Recipes

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This silky white bean dip has a crowd-pleasing, hummus-like appeal, but it’s seasoned with toasted cumin, lemon zest and chile flakes instead of tahini. Drizzling warm cumin oil over the top brings out the earthy flavor of the beans and adds a richness that makes the dip even more velvety. You can make the dip up to five days ahead (store it in the fridge), but don’t add the cumin oil until right before serving for the most pronounced contrast of flavors and textures.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Beautiful to behold, fun to eat and a snap to make, these loaded focaccias are like charcuterie boards, but with an edible base. You can use any kind of flatbread to make them, but thick pieces of focaccia work particularly well, holding their own against whatever is on top. The key here is to choose a few toppings that work well together, like figs or persimmons, blue cheese and walnuts, or Parmesan, arugula, salami and pepperoncini. Or, use one combination of ingredients for one side of the focaccia and another for the other side. Just bear in mind that keeping things simple will look and taste the most harmonious.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Mini peppers make adorable, colorful wrappers for cheese in this sweet and savory recipe that’s extremely easy to make. Just stuff the diminutive peppers with chunks of cheese (halloumi, or paneer also works), some garlic and herbs, then roast until they collapse into soft, caramelized heaps filled with salty, not-quite melted cheese. You can serve these on crostini or lettuce to make festive finger food, or plop them on salads, rice dishes, eggs or beans.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

You don’t need to use an egg substitute like flax seeds or aquafaba to make excellent vegan latkes. The key is to use flour to bind the potato strands together, then leave the latkes alone in the pan as they cook thoroughly on the first side before flipping them. (Too much flipping can cause them to fall apart.) Once the latkes form a golden-brown crust on the first side, carefully turn them over to finish cooking. For the crispiest result, you can add the potato starch lost in squeezing back into the batter (see the Tip for details). It does add an extra step and 15 minutes to the process, but it’s easy and worth it for latkes lovers who live for the crunch.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Roasting gnocchi on a sheet pan gives the potato dumplings an irresistible, chewy-crisp texture with lovely browned edges. Here, the gnocchi are cooked with sausage and peppers, the classic sandwich combination, to make a rich and very savory one-pan meal. A handful of cherry tomatoes melt in the pan alongside everything else, adding a juicy element that’s almost like a sauce. Hearty and satisfying, this dish needs no accompaniment, though spooning it on top of a bed of arugula or baby spinach would add even more vegetables to the mix.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Filled with fruity jam and dusted with cinnamon sugar, this easy Bundt cake resembles a giant jelly doughnut. Easily mixed in one bowl, it has a tender, cakey crumb that’s scented with nutmeg and vanilla, and its jammy core helps it stay moist for several days. Serve slices plain, with coffee or tea, or dolloped with whipped cream for a festive, simple-to-make dessert.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

With a puffy, soufflé-like top covering a jiggly layer of pudding, this comforting dessert is balanced by the sharp tang of lemon juice and zest, while dollops of blueberry jam add sweetness and color. If you can time this to serve warm from the oven, you’ll be rewarded with the most ethereal texture, but it’s also excellent at room temperature, or even chilled, in which case it becomes denser and more curdlike.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Adapted from Renee Erickson, the Seattle chef and restaurateur, this meatloaf has more verve than most. The ground meat (in this case turkey, but you can substitute beef or pork) is seasoned with grated orange zest, garlic and Parmesan for maximum oomph. But the real secret lies in the tomato sauce that stripes the center and top of the loaf, which is spiked with red wine. The tangy sauce adds color and complexity to the loaf and helps keep it extra juicy as it bakes. Serve this with mashed potatoes and peas for a classic, comforting meal, then tuck leftover slices into buttered toast the next day for the best meatloaf sandwiches imaginable. Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Also called Danish dream cake (drømmekage), this vintage recipe has a tender cake topped with a “lazy” frosting of butter, brown sugar and coconut. Then the whole cake, still in its pan, is run under the broiler until the brown sugar melts, turning fudgy, and the coconut toasts and singes in spots. It makes for a lovely treat that keeps well, too. The topping, brittle and crunchy on the day it’s baked, gets softer and creamier after sitting at room temperature overnight, where it will last for three days.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This tangy, fruity dessert is gluten-free, vegan and suitable for Passover (those who choose to avoid cornstarch at Passover can use tapioca starch in the filling). The topping is a bit sandier and more caky than a classic crumble, with a subtle, nutty sweetness from a combination of almond flour, almond butter and shredded coconut. Paired with the jammy fruit, the almond butter gives this crumble distinct PB&J energy. Note that almond butter brands vary widely; some are loose and runny, others thick and pasty. If yours is on the thicker side, you may need to add a bit more to get the crumbs to hold together. Leftovers make a terrific breakfast, topped with yogurt if you like.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

These curd-filled treats split the difference between lemon bars and lemon poppy seed cake, with a shortbread-like crust and crumbly streusel topping studded with poppy seeds. If you don’t feel like making homemade lemon curd, store-bought works perfectly, or substitute thick fruit jam or marmalade.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Inspired by the vegan, gluten-free chocolate chip cookies that Lee Farrington makes at LB. Kitchen in Portland, Maine, these one-bowl delights are chewy at their centers, crisp at the edges and full of raisins and sweet spice. The batter is very sticky and needs to be frozen before baking so they don’t spread too much, but a couple of hours will do it. Feel free to substitute hazelnut flour for the almond flour for a deep, toasty flavor, and be sure to look for gluten-free oat flour and oats.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

