Quick

This is a tangy, creamy, and herbaceous version of a classic dressing that is well paired with crisp and sturdy romaine lettuce. Use whole uncut leaves; if the heads are large, you may need to remove many of the outer leaves to get to the pale green sweet leaves at the heart. Little Gem and Winter Density are small tender varieties that are perfect for this dressing and for Caesar salad.

I love fruit at the end of a meal and am easily satisfied with whatever is ripe and in season. However, if I have guests and want to give them something more than fresh fruit, simply baking sweet peaches or nectarines transforms them into a warm and fragrant dessert. All kinds of fruits are lovely baked—pears, nectarines, apricots, pluots, apples—but peaches are particularly luscious and juicy. This recipe gilds the lily a bit with berries and wine. If those ingredients are not on hand, don’t let that stop you; the peaches are wonderful baked without them.

Oven-roasting is an especially good way of cooking winter root vegetables such as potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips, and celery root, as well as onions, unpeeled garlic cloves, squashes, and fennel. The crispiness and caramelization that develops in the oven brings out the vegetables’ natural sweetness and intensifies their flavors.

For Bryant, shucking and eating freshly picked ears of corn reminds him how for generations his family was intimately connected with their food sources—they ate what they grew. When you eat juicy corn on the cob, served straight from the pot and slathered with butter, it’s easy to imagine such a connection. Freshness really matters with corn—as soon as it is picked, the sugars in the corn start converting to starch. Choose ears that feel plump and fat with tightly closed, bright green husks and golden brown silks. Look for stems that are moist and pale green, and check for tight, small, plump kernels. Kernels cut from the cob offer other possibilities: sautéed, with sweet peppers, chiles, tomatoes, squash, or beans; or used in cornbread and griddle cakes, and in numerous soups and salsas. To prepare kernels for cooking, pull off the husks and cornsilk from the ears of corn. Rub the ears with a clean dish towel to remove any clinging cornsilk, and snap off the stems. Cut the kernels from the cobs: Hold an ear by the tip, stand it up vertically with the stem end down, and use a sharp knife to cut down the length of the cob, cutting just deep enough to slice off the kernels. This is messy; to contain the kernels, it helps to work in a large bowl, or on a small cutting board set inside a roasting pan.

Steaming is one of the simplest and most nutritious ways to cook vegetables. It is an especially good method to capture the delicate flavors of tender young vegetables such as turnips and turnip greens, carrots and carrot tops, peas and pea shoots, green beans, cauliflower, beets, and spinach. After cooking, the vegetables can be seasoned lightly with salt and perhaps a squeeze of lemon juice, or flavored with various vinegars, olive oil or butter, or a sauce.

Oliver likes to blanch his greens. Blanching vegetables means cooking them briefly in rapidly boiling water. Blanching is suitable for all sorts of leafy greens: chard, kale, beet greens, turnip tops, collards, cabbage, spinach, sea purslane, dandelion, and nettles. Blanched greens can be seasoned and served warm; chopped and added to stuffings, meatballs, soups, and stews; or dressed and served cold or at room temperature.

Leafy greens of all sorts are good simply wilted, cooked by a combination of steaming and sautéing. Tender greens such as spinach, watercress, and pea shoots cook quickly, in just a few minutes, uncovered. The sturdier greens (chard, kale, broccoli rabe, collards, cabbage, amaranth, beet greens, turnip tops) take longer. These are best cut into ribbons, or shreds, and covered to steam during cooking. It helps to have a large shallow pan that can accommodate a big mound of leaves at the outset, a tight-fitting lid, and a pair of tongs to stir and lift the greens to keep them moving and cooking evenly.

I make this soup year-round with fresh shell beans in the summer and fall, and with dried beans in the winter. The other vegetables in the soup vary with the season. It can be put together quickly if the beans are already cooked.

Fresh shell beans are superb. A bowl of plump shell beans flavored with only olive oil, black pepper, and salt, with a glass of wine, and some crusty bread—that’s food for the gods, as David says. All sorts of varieties—cranberry, cannellini, flageolet, lima, and butter beans, crowder peas and black-eyed peas—are harvested in the summer and fall, and are becoming more common in farmers’ markets. Fresh beans will cook in 30 to 45 minutes.

Dirty rice is a spicy Cajun dish typically made with sausage, chicken giblets, and vegetables—the meats color the rice and make it look “dirty.” There are as many versions of the dish as there are cooks. This one, contributed by Tanya Holland of Brown Sugar Kitchen, in Oakland, California, is spicy, light, and meatless.

This dish of Lidia’s is what I make for supper when I return home tired and hungry after traveling. I like it very plain, with lots of parsley, but you could spice it up by adding a pinch of dried chile flakes or chopped anchovy, and serving it with grated cheese.

When using smaller clams such as Manila and littleneck, make this pasta with the clams in their shells. When using larger clams, cook them first, remove from their shells, and chop, returning them to the pot with the tasty clam liquor.

Kale is a strong-flavored green that is both bitter and sweet—Red Russian and lacinato varieties are especially good—and combined with garlic, dried chile flakes, and nutty wheat spaghetti, kale makes a bold and satisfying pasta dish.

Charlie makes this refreshing soup when tomatoes are at their peak of ripeness and flavor. The same method can be applied to extract flavor from other watery vegetables and fruits, such as cucumber and watermelon.

I like an uncomplicated tomato sauce that tastes of sweet, flavorful tomatoes, garlic, and chile. It makes a delicious pasta sauce by itself, or it can be garnished with fresh herbs and cheese, and it can be the base of many other sauces.

Pesto is a traditional pasta sauce, but it is also a delicious sauce for grilled vegetables and chicken, salads, and pizzas, and a perfect final flavoring to a bean and vegetable soup.

In Mexico, salsas are typically made with ingredients roasted on a clay comal, or griddle. A cast-iron skillet is a good substitute. When whole chile peppers, unpeeled garlic cloves, tomatoes, and tomatillos are dry-roasted, they brown as they cook and develop the toasty overtones that create deep flavors in the salsa. Another traditional tool is the molcajete y tejolote, a rough stone mortar and pestle used to mash and blend the salsa.

The simplest guacamole is made with avocado, onions, jalapeño, lime, salt, and cilantro. The amounts of the ingredients can vary; guacamole is very forgiving. The important things are to taste for a balance of salt, heat, and acid and to make the guacamole taste the way you like it.