Pine Nut

Crunchy pine nuts enhance this side dish with their distinctive flavor.

Nuts and olives make this an extra-fancy side dish to serve with baked chicken or on a vegetable plate.

This colorful and crisp medley of fresh vegetables is easy enough to prepare for everyday meals, yet elegant enough for guests.

As with other nuts, you may find a variety of pine nuts available in your local grocery store. Toasted, salted, dry-roasted, raw, and even seasoned varieties are available in markets today. Be sure to look for pine nuts that are raw or dry-roasted, which means they’ve been roasted without any added oils or fats. Though I normally prefer dry-roasted, here they’ll toast in the pan, which will give the dish great flavor. To trim peas, just break off the stem end and strip the string away from the edge. It’s a great project for the kids.

It is a good idea to roll up and fry one of these fish balls before forming the whole batch. You can check the seasoning and add a little salt and pepper if you like before you cook them all. Cooking a little sample is a good thing to keep in mind when you’re making meatballs, too.

Pesto is at its best when used immediately after it is made. However, it can be refrigerated for up to a few weeks if it’s spooned into a container, topped with olive oil, and sealed tight. If you find yourself with an abundance of basil in summer, make some pesto and store it in small portions in the freezer, where it will last for up to a few months. Frozen pesto gives great freshness of taste to hearty winter soups and pasta sauces. Long pasta shapes, like fresh tagliatelle or dried spaghetti or linguine, pair well with pesto. When dressing pasta with pesto, remember these important points: Don’t actually cook the pesto—you’ll lose its fresh quality—but warm it together with the cooked pasta for a minute over low heat. There should be just enough pesto to coat the pasta lightly. If necessary, spoon in a little of the pasta-cooking water to help the pasta and pesto glide into a bowl.

For a pasta dressing

Typical pesto can be more than 50 percent pure fat, and even though a little goes a long way, that’s just too many calories. This is a re-invention of the classic pesto alla genovese. The garlic, pine nuts, basil, and Parmigiano-Reggiano are all still there, but low-fat sour cream stands in for the olive oil. It may not be 100 percent authentic, but you’ll love what it does for your dress size.

You can make this dish again, subbing cubed white or dark meat chicken for the lamb if you have extra spice blend on hand.

This is my favorite fish dish in the book. Try it and you’ll taste why.

With veggies and pasta in one dish, there’s no need to make any sides—plus, you only have to wash one pot!

Polpette are baby meatballs and these are stuffed with a pine nut (buttery, slightly crunchy surprise) and a currant or raisin (to keep the meat moist).

Serve with a green salad and crusty bread.

In the quaint walled town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, I passed the birthplace of Michel de Nostredame—called Nostradamus by most—a physician and astrologer best known for his prophecies, not for his recipes. Nearby is a small bakery called Le Petit Duc. Owned and operated by Anne Daguin and her husband, Hermann van Beeck, the bakery, which has a branch in Paris called La Grande Duchesse, specializes in Renaissance recipes. They include those of the prominent Nostradamus, who came from a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism in 1504, when he was just under a year old. When I spoke with Anne, whose mother is Jewish, she told me that she had wanted to open her shop in Saint-Rémy but felt that there was no real pastry tradition there. So she turned to old books for inspiration, and found many recipes, some by Jewish physicians like Nostradamus, who came from a long line of men skilled in mathematics and medicine. As a healer, he often used foods and herbs as treatments for various illnesses, such as this praline with pine nuts.