5 Ingredients or Fewer

You can make sorbet by simply freezing fruit and pushing it through a juicer. That’s it. While plain fruit in season is quite sweet on its own, you can top the sorbet with maple syrup or any other sweetener of your choice. Toppings could include chopped nuts, cacao nibs, or whipped cream. If the fruit freezes for more than an hour, it be will be too hard, and you will need to thaw it a bit before it can pass smoothly through the juicer.

This is a quick sauce that’s not overly sweet. Serve it over cake, ice cream, or yogurt. Strawberries, mulberries, blackberries, raspberries, and boysenberries will all work well, either on their own or mixed. For a piquant sauce, be sure to use sweet, full-flavored berries.

This makes for an easy, satisfying breakfast when summer fruit is plentiful. Tahini, a Middle Eastern nut butter made from ground sesame seeds, is most often used to make hummus and baba ghanoush. I find that locally made and organic brands of tahini are fresher, sweeter, and looser than commercial brands, in which the oil has often separated from the solids.

Apricots seem exotic and rare because they disappear from the market before peaches and plums, their stone fruit cousins. Light grilling keeps their pleasing shape intact, and the fruit’s natural sweetness is accentuated by the fat and sourness of the goat cheese. If you don’t have a grill, sear the apricots in a pan, following the same instructions for grilling. For a sweeter take on this recipe, reduce the salt and pepper and, after topping the apricots with the goat cheese, drizzle them with honey and garnish with a few mint leaves.

This recipe was inspired by a visit to the Middle East. The day was hot and dry, and someone gave me lemonade with basil and mint. I have been putting herbs in tea and lemonade ever since. Although you can experiment using all sorts of different fresh herbs, this combination makes for a relaxing tonic, as both lemon balm and lemon verbena are known for their calming properties. On a warm night, substitute this lemonade for a glass of white wine, or turn it into a cocktail by adding white wine or champagne.

This drink is best in the summertime, when watermelons are at their sweetest and most flavorful. For cooling off and rehydrating on a hot day, there is simply nothing better. Because watermelons are huge, relatively inexpensive, and have a high water content, they make a good base for drinks. Experiment with using different varieties of tart and sweet apples.

Easy to prepare, baby artichokes require only half the work needed for the larger globe variety. Because they’re so small, they haven’t formed the fuzzy inner choke that requires so much trimming, and they are fully cooked in 20 minutes or less. The herb chervil is in the same family as fennel and has a mild licorice taste. It is slightly sweet and adds a cooling herbal zing to summer dishes.

This refreshing drink needs just a hint of sweetener, as sassafras is naturally quite sweet.

Quince smells wonderful, like a pear with notes of citrus. But resist tasting the raw fruit—it is highly tannic until cooked through. Quince require a long cooking time to soften to the point of being edible, and a sharp knife is needed for slicing through their hard flesh, but their delicate flavor is worth the wait and the work. Quince grows in much of the United States—I’ve even picked some in Central Park—and they are sold at many markets throughout the winter. Serve this dessert on its own or with vanilla ice cream and the easy crunch topping from the Pear Kanten with Pecan Crunch (page 101).

Choose your favorite fall fruit to adorn this sweet focaccia. The great Italian cook who taught me how to make it recommended throwing three tablespoons of water into the lower part of the oven (below the pan of focaccia) three times during the first ten minutes of baking. The steam created results in a crispier crust. Try it, but be careful not to extinguish the pilot light or soak the focaccia!

Try making a soothing bowl of cooked amaranth for breakfast. Enhance it with classic oatmeal toppings, from milk and fresh fruit to a pat of butter and a pinch of salt. Soak the amaranth in water overnight to cut the cooking time in half.

In fall, look for clusters of deep purple berries on elderberry trees growing wild throughout the country. I’ve seen elderberries for a fleeting harvest week at farmers’ markets, but you can buy dried organic elderberries as a substitute. This powerful tonic has worked effectively for me over the last two winters; I take a tablespoon right when I feel a cold coming on, and I keep taking it every few hours until I feel better. It’s very tasty, too!

This is the master recipe for egg pasta to accompany three dishes in the book: Squid-Ink Pasta with Crabmeat-Stuffed Squid (page 124), Fresh Egg Pasta with Seared Lamb (page 109), and Fresh Egg Pasta with Pork Loin (page 128). Adding squid ink to this recipe turns the pasta almost black and makes a dramatic presentation. It adds a subtle ocean flavor to a dish that’s absolutely sublime. I first started preparing squid-ink pasta at Ambria Restaurant, the legendary Chicago fine dining restaurant where I cooked for nine years.

While the underlying dashi is the same, udon broth is not as strongly flavored as soba broth because these wheat flour noodles absorb liquid easier than do the hard buckwheat of soba. You can freeze this broth for up to a month or keep in the refrigerator for up to a week and use for a number of dishes, which is what we do at my home because my family is crazy for udon!

This dish packs flavor with history. Take the word nanban, which refers to foreign influence in Japanese cooking. But duck is native to Japan, so what’s so foreign here? Back in the seventh century, the emperor issued a decree forbidding meat, and the country followed a Buddhist diet of fish and vegetables for more than a thousand years. Once Japanese started eating meat again in the nineteenth century, they called dishes like duck soba nanban—duck is something a foreigner would eat. It’s a convention that continues to this day.

Here is my standard dashi recipe. The kelp is loaded with savoriness, a taste we call “umami” in Japan. This recipe is for 2 quarts of dashi, but you can easily double the quantities and freeze leftovers for up to 2 months.

My brother-in-law and I have a long-standing ritual whenever I visit my family in Japan: he welcomes me home with a plate of his own freshly made soba noodles. I can’t think of a more gracious—and delicious—greeting. I love the bright buckwheat flavor and irresistible nutty, sweet aroma of fresh soba, a sensation you simply can’t fully experience with dry noodles or fresh-frozen. This recipe is a bit challenging, true, but worth it. A few notes: First, professional soba makers use a “soba kiri” to cut the noodles, an expensive, specialized blade 12 inches long and 6 inches wide. But at home, a large kitchen knife works perfectly. Second, cooks in Japan traditionally use a lightweight wooden box as a guide for cutting soba, but anything lightweight with a straight edge will work fine, even a plastic ice cube tray. And finally, but most important: cut noodles should be cooked and served immediately. You can freeze any unrolled dough, well wrapped, for up to a month, or store fresh dough in the refrigerator for a few days.

This is the base for Shoyu Ramen (page 24) and other ramen recipes in this section.

Use this base for Shio Ramen (page 22) and other recipes. You want this broth to be light colored, which is why I use “white” soy sauce, an almost clear liquid, rather than typical caramel-hued soy sauce.