Vegetable

Freshly rendered lard is the traditional fat for refried beans. Look for it at Latin American markets.

A mixture of fresh green beans (haricots verts, yellow wax beans, romano beans, or Blue Lake beans) makes this dish both beautiful and tasty. Each variety cooks in a different amount of time, so cook them separately. The same water can be used. Cook yellow wax beans first, to preserve their color. A variety of shell beans can be used as well, but once again, be sure to cook different beans separately.

For an overview and more detailed instructions for making risotto, see page 103.

The combination of artichokes, green garlic, colorful spring onions, and flowering thyme makes a delectable braise.

Green beans are beans harvested while the pods are still tender and edible and the seeds within are immature. There are many, many delicious varieties: Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder beans, wide romano beans (both yellow and green), yellow wax beans, purple and cream-colored Dragon’s Tongue beans, and the tender little French beans called haricots verts, to name only a few. Choose fresh, bright, crisp beans. They should snap quickly when bent and should have only the tiniest of seeds inside. Use the beans quickly to enjoy their best flavor. To prepare them, give them a rinse, and then snap or cut off Large flat romano beans are one of the summer vegetables I most look forward to for their irresistible beany flavor. Don’t hold back on the marjoram; the fresh pungent flavor of the herb is a wonderful complement to the beans.

This pie makes a good picnic breakfast.

Farro is a delicious, nutty-tasting whole grain with a flavor like a cross between wheat berries and barley. It cooks quickly (almost as fast as rice) and can be served boiled, plain, or marinated in a salad; or it can be prepared in the same way as a risotto. I usually cook 1 1/2 cups of farro at a time. I serve half of it warm as a side dish and the other half the next day as a salad.

The difference between good lasagna and divine lasagna is making it with silky, fresh pasta.

Any variety or combination of summer squash will do for this recipe. Use more than one color for a more vibrant dish.

I love the flavors of spicy garlicky sausage together with nutty greens such as broccoli rabe. Besides fusilli noodles, penne rigate, orecchiette, or any other large toothy pasta shape is good for this sauce.

This can be used only as a fresh sauce for pasta, but also as an element in many different dishes. When tomatoes are abundant, this is a good sauce to make in quantity and freeze or can. If you are going to pass the sauce through a food mill, there’s no need to peel and seed the tomatoes beforehand. The food mill will strain out all the skins and seeds.

This recipe is only for tomatoes that are at their absolute peak: dead ripe and full of flavor.

Bucatini is the classic pasta for this sauce.

This is the sauce you need to make pasta alla puttanesca, a specialty of Naples.

This is not a particularly traditional version of this recipe, but if you have ripe delicious tomatoes, it makes a beautiful piquant summer soup—a sort of liquid salad—that’s worth all the grating, pounding, and dicing. For a light summer meal, add a few shrimp—or other fish or shellfish—to the soup.

A panade is a thick soup made of layers of bread, vegetables, and cheese moistened with broth or water and baked until soft and golden. This onion panade is a hearty, homey soup bursting with sweet onion flavor.

This is a soup for the height of summer, when tomatoes are abundant and perfectly ripe.

Yellow bell peppers also work very well in this soup, but green peppers are not sweet enough. You can even make two batches of soup, one red, one yellow, and ladle them into bowls for a yin-and-yang effect.