Parsley

This recipe actually gives you two flavorful sauces, to use as a dressing for pasta or to give a fresh accent to all sorts of dishes, from steamed vegetables to roasted meats. The basic sauce is a simple, loose parsley pesto, quite good and easily whipped up any time of year. In summer, I cut ripe, sweet tomatoes into small pieces and mix them into the pesto. The juices and flesh of the tomatoes merge with the parsley sauce, creating a new dressing with multiple dimensions of flavor and texture.

This distinctively flavored pesto is a superb dressing for maccheroni alla chitarra (page 236), spaghetti, or linguine, or a short dry pasta such as gemelli, lumache, or rigatoni. It’s a great condiment, too: put a spoonful on fish or chicken hot off the grill for a real treat. Make extra pesto when basil and parsley are plentiful, in summer, and freeze it in small containers to use through the winter.

Späetzle are little noodles or dumplings made by pressing a sticky dough through a perforated tool right into boiling water—one of the simplest of all the techniques by which pasta is made. These whole-wheat späetzle are especially delicious, dressed simply with butter and grated cheese, and make a good alternative to potatoes as a contorno accompanying roasts or braised meats. The key to making späetzle is having the right tool or utensil, with holes large enough to let the sticky dough pass through easily and quickly. You might have a colander that works, but I recommend that you buy a späetzle-maker designed for the job. There are different kinds—some slide like a mandoline; others extrude the dough, like potato ricers—and both types are inexpensive and easy to use. And you’ll use your späetzle-maker often, I am sure, after you make and taste a batch of spätzle di farina integrale.

Editor's note: Use this recipe to make Black Rice with Squid .

• Picada is an aromatic sauce traditionally used in Catalan cuisine as a base flavoring for many dishes. It is also often added toward the end of cooking.
• Picada will keep for 1 week in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer.

Thanksgiving is hands-down my favorite holiday. Bar Americain is open each year for Thanksgiving, and we typically serve about six hundred people before the day is over. No matter how many wonderful selections we offer on the abbreviated holiday menu, without fail turkey is the biggest seller—partly because people love it and partly, I think, out of a sense of tradition. This is the turkey that I serve at Bar Americain, with only the dressing and sides changing from year to year. This year I am pairing the all-American bird with all-American ingredients: wild mushrooms and Pinot Noir from the Pacific Northwest, figs from California, cranberries from Maine, bacon from Kentucky, and sweet potatoes from Georgia.

"Talk to most chefs and they'll say they'd want a perfectly roasted chicken for their last meal," says Sean Brock. For his definitive version, Brock starts with superflavorful heritage-breed chickens, but the key to the dish is prepoaching the bird in an immersion circulator. Because most home cooks don't have access to this equipment, we adapted the recipe to work in a home kitchen.

Make this salad as tart or as creamy as you like with the addition of more vinegar or mayonnaise.

Serve this terrine as an elegant starter to a summer meal.

Soy Free Tabbouleh, tabouli, tabouleh, taboolee . . . however you wanna spell it, it spells YUM! It has a clean, light flavor that just tastes healthy. If you have a food processor, now is the time to use it.

Also known as fajita steak. It might look like a weight lifter's belt, but skirt steak is juicy and delicious. With a flavor-to-cost ratio that works strongly in your favor, this thin cut cooks quickly for an impromptu BBQ. Buy one 1 1/2 pound skirt steak (about 1/2" thick) and cut it in half crosswise.

It's the ketchup of the summer. Spoon this on grilled lamb, pork chops, eggplant, or line-caught swordfish.

The beauty of this basic recipe is that it can be tweaked in numerous ways. For a spicy version, add some sriracha sauce. Try swapping out the lemon juice for lime juice and use feta cheese instead of Parmesan and mix in some chopped fresh cilantro and chopped red onion or shallot. For a curried chickpea salad, leave out the Parmesan and add curry powder to taste, dried currants, sliced green onions, and shredded carrots.

Rounding this main course into supper for company is easy. Get store-bought hummus and pita chips for everyone to nibble on while you're at the grill, and serve the skewers with rice or couscous on the side and a bottle of rosé. Have a guest bring ice cream, sorbet, or cookies for dessert.

Weighing down a chicken with bricks seems so ancient. Did the advisors to Roman emperors hatch the slogan, "A chicken under every brick," to go along with the bread and circus motif? Brick morphed so naturally from the good earth—add water and high heat (ecco fatto, terracotta) and civilization started to build in a big way. Roman bricks were longer and narrower than present-day bricks, but any brick will do. If you have a few handy, you should wash them, let them air-dry, and wrap them in a few sheets of aluminum foil. Otherwise, you can use a heavy pan of some sort. I've used an 8-quart Le Creuset, covering the bottom with aluminum foil.

This salad is so simple and refreshing. The spiced matzo chips can be made a few days in advance and stored in a ziplock bag. I always make some extra to serve with soup or dips at another meal.
Parve
Gebrokts

Thick, herby chimichurri is a great sauce to add to your cooking repertoire. Serve it with grilled meats or sausages, toss it with roasted potatoes, brush it on bread before grilling, or pair it with fried eggs.

If you want to get that restaurant- quality caramelized crust on a scallop, you need to do three things: "rinse it, pat it dry with a paper towel—and then get your pan really hot. Don't be afraid,"says Vitaly paley, chef at Paley's Place. We've found that one to two minutes per side browns the scallops without overcooking them. And gastrique? that's a sweet-sour sauce made from caramelized sugar and vinegar. To get the full Paley's Place experience, serve with parsnip mash, a subtly sweet side that echoes the sweetness of the scallops.