These vegan, gluten-free stunners, which you can mix in one bowl without an electric mixer, have a candy-like crunch at the edges from caramelized brown sugar; a chewy, dense center from a mix of almond and oat flours (look for a gluten-free version); and a bittersweet speckling of mini chocolate chips strewn throughout. Adapted from Lee Farrington, LB. Kitchen in Portland, Maine, they bake up sturdy enough for picnics, lunchboxes and mailing to far-flung, cookie-loving family and friends, but note that the sticky batter does need to be frozen before baking so plan ahead. Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This elegant, company-worthy roasted chicken is seasoned with nutmeg and herbs and served with grapes that have been prepared two ways. Some have been roasted with red onions alongside the chicken, caramelizing at the edges. The rest are briefly pickled in vinegar, providing a sweet-tart contrast to the buttery sauce and crisp chicken skin. Leaving the grapes in small bunches for roasting not only makes a lovely presentation, it also keeps them from rolling off the pan and people’s plates for serving: pretty and practical.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This simple Cantonese noodle soup is endlessly adaptable. Choose rice noodles or egg noodles, add pickled mustard greens, oyster sauce and chile oil for pungency and spice, or leave them out for a mellower broth. The combination of good broth, springy noodles and leafy greens makes for a satisfying foundation no matter how you zip it up. Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This colorful, vegetable-filled dish has all the flavors of ratatouille but requires a lot less work to get there. Instead of standing at the stove to cook the eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and peppers individually, they’re roasted all together on a sheet pan until they caramelize and collapse, turning silky and sweet. Spiced chickpeas are added to the oven halfway through cooking, giving them a chance to crisp up. Sprinkled onto the vegetables just before serving, they add protein and a delightful crunch.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

A little miso paste and a dash of soy sauce add umami complexity to this simple garlicky pantry pasta, while using pickled peppers, instead of the usual chile flakes, lends acidity as well as heat. Mild white miso works best here, integrating seamlessly with the other flavors. But you can substitute yellow or red miso if that’s what you have on hand; just take care when adding extra salt, tasting as you go.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Adding whole lemons slices to a classic midnight pasta brightens the dish, giving it a juicy tang to all the salty, savory flavors in the pan. The key is to blanch the slices in the pasta water first, which tames their bitterness, then to give them a quick sear in olive oil, which caramelizes their edges. Make sure the pan is very hot when you add the lemon pieces. Otherwise, it can be hard to get them brown enough to bring out their natural sweetness.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

A can of white beans rounds out this midnight pasta variation, lending protein and heft along with a pleasing creaminess when the beans break down into the olive oil, turning into a silky, almost velvety sauce. Some crushed fennel seeds offer a gentle, haunting sweetness, and olives make it pleasingly briny. But if olives aren’t your thing, feel free to leave them out for a milder but no less hearty dish.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

Slowly roasting pears in spiced red wine turns them into tender morsels that glow like garnets and taste like cinnamon and cloves. Use a fruity but dry red wine here for the richest flavor, and pears that are firm all over, without any soft spots. This recipe makes extra crumble, which will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for at least two weeks. Use it over ice cream, yogurt or just nibble it out of hand. Warning: The crumble can be hard to stop eating once you start.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

The name of this delightful vanilla layer cake comes from the measure of ingredients in the batter — 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and four large eggs. But, like its buttery sister, the poundcake (a pound of each butter, sugar, flour eggs), a little fine tuning goes a long way to yield the most tender, delicate-crumbed cake. Using a combination of butter and oil makes the cake layers moist, and reducing the sugar slightly keeps them from becoming cloying. Feel free to substitute any other frosting for the mocha buttercream. Cream cheese frosting, lemon buttercream and chocolate ganache are excellent on this adaptable cake.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

This recipe gives you everything you want in a roast turkey: crisp skin, juicy and well-seasoned meat. It’s also extremely straightforward, the kind of thing you can memorize, then return to year after year. The important points are to dry brine the turkey in the fridge a day or two before roasting, brush oil or butter onto the skin so it turns gorgeously golden in the oven, and splash a little wine in the bottom of the roasting pan so the drippings don’t burn. Once you’ve figured out the amount of salt to use in the dry brine (see Tip), you can add herbs, spices and aromatics, or leave it plain and simple. It’s everything a classic Thanksgiving bird should be, no matter when you make it.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

These ultra-fudgy brownies take the bittersweet elements of Vietnamese coffee — espresso and sweetened condensed milk — and turn them into dessert. For the most pronounced coffee flavor, there’s instant espresso in the brownie batter plus some ground espresso (or coffee beans) speckling the milky cream cheese swirl. To get the neatest, most crumb-free slices, chill the cooled brownies for an hour or so before slicing them upside down. Use a sharp knife and wipe it down between slices. These brownies last for up to a week when kept refrigerated in an airtight container, and they freeze well, too.

Melissa Clark · NYT Cooking

My mother, Rita Clark, adapted this recipe from Edda Servi Machlin’s “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews," tweaking it slightly by using brisket instead of eye of round, and adding plenty of minced garlic. It’s fresh and lemony tasting, much zestier than the usual brisket, and far more tender, too, thanks to the acid in the lemon juice. It lasts for days in the fridge and makes excellent sandwiches. Best of all, it’s one the easiest brisket recipes out there.