Simple Cooking

Avocado shells make handy vessels for a bright salad made with the scooped-out flesh. Lime juice, garlic, and a pinch of cayenne flavor the dressing. The salad can also be served as a topping for quesadillas or as a fresh filling for tacos.

This is an American-style Italian frittata or Spanish tortilla, an open-faced omelet that's a great last-minute brunch dish. The potato chips are layered throughout yet still retain their firm texture. (You don't even need to add salt to the eggs, because the potato chips provide the seasoning.) You can enjoy this warm or at room temperature, with sour cream on the side. Or if you're a ketchup-on-your-eggs person, use the San Marzano ketchup. (After I came up with this dish, I saw similar versions done by José Andrés and Ferran Adrià. A good idea is a good idea no matter how many people come up with it.)

My wife, Jazmin, is of Honduran descent. When you walk into her mother's house, everything is Latin-inspired, especially the cooking. This dish is a Latin staple, and because Jazmin likes it so much, arroz con pollo has become a staple for us. You can throw in half a bag of frozen peas toward the end to up the nutritional content. We serve it with a bottle of hot sauce on the table and a bowl of yogurt.

When you're making preserves, fully 50 percent of your success is in the shopping—good fruit makes good jam. Technique matters also, and a sound recipe makes a difference. But the crucial remaining factor is organization. Especially when dealing with a large quantity of perishable fruits or vegetables, you have to think through your strategy and plot out your work. If you can't get everything put up immediately, you have to take into account how the produce will ripen—and soon fade—as it waits for you. My strategy for how to use a bushel of peaches would look something like this: First day/underripe fruit: Pectin levels peak just before ripening, so I'd start with peach jelly. If you don't want to make jelly, give the peaches another day to ripen. First day/just-ripe fruit: Peaches that are fragrant and slightly yielding but still firm enough to handle are ideal for canning in syrup, as either halves or slices in syrup. Second day/fully ripe fruit: As the peaches become tender and fragrant, make jam. Third day/dead-ripe fruit: By now, the peaches will likely have a few brown spots that will need to be cut away, so I'd work up a batch of chutney, which requires long, slow cooking that breaks down the fruit anyway. Fourth day/tired fruit: Whatever peaches haven't been used by now will likely look a little sad, but even really soft, spotty ones can be trimmed for a batch of spiced peach butter. Southern peach chutney evolved from an Indian relish called chatni that British colonials brought home during the days when the sun never set on the Empire. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, chatni is made fresh before a meal by grinding spices and adding them to a paste of tamarind, garlic, and limes or coconut. Pieces of fruit or vegetable may be incorporated, but the chief flavor characteristic is sour. The British turned that into a fruit preserve, explains the Oxford Companion: British chutneys are usually spiced, sweet, fruit pickles, having something of the consistency of jam. Highest esteem is accorded to mango chutney… . Chutney later spread across the Atlantic to the West Indies and the American South, where the esteemed mango was replaced by the honorable peach.

June 24 is the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, the traditional day to harvest green walnuts for making nocino, a delicious liqueur invented at a congress of witches, according to Anna Tasca Lanza, the doyenne of Sicilian cooking. Lanza's witches were Italian, but other countries from Croatia to France to the chilly Teutonic regions equally claim greenwalnut liqueur as their own. I learned to make it at the Institute of Domestic Technology, a cooking school in Altadena, California, where I also teach. When you harvest the nuts—working barefoot, according to some folklore—they are smaller than eggs, smooth to the touch, and crisp like apples, because the shells have not yet hardened. The nutmeats, at this stage, are jelly. Like most liqueurs, nocino is easy but requires patience. You slice the nuts and cover them with strong booze, sugar, and spice, and allow the mixture to infuse for forty days, until it is nearly black. The real test of patience begins after you bottle it. Ten-year-old nocino is said to be the best, and certainly you would never drink this summer's batch before cold weather sets in this fall. Mature nocino has a complex flavor of nutmeg, allspice, coffee, and caramel. Drink it neat as a digestif, or use it to flavor desserts. A few tablespoons of nocino lightly whisked into a cup of heavy cream will cause it to seize, as if magically transformed into cooked custard. The thickened cream is called "posset," and can be used as a sauce alongside cakes or other desserts. My nocino recipe is based on those from the Institute of Domestic Technology and Lanza's Sicilian cookbook The Garden of Endangered Fruit. Its fundamentals are green walnuts, 80-proof grain spirits, and sugar. (My secret ingredient is coffee beans.) You can change the aromatics if you like, but use small quantities, because the spices can take over. Green walnuts are sometimes available at farmers' markets, or can be ordered online at www.localharvest.org.

