Simmer

Homemade chicken soup is easy to make and tastes so much better than the stuff you get in a can that it’s worth the extra time it takes. I use a whole chicken to make the broth, but only put the dark meat in the soup. You can use the white meat to make Chicken Salad Pitas or Barbecue Chicken Pita Pizzas and save yourself the step of cooking the chicken.

You can serve this salad as a side dish, but it’s so packed with stuff that it can easily be a meal. I love this kind of dish because I can have it as a meal one day and then snack on the leftovers for a few days (right out of the container, of course).

Beets are another one of those things that sounded gross so I wouldn’t try them. By now you know the next line . . . once I tried them I really liked them. They are sweeter than most vegetables, which is fine by me. This salad can be eaten as a side dish, but with the potatoes and eggs, it’s filling enough to make a meal of it.

This is the world’s easiest dip to make and it’s delicious. Even if you aren’t having a Cinco de Mayo party, this is a great dip to make when you are just hanging out with friends.

This is the epitome of college budget dishes. It’s yummy, cheap, easy, and it even has complete protein. (Your mom will be so proud.) Recaito is a cilantro-flavored Mexican sauce that can be found in the Mexican food aisle in most grocery stores. You could also make your own by chopping up fresh cilantro, green pepper, onion, and garlic, but at $1.25 for enough to make this six times, I go for the jar.

This chili is so tasty that your carnivore friends may not even notice it doesn’t have meat. It makes a lot, so if you have leftovers, freeze individual portions in resealable bags. For a quick meal, just nuke one and eat it my favorite way: poured over a baked potato.

This is a delicious low-fat version of a standard curry dish. You might think that low-fat means you won’t be full, but with all the potatoes and chicken in this easy-to-prepare meal, even big eaters will be satisfied. Curry can be a refreshing change especially if you’ve gotten stuck in a culinary rut.

As one of my all-time favorite dishes, I make this recipe all the time. It’s best with fresh mushrooms, but I will admit that if I don’t have any in the refrigerator (or if I’m feeling particularly lazy), I will make this with canned mushrooms and it’s still yummy. When your friends think you’ve created a masterpiece, remember you don’t have to tell them how easy it was.

I adore tortilla soup, but a lot of restaurants make it too spicy for me. I’d rather make it at home where I can control the heat by using milder salsa. This is an easy version that can be made from start to finish in less than 30 minutes.

Chicken and dumplings is a great cold-weather dish. When we lived in the Midwest, we would always have this after a day of sledding or building snow forts, but when we moved to Arizona this tradition became a problem. Now when I want chicken and dumplings, I turn down the air conditioning, close the blinds, and pretend it’s snowing outside (if I don’t close the blinds, the palm trees kind of ruin the effect).

This is one of my favorite after-school snacks. It tastes great and it makes a lot, so I can eat it for a few days in a row. Although it tastes better cold, I am usually too impatient (and hungry) to wait for it to chill, so I eat it warm the first day and then cold the rest of the time.

This is the way the rest of my family makes of wonton soup. When I make this for myself, I use vegetable broth and sauté a cup of cabbage to use instead of the pork. I also like to whisk in a beaten egg before the wontons go in for my own version of egg drop–wonton soup.

The key to making good maki rolls is to never refrigerate the rice. When rice has been refrigerated it becomes hard, and it completely changes the texture of the rolls. You can buy tied-together sheets of tiny bamboo strips, called “sushi mats,” for a few dollars. They make it easier to keep the rolls tight, but if you don’t have one, plastic wrap also works pretty well.

Tartufo means “truffle” in Italian and refers to how these ice cream mounds look when dipped in pure chocolate, which forms a neat, crispy coating for a favorite ice cream. You can make them any size you wish, but I usually make mine about golf ball size (about 2 ounces, 60 g, each) and serve two per person. The trick to making Tartufi is to work rather quickly and neatly. Keep the ice cream mounds in the freezer until the absolute last moment prior to dipping.

White truffles are especially fun to fold into Chocolate Ice Cream (pages 26 and 28) for both color contrast and taste.

Just about every gelateria in Italy features a bin of stracciatella, vanilla ice cream with chocolate “chips.” It results from a technique that clever Italians devised for pouring warm, melted chocolate into cold ice cream. The flow of chocolate immediately hardens into streaks, which get shredded (stracciato) into “chips” as the ice cream is stirred. The trick to stracciatella is to pour it into your ice cream maker in a very thin stream during the last moment of churning. If your aim isn’t very good, or your ice cream machine has a small opening, transfer the melted chocolate into a measuring cup with a pouring spout. (If you’re using a microwave to melt the chocolate, simply melt the chocolate in the measuring cup.) The trick is to pour it not on the turning dasher (mixing blade) but into the ice cream itself. You can also drizzle it over the ice cream as you layer it into the storage container, stirring it very slightly while you’re pouring.

This sauce is easy to put together and is lovely served with any of the dark chocolate ice creams or sorbets in this book. I appreciate it for its creamy sweetness, and it rarely fails to impress. Be sure to use top-quality, real white chocolate, which is actually ivory colored, due to an abundance of pure cocoa butter.

One of the funniest (albeit most excruciating) things I’ve ever seen was a videotaped appearance of a cookbook author making a rhubarb pie on a live morning television show. Just as the cameras began rolling, the cocky, self-assured host looked at his guest and blurted out, “I hate rhubarb. I mean, I really hate it.” The poor dear continued to make her rhubarb pie, but it was easy to see that his constant grousing was taking its toll on her as she baked, bantered, and defended her delicious-looking pie for a few painful on-air minutes. If it were me, I would have taken a different approach. With the cameras rolling, I would have ordered him out of the studio and pulled another person into the kitchen who looked forward to the first rhubarb in the spring with the same anticipation that I do. Look for stalks that are bright red, which will make the most enticingly colored sorbet. The flavor of the gently stewed ruhubarb with fresh strawberries will remind you why this combination is so beloved by almost everyone, including me.

It’s easy to forget that citrus fruits do have a specific season, since they seem abundant all year round. The major exception is tangerines, which are rarely seen except during the winter. My favorite varieties for making this sorbet are the oddly shaped tangelos, whose juice is mischievously tart, and the mottled honey tangerines, whose coarse, funky exterior belies the bright-colored and exceptionally sweet juice within.

I wouldn’t dream of visiting the vast Central Market in Florence without my friend Judy Witts, known throughout town as the Divina Cucina. With Judy as my guide, butchers and cheese merchants greet us like given-up-for-lost family members, and everywhere we turn another oversized platter appears, heaped with Tuscan delights: sheep’s-milk pecorino, candied fruits spiced with mustard seeds, fresh raspberries dotted with syrupy balsamic vinegar, and, gulp, juicy tripe sandwiches (which I haven’t built up the courage to try). And because we’re in Italy, it all ends with shots of grappa taken straight from little glass vials, obbligatorio after all that sampling. This sorbetto is adapted from Judy’s recipe. One of her favorite parts is the little chocolate “seeds” it contains. Since watermelons have a lot of water, take the sorbetto out of the freezer long enough ahead of serving to make it scoopable, 5 to 10 minutes. To pass the time, serve shots of grappa, and if there’s any left by serving time, splash some over the sorbetto too.