Recipes

Malaysian, Thai, and other South Asian curries each have their own distinctions, but they also have many things in common, with the edges blending in and out between spices and techniques. This rich, fragrant beef and potato curry is flavored with a Malaysian spice mix, onions slowly cooked with techniques learned from South Indian cuisine, then simmered with Thai coconut milk in the perfect American instrument for a long, slow braise: the CrockPot.

This is what I decided to do with the live rockfish that I bought at Manila Oriental Market. I stuffed it with aromatics and steamed it whole. It’s surprisingly easy to cook a whole fish this way and it’s a very healthy preparation containing no added fat.If you don’t have a steamer, you can bake this fish. I’d splash a little cooking wine over it and give it 15-20 minutes in a 350° F oven.

With Thanksgiving coming up soon, I’m sure a lot of us are on the search for interesting recipes for side dishes to accompany our birds.A mash of some sort is a natural to partner for a thick slice of roasted turkey.

There are lots of important races for Senate across the country today. At this point, there’s not much we can do other than get out there and vote. Whenever I feel helpless, it’s always good to get into the kitchen and make a big pot of something. What better something for today than Senate Bean Soup? It’s been a daily fixture on the menu of the US Senate Restaurant in Washington since the early 1900s.

A little bit of sparkle, a little bit of chocolate, stirred up in a tiny cut glass cup. That’s the recipe for my Mini Chocolate Ice Cream Sodas.If you don’t spring for champagne for your next party, here’s another way to end the night with some delicious tiny bubbles. I first served these at my holiday party last year and, as my guests quickly discovered, these aren’t your run of the mill float.

Almond flour and almond meal, its coarser counterpart, are made just from almonds skinned and ground fine to be used in cakes, macarons, or meringues. It is time-consuming to make almond meal at home, but since whole almonds can be had for a fraction of the cost of almond flour, sometimes this is worth it. These instructions include a step for blanching and skinning almonds, which is useful for more purposes than almond meal.

Persimmons are all over the markets here in the Bay Area and they’re a common backyard fruit. Their relatively short season hits just as fall begins, making them one of autumn’s local icons.If you visit the countryside north of San Francisco on an overcast fall day, you may notice the leafless, spindly trees laden with fiery orbs set off against a slate sky. Grant provided an excellent overview of both types here.Persimmons even taste like fall.

Making meatballs can be time-consuming, which is why I like to make a double batch of these and freeze half. Roll the meatballs then freeze on a cookie sheet until hard. Put the frozen meatballs in plastic bags and freeze for up to two months, and let them defrost in the refrigerator before cooking.

Everything’s better roasted. Ok that’s a sweeping statement, but I almost always default to roasting when it comes to vegetables. It concentrates their flavors, caramelizes their sugars and produces interesting textural contrasts. Basically, it enhances everything that is already great about vegetables.Broccoli has been an exception up until recently. It’s really quite lovely blanched then sautéed, but I felt like cooking it differently the other night.

I love hors d’oeuvres but most recipes for them are a bit too involved for the home cook. They require an unrealistic amount of preparation and have to be served right away and the ones that don’t are just a little bit dull. This recipe comes from Tyler Florence. The combination of warm figs, melted blue cheese, salty, velvety prosciutto and sweet honey are guaranteed to wow your guests.

“No, no – you’ll have to give me the recipe.” In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), an ambitious actor (John Cassavetes) and his childlike bride (Mia Farrow) move into a creepy New York apartment complex (the Dakota), and soon make the acquaintance of the strange old couple who are their neighbors. The wife in the pair, Minnie (played with mischievous banality by Ruth Gordon) is the kind of woman who invites herself in and peers into all the kitchen cupboards.

Go green for Halloween. This green Jell-O salad has been a holiday tradition — and just a bit of a laugh — for as long as I can remember. My mom was served this “salad” as a special treat in the 1950’s, and she made it for my brothers and me in the 1980’s.While we usually have it for Christmas, the Atomic Age recipe seems to be a better fit Halloween. This sweet treat is somewhat slimey and the combination of convenience ingredients might scare some.

I love the strong, savory herbaceousness of celery. Celery root is a wonderful vegetable in its own right. It’s great for roasting, gratins, or in soup. The bold flavor of the root can more than hold its own with the toasted spices in this soup. The bacon provides salty contrast and the honey mellows and ties it all together. Looking for an elegant starter soup for a holiday dinner that’s a little out of the ordinary? This might be it.

