Root Vegetable

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of Fox's MasterChef.

Blanched garlic, which is sweet and mild, is blended with briny clam liquor and olive oil to make a creamy white sauce for this unconventional pizza.

Oil-Packed Tuna, Hard-Boiled Egg, Roasted Fennel, Tomatoes, Tapenade and Greens Lots of cookbooks offer creative ideas for kids' lunches, but what about the rest of us? Lunch can get tiresome for adults, too, so I decided to create a few sandwich recipes for an older crowd—ideas that will get you out of your same-old-sandwich rut, amp up your midday nutrition, and energize you for the demands of the afternoon. If you want a change of pace, this recipe is for you! It's basically egg salad dressed up for an evening out, and it's absolutely delicious! It's loaded with omega-3 fatty acids that keep the brain sharp and help performance, plus protein from the tuna and egg and antioxidants from the fennel; the flavor is over the top! Cook the fennel over the weekend, so you have it on hand to enjoy during the week.

"This looks impressive, but it's simple to whip up," Bemis says. "It goes great with crusty bread and champagne."

Curried Potatoes and Spinach in Naan The flavors of Indian food are magical. They dance on your tongue, and the spice blends transform basic meat and vegetable dishes. Those spices also contribute to good health. Curcumin, a compound in curry, may have the power to lower breast cancer risk. Turmeric, another component of curry and nicknamed the "spice of life," may treat inflammatory diseases and protect our brain as we age. This Indian-inspired alternative to the standard sandwich will get you refueled in no time! Rich in protein and complex carbohydrates and packed with nearly a day's worth of vitamin A, this meal is complemented perfectly by a cooling cucumber-yogurt sauce. You could also serve this for supper, paired with a nice carrot-ginger or lentil soup.

To ensure the snow-white color of this soup, don't let the onions brown.

Feel free to play with different herbs in the chimichurri recipe—that's what these brothers and co-chefs have always done: "When we were younger, our mom would buy lots of herbs, but she'd never use them," says Michael. "So we'd just blend them with garlic, oil, and vinegar."

Browning the farro imbues it with a nutty flavor—a step you can add any time you prepare the grain.

McFadden always dresses his salads with the acidic components first so the produce can absorb some of those flavors before being coated with oil.

To give steaks a boost, Myers makes an herb rub (he likes to dry the herbs himself; if you don't have a microwave, sub in 1 teaspoon of each dried herb) and pairs the meat with a tart ponzu sauce (ponzu is available at Asian markets and some supermarkets).

Typically steamed or sautéed, fresh mustard greens are also great raw and simply dressed. "I like the strength they give to salads," says de Pue.

I began making frittatas regularly when our family transitioned from the pancakes-or-waffles-every-weekend phase into more "grown-up" breakfasts. As in much of my cooking, I believe I first learned to make a frittata from Julia Child, in one of her books or her television shows. You can whip up a frittata for any meal: for a weekend breakfast, or with a green salad for lunch, or supper. The frizzled leeks are inspired by a dish served at Union Square Cafe in its early years. It was the first time I saw the word "frizzled." "Fun word," I thought, and asked Danny Meyer where it came from. "My grandmother. Louise Meyer used to serve mashed potatoes with fried onions on top," he said. "When we opened Union Square Cafe in 1985, we substituted rutabaga for the potatoes, and leeks for the onions. That became our 'Mashed Turnips with Frizzled Leeks.' To avoid using the word 'fried,' I landed upon 'frizzled.' After that, frizzled leeks found their way onto everything from mashed potatoes to scallops, an omelet, red snapper, and just about everything except for ice cream." If you don't have leeks, then thinly sliced onions, pan-roasted asparagus tips, crisped bacon all work fine. Concerning culinary substitution, I think of the Russian proverb that my grandpa Jan would trot out about many things in life: "If no fish, then lobster will do." Apparently, lobster prices under the czar were less steep than they are in present-day America, but I took his point. As I noted earlier, Parmesan cheese has a lot of umami, which contributes to the high FPC of this recipe, especially when I top the finished frittata with some cherry tomatoes charred at high heat and pepped up with crushed red-pepper flakes.

Why do I love roast winter vegetables? For starters, because they are fresh, local, and seasonal. Unlike summer produce, they keep for a long time without losing most of their flavor. They feel like winter food: hearty, substantial, rib-sticking. Francis Mallmann quick-roasts them at very high heat in a wood oven until they almost burn. A home oven doesn't put out that kind of thousand-degree heat, but when something as simple as slices of Delicata squash are coated with a little bit of olive oil, sprinkled with kosher or coarse sea salt, and then roasted, they come out of the oven chewy, nutty, sweet, and savory. Part caramelization, part umami, and part Maillard. This dish is a slight adaptation of a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty, which I came across when I was asked to be a judge in Food52.com's "Tournament of Cookbooks." In case you don't know Yotam Ottolenghi's work—you'd never forget such a fun name—he is a London-based Israeli chef who writes a vegetarian column for the Guardian. He is not a vegetarian himself, which makes me trust his recipes even more. In other words, he is neither ideological nor moralistic about it: his only aim is food that tastes great. Caramelized and well-seasoned winter vegetables are fine by themselves, but the maple-mustard vinaigrette lifts the flavors enormously. We made this recipe for a New Year's Eve dinner, and afterward I received ooh-and-aah e-mails from people about "the best vegetables ever!" For sure, the company, the wine, and the other food had something to do with the reviews. But, taking all that into consideration, tell me, honestly, how often are people moved to praise a parsnip? A few years ago I would have said you need your own roast tomatoes for this recipe, but now I find that Desert Glory or similar deeply flavored cherry tomatoes, though they don't hold a candle to real summer tomatoes, are fine when caramelized.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

This dish originates from Bizerte, the northernmost city in Africa. It is sweet and spicy and beautifully aromatic. It is adapted from a recipe kindly given to us by Rafram Hadad. Serve it as a main course with some plain rice or couscous and something green, like sautéed spinach or Swiss chard. Dried rose petals are available in Middle Eastern stores and also online.

Yuca Bread with Queso Fresco The ratio of flour to cheese seems crazy, but it works. Serve the bread hot (for a spongy texture) or warm (for a denser interior with the dough settling more and forming air pockets).

This Thai-inspired salad has that classic tart-sweet-spicy flavor balance that really gets your taste buds dancing. The cool, crunchy herb-laced salad is the yin to the yang of the rich tender beef. What’s more, the food processor does most of the work.

Here, cauliflower lightens traditional mashed potatoes and blends in seamlessly. A touch of butter is all you need to make them rich and sumptuous. Steaming the vegetables instead of boiling them helps preserve their vitamin C.