Saute

This salad is the answer to people who think they don't like leafy greens. Good kale has a deep, almost meaty flavor. Searing it and mixing it with brown-butter-drenched pine nuts, sweet raisins, and salty Parmesan cheese is a no-fail treatment. Most other hearty greens like beet greens, dandelion greens, or radish tops would also be good in this dish.

Sauté ground lamb with cooked lentils and plenty of spice for a lightning-fast weeknight dinner—then pile extras into a rice bowl or pita pocket for lunch the next day.

Frozen corn and cranberries are the secret to these festive flapjacks.

A Spanish twist on brussels and bacon done in the style of a stir-fry. Wait till the last minute to pull this dish together, but have everything prepped and ready to go ahead of time.

Flip the script on a winter vegetable that's usually stewed: Collards are great when briefly sautéed.

These knobby-looking tubers (a.k.a. sunchokes) are sweet and nutty when browned. Balsamic vinegar smacks some sass into them.

A flavor bomb, this dish highlights the fragrant hot cherry pepper. I make it for company because the dish is unusual, very seasonal, and warms up well, so I can enjoy the cocktail hour, too. If you find seeded pickled cherry peppers in the deli section of your supermarket, you can skip the first step in the recipe.

For a dish that's easy to eat (and still has that classic barbeque-shrimp presentation), peel the shrimp, leaving the heads and tails on, before adding them to the sauce. If you leave the shrimp out, then you have a great New Orleans barbeque sauce recipe. Try substituting poached oysters for the shrimp.

Drummed up by our intrepid recipe tester Lauren Godfrey, this nontraditional taco, sweet with squash, earthy and nutty with kale, and crunchy with fried pumpkin seeds (pepitas), is—shhhhh—vegan. Don't tell anyone, but because it is so tasty, no one will care. The cashew crema can be replaced by store-bought crema or our Cumin-lime crema, but after polling both vegetarian and carnivorous friends, everyone preferred the nutty and rich nondairy cashew version (which must be made with raw cashews to work). To prepare the butternut squash, use a sharp peeler to remove the tough skin before slicing it in half and scooping out the seeds and fibers. Lazy cook's tip: Some markets sell butternut squash already peeled and seeded and ready to go.

Think of this as a carbonara, but with tomatoes in place of the eggs.

Watson, who's from Louisiana, grew up on his mom's dirty rice; that dish helped inspire this bastardized fried version. The chicken-liver base tastes very concentrated and intense on its own, but becomes nicely balanced in the finished dish.

"Never met a fritter I didn't like, and I love this one." —Allie Lewis Clapp, food editor

If you can't find flat runner beans, use any color snap, wax, or French beans and reduce the cooking time.

Briefly cooking the tomatoes is key–the finished sauce should still be very fresh-tasting.