Side Dish
4106 recipes found

Watercress Salad With Raw Beets and Radishes
This colorful salad, made with peppery watercress, is easy to put together. Dressed only with lemon juice, a separate horseradish cream is passed at the table. Serve a small portion as a first course or a more generous amount as a main course for a light lunch.

Barszcz (Classic Polish Borscht)
Most Slavic countries have their own form of beet soup, a winter staple across Central and Eastern Europe. Barszcz, the Polish variation, is usually served as a clear burgundy broth with bright, wintry flavors. It is sweeter and beefier than Ukrainian or Russian borscht, and much less textural: Most vegetables are strained after imparting their flavor, though the soup may include grated beets or morsels of meat. This recipe is adapted from “From a Polish Country House Kitchen,” an anthropological cookbook by Anne Applebaum and Danielle Crittenden (Chronicle Books, 2012). Strain the vegetables entirely and sip the restorative broth directly from a mug, or serve the soup with sour cream and enjoy with pierogi.

Acar (Cucumber Pickles)

Black Coffee Barbecue Sauce

Grilled Swiss-Chard Stems With Roasted Garlic Oil
Don’t throw all those Swiss-chard stems away. Not everyone is a fan of including them with sautéed greens, but here’s a plan for the rest of us who love their texture and flavor. Prepare to blanch, blister and then dress these stems in an intense garlic oil. With a little lemon and salt to perk the taste buds, you’ve got a new favorite side dish.

Sweet Potato and Apple Hobo Pack
The hobo pack, a self-contained, foil-wrapped meal cooked in hot coals, is an easy option for outdoor cooking. Though this recipe includes a lot of fall flavors, it is great for summer cookouts, a change from the usual suspects. The key to success is to be sure the foil packet is tightly sealed so no juices leak out. Be aware that the intense heat of the coals will deeply char some of the food that’s right up against the foil, but to us that’s the best-tasting part.

Martha Rose Shulman's Roasted Okra
My friend Marian Schwartz gave me the idea to roast okra. It’s an ingenious strategy: No need to marinate the okra in salt and vinegar beforehand -- it develops a wonderful seared flavor in the hot oven, and it won’t be gooey.

Ismail Merchant's Spinach Puree (Palak Bharta)

Roasted Golden Beet and Winter Squash Salad
Golden beets are more savory and earthy than their sugary ruby counterparts and fare better alongside the caramelized roasted winter squash in this many-textured salad. But red beets will work, too, if you don’t mind a slightly sweeter dish over all. If you can’t find delicata squash, other varieties, such as sweet dumpling (shown here), honey nut or acorn squash, make fine substitutes.

Brooklyn-Style Hoppin’ John
Hoppin’ John and greens are two simple dishes that are required eating each New Year’s Day for Southerners (or anyone else, one imagines) who want to bring luck and prosperity.

Kale Tabbouleh
Here’s the thing about tabbouleh salad: Most of the ones I’ve had invert my preferred proportion of bulgur to parsley. What you usually get is a bowl of tabbouleh studded with bits of parsley. I like a salad that is mostly parsley, studded with grains of tabbouleh. I pictured a generous ratio of green to tan, but with kale standing in for parsley. It has a hint of parsley’s pleasing bitterness, but is far milder, which means that this tabbouleh salad didn’t have to be just a side dish, one best eaten in small portions. Instead, I could eat a whole bowl of it — a dream for a raw kale devotee.

Bar Snack Brussels Sprouts Steeped in Olive Oil and Fish Sauce
This recipe does not include quantities for an excellent reason. At Prune, in New York, we started with a pound of brussels sprouts for dinner but ate them all while still prepping in the kitchen and then increased to two pounds and ate those as well, before we even sat down. Now we make them to be eaten standing up on purpose. Set out on the bar for parties, where you’d expect to find olives; they never last there either.

Betty Talmadge's country barbecue sauce

Cilantro-and-Mint Salad
It’s not just cilantro-and-mint salad, of course. There is parsley as well, and also arugula and baby lettuce: a jumble of herbs and soft greens lightly dressed with lime juice and oil. It’s a terrific salad to serve as a foil to spicy food, or to sprinkle on a taco as kind of green-ish version of pico de gallo.

