Vegetables
1337 recipes found
Roman-Style Braised Fennel
Fennel is a crunchy, assertively anise-flavored vegetable that mellows and sweetens when cooked. Here, the vegetable is prepared in the style of carciofi alla Romana, or braised whole artichokes, which is a simple preparation of simmering them in aromatic olive oil until incredibly tender. The braising liquid is infused with bright lemon, fragrant garlic and fresh herbs, which impart the fennel and shallots with layers of flavor. This versatile side dish can be served warm or at room temperature, and leftovers can be chopped and tossed with spaghetti and Parmesan for an easy meal. The unused fennel stalks can be chopped and sautéed as part of a vegetable soup, and the fronds can be used in place of dill to make gravlax.
Stuffed Acorn Squash With Sausage and Kale
This recipe dresses up the humble acorn squash for a dinner that’s a hearty and comforting celebration of fall flavors. Feel free to tweak the recipe to use what you have on hand: Any leftover rice or cooked grains will work, along with spinach or other sturdy greens in place of the kale. Though this is not a recipe for rushed weeknights, the squash can be assembled completely in advance and finished in the oven just before serving. For best results, use medium squash, and remove the stem for easier cutting.
Roasted Turnips and Winter Squash With Agave Glaze
Traditionally, this dish, from the Great Plains, would include timpsula, the wild turnip that grows in patches across the region. (Old Lakota harvesting stories tell of how the timpsula point the forager from one plant to the next.) In Lakota homes, the turnips are often braided and dried for use throughout the winter. Unless you live in the region, fresh timpsula is difficult to come by, as it’s not sold commercially. It’s also milder and slightly denser than the garden turnips we’ve substituted in this traditional pairing. The agave glaze adds a touch of sweetness to the vegetables, and the toasted sunflower seeds add crunch. Serve this with bison pot roast with hominy or spooned over wild rice for a comforting vegetarian meal.
Sweet Potatoes With Bourbon and Brown Sugar
These silky mashed sweet potatoes are spiced with cloves, nutmeg and a little black pepper, brightened with lemon zest, and spiked with bourbon (or orange juice, if you'd prefer). Puréeing them in a food processor yields the smoothest, airiest texture, but for something a little more rustic, you could mash them by hand. Whichever you choose, these reheat well, either in a microwave or in a pot over low heat.
Roasted Beets With Yogurt, Pistachios and Coriander
This sophisticated side is easy enough for a weeknight, but fancy enough for entertaining thanks to a few unexpected additions: Seasoned Greek yogurt forms the basis of an effortless sauce, while toasted coriander seeds and chopped pistachios add texture. Roasting sweet, earthy beets concentrates their flavor, and a splash of balsamic balances out their sweetness. This dish can be prepared in advance and served hot, cold or at room temperature, but its assembly should be done just before serving so the toasted coriander seeds and roasted pistachios retain their crunch.
Sweet Potatoes With Cranberry Chutney
This is an easy and surprisingly delicious way to get a dramatic-looking sweet-potato dish on the table with little fuss. The heat of the jalapeños in the chutney, mixed with aromatic vegetables and the sweetness of the dried fruit, gives the cranberries depth. A dollop of sour cream goes on the halved sweet potato, followed by a generous spoonful of chutney. Make the chutney up to two weeks ahead and keep it in the refrigerator. It also freezes well. Assembly on Thanksgiving is an easy last-minute task.
Mashed Sweet Potatoes With Maple and Brown Butter
This recipe is a grown-up take on sweet potatoes with brown sugar and marshmallows. A generous swirl of browned butter and maple syrup give the potatoes an earthy sweetness and great depth of flavor, while salted, toasted pecans sprinkled on top add a savory crunch. To save time on Thanksgiving, toast the pecans and make the brown butter up to a day in advance. Simply store the pecans in an airtight container, and the brown butter in the refrigerator. (Gently melt the butter in the microwave before using.)
