Recipes

Julia Moskin · NYT Cooking

Here is a fried chicken recipe that is the best kind of weeknight cooking, with ingredients found quickly at most local grocery stores, whirled in a food processor and then left overnight to turn into something delicious the next evening. A yogurt marinade helps tenderize the boneless, skinless chicken thighs, infusing them with saffron and paprika, and a quick frying lends the meat a crispy, minty coating. You can marinate the chicken for 3 hours or overnight, but you set the timetable depending on whatever else is going on. This chicken will adapt. Make one night, finish the next. That’s living. Julia Moskin

Julia Moskin · NYT Cooking

Julia Moskin

Julia Moskin · NYT Cooking

Ana Sortun of Oleana restaurant, in Cambridge, Mass., created a menu based on the traditional cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Turkey and Greece, with many influences of spice and seasoning from the Arab world. She has created surprising but successful dishes like parsnip hummus; this beet-spiked tzatziki (the Mediterranean's traditional cucumber-yogurt-garlic salad), radish salads and rhubarb compotes. Julia Moskin

Merrill Stubbs · NYT Cooking

Merrill Stubbs

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

The New York Times · NYT Cooking

Freeze vegetables at the height of the season, when they are at their Technicolor best, and you'll be rich with cooking options for months to come. For example, this muhammara, the Middle Eastern red pepper and walnut spread, can be made with either fresh red bell peppers or ones that you have chopped and frozen. The version made with frozen peppers is a little looser and lighter in color than the version starting with fresh peppers, but otherwise you sacrifice nothing having started with frozen produce — the two final spreads are similar in taste. The New York Times

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Flavored with sesame seeds and tahini paste, these sophisticated shortbread cookies, adapted from "Soframiz" by Ana Sortun and Maura Kilpatrick, have a pleasing crumbly texture and an intense, almost nutty flavor. Serve them as part of a cookie plate for dessert, or with coffee or tea as a midafternoon snack. Melissa Clark

Amelia Nierenberg · NYT Cooking

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. Amelia Nierenberg

Amelia Nierenberg · NYT Cooking

Pierogi are always on the menu at milk bars, historic Polish restaurants that were once socialist canteens. This recipe for pierogi ruskie, stuffed with potatoes and cheese, comes from the Bar Prasowy, which is one of the most famous milk bars in Warsaw, and a place where fist-size dumplings can be filled with mushrooms and meat, spinach and cheese, or any number of combinations. These pierogi can be made from kitchen staples, though you’d be doing yourself a favor if you sought out the salty quark cheese that would be used in Poland. Be patient with your first few pierogi: Sealing the filling inside the dumpling takes some practice, but the practice itself is enjoyable. You can snack on the pierogi straight after boiling, or pan-fry them with butter until crisp and serve with barszcz, a light Polish borscht. Amelia Nierenberg

Amelia Nierenberg · NYT Cooking

Seasoned with little more than olive oil and crunchy sea salt, focaccia is an ancient bread that is unexpectedly easy to make. Once a staple at Caroline Fidanza’s now-closed sandwich shop, Saltie, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this recipe from the “Saltie: A Cookbook” is perfect on its own, but also serves as a base upon which you can experiment. If you want to alter its flavor, sprinkling some aromatic dry herbs on top of the dough provides deep savory notes. Or decorate it vibrantly with the vegetables and fresh herbs of your choosing for an Instagram-worthy focaccia garden (see Tip). Amelia Nierenberg

Amelia Nierenberg · NYT Cooking

This family-style Cambodian dinner is fragrant and hearty, with easy-to-prepare dipping sauces that make every bite a little different. If you’re in the U.S., you may need to call around to your local South Asian and Chinese grocers to find young jackfruit. But once you have your ingredients, you mostly just need to chop to get this Cambodian dinner on the table. The chef Rotanak Ros, the author of “Nhum: Recipes from a Cambodian Kitchen” (Rotanak Food Media, 2019), said this dish was a special one: “People raise chickens to sell, not to eat,” she said, speaking of villages where she conducts research. “The money from one chicken can feed the whole family, at least, for three days.” To kill a chicken, then, is to honor a guest. Amelia Nierenberg

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Any food historian will tell you that trying to track down the origin of a recipe is like chasing tadpoles. There are so many and they all look alike. One thing is clear, though: a good recipe has a thousand fathers, but a bad one is an orphan. And on the Internet, fathers are created effortlessly. Since chicken Canzanese is assured of immortality online, it seemed time that we gave it a whole new start here. Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

You can use the leftover ground macaroons in this recipe for the tortoni. Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Tortoni, a frozen mousse speckled with crushed macaroons, became the rage in Paris in the early 19th century, wended its way to America, where it found a ravenous following, and then evaporated from our culinary memory.

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

The popover is a culinary marvel, a loose batter that, with the aid of a hot oven, expands like a golden cumulus cloud, producing a crisp, hollow pastry with a soft, eggy interior. While the mixture is very similar to crepe batter, when you confine it to deep, narrow, muffinlike molds, the surface of the batter sets and the air is trapped, so that the pastry has nowhere to go but up and out, creating a gravity-defying bubble. Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

This recipe is an adaptation of one that ran in The Times in 1879 and came from a publication called Young Ladies’ Magazine. And although it takes two days to make the actual work involved is brief. The recipe instructs you to serve it with peas, although I’ve seen other versions insisting on asparagus; both are great choices. I made two small changes to the Times recipe. Rather than frying the cutlets in lard (feel free to do so if you like), I used a combination of butter and olive oil. And I included lemon wedges for squeezing over the cutlets at the table, an Italian touch. After making epigram of lamb, Eric Korsh, the chef at Restaurant Eloise in Sebastopol, Calif., called it a “perfect simple recipe.” The braising makes for tender, fragrant cutlets, and there’s something in the sautéing that makes the fat in the lamb seem extra succulent. “It’s like lamb Wiener schnitzel, but beautiful,” Korsh said. Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

I see you rolling your eyes at the thought of spaghetti primavera. The dish, rarely seen now, became an absurdity of 1980s so-called seasonal cooking. Meant to be an expression of spring, the mad jumble of vegetables over pasta was mostly an expression of the death match between French and Italian cuisine (cream versus olive oil, sauce versus pasta). But in the late 1970s, when New York’s Le Cirque popularized spaghetti primavera, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey called it “by far, the most talked-about dish in Manhattan.” I encourage you to make Le Cirque’s version, all 10 pain-in-the-neck steps of it, because despite its tempestuous origins, it’s wonderful. Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser · NYT Cooking

Dehydrated strawberries can be found at health-food stores and at specialty-food stores like Trader Joe's. They add a concentrated sweetness and acidity to the crumble, but if you can't find them, no one will know they're missing. Amanda Hesser