Baking

Silver Palate Sour Cream Apple Pie was the most popular apple pie at The Silver Palate, the gourmet take-out shop that Julee Rosso and I opened in New York City in 1977. This pie will win raves in your home too! When chopping the walnuts, make sure they're not too fine.

Here's a different use for one of the ingredients from the first Thanksgiving. Though this recipe is particularly easy to prepare with frozen winter squash purée, canned pumpkin purée or mashed freshly cooked butternut squash will work just as well. The squash will impart a beautiful golden color to the rolls.

Sweet summer apricots are a terrific topping for this upside-down cake.

For this recipe you will need 3 mini-muffin pans, each containing twelve 1 3/4- by 1-inch cups. Resist the temptation to make the bites in batches because the potato mixture will discolor.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

This cake should not be assembled until just before serving.

This recipe is used to prepare Beef En Croûte with Coriander Walnut Filling.

(Chick-Pea Flatbread with Sage)

"As a kid, I'd accompany my mother to her job at the racetrack, where she would lead the horses out to the starting gate," writes Michael Hunter of Studio City, California. "Eventually I was helping out in the stalls, and when I got older, I became a jockey. My mother was also the person who, in a roundabout way, inspired my other passion: cooking. I'd come home from school, and she would have prepared something from a box or can. I didn't always like what was on the dinner table, so one day I asked her to buy me a cookbook. Pretty soon I was making dinner for us almost every night. Now, after seventeen years of racing horses and cooking for family and friends, I'm making the jump to professional cooking."

To bake these tartlet shells all at once, you will need 50 tartlet pans, each 2 inches in diameter (across the top) and 1/2 inch deep. However, you could also make these tartlets in batches, using fewer pans.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.