For pregnant women - quick and easy recipes - page 3

Without any butter or cream to mask them, the sweet flavors of parsnip and cauliflower come through in this easy, comforting side dish. It’s a healthy alternative to the usual mashed potatoes served with braised short ribs or seared lamb chops. This dish was featured as part of our 5 Recipes for Fall Ingredients. Game plan: This purée can be completely made ahead. Cool and refrigerate until ready to serve. Rewarm, stirring occasionally, in a covered saucepan over low heat.

Guacamole may be the most popular accompaniment to tacos, nachos, or tostadas, but this crema is just as easy and flavorful. Using a food processor to blend an avocado with sour cream, cilantro, and lime juice creates a smooth sauce that works great as a dip for Chorizo Scotch Eggs or as a topping for Black Bean Cakes with Fried Eggs.

This chopped salad is a departure from your average leafy green salad, made instead with chunky, crunchy chopped vegetables. Sweet snap peas, cucumber, and carrots are cut into bite-sized pieces and tossed with cilantro, scallions, and a spicy Thai-inspired dressing for a healthy and flavorful side dish. Add some grilled shrimp or leftover roasted chicken and serve over rice noodles for a healthy weeknight meal or easy packed lunch. What to buy: Look for chile-garlic paste in the Asian sectio...

Spending a few minutes preparing a handful of ingredients for a marinade gives this dish tons of flavor, plus the bonus of a built-in sauce after the chicken is cooked. Just combine soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and a little brown sugar in a baking dish, add the chicken, and let it marinate in the fridge overnight. When you’re ready to cook it, put the whole dish in the oven, and in 40 minutes you’ll have crispy, saucy, flavorful chicken.

Dicing raw zucchini and yellow squash for a salad is a fast way to use up these plentiful summer vegetables. Toss them with some red bell pepper, grapes, pine nuts, chopped mint, and a Moroccan-inspired dressing to round out this healthy dish. Paired with a grilled rib-eye or a hearty piece of fish, this salad adds plenty of flavor to a summer meal with minimal time in the kitchen. What to buy: Look for preserved lemons in gourmet grocery stores or online; or you can make your own.

Like banana bread, zucchini bread is an easy quick bread to put together, without the need for any fancy appliances. Just mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl, the wet in another, combine the two, and pour the batter into a bread pan. After about an hour in the oven, and a little time to cool, you’ll have a tender, sweet, flavorful bread to enjoy for breakfast, teatime, or a snack. Special equipment: You’ll need a metal 9-by-5-inch loaf pan for this recipe.

Adding a bit of pumpkin purée, cinnamon, and nutmeg to a basic cream cheese frosting gives it holiday appeal. It’s also easy to make: Just beat butter and cream cheese together in a mixer, then add powdered sugar and spices, and throw in the pumpkin at the end. Use it to frost pumpkin cupcakes, carrot cake, or ginger cake.

Chef April Bloomfield of New York’s The Spotted Pig created this soup version of bubble and squeak, an English dish of shallow-fried vegetables, to use up leftover root vegetables. To make it, sauté a mix of onion, parsnip, potato, Jerusalem artichoke, carrot, fennel, celery root, and turnip, then simmer with broth until tender.

Maxime Bilet, coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and the brand-new Modernist Cuisine at Home,* shared this easy, fun way to give chocolate a popping effect. Just melt your favorite type of chocolate with some butter, then mix in crushed puffed-rice cereal and some Pop Rocks—any flavor you like! Once it cools, break it up and surprise kids or adults with this novel treat. What to buy: You can purchase large quantities of unflavored Pop Rocks–style candy online and at some specialty markets.

Mango lassis are commonly served at Indian restaurants, but their thick consistency and sweet flavor can be like drinking a milk shake with your meal. This savory and refreshing version of the yogurt drink from Chef Susan Feniger of Street restaurant in Los Angeles is flavored with fresh mint and cumin, and lightened by the addition of sparkling water. What to buy: Indian black salt, also known as kala namak, is a sulfurous-tasting salt used in Indian and Pakistani cuisine.

Simplicity reigns in this salad of butter lettuce and pumpkin seeds. The roasted garlic and apple juice in the vinaigrette add a welcome twist. What to buy: If you want to intensify the pumpkin flavor, make the vinaigrette with pumpkin seed oil. Game plan: We roast garlic a few times a week and keep it around to add a subtle layer of flavor to dishes. Put a whole head of garlic in a 400°F oven and roast until the cloves are soft when pressed.

The flavour in this rich caramel sauce is balanced out by the addition of bourbon and espresso powder. Start by boiling butter, brown sugar, and cream, plus some light corn syrup to keep the caramel from crystallizing. When it’s ready, flavor it with bourbon and espresso powder for a boozy sauce that adds a little extra pizzazz to a scoop of ice cream or a slice of Mississippi Mud Cake. Game plan: The sauce can be made up to 4 days ahead.

Though braising sounds like a time-consuming effort, this recipe from Ana Sortun, chef and owner of the Mediterranean restaurant Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can be pulled off in less than 30 minutes. The mix of Mediterranean ingredients like anchovy, raisins, capers, olives, pine nuts, and lemon lends tons of bright flavor and unexpected complexity without extra fat or calories.

Whole wheat flour gives this pizza dough a hearty flavor and a chewy yet crisp texture. This recipe makes enough dough for two large pizzas, so you can top one for the adults and let the kids have a go at the second one, or freeze it for later. Just add pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and all your favorite toppings. Chowhound uses this in our easy margarita pizza recipe.

The classic technique for making glazed carrots involves adding just the right amount of water to a saucepan along with carrots, butter, and sugar and simmering for the exact length of time it takes for the liquid to reduce to a syrup and the carrots to become just tender. I usually overcook the carrots or add too little water, so I like this more forgiving technique. Cook the carrots in boiling water until crisp-tender and drain.