After some experiments and variations, the final recipe gave a rich yet light custard, not too sweet and flavored brightly with spices and honey.The texture is lighter and creamier than a traditional pumpkin pie filling, and the spices exchange heavy cinnamon for the citrus and herb notes of coriander. The top is covered with a crackly burnt sugar crust that balances the earthy pumpkin with a slightly bitter caramel flavor.

But sometimes when I just want some dinner after a long day, I do need to be reminded of the basics. For this you need only a handful of ingredients: a big tomato, half an onion or a few shallots, garlic, olive oil, some fresh basil, sage, or rosemary. Some red wine really helps, but don’t knock yourself out. Swirl over some tortellini from Trader Joe’s, pour the rest of the wine into a glass and you have yourself a very nice dish of pasta – all in about 10 minutes flat.

Here’s a fall flavored weekend dessert that can be assembled ahead of time and baked just before serving. It’s great for company as a finale to a homey fall meal. The earthy flavor of the sweet potatoes really comes through, pairing well with the spices and the caramely, nutty sauce. I made a batch and gave some to two sets of friends who heated it up in the microwave later. Everyone raved.

The Fall Colors Contest is still blazing onward, so here’s a vivid dish to stand up to all those orange walls. The depth of color in this red cabbage startled me! The purple is so deep and true, it looks like it’s been dyed. This is an easy and very healthy salad, with the tang of capers and vinegar and the vigorous crunch of fresh cabbage. Some soft white beans round it out into a satisfying dish that will brighten your kitchen and your dinner table.

Dessert can be demanding. So much whipping, melting, baking and waiting. I’ve picked up some tips for putting together a decent “company dinner” on the double, but I can’t get the last course right . . . and I have this frustrating feeling that it’s the end of the night that everyone remembers.I’m learning that some home cooks have a stable of desserts that rely on pantry ingredients that don’t demand too much ambtion or make a mess at the last minute.

Quinoa (keen-WAH) is one of those exotic supergrains that everyone knows is good for you, but no one knows how to use. I speak for myself, anyway.This dish showed me that quinoa is an easy, delicious menu addition, with a full, nutty flavor and seeds that pop roundly under the tongue. It soaks up flavor and makes a wonderfully satisfying filling for the zucchini boats.

I’m always looking for interesting side dishes. It’s sort of old-fashioned but I quite like a meal comprised of a protein, a green vegetable of some sort of a starch. I discovered this recipe in Donna Hay’s book, New Food Fast.The nice thing about this dish is that it cooks pretty quickly and is completely hands off. The sweet potato ends up tender in the middle and crisp at the edge. I like to use it as a base for chicken breasts or pork chops. It’s also quite versatile.

Columbus may have come searching for gold, but what he found was a wealth of new foods. Before Europeans arrived in the New World they had never tasted peppers, chocolate, tomatoes or the culinary gold of maize – staple of the Native American diet. Imagine Indian curries without peppers, pasta without tomatoes, or Paris without chocolate!This recipe is adapted from one that Gourmet ran last summer, with a tangy lime butter sauce over lightly cooked corn and herbs.

The grapes have been so abundant and varied in the markets here that it’s tempting to buy more than can be reasonably eaten as a snack.Here’s an easy recipe that bridges summer and fall, using grapes as its main ingredient and celery as a companion for a twist on the classic Waldorf. Fennel, endive or arugula also pair nicely with the grapes if you happen to have any of those on hand. Any of these will make a tasty substitute for the celery.

Collard greens with bacon are just so good that I couldn’t resist the heavy bundles of fresh collards piled high at the produce stand this week. And even though we just gave you a recipe for rappini I had to share this too. Collards are related to the cabbage, along with kale, turnip greens and mustard greens – all of which can be substituted for one another in a braised recipe like this.

Jam looks intimidating – boiling and canning and sterilizing and botulism all rolled into one specter of potential food poisoning. But while canning itself is much easier than it looks, you don’t need to mess with that for just one or two quick jars of jam. An hour or two will give you a jar of jam that can be frozen for up to six months or refrigerated for a month with that taste of summer fruit locked inside.

It’s the Jewish New Year so it’s time to celebrate and reflect. This weekend, since I didn’t have time to make my traditional, from scratch honey cake, I opted for a no-fail bundt cake recipe. I recently learned that the bundt pan was created by Nordic Ware here in the United States after a couple of ladies from the Minneapolis chapter of the Hadassah society asked Nordicware founders, Dave and Dotty, to make a pan similar to the ones their grandmothers used in back in Germany.