Vegetable Risotto
Dried mushrooms are reconstituted in hot water. Lettuce and fennel are sweated down in some hot butter in a big, heavy-bottomed pot, then set aside. Onion takes their place, followed by short-grained arborio rice, followed by hot water. Then the cook stirs and stirs, performing the old dance of risotto. (I tried the dish using the stock left by the mushrooms but found it too muddy and dank.) The mushrooms, diced small, go into the pot along with some more water and stirring. Then, at the end, the lettuce and fennel, some Parmesan, a heavy dusting of nutmeg and whatever butter is left. The result is remarkable, particularly in the matter of the lettuce, a mineral thread of flavor above the soft forest floor of the rice.

Warm Kale, Coconut and Tomato Salad
This stylish recipe for a warm kale salad comes from Anna Jones, a British food stylist who worked for Jamie Oliver before striking out on her own. It appears in her 2015 cookbook, “A Modern Way to Eat,” a collection of recipes that anyone who spends as much time as I do snooping around home kitchens can tell you is shaping up as a kind of new-era “Silver Palate Cookbook.” (This salad could be Jones’s chicken Marbella.) It calls for oven-roasted tomatoes slicked with olive oil and fragrant with lime, as well as kale cooked soft in parts and crunchy in others, the pure mineral intensity of the greens bracketed by soy sauce and shavings of coconut. The dressing – ginger, miso, tahini, honey, olive oil, lime juice and chopped hot pepper – is a far thicker mixture than vinaigrette, one that lends itself better to drizzling over the bowl.

Stuffing-Stuffed Mushrooms
In this recipe, classic stuffed mushrooms become an excellent vegetarian Thanksgiving appetizer or side dish by replacing Italian bread crumbs with cornbread, and using traditional stuffing flavors like rosemary, celery seeds and poultry seasoning. Two tips for making these extra flavorful: Trim the mushroom caps a bit to provide more surface area for caramelization, and pre-roast them to reduce moisture and prevent them from getting soggy. You can turn these into a main dish by using about eight large portobello mushrooms instead of two-bite cremini mushrooms, and increasing the cooking time accordingly. If you’re lucky enough to have leftover Thanksgiving stuffing, you can use it in place of the cornbread mixture (you’ll need about 4 cups); just add two beaten eggs and grated Gruyère cheese to bind the mixture before piling it onto the mushrooms and roasting.

Rice Noodle Salad With Crispy Tofu and Lime-Peanut Dressing
Unrefined expeller-pressed peanut oil contributes a wonderful nutty flavor to this dressing

Baked Lima Beans

Peppers Stuffed with Farro and Smoked Cheese
This dish combines smoky-flavored cheese and paprika with the crunch of the farro and walnuts. Simmer the farro or spelt until it splays. I was inspired to make this filling by a delicious stuffed tomato dish I ate recently at Oliveto in Oakland, Calif., in which the tomatoes were stuffed with a smoky barley filling. I used a Dutch smoked gouda-like cheese that was labeled, simply “smoked cheese.” I added paprika to the mix, which contributes to the smoky flavor, and walnuts, because I love the crunchiness with the grains. The cooked farro or spelt should be soft, so make sure to simmer until the grains splay.

Romaine and Stilton

Creole Rice

Farro Risotto With Sweet Corn and Tomatoes
Here’s a heartier, whole-grain alternative to traditional risotto that doesn’t require as much attention or stirring. Pearled farro is a must for this recipe; the tough husks have been removed so the grains cook in less time. The farro simmers in a quick homemade corn stock that makes use of the leftover corn cobs and imparts a rich corn flavor. Finally, fresh tarragon gives this risotto a lot of personality, but basil would be a fresh substitute.

Roasted Squash With Cheese Fondue
This autumnal dish turns a classic cheese fondue into a sauce for whole roasted squash. The lightly caramelized squash are filled with the gooey fondue mixture and topped with crunchy, garlicky bread crumbs. When the squash are cut, the cheese sauce runs onto the serving plate, to be spooned back over the soft, amber slices. Serve this as a side dish to roasted meats or fish, or as a rich appetizer on its own. For the best presentation, choose squash that are about the same shape and size.