Salad

Here, lemon vinaigrette sharpens creamy white beans for a lively vegetarian meal.

Try a milder domestic Gorgonzola (rather than the equally delicious but more pungent Italian version). Using an assortment of different colored beets makes the salad more vibrant.

Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Harumi's Japanese Cooking , by Harumi Kurihara. To read more about Harumi, click here. Mushi Dori no Gomadare Salad Sesame sauce using the juices from cooked chicken is so easy to prepare. This style of dressing with sesame, gomadare, is very common in Japanese cooking and is used for both meat and vegetables. This particular chicken dish makes a lovely appetizer, but it also goes very well with cold noodles.

Make this multicolored salad a day ahead and chill it overnight for best flavor.

Ann Gillespie of Alexandria, Virginia, writes: "Because I'm balancing graduate school and a family, I try to cook things that don't take a lot of time. But I love experimenting with ingredients, so most of my recipes are easy to make and use interesting flavor combinations. During the week, salads are our mainstay. When we get bored with veggies, we add different fruits, like the blueberries in the recipe here."

A quick dip in egg and matzo meal creates a light, crisp crust for this boastworthy fried chicken. The perfect foil? A refreshing salad of mesclun greens, baby artichokes, and asparagus enlivened with a smooth, dill-flecked vinaigrette.

Fresh, peppery arugula pairs nicely with the Steamed Clams with Pasta.

Tossed in a fabulous country-style dressing, these bitter greens are a wonderful counterpoint to a hearty main course.

It's impossible to overstate just how well the ingredients come together in this beautiful salad. The textural contrast of juicy ripe oranges and crisp endives is enhanced by a surprisingly complex vinaigrette containing sweet, spicy, and smoky flavors.

Editor's note: This recipe was included with two others from our roundup of great cookbooks for Dad. There are more than 80 varieties of the avocado fruit, with the Hass variety responsible for 85 percent of production. The Hass avocado was discovered by a California postman named Rudolf Hass. Avocados are rich in unsaturated fats, contain no cholesterol, and are packed with dietary fiber and vitamins such as folic acid, A, B6, C, thiamin, and riboflavin. And for good measure, this salsa adds honey, mango, strawberries, and citrus juices to complete the healthy affair.

Olive oil in a dessert might seem a little odd, but try to think of it as a flavorful ingredient rather than a fat...as long as you choose a delicious extra-virgin oil. I first had something like this in Jabugo, Spain, when I ate slices of orange simply drizzled with a grassy local oil as a dessert. It was a revelation. If you want to go dairy-free in this dessert, then skip the yogurt and mix the mint in with the grapes.

Barbara Edwards, the reader who sent us this recipe, wrote that every time she served this salad, the men in the group would "lick the platter clean." We found the women in our test kitchens were crunching on it as happily as the men. The creaminess and tang of cottage cheese and mayonnaise offset the edge of onion and the crispness of cabbage.

This bistro classic is enriched by rounds of smoky, spicy sausage. All you need is a leafy salad and a glass of red wine. The French green lentils that we prefer are prized for their finesse; they also hold their shape better than some other varieties and are less starchy.

We've run recipes for this classic salad in various incarnations every few years as far back as the 1940s — with and without raw egg, with and without anchovies, changing up the cheese and even mixing in pasta or shellfish. This version is simply the best.