Side Dish
4106 recipes found
Green Tomato and Swiss Chard Gratin
This is a very comforting and pretty main dish with several layers of good flavor.
North African Bean Stew With Barley and Winter Squash
This warming, highly spiced stew is rich in beans, grains and chunks of sweet winter squash. Feel free to substitute other grains for the barley. Farro works particularly well. If you’d prefer something soupier, thin it with a little broth or water before serving.
Tomato-Rice Soup
Many vegan dishes (like fruit salad and peanut butter and jelly) are already beloved, but the problem faced by many of us is in imagining less-traditional dishes that are interesting and not challenging. Here are some more creative options to try.
Challaw (Cardamom and Cumin Basmati Rice)
The Afghan Australian cookbook author Durkhanai Ayubi emphasizes that a distinctive quality of challaw — a simple Afghan dish — is the elongated and separate grains of white basmati rice. She shared this recipe from her mother, Farida Ayubi, for this fragrant and comforting pot of rice in their cookbook “Parwana: Recipes and Stories From an Afghan Kitchen.” In this preparation, the rice is first parboiled and then steamed and scented with cardamom pods and cumin seeds. It is worthy of a celebratory feast, alongside saucy dishes like sabzi, but easy enough for weeknight meals.
Wild Rice, Almond and Mushroom Stuffing
Wild rice can be the base of a satisfying and refined Thanksgiving stuffing, particularly when it is combined with mushrooms, almonds, sherry and herbs, as it is here. Use this savory mixture to stuff a turkey to serve to the omnivores at your table, or bake it separately and serve it as a side dish, one that is especially good for vegetarians and vegans.
Tomato Bread Salad With Chorizo and Herbs
I often make panzanella, the Italian bread and tomato salad. To give it Spanish flair, more heft and a dose of spice, I tossed in cubes of crisp cured chorizo. We ate it for dinner one night and fried up the leftovers for brunch, topped with poached eggs.
White Borscht
This white borscht, a nod to the tradition of sour soups in Ukrainian cooking, is simply a perfect meal: rich and satisfying, yet bright and delicate and clean all at once. It’s given its distinct tang up front, by soaking a hunk of sourdough bread in the simmering broth, and also at the end, by whisking in a little crème fraîche before serving. At the center is the delicious, subtle, complex broth. The better the kielbasa, the better the broth, obviously, and it’s worth using the whole garland for that complex smoky seasoning it imparts. There’ll be extra for snacking. The chopped dill keeps it all bright and fresh and lively in the mouth. A year-round classic to have in your repertoire, it’s especially beloved in colder months. When weather forecasters announce a dismal spell of sleeting days in a row, you’ll think, oh, good! White borscht weather!
Deep-Fried Borek
You can make your own feuille de brick, but it’s one of those products, like burgundy wine and saltine crackers, better left to the professional artisans. Alas, even finding it commercially made can be difficult as well, but it is worth the effort to procure. Fortunately, it freezes beautifully, so when you find a source, get more than one package and freeze the extra for future use. Thin as a sheet of tracing paper and as transparent, the dough fries up shatteringly crisp, and makes an incomparable borek. Everyone at dinner will ask you how you did it.
Salt-Baked New Potatoes With Pink-Peppercorn Butter
This way of cooking recently harvested new potatoes, by burying them in a plaster of damp salt and baking them, is a triple pleasure: effortless, tasty and very fun. The salt crust seasons the potatoes perfectly, just as it would if you’d boiled or steamed them in salted water, but the airtight seal concentrates their special flavor and texture. They come out dense, waxy and almost creamy. Bring the pan of cooked potatoes to the table right from the oven as is, so everyone can puzzle over the curious-looking white crust, and then delight over the discovery of the piping hot little beauties revealed inside once the surface is cracked. Dig them out and swoop through the butter before popping into your mouth, their skins so paper-thin they snap when you bite into them. Their appeal is irresistible.
Warm Chickpea and Green Bean Salad With Aioli
You could use canned beans for this, but then you wouldn’t have the broth to use for thinning out the aioli.
Scones
Traditional English scones are barely sweet — they are usually eaten with sweet jam and clotted cream — and they are lighter, flakier and tastier than their American counterparts. You can make the dough in the food processor (do not overprocess), but if you’re willing to incorporate the butter by hand it is of course fine to do it in a bowl. You’re looking for a slightly sticky but not messy dough; start with a half cup of cream and increase it as needed. Serve the baked scones warm, with the best jam you can lay your hands on, and a dollop of crème fraîche, mascarpone or, if you can find it, clotted cream.
