Make Ahead

This peppermint bark is made with not one, but three kinds of chocolate: milk, bittersweet, and white.  It’s a stunning, festive sweet to make for yourself and loved ones during holiday season. 

These caramel candies are a joy to make and give to loved ones. Make the original, then try your hand at orange caramels, espresso caramels, and salted caramels.

The best cranberry-orange relish recipe is a simple chopped mix of fresh cranberries, orange, sugar, and a touch of cinnamon.

This vegan pecan pie is flavored with coconut oil, maple syrup, and almond milk, while tapioca flour takes on the role of thickener, replacing eggs.

Like regular fish sauce, this vegan version packs a subtle umami punch—but a little goes a long way.

Layers of nutty pistachio ice cream and bright jam-flavored whipped cream make for a lovely pastel duo in this riff on a classic summer dessert.

A few tweaks to the standard icebox cake formula make this version stand out: jam (in this case, peach) folded into half of the whipped cream for a fruity element, Ritz crackers that go delightfully soft in the freezer but still make a case for belonging in dessert with their salty, buttery flavor, and a layer of butter pecan ice cream right through the middle.

These pickled iceberg leaves are a good reminder that meat isn’t always required to make a sandwich substantial and well-spiced.

Masa is the essence of Mexico. It is the foundation of Mexican cooking. In Oaxaca, a lot of families still make their own nixtamal at home to supply their daily masa consumption. Nixtamal is the process of treating dried corn with an alkaline solution to make it more nutritious. Slaking lime—also known as pickling lime, a naturally occurring mineral compound—has been used for thousands of years for this process. After a night of soaking, the nixtamalized corn is ground and transformed into masa. This technique has been passed from generation to generation, especially in Oaxaca. Every night before my mom goes to bed, she nixtamalizes a batch of corn so she can make fresh masa the next morning. It’s part of her nightly routine.    The trickiest part of making masa might be grinding it, and for that I recommend a tabletop wet stone mill or a hand-cranked wet grinder. I like Premier’s Small Wonder 1.5-liter tabletop wet grinder.    Believe me, there is nothing more fulfilling than making your own masa at home.

This smoky chipotle and tomatillo salsa is an excellent dipping sauce for crudités or tortilla chips, or you can spoon it on top of tamales. You can use more chiles for a spicier sauce.

Barley flour, cornmeal, and a hint of grapefruit juice make this easy pie crust extra flavorful. Try it with this Blueberry-Nectarine Lattice Pie.

The underlying notes of vanilla and nutmeg—found in Coca-Cola—are layered with piquant aromatics and tangy tomato ketchup to produce a barbecue sauce that's remarkably dynamic. 

This barbecue sauce recipe combines bright ginger and sharp Dijon mustard.

Chances are, if you're not Oaxaqueño and grew up in this last generation in Mexico or the United States, you’ve probably been taught to think that pork fat like aciento—Oaxacan-style chicharrón paste—is not good for you, and that you should always cook and eat things made with a plant-based oil instead. It’s normal to think this way. That is, until you go to Oaxaca and see that aciento is a way of life and that a lot of elders live to be more than one hundred years old eating the stuff on a daily basis. You’ll also realize that it is amazingly flavorful and really completes a lot of masa-based Oaxacan dishes such as tlayudas, memelas, empanadas, and chochoyotes. Think of it as a Oaxacan brown butter. If you do it right, it should taste nutty and toasty, not like lard or like fat. I also understand that a lot of people may not have the time to properly render chicharrón into a paste, so this shortcut version using olive oil is much quicker and tastes almost as good. If you can’t find or don’t have access to fresh chicharrón, American-style pork rinds also work well.

In this herby make-ahead brunch dish, French onion dip meets savory bread pudding. Put the strata together the night before, then bake at breakfast time.

This Jalapeño Ranch is gonna kick up all kinds of taco creations and take veggies and dip to a new level in your life.

This cake has the fluffy, so-light-it-could-float texture of angel food cake, with a touch of egg yolk for richness. Tahini brings pure sesame flavor and a lining of sesame seeds adds a bonus level of crunch.

There is a way to have your macaroni fix in the freezer: a custard-style baked mac ’n’ cheese. Instead of a cream-based sauce, this one uses eggs and béchamel to help bind a very cheesy filling with the noodles. The pimentos help to cut the richness with a little bit of acidity.

One great thing about dumplings is that you can use practically anything in the filling—and you can pan-fry them, or boil them, or deep-fry them.

For dense hand-pulled noodles, you’re going to want the sauce to be saltier and spicier, balancing out the thick wheat noodles with extra aromatics for depth of flavor.