Brunch

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Entertaining with the Sopranos. To read more about the cookbook, click here.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Eggs by Michel Roux. To read more about the book, click here.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Eggs by Michel Roux. To read more about the book, click here. For optimum flavor, use the meat from a freshly cooked live crab.

Editor's note: This recipe is from Michele Adams's and Gia Russo's book Wedding Showers: Ideas & Recipes for the Perfect Party. Floating petals on top of this pretty punch adds color to the buffet table. Make sure you choose flowers that haven't been sprayed with chemicals.

Editor's note: This recipe is from Michele Adams's and Gia Russo's book Wedding Showers: Ideas & Recipes for the Perfect Party.

Pho Bo Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Mai Pham's book Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. Pham also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Pham and Vietnamese cuisine, click here. This beloved noodle soup is a complete meal in itself and is best served for breakfast or lunch on a weekend. Because the simmering takes at least two hours, I like to prepare the broth a day ahead of time and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will last for three days. Many cookbooks call for it to be made with oxtail bones, but I prefer marrow bones and beef chuck, which is what pho cooks in Vietnam use. A good pho broth needs to be clear, not muddy and dark, certainly fragrant of beef, anise and ginger. You can serve this soup with several toppings, but the easiest ones to prepare at home are cooked and raw beef. To use broth that has been made in advance, bring it to a boil, then add fresh ginger to refresh it. Come serving time, get friends or family to help cook the noodles and assemble the bowls. Make sure that the broth is boiling hot and the bowls preheated. Allow about 1 part noodles to 3 parts broth for each bowl.

Recipe from the kitchen of Felicia Gray, age 12 Many crab dip recipes call for imitation crabmeat, but there's no place for "krab" here. Only real lump crabmeat makes it taste best. Serve it while it's hot with crackers, bite-size pieces of bread, or veggie sticks. It can also be presented in a bread bowl and served with a tray of fresh broccoli, carrots, zucchini, or crackers.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown's Weekends. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here. I love an all-in-one dish!

Keftes de Espinaca Among my favorite spinach dishes are these simple but delicious patties. Even spinach haters can't resist them, especially when they're splashed with a little fresh lemon juice; fresh juice does make a major difference in taste. Onions add a sweet flavor and textural complexity. These patties are traditional on Passover and Rosh Hashanah, corresponding to the emergence of the early and late spinach crops.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown Entertains. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here.

While I love a shrimp cocktail, this I think has a slight, elegant edge. The hot, green mustardy horseradish, the wasabi paste, is not so hard to find these days but you could always substitute a small dollop of Colman's English mustard in its place I suppose. Similarly, you could shred some little Boston lettuce should you have difficulty locating the Chinese leaves.

The egg in this fried rice is cooked by a super easy method. Rather than being made like the classic egg "crêpe," the egg is cooked right in the well of the rice, which creates a much more delicate texture.

If you have a nice sharp chef's knife, this is a breeze. (Or if you don't, you should buy a sharpening stone, and you'll never have blunt knives again.) The idea for this recipe came about when we were catering a HUGE job on a TINY budget. They wanted tuna tartare, but I knew it would be expensive, and it's best eaten soon after it's made or it starts to get all gummy. Gravlax, on the other hand, needs at least a couple of days to cure, so I decided to use diced salmon instead of tuna, for economy, and to marinate it with our gravlax spice mix a day before the event, freeing up the chefs for other last-minute things. In my test run, I added orange zest, thinking, isn't orange good with salmon? Normally you would put something like this on a cucumber slice and that would be fine, but the juniper in the marinade suggested potato, so we served it on a slice of crisp potato, and it was ravishing in the extreme. The potatoes can be made ahead of time too, as long as they're cooked until they're completely crisp and stored in an airtight container until you need them. Any potato not cooked all the way through will soften the others; if that happens, pop them all in a 350°F oven for five minutes, or until they've crisped up again. The salmon can be sticky, so use two teaspoons to put it on the potato. I could never remember of which there was more in the gravlax cure, sugar or salt (since in the basic gravlax recipe one is three tablespoons and one is four). So after years of irritably looking up such a short recipe, I decided to THINK for a second and realized salt has four letters so salt is the four tablespoons. Welcome to my world.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from David Bouley, Mario Lohninger, and Melissa Clark's book East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube. Lohninger also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Lohninger and Austrian cooking, click here. David Bouley: Mario and I wanted to put fresh herring on the menu, but we couldn't find a consistent source for the best product from the North Sea. So we came up with this dish using mackerel, an underused fish in this country. When you marinate the raw mackerel, it becomes very mellow in flavor. It's a clean-tasting fish, not a bit "fishy" or strong. We marinate the mackerel in Bibb lettuce and cucumber juices, then mix it with beet and apple for sweetness and a little crunch. It's both light and refreshing.

This fruit butter makes a quick dessert. It's also a great snack on bread or toast. We use it in a low-fat recipe for a moist and chunky apple butter spice cake. We have found preserving in half-pint (250 mL) jars convenient, since that recipe calls for that amount of apple butter. But if you use larger jars, you'll have lots left for other uses.

(Idlee Sambaar) Editor's note: These instructions are excerpted from Julie Sahni's book Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. Sahni also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. Idlee sambaar is one of the great classic dishes of Indian vegetarian cooking. The dish consists of split peas in a spicy vegetable sauce that is a slightly milder version of the lentil and vegetable stew called sambaar. Radish and onion are the primary vegetables used to make this sauce, because their distict fragrance provides a marvelous contrast to the dumplings. Idlee sambaar traditionally are served in a generous amount of sauce in individual soup plates. Other spicy accompaniments, such as coconut chutney , Red Gun Powder (see tips, below), and hot-spicy pickles are also traditional. In India idlee sambaar are always served at tiffin or brunch.

I purposefully made this beef marinade super powerful. With this hors d'oeuvre, you only end up with a little mouthful and the peppery flavor needs to come through loud and clear. In the catering company, we shave the beef into small pieces which are then piled onto the crostini, so you can easily bite through without too much effort.

Improv: Instead of smoked salmon, try this with a generous dollop of caviar on the eggs, or top them with smoked trout or whitefish.

Improv: Substitute lemon peel for the orange peel, and cinnamon for the cardamom.