Category — Main Course Recipes

Brussels sprouts and bacon–a classic combination. Add Marcona almonds, minced shallots, and touches of cream, white wine, and parmigiano, and you have a 20-minute pasta dish that transcends the mere classic and becomes, well, pretty fancy.

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Is there anything more satisfying than a perfectly seasoned steak cooked to your exact liking? For a meat-lover like me, there is not. Unfortunately it can be hard to get that steakhouse taste at home, unless you know a couple of culinary secrets. Here is my tried and true method for cooking steaks. Once you start making them this way, you will never go back to your old habits!

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Chicken Tikka Masala is one of my favorite dishes to order at an Indian restaurant, but I had never dared to try and make it at home. Recently our friend Ehab cooked up a batch for a dinner party and I fell in love with it. The best part is that the recipe is surprisingly simple and requires very little prep time.

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One of the most searched and clicked recipes on this site is Robert’s Chilaquiles. That means that a lot of people have had the benefit of my friend Robert’s wonderful recipe for chilaquiles, which makes me ¡muy feliz! Robert’s recipe for this Mexican breakfast treat involves layers of fried tortilla triangles, scrambled eggs, chorizo, cheese, and a spiced tomato sauce. However, after spending a long weekend in the neighboring Mexican towns of Puebla and Cholula, we kind of got hooked on chilaquiles verdes–made with a green tomatillo sauce in place of the red.

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Want to get rid of all that skanky produce in your CSA box or bottom fridge drawer? Want to get all your vitamins and minerals in one meal? Want to shrink your muffintop? Boy, have I got good news for you. Here’s how it works:

Heat your oven to 350. Put a piece of foil or parchment on a rimmed baking sheet. Add peeled and roughly chopped root vegetables like carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, potatoes, rutabagas, etc. They can be kind of gnarly and skanky and overripe–it’s OK! Drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.

Now, add softer vegetables, like onions, tomatoes, leeks, and garlic cloves. (I used way overripe, mushy, squirty, bruised tomatoes, that I would otherwise have had to throw away.) Drizzle with oil again and salt and pepper again. Roast for another 30 minutes to an hour, until vegetables are soft and starting to brown.

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I grew up with Sunset magazine, and it’s still one of the best food and travel magazines out there. I’ve tried several recipes over the years, and this one was a knockout. It was easy, delicious, well-spiced, and interesting. This one’s going in the permanent files!

I highly recommend you give it a try. I couldn’t find the recipe at Sunset.com, but I found it reproduced here. Enjoy!

I am in LOVE with cold peanut noodles, but they always have a ton of peanut butter and sesame oil in the sauce which is incredibly caloric, and noodles aren’t exactly low cal either. My muffin top is big enough already so if I want to eat these I feel I have to make them a slightly different way, wherein the noodles are augmented by lots of colorful vegetables and the caloric parts of the sauce are cut down a bit. After much experimentation, this is the happy medium I came up with!

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Back when I worked at Azie, we made a lovely sauce for salmon by steeping corn cobs in a cream and broth mixture, and then adding back the roasted corn. The other night, when I needed a vegetarian meal for my visiting in-laws, I reworked it with crispy portobello mushrooms–an excellent complement to the creamy, sweet corn–and served it over fresh fettucine noodles. A perfect summer meal!

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Recently a friend was coming over for dinner, and asked if he could bring some fish over for me to cook. I loved this idea because a) fish is hella expensive, and b) I loathe going to the store. He very kindly went all the way across town to Yum Yum Fish Market to get the most delicious, high quality, enormous hunk of tuna for me to make this. (Future dinner guests: take note. If you come to my house, a large piece of high quality fish is an excellent hostess gift.)

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Some of my favorite meals start out by throwing a bunch of tasty things into a food processor or blender and adding oil and cheese. It’s reasonably hard to go wrong and it’s insanely easy and fast to make. In fact, the most difficulty I encountered when making this recipe was walking 2 blocks to the market to buy the ingredients…

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