday picnic is also a custom, so the fact that all the goodies are already wrapped up in the bread makes it a very transportable option. The herby pesto and Gruyère, though, are my own nontraditional additions. This can be baked and presented in various ways, but the ring both looks great and has some nice symbolism — the circle of life and renewal associated with spring in general and Easter in particular. A very large (10-inch, or 24-centimeter) tube pan with a flat bottom is perfect, but you can improvise with a cake pan, creating a hole in the middle with an overturned bowl or ball of aluminum foil placed in the middle of the pan.
Whole-Wheat English Muffins
Yes, it is worth your while to make English muffins from scratch. Not only is the texture lighter and crisper, homemade muffins taste better, too — yeasty, wheaty, complex. You will need to sear these muffins on the stove top before baking. That’s what gives them their unique crunch on their bottoms. This recipe does not require muffin rings, but if you have them and would like to use them, go right ahead. Just add a few minutes onto the baking time to accommodate the muffins’ increased thickness. Then fork-split them, toast and serve with plenty of butter. After all, that’s what those crevices are made for.
Oven-Baked Millet
Deborah Madison, in her wonderful new cookbook, “Vegetable Literacy,” put a new spin on millet that may have changed my millet-cooking life forever. She suggests cooking the grain as you would a polenta, which it kind of resembles when it’s cooked, with most of the grains breaking down to a mush while others remain crunchy. I’d always been a bit flummoxed by this uneven cooking and the texture of the broken-down millet (it’s a bit chalky). But serving it like a polenta makes perfect sense. You can serve it soft, right after it’s cooked, or let it set up and then slice it and crisp the slices or use them in gratins, as I do with cornmeal polenta. I was so taken with this idea that I decided to cook the millet in the oven, the way I do for my easy cornmeal polenta, after first toasting it in the pan. It worked beautifully.
The Original Waldorf Salad
"Millions who never visited the Waldorf owe him a debt," The New York Times wrote in 1950, upon Oscar Tschirky's death. Mr. Tschirky, a Swiss immigrant who became known as "Oscar of the Waldorf," is credited with creating this piece of Americana in 1893, a timeless dish whose popularity has spread far past the Waldorf's exclusive doors and into home kitchens. Over time, variations would include blue cheese, raisins and chopped walnuts, which can be added here alongside the celery and apples. But the original is an exercise in simplicity: four ingredients that have lived on for over a century.
Salami and Scallion Biscuits
These rich, savory biscuits are even better than the traditional ham and cheese variety. Bits of chopped salami and scallions are scattered throughout tender dough that's been enriched with heavy cream. Did we mention that they come together – start to finish – in about 45 minutes? They'll be gone in about five.
Millet and Greens Gratin
Millet can be dry, but here there’s lots of custard to moisten it, and it works really nicely to hold this gratin together. I used 1 1/4 cups cooked millet that I’d frozen a while back. Look for beets with lush greens at your farmers’ market. There’s a lot of variation from one bunch to the next; I judge the beets I buy as much by their greens as by the bulbs.
Apple-Walnut Drop Scones
There are many reasons an apple a day may keep the doctor away. Among popular fruits, apples rank second (after cranberries) in antioxidant power, according to the nutritionist Jonny Bowden. They are extremely high in phenolic compounds (polyphenols), particularly quercetin, and if the apple is red, anthocyanins. These phytochemicals carry many health benefits, both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. Apples have been linked to lower rates of heart disease in several studies. The phytonutrients in apples are concentrated in and right under the skin. So whenever it’s possible when you’re cooking with apples, it’s best not to peel them. Seek out organic apples if possible, as the skin is also where you’ll find most of the pesticide residue, and conventionally farmed apples are on the Environmental Working Group’s list of the most contaminated produce.Scones are easy to make and lend themselves to whole-grain flours. These are particularly moist because of the grated apples.
Simple Blueberry Muffins
This recipe first appeared in The Times in a 1986 article by Nancy Harmon Jenkins that extolled the virtues, and the many delicious applications, of summer berries. There's nothing fancy about this muffin – it's mostly flour, eggs, butter and blueberries. But that's the beauty of it. It's the perfect sort of baking project to tackle on a lazy weekend morning. This recipe calls for blueberries, but feel free to substitute almost any ripe and sweet berry.
Savory Whole-Wheat Buttermilk Scones With Rosemary and Thyme
These rich, herbal scones are savory like American biscuits, with the added nutty, wholesome dimension of the whole-wheat flour. They’re great with cheese and with salads, soups and stews.
Spicy Tunisian Carrot Frittata
Tunisian frittatas are sometimes baked in an earthenware dish in the oven, sometimes on top of the stove. This one, adapted from a recipe by Clifford Wright, is made like an Italian frittata, but the spices are unmistakably Tunisian.