Toasting the curry powder with other aromatic ingredients before adding the liquid intensifies the flavor of this quick take on chana masala. You can roast the cauliflower and tomatoes a couple days ahead; cool, cover, and refrigerate until ready to use.

Finely chopped toasted walnuts bulk up the yogurt dressing for this gorgeous salad. It's pretty enough to serve to company, either as the main course of a vegetarian meal or as a meatless offering at a summer potluck.

Processing your pickles in a hot-water bath rather than a boiling-water bath will give you a firmer texture. It follows that if you want pickles with real snap, don't process them at all. These dill-pickle spears—or sandwich chips, depending on how you slice them—can be processed, if you want, for long-term shelf storage, but first try making a batch to keep in the refrigerator. They will be crisp, and the flavor of raw cucumber comes through. It's the freshest-tasting pickle in this book, and perhaps my favorite. The recipe can be scaled up.

If I entered a competitive-eating contest, it'd be one for pancakes. I like mine crispy edged, yet soft and tender inside. After years of tinkering, I've found that the best way to get this texture is to start with a fresh pancake batter, but you don't even have to make it yourself. (I love the buttermilk-based Robby's pancake mix available at RobbysPancakeMix.com or Amazon.) If you can, let the batter sit overnight in the refrigerator to hydrate and swell—that extra time makes for the fluffiest pancakes, I promise you. I love the play of the sweet maple syrup with the creamy, slightly bitter nature of the coffee butter in this recipe.

This soup is about as easy as opening a can, and it is especially good for lunch on a hot day or poured out of a thermos at a picnic; it is so refreshing and satisfying. And if you have cucumbers in your garden, here is a way besides salad or pickles to use your bounty. This recipe can easily be doubled.

This simple recipe for roasted salmon packs gobs of flavor for little effort. The natural oils in the fish intensify the seasonings. This recipe also can be used for smaller fillets or salmon steaks. You'll just need to watch it as it cooks and adjust the time accordingly. Editor's note: This recipe makes 4 servings, plus more for leftovers. Please see "Deconstructed Sushi" and "Monster Salad" below for tips on how to enjoy, pack, and serve the leftovers.

When I started working at Payard Pâtisserie in New York City, I had already been a pastry chef in Boston for a few years. I couldn't wait to see what this French guy could teach me. On my first day, I was handed a stack of recipes—all in French—and immediately realized it would be a challenging year. I spoke and read basic French, but I was pretty hazy on much of the baking vocabulary, and there were many words I'd never even seen before. Pithivier was one of them. I didn't even know how to pronounce it. (It's pee-tee-vee-YAY .) "Watch and learn," Chef Payard told me. He sandwiched a mound of rum-scented almond cream between two large squares of homemade puff pastry and then quickly scalloped the edges of the pastry to look like a sunflower. Slash-slash-slash went his paring knife over the top pastry as he etched sun rays into the surface. The whole thing went into the oven and emerged golden brown with a glorious starburst pattern on top. It put every other pastry I had ever made previously to shame. At Flour, we give our own spin to the pithivier by omitting the rum and adding a thick layer of caramelized apple butter atop the almond cream. It's a spectacular dessert.

"To save time, make the potato sauce a day ahead and refrigerate," Bemis says.

Prefer the big taste of beef in your Joes? Substitute lean ground beef. Or bison. Or a blend. Sloppy Joes are a total what-have-you recipe. Somebody in the family off carbs or gluten? These are awesome in lettuce wraps, too. Don't be intimidated by the number of ingredients. This recipe comes together effortlessly in minutes. Editor's note: This recipe makes 4 servings, plus more for leftovers. Please see "Next-Day Sloppy Joes" and "Sloppy Joes Chili" below for tips on how to enjoy the leftovers.

Warm and nourishing, this panfried rice is a brown-bag favorite. The dish starts with a couple of scrambled eggs to which rice, edamame, and seasonings are added. If you happen to be making eggs for breakfast, it’s just a few extra steps to make this savory lunch dish. Naturally, brown rice is more nutritious than white. Leftover farro or barley make tasty substitutions.