Skillet Irish Soda Bread Served With Cheddar and Apples
Authentic Irish soda bread contains no raisins, butter or eggs. This American version is made with buttermilk, butter, eggs, raisins and sugar. It’s baked in a heavy iron skillet so that the top and bottom crusts become crunchy and browned while the center stays tender and pale, studded with treacly bits of raisins.
Caramelized-Scallion Sauce
A twist on the Cantonese classic ginger-scallion sauce, this aromatic purée focuses on the flavor of scallions slow-cooked to draw out their gentle sweetness. Adding more scallions at the end brings a fresh complexity to the sauce, but if you want to keep the whole thing mellow and sweet, feel free to omit that step, and just cook all the scallions at once. It's great as a dressing for noodles, boiled or roasted vegetables and simple meats and fish.
Purple Hull Peas and Mustard Greens in Smoky Potlikker
Southern field peas come in seemingly endless varieties, the most well known of which are black-eyed peas. For this dish, it’s worth seeking out their sister, the pink-eyed purple hull pea that April McGreger, who makes Farmer’s Daughter brand pickles and preserves Hillsborough, N.C., knew growing up. They are sold fresh in late spring through the early fall in the South, but can be found frozen. Black-eyed peas will do just fine, though. This is a bold and brothy soup with plenty of what Southerners call potlikker, flavored with ham hocks for traditionalists or smoked turkey parts for a lighter version. It is essential to serve this dish with sturdy cornbread to soak up the potlikker. Ms. McGreger likes thin and crispy cornbread.
Curried Fish Soup With Cream and Tomatoes
Lentil Soup With Pounded Walnuts and Cream
Eggplant With Miso
Chicories With Pears, Blue Cheese and Secret Anchovy Dressing
Gently bitter, yet fresh and crunchy, chicories are the perfect canvas on which to create a Thanksgiving salad. With a single anchovy fillet, mustard, vinegar and lemon juice at its base, this light, vibrant dressing is surprisingly refreshing and flavored with a faint rumor of umami that will make you reach — over the stuffing — for seconds. If you don’t have, or don’t like, pears, substitute Fuyu persimmons or a crisp, tart apple variety such as Fuji or Honeycrisp. If you don’t like pecans, use walnuts. If you can’t find Roquefort, use another sheep’s milk blue, such as Oregon Blue or Ewe’s Blue, both of which are American-made in the Roquefort-style.
Gérard’s Mustard Tart
Be sure to use strong mustard from Dijon. Dorie's friend Gérard Jeannin uses Dijon’s two most popular mustards in his tart: smooth, known around the world as Dijon, and grainy or old-fashioned, known in France as “à l’ancienne.” You can use either one or the other, or you can adjust the proportions to match your taste, but whatever you do, make sure your mustard is fresh, bright colored, and powerfully fragrant. Do what Gérard would do: smell it first. If it just about brings tears to your eyes, it’s fresh enough for this tart.
Simple Vegetarian Pho Broth
The focus of this broth, a base for pho dishes with tofu and a variety of mixed vegetables, is the charred ginger and onion. Spice comes from a bag filled with star anise, peppercorns, cinnamon stick and cloves and more flavor flows from an abundance of sweet vegetables. Nonvegetarians can add fish sauce to this aromatic and beautiful vegan broth if they wish.
Brown Soda Bread With Oats
For years I’ve been trying to make a moist soda bread loaf like the kind I love to eat when I’m in Ireland. Finally I’ve achieved it with this recipe, which is adapted from Bon Appétit’s recipe for Fallon & Byrne Soda Bread (Fallon & Byrne is a restaurant in Dublin). The bread is a whole-wheat loaf with both rolled and steel-cut (pinhead) oats, and does not have the hard crust that round soda breads can have. One reason is that the moist dough is baked at a lower temperature than free-form soda bread.
Sauteed Fruit And Red Berry Sorbet
Miso Glazed Carrots
Cucumber Yogurt Salad With Dill, Sour Cherries and Rose Petals
Crunchy cucumber, cool yogurt and the surprise of tart cherries make this salad alluring, especially when paired with a hot, savory stew, soup or tagine. During Ramadan, the month of the year when observant Muslims fast during daylight hours, it is delicious for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast at sunset. Try it with harira, the traditional Moroccan iftar dish: a fragrant lamb-tomato soup with chickpeas, lentils and vermicelli. Add a pretty bowl of dates — the food Muslims traditionally eat first to break the fast — and the meal is complete. Both spice and craft shops sell food-grade dried rose petals, or you can make your own by hanging a bouquet of (organically raised) roses upside down to dry.