Potato Salad With Capers and Anchovies
Serve this zesty room-temperature salad on its own with crisp lettuce or arugula leaves on the side, or to accompany meats from the grill, a roast chicken or any type of fish. The dressing is essentially a well-seasoned vinaigrette, enhanced with Dijon mustard, capers, a little garlic and a few chopped anchovies. Red onion, thyme leaves and chopped parsley complete the picture — in all, a very simple dish. Most important is to dress the potato slices very carefully with your hands, in order to coat them well and to keep them from breaking. It is a potato salad you’ll grow to love, best eaten within hours of assembling (but perfectly serviceable the next day).
Roasted Butternut Squash Salad With Green Goddess Dressing
This colorful salad of sweet, soft roasted squash and crisp, bitter greens finished with a creamy, tangy green goddess dressing is an elegant mix of contrasting flavors and textures. The squash is good both warm and at room temperature, so feel free to roast it ahead of time. Some bitterness is nice against the sweet winter squash, but if you want to mellow radicchio’s bite a bit, you can soak the pieces in ice water for 10 to 30 minutes, then drain and dry before adding to the salad. Just taste before you soak; you’ll want a little bit of its bitterness. The dressing will keep for at least three days in the fridge. Serve it over other salads, or as a dip for cut-up vegetables and chips.
Roasted Butternut Squash and Red Onions
Here is an easy, healthy addition to a Thanksgiving feast or weekday dinner from Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, which was included in a Julia Moskin video feature in 2013. Chop up a few red onions and a butternut squash, roast them in high heat, and drizzle them with tahini sauce, herbs and pistachios. That’s it. (Keep an eye on the onions, though. They may cook faster than the squash.)
Potato Mousseline
Here is a riff on the classic side dish that calls for running the potatoes through a ricer (if you don't have one, a splatter screen over a bowl will work just as well), the addition of brown butter and a sprinkling of grated nutmeg. The result is something just as comforting, but a bit more complex and flavorful. (And for everything you need to know to make perfect potatoes, visit our potato guide.)
Three Sisters Bowl With Hominy, Beans and Squash
There are quite a few legends within various Indigenous communities involving the three sisters: corn, bean and squash. The ancient and advanced farming techniques from the Cherokee and so many other tribes throughout the East Coast yielded countless strains of these ingredients, in many sizes, colors and flavors. These diverse seeds are not only a direct connection to the past, but a symbol of resistance to the destruction of our cultures. This recipe showcases the simplicity of these flavors and can stand alone as a vegan meal or can accompany bison pot roast, roast turkey or salmon with crushed blackberries.
Russian Salad
Basically a vegetable-studded potato salad with mayonnaise, Russian salad is hugely popular all over the world for family gatherings and festive events. It’s a beloved, traditional party dish riffed on almost everywhere but my own home: I’d only ever seen pasty, congealed versions I would never wish to eat until I tried this one from Vladimir Ocokoljic, served at his Serbian restaurant Kafana in New York City. While not quite as demanding as his aunt back in Belgrade, who used to slice even the peas in half, Mr. Ocokoljic insists on the tiny dice (each ingredient should match the size of a pea) and emphatically dislikes any sweet pickles (only gherkins or cornichons are a fit), making the finished dish delicate, luscious and savory. Whisking pickle brine into the mayonnaise creates a liquidy slurry, loose enough to dress the salad without its becoming smushed and gluey.
Marinated Beet Salad With Whipped Goat Cheese
It's easy to make a pretty good beet salad, but this one makes the leap into greatness. After decades of kitchen experiments, the chef and beet maven Andrew Carmellini shared how to elevate both elements: marinate the beets, then season and whip the goat cheese. Feel free to cook the beets on a grill instead of in the oven if you've got a fire going. Young beets, juicy and tender enough to bite into, can be used instead of the thick-skinned, mature kind. But do not roast: Steam them just until tender.