Too Much Zucchini? Here’s some inspiration for the weekend. If you’ve got a garden or a neighbor with a garden, chances are you’ve got a crisper full of zucchini right about now.This soup is a bit unusual in that the zucchini is pureed rather than chunky. This recipe comes to The Kitchen courtesy of chef Susan Beach. Her calendar of recipes for seasonal soups and salads just got a nice write up in The San Jose Mercury News and, of all places, in The Missoulian.

Much spinach was dumped this week by consumers, grocery stores and restaurants. E. coli is not something to mess with. I usually don’t pay much attention to health warnings, but in this case I felt it was worth finding some alternatives to satisfy my craving for leafy greens. Try this one and you may not go back to spinach! Broccoli rabe, or rapini, is a relation of the turnip, not broccoli. It’s a spicy green with a strong mustard flavor and a strangely perfumed bitterness.

The DIY feature from Faith, our new Editor-At-Large, will offer options to that jar or packet at the grocery store by giving you recipes for foods you might not think to make yourself. Homemade bread, peanut butter and jam – they’re much easier than you think. Dulce de leche, cajeta, milk jam, confiture du lait – whatever you call it, it’s delicious.

This recipe comes from our yoga teacher, Guy with whom we recently co-hosted a retreat. At the event he spoke about yogic diet and made this dish of summer dal for us, packed with cooling cardamom. Add more ginger if you like ginger; add chilies in the winter for warmth.“Don’t forget to add the love.”(Thanks, Guy!

Our neighborhood ice cream joint is Cones on Bleecker Street. A few weeks ago I noticed a new (new, or new to me?) flavor: Sweet Corn Ice Cream. It was delicious, and after trying it out at home, I realized it was quite easy to make. This is not their recipe (I don’t think they share such information), but an approximation of what I tasted there.

The beets in our garden are big enough to eat, which, in my world, means they’re the size of golf balls. In the fall, when the beets are huge and the greens not as young, I like to make the Beet Box, but when the root and tops are tender and young, we celebrate the beet a different way. Last night we yanked up a handful and roasted them, then sautéed the greens in some Herb Butter and topped with toasted hazelnuts and cold goat cheese.

With all the talk about ice cream lately, we wouldn’t want you going out and buying cones, which often have shortening, artificial flavourings and preservatives. Here’s a very simple way of making your own. This is a great accompaniment to your original ice cream recipe that you’re submitting to the contest, don’t you think?

We learned yesterday in The History of Ice Cream, that Thomas Jefferson was an early adopter in the New World ice cream scene. Turns out, someone came across his own personal recipe for vanilla ice cream . We thought we’d try to decipher the manuscript (see recipe below with some clarifications and compare to the original recipe), and then make it ourselves.

When the herb garden starts going crazy, or you just couldn’t control yourself at the market and ended up bringing home way more herbage than you needed for that one little recipe, it’s time to make herb butter. Keep it in the fridge and slather it on grilled fish, poultry, or red meat, veggies like corn on the cob, or put a nice pat of it on your favorite piping hot bread.

A friend left this recipe on my refrigerator while I was out. They must have known that mangoes are one of the two non-local items I cannot live without (avocados are the other.

“I think it looks a little sad because I used my glass pie plate which is a deeper than I remembered so it doesn’t have that nice plumped up effect. It’s based on a family recipe that both my mother and my grandmother made, which we all tend to play fast and loose with. This pie combines half cooked fruit with half fresh fruit, so you can sugar and spice up the cooked part but still get the freshness of the raw fruit. ” (Thanks, Abby!

There was a special request for a basil or mint sorbet. This is a little more tricky, since there isn’t much there there when it comes to herbs and their volume. A handful of mint doesn’t have the same effect as a handful of berries, especially when there’s no dairy base to hold up the flavor. In many dessert recipes, apples are used as a base when bulk is needed, but not an overwhelming flavor.

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.

A Sicilian friend who once visited us for the weekend and offered to make lunch, taught me a great substitute for Parmesan. We’d run out, and his pasta dish commanded a topping. So he fried up some bread crumbs and declared them “Poor Man’s Parmesan” with a very Southern Italian flick of the wrist and lift of the eyebrows.

When you’re facing a whole season of ice cream making ahead of you, it’s good to review the basics. There are two kinds of ice cream, as far as the home-cook is concerned: those made custard-style, and those not. I find that knowing the custard-method down pat is important, and a great springboard for other flavors. So as you gear up for a warm summer weekend, I hereby arm you with a Basic Vanilla Ice Cream recipe.

