Deep Fry

These can be served on a salad of baby greens. Toss the greens with tarragon vinaigrette and sprinkle with toasted hazelnuts.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

Lovely with fish dishes, but also good served with chicken or lamb or scattered over a soup, salad or pasta.

This is an updated version of the chremslach passed down in my own family. I have never had a seder without it. A heavier version stuffed with cranberries appeared in many early American Jewish cookbooks as Kentucky grimslech.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

Sopaipillas are crisp fried breads traditionally topped with honey; cinnamon and sugar are sometimes added to make a great dessert. In this recipe, fried tortillas approximate the texture of true sopaipillas.

A perfect crab cake is plump and moist with a crisp crust and has enough spice to accent, not overpower, the crab.

In the South we grow up loving catfish, which is plentiful in the bayous and rivers. Now it's farm-grown and northerners are discovering its mild and versatile flavor. We coat bite-size fingers of catfish fillets with plenty of Tabasco sauce and deep-fry them for a knock-your-socks-off appetizer.

Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 25 min It seems like people have been making fun of the railroad for as long as we can remember, but no one jokes about the French toast that used to be served on the Santa Fe line. The train might have run late, but when indulging in a breakfast like this, who cared?

If you can't get cotija cheese, you can substitute feta — it's stronger in flavor and a bit saltier than cotija, but it works fine. Archibald also makes a version of this salad topped with shavings of Manchego cheese.

The myzithra cheese often used to stuff zucchini blossoms in Greece comes in two forms: soft (like fresh ricotta) and dried salted (similar to ricotta salata). We wanted to combine the soft and the salted in this recipe, but because the soft variety turned out to be especially difficult to find, we substituted fresh ricotta with very good results. We've also given ricotta salata as an alternative for the salted myzithra.

(Cebollas Fritas) These egg-battered onions have a sweetness that marries well with rich dishes such as Churrasco de Sao Paulo a la Parilla .

This is a dessert version of classic fried savory ravioli, dressed up with custard sauce.

Ripe plantains have peels that are almost completely black whereas the firm-ripe ones called for in this recipe are mottled black and yellow. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

At restaurants, onions can be sliced into very thin rings on a meat slicer. By cutting the onions in half first, home cooks can get close to the same thinness with a knife, even though it means sacrificing the ring shape.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.