Fry

Since you serve this side dish at room temperature, it’s perfect for a party or holiday buffet. It’s also a terrific appetizer when served on crostini or low-sodium whole-grain crackers.

This dish is an excellent accompaniment to almost any Asian entrée, such as Chicken with Ginger and Snow Peas (page 157) or Pacific Rim Flank Steak (page 180). Add some chicken, shrimp, beef, or pork cooked without salt to transform this into a main dish.

Cooking the squash in a nonstick skillet gives it a caramelized crust that heightens its sweetness, which in turn is complemented by a light glaze of orange.

Simple main dishes, such as broiled or grilled steak, pork chops, chicken breasts, or leftover Meat Loaf (page 184), get all dressed up with the addition of this sauce.

Whether you serve these pancakes for breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner, they’ll soon become a family favorite.

With this recipe in your repertoire, you’ll be tempted to start a weekend tradition of serving waffles for a special breakfast treat. Double the recipe when you have guests or so you’ll have waffles to freeze for quick breakfasts later on.

Sautéed mixed mushrooms become delectable appetizers when you combine them with garlic, feta, and horseradish sauce, then use the filling in flaky mini phyllo shells.

The perfect omelet is a gently oval shape of coagulated egg enclosing a tender custard of eggs. It can be a plain breakfast omelet flavored only with salt, pepper, and butter, or it can be a quick main course luncheon omelet filled or garnished with chicken livers, mushrooms, spinach, truffles, smoked salmon, or whatever the cook wishes—an attractive use for nice leftovers, by the way. And you can make an omelet in a number of ways, such as the scrambled technique, the tilt-and-fold method, and so forth. I have always preferred the 2-to-3-egg omelet made by my old French chef teacher’s shake-and-jerk system, as follows. If this is your first attempt, go through the movements of the jerk—and note it is not a toss, it is a straight jerk toward you—and practice the unmolding technique. Serve the whole family for breakfast, so you’ll be making 4 or 5 omelets or more and will get the feel. It’s a very fast lesson, since an omelet takes only about 20 seconds to make.