Last week in an Open Thread, a reader left an inquiry for Coffee Chip Ice Cream. LED, this one is for you:Coffee Chip Ice CreamMakes about 1 quart 1 tablespoon instant espresso powder2 cups heavy cream2 cups milk1/2 cup dark coffee grounds8 egg yolks3/4 cup sugar8 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, chopped fine, or 8 oz. mini chocolate chipsIn a medium saucepan, heat the espresso powder, cream, milk, and coffee grounds until simmering. Remove from the heat and let stand about 20 minutes.

We’ve been drinking these margaritas for as long as we can remember, and I mean year-round.Right about now as the days get longer and warmer, the rest of the world catches up and decides it’s margarita time. With Cinco de Mayo celebrated today, what better time to share the recipe? Watch out, they’re strong.

We celebrated the birthday of a Bermudian friend a few nights ago. On the menu were Dark & Stormies and Rum Cake, of course. Being with child, I did not gulp a D&S, but I did enjoy the cake. The recipe, in its original form, comes from the birthday boy’s mother in Bermuda, who gets it from Bacardi.

Great news: shrimp have moved up on the Blue Ocean Institute’s Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood, and with the news, a craving for shrimp hit me hard. We were having some friends over for Sunday supper, so I decided to get the pasta machine out, and make a shrimp ravioli. It turned out beautifully – and enjoying that fresh shrimp flavour guilt-free was wonderful.

Here’s a recipe from a reader, SarahW, for a simple pasta dish using Swiss Chard (it’s been a hot topic of discussion on the Open Threads for a while) and Feta cheese. With greens such as spinach about to come into season on the East Coast, this would make a great spring dish. Pasta With Greens and Feta 6 Tbsp. olive oil (or less) 4 cups chopped onion 8 cups packed chopped bitter greens (e.g.

Ouch. Pictures don’t lie, do they? Over the weekend, my cooking pal, Amy, and I attempted to re-create the Compotée d’Osso Buco that we had one afternoon in Paris (above, left). Pierre, the chef, had given Amy a loose idea of how he made it, so armed with a few notes, we hit the stove.We started with a great cut of veal from Florence Prime Meats (5 Jones Street @ West 4th, NYC), then followed Pierre’s vague instructions, adding a little of our own instinct.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, folks on yesterday’s open thread chatted about how to make corned beef. Several suggestions rolled in: • Faith pointed our attention to Slashfood’s “Corned Beef and Cabbage: Do you do it, and how?” • DrewB gave us his mom’s technique: “Remove it from the bag, wash off the brine, soak in two or three changes of cold water overnight.

Dare we call this a recipe? Really, it is more of a snacky reminder, in list-form, of the deliciousness of its ingredients – who doesn’t love a black bean and Queso Fresco? Black Bean Soft Taco serves 1, as a snack or a side 1 corn tortilla 1/4 cup cooked black beans dash ground cumin dash of salt and freshly ground pepper 2 tablepsoons crumbled Queso Fresco (or Feta cheese) A few pinches chopped cilantro In a skillet over a medium flame, warm the tortilla for a few second.

We gobbled up this granola all weekend. Sprinkled over yogurt, swimming in milk (cold or warm), or eaten by the handful, it was hearty and satisfying, without being too sweet. Try experimenting with other dried fruits and spices if those listed aren’t your favorites.(Thanks, Stacy!

Readers requested a great hot chocolate recipe to serve this holiday. Here’s one my mother used to make every Christmas morning.Mexican Hot Chocolateserves 41 quart milk (whole milk if you’re feeling decadent, lowfat if you’re holding back) 2 tablets Ibarra Mexican chocolate* (3.3 oz each), broken into small piecesHeat milk until just about to boil, do not allow to boil over.Place half of the chocolate in a blender.

This is a Restaurant Reproduction from Little Giant, a wonderful little restaurant on the Lower East Side serving “Seasonal American” food. Sautéing the beet greens in the pancetta may not be how it’s done at the restaurant, but we really liked the flavor. Of course, you can simply sauté in olive oil instead.

We were too tired to cook last night. So we went to one of our favorite no-reservations-needed little gems: Grano Trattoria (21 Greenwich Avenue @ 10th Street). There is a salad on the menu that they call Carciofini alla Romana, but our Italian isn’t that advanced, so we’re going with Warm Artichoke Salad with Pancetta and Sheep’s Milk Cheese. It always pleases our palates. Max goes so far as to say it gets better each time. Possible.