Cucumber

While the concept of sweet-and-sour dishes is generally appealing, the execution often leaves something to be desired. Sweet-and-sour is like a seesaw; if it tilts too far in either direction, you could be thrown off balance, mangling your taste buds in the process. In this recipe I use a very light hand on both sides; the sour is a delicate brown rice vinegar, the sweet a gentle agave nectar. They dance together nicely on the tongue, more like ballet than Irish clogging. For folks who like a crunchy texture or who want to avoid fat, this one’s a winner.

Avocado lovers will go ga-ga over the taste and those with swallowing difficulties or mouth sores will delight in the texture. Those of you into cool or room-temperature soups will embrace the clean, fresh feel of this blend. Avocados are one of those great superfoods, full of good fats and vitamins. They’re fun to work with, and all of the great shades of green in this soup are like preparing a beautiful watercolor that you can eat.

A collection of vegetarian soups wouldn’t be complete without this Spanish classic. It’s especially delicious topped with Garlic Croutons (page 159).

A splendid no-cook soup that will awaken taste buds dulled by summer heat. This soup can be eaten as soon as it is made, but definitely benefits from having time to stand for several hours so that the lively flavors can mingle. This soup is a great first course for a Mexican or Southwestern-style meal.

Think of this no-cook soup as a Thai-flavored gazpacho. It’s best with really lush summer tomatoes. Serve with a cold noodle dish for a quick summer meal.

Here’s an exceptionally easy, no-cook soup. This evolved from the classic recipe for Middle Eastern cucumber soup, which is made with a base of yogurt. However, I don’t think it tastes right with soy yogurt, so I tinkered with it until it approximated the original flavor, without the yogurt. I enjoy it with barley added, as suggested in the variation below.

This brightly colored soup makes a delightful introduction to a summer dinner, or it can be the centerpiece of a light meal accompanied by salad-filled wraps.

This light soup of lettuce, cucumber, and fresh spring peas was quite common in nineteenth-century America. Potage maigre translates loosely as “fast day” soup, traditionally made for Lent. Versions of it appear in old Creole cookbooks.

This is a great light summer meal! Adding a thin coating of olive oil on top of the fish will result in a less-dense fillet. For an even richer flavor, place several pats of butter on the fish.

When we were kids, just a little older than Jack is now, we used to run over to Granny Paul’s house to pick the baby lettuce in her spring garden. Now we can find bagged conveniently baby lettuce in our supermarket. We like to make this salad to accompany and lighten up all kinds of heartier fare, like Creamy Chicken Alfredo Bake (page 32). If you can’t get baby lettuce, you can make this recipe with any kind of lettuce you’ve got in the fridge.

Our Aunt Peggy doesn’t serve a meal without this delicious salad. She sometimes makes a variation with banana peppers or bell peppers added in. It’s such a simple, healthy side, and all you need to get dirty is your cutting board and one bowl. Its fresh garden flavor is a terrific complement to the spicy rice or just about any main course in the book, but we especially love it with Honey Mustard Baked Chicken (page 33) and any kind of pork chop (pages 22, 23 and 24).

The sweet and spicy dressing on this simple salad is a real winner (and one of Brooke’s favorites). You can buy canned chipotle chiles in the Mexican section of most supermarkets. They add the smokiness we usually get from bacon to this healthy spinach salad.

When we were traveling around the country shooting episodes of our Food Network show, Road Tasted, we ate lots of fried, barbecued, and sugary food (Hey, it’s a tough job but somebody has to do it). Wherever we were, Bobby would seek out a salad for lunch or dinner to add a little balance to his diet. The night he discovered chopped salad, it was love at first sight. He developed this easy week-night recipe as soon as we were back home. It’s a salad that accommodates almost any ingredient—feel free to add your own personal favorites into the mix.

Jamie is always in search of good Asian food, which is one of his favorites. We must have had this salad somewhere along the way, because it found its way into Jamie’s kitchen recently. With lime, soy sauce, cucumbers, peanuts, and rice noodles (which you can find in the Asian foods aisle of most supermarkets), it’s a whole new set of tastes that will no doubt appeal to anyone looking for something new to try. It’s also a perfect place to park your leftover steak.

This is an Indian sauce introduced to me by Madhur Jaffrey years ago, and I have been making it steadily ever since. It is, of course, good with almost any Indian curry dish, and I find that it is also delicious with cold chicken, lamb, salmon, or shrimp—in other words, an excellent way of dressing up leftovers.

My mom is a florist so I love flowers—especially big orange ones like zucchini blossoms! I make zucchini blossoms stuffed full of creamy ricotta cheese and then fry them until they’re golden and crispy. In my opinion, zucchini blossoms are nature’s perfect little packages. What’s better than a crispy, crunchy, cheesy flower? A crispy, crunchy, cheesy flower on a bread salad—a gorgeous mix of perfectly ripe tomatoes, basil, cucumber, red onion, and bread, which softens when it absorbs all the veggies’ wonderful juices.

These may resemble traditional Buffalo wings in appearance, but a blend of soy sauce, tahini, ginger, garlic, and Asian chile sauce (available at Asian markets) makes these wings major-killer. This sauce is bangin’ and can be used on grilled anything. Instead of typical celery and blue cheese, a cool side of cucumbers, Greek-style yogurt, and fresh mint finishes this dish.

Pickled vegetables are great to have in the fridge as a go-with-everything condiment; try them on sandwiches or burgers, in place of olives at a cocktail party, or alongside Falafel with Tahini Sauce (page 29). A quick brine made of rice vinegar, sugar, and water gives your favorite crisp vegetables a sweet-and-sour flavor. They’ll keep for up to three months in an airtight container in the refrigerator, and the recipe can easily be doubled if you want to prepare a bigger batch. The vegetables in the recipe below are my favorites, but feel free to mix it up by adding others such as raw baby corn, zucchini, or beets. One batch of brine will be enough for any one of the suggested vegetables, below.

A take on the margarita, this drink has Sombra mezcal, which greets your palate with a smoky introduction. The inherent peppery notes of mezcal and jalapeño are cooled by fresh pineapple and cucumber and balanced by fragrant cardamom. Mezcal is fermented and distilled from agave, so a splash of the nectar ties the flavors together.