Braised Celery With Thyme and White Wine
Inspired by the French method of cooking duck or chicken confit, in which the meat stews slowly in its own fat, this recipe simmers celery in a classically French sauce, with white wine, stock, shallots and herbes de Provence. The celery is first blanched in heavily salted water, which jumpstarts the cooking process and seasons the stalks from the inside-out, then it’s roasted in liquid until submissive and silky, with a texture reminiscent of roasted fennel. Once the celery is tender, the liquid is reduced on the stovetop until just thick enough to coat a spoon. The resulting sauce bears an uncanny similarity to the jus underneath the Thanksgiving turkey, in both flavor and mouthfeel, and the dish is equally at home at the Thanksgiving table as paired with a store-bought rotisserie chicken and some mashed potatoes. Like classic confit, you can prepare it in advance and simply reheat before serving.
Sautéed Brussels Sprouts With Sausage and Pickled Red Onion
There’s a special place at the dinner table for anything cooked in bacon or sausage fat, but brussels sprouts pair especially well with that kind of smoky, fatty flavor. Caramelized in sausage drippings, the sprouts stay lighter than expected thanks to some quickly pickled red onion and lots of fresh parsley.
Green Beans With Dill
Steamed green beans served with a button of butter make for a perfectly acceptable side dish, but if you're looking to elevate the green bean to company-worthy status (with almost no more effort), here's your recipe. Just blanch the beans for a few minutes, toss with butter, chopped fresh dill and a grind or two of black pepper.
Brussels Sprouts Gratin
The most indulgent way to eat any vegetable is to bathe it in cream and top it with cheese, but few benefit from that treatment as much as brussels sprouts do. Whether or not you decide to top them with crispy bread crumbs (you should), the end result is a decadent, but never too heavy, side dish that could easily become your main course.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes With Hot Honey Browned Butter
Doubling down on sweet potatoes’ sweetness by adding honey is like adding fuel to the fire, but the nuttiness from the browned butter, heat from the crushed red pepper flakes and bright acidity from the vinegar all work together to bring it back from the brink. This hot honey browned butter is also good on roasted winter squash, over plain oatmeal and — if we are being honest —probably over ice cream. But that’s a different conversation. (This recipe is adapted from "Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes" by Alison Roman.)
Spring Vegetable Soup
You need not (and may not want to) use all the vegetables below at once; try mixing and matching. All measurements approximate.
Sweet Potatoes With Sour Cream and Pecans
Soft at the center, caramelized at the edges and warmly spiced from the garam masala, these roasted sweet potatoes get a tangy bite from lime-spiked sour cream, while toasted pecans add crunch. You can make the lime sour cream up to four hours ahead. Simply pull it out of the fridge 30 minutes before serving, and let it come to room temperature before drizzling it over the potatoes.
Pan-Roasted Green Beans With Golden Almonds
This simple almond-shallot topping goes with just about any simply cooked vegetable, but it tastes best with green beans. Instead of simply blanching the beans, I char them until they develop a smoky richness.
Roasted and Raw Brussels Sprouts Salad
If you like a good kale salad, or any type of crunchy salad, then you will love this one, which combines shredded raw brussels sprouts with roasted brussels sprouts leaves. As with any sturdy greens, the raw sprouts benefit from marinating in the dressing, which uses fresh lemon juice and salt as tenderizers. While the uncooked greens can be prepared in advance, you’ll want to add the warm ingredients just before serving, so you can enjoy the contrast of the crisp leaves and toasted almonds with the tangy shredded sprouts.
Sancocho
Sancocho, a word often used as slang by Puerto Ricans to mean a big old mix of things, is a rustic stew eaten across the Caribbean and made with every imaginable combination of proteins and vegetables. My father cooked his with beef, corn and noodles; my mom with chicken breasts, lean pork and sweet plantains; my grandmother with beef, pork on the bone and yautia. As such, I’ve rarely used a recipe, so this one is based largely on observation, taste memory and what I like. Pretty much every ingredient can be swapped out, and it also makes for a sumptuous vegetarian dish without meat. Sancocho epitomizes the resilience of Puerto Rican people, as it is often prepared in times of crisis — such as after a hurricane — and made with whatever you have on hand.