Sauce and Marinade Recipes & Ideas

Confit is an old French word for a classic method of food preservation. It simply means food that has been slowly cooked in salt and oil for long-term preservation. Duck confit is a famous example, but vegetables – especially garlic – are often used. This version is an easy, hands-off recipe for a tart, flavorful confit of fennel, lemon, and garlic. It’s sweet and mellow with notes of bright bitterness from the lemon.

Sage makes a powerful pesto oozing with garlicky, oily summer flavor. We recently went hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, where the hot sun brings out all the scent of wild California sage, so warm summer and this powerful aroma are inextricably connected in our mind right now. A little of this pesto goes a long away, and we found that it’s best made with Italian parsley to lighten the sage a bit.

We’ve used cardamom in the layered pastry – its spicy, smoky sweetness goes beautifully with the blackberries here! Any leftover blackberry sauce is heaven swirled into plain yogurt or over pancakes, too.

Summer is here, more or less, and we’re cooking easy, light and quick. This catfish recipe is one of the easiest, quickest dinners we know; it also happens to be one of our favorites. We learned this technique for flash frying thin fish fillets from Mark Bittman. It’s fast and easy; the only challenge is that you have to be very careful turning the fish in hot, spluttering oil and butter.

We made pancakes last weekend, a hearty Saturday brunch for a crowd. We are great fans of maple syrup, but we also love the chunky fruit toppings found in diners and family restaurants like Bob Evans. You can buy these industrially pre-packaged in jars, of course, but it is just too easy to make your own. You don’t even need fresh fruit; frozen does just as well, and bags of organic frozen peaches and blueberries are easily available from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

Horseradish has a tingling, biting flavor that goes straight up the nose into the brain. Many find this sharp taste exhilarating; we love it in cocktail dip and egg salad. But its bite is often muffled by lack of freshness or too many competing ingredients in jarred sauces. If you really love horseradish, then fresh is the way to go.

We were recently shopping for applesauce and gave it up in disgust when even the “natural” types were discovered to contain high fructose corn syrup. Plain applesauce without unnecessary sweeteners can be found, but it’s so easy just to make your own. Our preferred applesauce is homestyle and chunky, full of the flavor of dark brown sugar and lots and lots of cinnamon. This is great served warm or cold, or spooned over ice cream.

Mayonnaise is a main part of many lunches: tuna salad, salad dressings, turkey sandwiches and more. British food writer Elizabeth David called mayonnaise “the beautiful shining golden ointment.” While I’ve made mayonnaise a few times, I’ll admit that for a potato salad or a smear on a sandwich, I’ve relied on Hellmann’s mayonnaise, known as Best Foods in the West.

This garlicly mayonnaise goes well with raw vegetables, and all grilled foods, so we like to serve it during the summer, but it is also a nice accompaniment to meats and fish cooked in other ways.Experiment by adding other flavors such as saffron, chipotle chile powder, or fresh herbs.