Parsley

This classic Argentine condiment gets a bit of a Southwestern spin, making it ideal for brisket barbacoa tacos.

The cart’s owner wants to keep his recipes under wraps, so the following is an approximation of one of his signature dishes.

This is the perfect soup if you don’t have much time. The whole thing’s made in the microwave, and it’s delicious.

This butter is delicious with eggs, seared fish, steaks, pork chops, chicken, or to spread on savory muffins or scones. When making it, it is important that the butter is still a little firm, but not so cold that it won’t whip in the mixer. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before making the compound. For best results, don’t freeze this butter.

Green lentils and bacon has long been a salad worth making. I will occasionally fold in some shards of crisp, olive-oil-drenched toasted ciabatta or lots of whole parsley leaves. A couple of years ago I started moving the whole thing up a notch by putting the lentils against a few pieces of exquisite Spanish ham and adding a certain smokiness with wide slivers of zucchini, their edges blackened from the grill. This has become a late-summer lunch I can’t get enough of.

It’s late March and green leaves as sharp as a dart are opening on the trees that shield this garden from the most bone chilling of the winter winds. The mornings are still crisp. You can see your breath. Stew weather. Unlike carrots, rutabaga becomes translucent when it cooks, making a casserole the glowing heart of the home.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

This is my version of the Spanish omelette, being lighter, crisper, and more studded with herbs than the norm. The point here is that you can mix the herbs to suit your taste. Tarragon and mint are a must for me, but any of the more unusual herbs is worth using too: chopped sorrel leaves, salad burnet, lovage, or any of the lesser-known basils. Because the herbs are only lightly cooked in this recipe, their flavor will stay true.

A beautiful marriage of textures, this: creamy salt cod purée and crisp potato skins. As baked potatoes go, this is a lot of work, and much washing up too, but the result is worth the trouble. Salt cod is not easy to track down; Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese markets and major supermarkets are your best bet. The recipe makes rather too much filling, but it is not worth dealing with a smaller quantity of salt cod. There’s no hardship anyway—simply keep the leftover purée in the fridge and eat it the next day with fingers of hot toast.

Goat cheese—sharp, chalky, a little salty—makes a sound addition to the blandness of a potato cake. The fun is coming across a lump of melting, edgy cheese in among the quietness of the potato. This is what I eat while picking eagle style at the carcass of a roast chicken or wallowing in the luxury of some slices of smoked salmon. It also goes very well with a humble smoked mackerel.

The affinity between potatoes and parsley is usually demonstrated by tossing new potatoes in butter and the chopped herb. I like to take it one step further and put the parsley in a soft, almost sloppy purée of potatoes. It excels as a side dish for white fish.

A poaching broth for fish, a chicken, or a lumbering piece of ham is all the more interesting for the inclusion of a leek or two. They soften the stock, bringing the flavors of onion, carrot, and herbs together. The ham recipe here is my standard “food for a crowd.” Poached ham slices neatly, even when it falls off the knife in chunks, and can be kept waiting patiently in its own stock without coming to any harm. I often serve it with creamed spinach. I include it here partly to show ham’s affinity with parsnips and also because it’s a useful recipe and I wanted to get it in somewhere. This seemed as good a place as anywhere. I usually buy a ready-tied piece of boneless ham from the butcher for this. It needs no soaking, but will benefit from being brought to a boil in water, drained, and then rinsed before being cooked in the apple juice.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

I am always on the lookout for simple but interesting side dishes to eat with cold roast meats. A little pile of grilled eggplants, their smoked edges moist with a vibrant green dressing, wakes up yesterday’s cold roast chicken or beef.

This is one of those recipes I find come in handy on several levels. I use it as both starter and main dish—often with parsley-flecked couscous on the side—but it is also a fine dish to bring out as one of the constituents of a laid-back summer meal in the garden. The sort where you just put a few simple dishes on the table and let everyone help themselves.

Bubble and squeak is an iconic British dish made by frying leftover boiled potatoes and cabbage to make a large, flat potato cake that is crisp outside and soft within. Bubble and squeak can be as simple as the traditional leftover cabbage and potato fry-up or somewhat more sophisticated, with the introduction of cheese, smoked pork, fish, or other vegetables. The bells-and-whistles versions can often successfully disguise the fact that your supper is made from stuff you found at the back of the fridge. Keeping the potato pieces quite coarse makes the texture more interesting.

As much as I appreciate the traditional rendition of the sort of celery root rémoulade you might get in a Parisian brasserie, I also like to shake it up a bit. Including the ham, or even bacon, in the salad rather than serving it alongside gives the meat a while to get to know the other ingredients, becoming more than just an accompaniment. An alternative to bacon would be shreds of smoked venison or prosciutto, or maybe smoked mackerel. Radish sprouts are stunningly colored sprouted seeds with a spicy heat. Enterprising natural food shops and supermarkets have them, or you can sprout your own in a salad sprouter. If they evade you, you could use any sprouted seed here.

The chickpea possesses a dry, earthy quality and a knobbly texture that I find endlessly useful and pleasing to eat. No other member of the legume family has quite the same mealy, warm nuttiness. This is the bean I want bubbling on the stove when there is pouring rain outside, filling the kitchen with its curiously homey steam as it slowly simmers its way to tenderness. Unlike its more svelte cousins, the flageolet and the cannellini, the chickpea is almost impossible to overcook. The length of time it takes to soften rules it out of weekday cooking for me, so I sometimes resort to opening a can. Chickpeas, often labeled ceci or garbanzo, leave their can relatively unharmed, which is more than you can say for a flageolet. They make good patties that you can season with cumin, chile, garlic, sesame, or coriander and fry until lightly crisp on the outside. Chickpea patties need a little texture if they are to be of interest. I process them only so far, leaving them with a texture that is partly as smooth as hummus with, here and there, a little crunchiness. The patty mixture needs a good ten minutes to rest before cooking. To calm the garlic notes, I spoon over a sauce of yogurt, grated cucumber, and mint or a similar one of shredded beets, taking care not to overmix it to a lurid pink.