Vegetarian
6945 recipes found
Penne Alla Norma
Teff Polenta Croutons or Cakes
One of the things I like most about teff is the texture of the tiny grains. This is particularly nice when you cut up stiff teff polenta into rounds or squares and fry them in oil. The surface browns beautifully and the little round grains on the surface become toasty and crunchy while the centers remain soft. I serve thin slices with salads, or in place of a cracker, topped with something. The thicker cakes can be used the same way you would use the softer teff polenta, drizzled with oil, topped with a sauce or a vegetable dish, or sprinkled with Parmesan, feta or blue cheese. They can serve as a side dish or at the center of the plate or bowl.
Spinach and Feta Borek
In Turkey, savory pastries like these are made with hand-rolled yufka sheets, but store-bought phyllo dough makes a fine substitute. Often shaped into bite-size parcels, this large version may be cut into wedges. Serve it with a salad of sliced cucumber and radishes, and a bowl of olives, if desired.
Skordalia (Garlic-Walnut Sauce)
Spiced Green Beans and Baby Broccoli Tempura
Deep-frying is not something I do often, but after I’ve eaten well-executed tempura at a restaurant and can’t shake the memory of delicious batter-fried vegetables, I get out my wok. I turn on the hood fan, open the window and start heating up oil. I like to play around with different batters and coatings. This spicy, delicate batter is somewhere between a puffy beignet-type coating and a simpler egg, flour and bread-crumb dusting. It’s mostly cornstarch, with a small amount of cornmeal and whole wheat flour — just enough to hold the batter together. I add dukkah, cilantro and cumin for flavor and texture. Ice-cold sparkling water helps keep the batter light; it fries up crispy rather than bready because there’s very little gluten to toughen it. You can use this batter with all sorts of vegetables, but I particularly love green beans and baby broccoli. The batter wraps itself nicely around the smooth beans and nestles in among the spindly flowers at the end of a baby broccoli stem, resulting in lacy, extra-crispy tempura. A wok is ideal for deep-frying. It can accommodate a lot of vegetables at one time without crowding, and it holds heat well. The oil should hover between 350 and 375 degrees so that the vegetables cook quickly and crisp up without absorbing too much oil. Be sure to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches, and use a thermometer. You will be amazed to find a green bean tender and hot inside its crispy coating in two minutes or less.
Penne With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
This exquisitely simple recipe came to The Times in a 2001 article about Paola di Mauro, an Italian winemaker in Marina, a small town southeast of Rome. She was one of a band of cooks who helped distinguish "cucina casalinga," roughly translated as "housewives' cooking." From her humble kitchen, Ms. di Mauro mentored some of the best Italian chefs and restaurateurs in the United States, including Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Piero Selvaggio and Tony May. Her recipe is easy and calls for just five ingredients – cherry tomatoes, olive oil, pecorino romano and penne pasta – but get your hands on the best ingredients you can afford. Ms. di Mauro intended this to serve four as a first course, but if you're making this for dinner, double the recipe.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Roasted Brussels Sprouts With a Pomegranate Reduction
If you thought you did not like brussels sprouts, this recipe will definitely change your mind. The first time my grandmother served roasted brussels sprouts to me, I could not stop eating them. When brussels sprouts are roasted, they become crispy on the outside and sweet and delicate on the inside. The addition of a warm pomegranate glaze, and the cool, sweet pomegranate seeds, makes these brussels sprouts a festive delight.
Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.
Arancini With Brandy-Soaked Raisins
These Italian fried rice balls have a surprise filling of brandy-soaked raisins, which gives them a gentle sweetness that contrasts with the savory fontina and mozzarella cheeses. You can make the rice mixture up to a day ahead, and form the balls up to four hours ahead. Then fry just before serving so the cheese is warm enough to gush when you bite in.
Oreo Chocolate Pie
White Gazpacho With Watermelon Rind
Taralli
Taralli are delicious ring shaped rusk-like Italian snacks from Apulia and Campania. Now that I know how easy they are to make I could be in big trouble, as whenever I’ve bought them from one of my favorite Italian delis I have a hard time resisting them. It’s the olive oil, I now know, that makes them special and different from other twice-baked breads. They are crisp but not hard, and this whole wheat version is as good as any traditional taralli I’ve tasted. I particularly like the version with black pepper. But I like them plain, without any embellishment, as well. The olive oil gives them so much flavor on its own. This recipe is based on a recipe in Carol Field’s “Italy In Small Bites.”
Shredded Vegetable Socca
Socca is street food in Nice, in the South of France. This Los Angeles version, served at the restaurant Sqirl, makes it a meal by adding shredded vegetables to the chickpea pancake and tops it with greens and creamy labneh. This recipe calls for carrots, winter squash (Sqirl generally uses kabocha) or zucchini — pick one and proceed. Add a fried egg on top to make it heartier, if you'd like.
Saag Aloo
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This frittata is just one good reason to stock peas in your freezer. My favorite herbs to use are tarragon and chives.
Herb and Radish Salad With Feta and Walnuts
This light, crunchy salad is inspired by sabzi khordan, the heaping platter of fresh herbs, radishes, walnuts and feta cheese that accompanies nearly every Persian meal.
Braised Cabbage
The chef Floyd Cardoz shared this recipe with The Times in 2011. “I personally love cabbage,” he said. At Tabla, his restaurant on Madison Square Park, he offered lightly caramelized cabbage wedges that had been spiced with cloves, black mustard seeds, shallots, garlic and ginger. Mr. Cardoz brought out the sweetness of the cabbage, and in the plating of it, its beauty.
Tomato, Oregano, and Feta Risotto
Simple Pencil Cob Breakfast Grits
Sometimes the taste of a humble, simple food can be a life-changing event. This recipe, courtesy of Kay Rentschler, creative director of Anson Mills, is a fail-safe method for making the mill’s luxuriously flavored heirloom grits. When properly cooked – over very low heat after an overnight soak – the resulting grits are incredibly creamy and almost as sweet as fresh corn. It is important to understand why you must cook these grits over the lowest possible heat: these are coarse grits, and if they are over-hydrated or boiled after they begin to thicken they will take forever to cook. (In technical terms, thickening is the point at which the first starch takes hold, or the point after continuous gentle stirring when the grits particles remain suspended in the liquid and you no longer have to stir continuously). Moreover, as Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts explained to me, if the heat is too high the new crop flavors of the corn will be blown out, in the same way that the flavor of fresh herbs is diminished by high heat.
Garlic Broth
Whole cloves of garlic, uncut and simmered gently for an hour with aromatics, yield a mild, sweet tasting, comforting broth that makes an ideal vegetarian stand-in for chicken broth. According to nutritionist Johnny Bowden, garlic needs to be crushed, sliced, or chopped in order for its compounds to be released. For this broth, I just crush the cloves lightly by leaning on them with the flat side of my knife. The less crushed they are, the milder the broth will taste.
Marinara Sauce
Cracked Farro Risotto (Farrotto) With Parsley and Marjoram
Finally, a way to make something as comforting as an Italian rice risotto using farro. The chef Barry Maiden revealed this ingenious method to me. Soak the farro, drain and then crack the grains slightly in a food processor. This allows the thickly hulled wheat berries to release their starch, creating the creamy sauce that defines the dish. Farro has so much flavor and the resulting farrotto is much more robust than a rice risotto. It needs little more than fresh herbs as embellishment, but of course you could add any vegetable you like to use in risotto.
