Dairy Free

As a rule, every dough you make should contain salt—it complements the sweetness in your filling—and this buttery shortbread is no exception. Using salt in the crust and the filling helps create balance among the sweet, the bitter (from the lemon peel), and the acidic notes (from the fresh lemon juice).

Chicken wings are great for stock. They're flavor-making powerhouses of bones, meat, and skin and are easy to find. Some supermarkets sell backbones and carcasses; feel free to use them toward (or instead of) the four-pound total.

This richly spiced one-pot meal is quick and easy enough for a weeknight.

Spoon this spicy and acidic sauce over a steak salad, serve alongside pan-fried chicken, or try it on a taco.

A dollop of this romesco sauce improves everything from steak to roasted cauliflower.

Here, a coarse sea salt like fleur de sel or sel gris plays a few important roles: It tempers and cuts the richness of the nuts and butter, it adds a concentrated crunch— and it makes the brittle look divine. Break this vibrant green pistachio brittle on top of ice cream or crumble it over rice pudding. Or, do what we do, and eat it straight off the baking sheet.

Don't bother peeling the onions; their skins add a nice, rich brown color to this vegetable stock. If you'd like, remove the skins for use in dishes when a lighter color is preferred, such as in risotto or cream sauces.

Buy thinly sliced beef at Korean markets, or ask your butcher to cut it for you.

Harissa is typically made with hot chiles and served with couscous. This herb-based spin is great with roasted vegetables, or as a rub for fish.

NVA: Mangoes originated in India, but today they are loved in cuisines all over the world. The Sanskrit word for mango is amra, meaning "of the people." I think barbecue means "of the people" in America so I have united them here. Justin and I demonstrate this dish at mango festivals from time to time. The bonus: We always bring a bowl of it premade so that the guests can have a taste. That means the batch we make up on stage comes home. You'll be left with half of the BBQ sauce from this recipe, but you'll be pleased as you can use it on any kind of thing in the world that you might barbecue. It is outrageously good on a burger.

I can't believe I'd never heard of this recipe until I was halfway through writing this cookbook and then only because my good friend Fran McCullough, a primo New York cookbook editor now retired and living in the historic town of Hillsborough just north of Chapel Hill, e-mailed one morning full of enthusiasm: "Have you ever heard of Atlanta Brisket?" She'd eaten it for the first time the night before at some local "food do" and was blown away by its flavor and succulence. A quick online search turned up this shocker. Eli N. Evans, my across-the-hall Gramercy Park co-op neighbor for nearly 20 years, is an aficionado of Atlanta Brisket. Who knew? President Emeritus of The Charles H. Revson Foundation of New York and like me a born-and-bred Tar Heel, Eli is the author of three acclaimed books: The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate, and The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner. The irony here is that I'd hand recipe "tests" across the hall to Eli and his family, never dreaming that he knew a thing about cooking.