American cuisine - quick and easy recipes - page 7

Two burgers, one on top of the other, with a corresponding slice of cheese. Each one. With melted cheese at its best. This burger recipe will delight all your guests.

This is a simple potato recipe in which the potato pieces are fried in a pan after being cut into strips, julienned, diced or mashed. It is widely known in the UK and America but is also widely used in Germany, where it is known as Kartoffelpuffer.

Some Caesar recipes try to downplay the anchovies and garlic, but here you can taste both (hint: The anchovies are in the dressing), and yes, it’s good. This is a great salad to make for a party.

Traditionally, Caesar salad was made tableside by a tuxedoed waiter tossing romaine leaves with the whole egg, cheese, and garlic all at once. We’ve made the process a little bit easier, and a lot less dramatic, by combining the dressing ingredients first. Note: While it’s perfectly safe for healthy adults to consume raw eggs, the elderly, pregnant women, or anyone with a delicate immune system should avoid them.

For this fresh, healthy summer salad recipe that balances sweet, tart, and salty, grilled watermelon, combines with feta, and mint.

For this classic Louisiana bayou crawfish boil recipe, crawfish are poached in water with onion, lemon, bay leaf, and garlic. Game plan: Unless you bought them prepurged, the crawfish will have to be soaked in an ice chest full of fresh water for about 10 minutes before cooking, to clean their exterior and cause them to get rid of the swampy muck in their intestines. For more New Orleans-style inspiration, check out our Mardi Gras recipes.

The Mai Tai is a sweet-and-sour cocktail with fruit flavors balancing aged rum. All agree that “Trader Vic” Bergeron mixed the first Mai Tai in 1944 at his bar in Emeryville, California, just outside of San Francisco. Naysayers need only heed the words of Trader Vic’s bartenders’ guide of 1947: “Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker.” Trader Vic had visited the South Seas, returning with all of the venerable accouterments now standard in a tiki lounge.

This easy, spicy lime and jalapeño coleslaw recipe adapted from Bon Appétit is perfect with fish tacos, or next to a burger. This recipe is featured on our Summer of Clean Eating channel.

Green cabbage, fresh corn, tomatillos, and cherry tomatoes: the perfect summer coleslaw recipe. A lime, garlic, and mustard dressing finish it off, along with a sprinkling of chopped cilantro.

A hearty dressing of mayonnaise, onions, dill pickles, and horseradish dresses red cabbage in this classic coleslaw.

This Devil’s Juice Sangría from New York City’s The Meatball Shop is the perfect drink to make in large batches. The flavor gets better over time, and it’s fun to serve in a big punch bowl for a group. You’ll have more Ginger Syrup than you’ll probably need, but any leftovers will keep in the fridge up to 2 weeks.

In this Southern classic adapted from Allrecipes, fresh okra pods are sliced, soaked in beaten egg, then dredged in seasoned cornmeal before frying to an even golden brown.

No Thanksgiving table is complete without a bowl of cranberry sauce. Instead of serving the one you have to shimmy out of a can, though, you can make your own in just about half an hour. Added bonus: It’ll taste better, too, less sugary, and with a delicious orange fragrance sure to elevate the holiday spread. Make-ahead note: The cranberry sauce can be made up to 2 days ahead. Store in the refrigerator and let come to room temperature before serving.

New York food and beverage expert Nick Mautone turned us on to this cocktail, a blend of sparkling wine with brandy, warm spices, and a touch of brown sugar. It’s the perfect opening to a memorable Thanksgiving, a sophisticated and seasonally-driven cocktail for a Christmas get-together, and an ideal prelude to the cork-popping moment when the New Year rings in at midnight.

The classic rendition of this dish is traditionally made with chicken, but we wanted to change up our poultry routine, so we swapped out the conventional choice with hearty and heathy turkey. What’s with the name? Story goes that the recipe is named after an opera singer, Luisa Tetrazzini, though there is still a debate about the dish’s true origins: whether they trace back to San Francisco’s Palace Hotel or New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel.