Like pumpkin pie, but more egg-y and without the crust; a perfect Thanksgiving Day—or fall or winter—dessert.

Trust me (and Simca Beck, the French cooking maven) on the measurements for this recipe. The large amount of garlic morphs into a beautiful, seductively aromatic, long-tasting sweetness.

The ancient Romans and those living in Europe into the Middle Ages treated (furthermore, named) the apple as a “vegetable,” cooking it alongside various meats, especially pork and game, or serving cooked and oft-elaborately-spiced apples as its own course, alongside cooked root and green vegetables.

About cooking red cabbage, keep in mind that any red in it quickly turns to mauve on long cooking, then a slate blue, finally an unappetizing dirty green. However, cooking or preparing red cabbage with an acid (vinegar, for example, or wine, or citrus juice) preserves the red color.

On a voyage back from Europe to the United States aboard the Queen Mary 2, I tasted this creamed spinach in its steak restaurant. It’s delicious; you could eat it for dessert, it’s so rich and filling. I think the dual secrets are squeezing the spinach of excess water after it has been blanched and thickening the cream. 

Pastel de choclo is what we would call a layered casserole or a sort of shepherd’s pie, consisting of a topping of a sweet corn polenta over a savory ground beef filling, separated by and further flavored with a vein of chopped hard-boiled eggs, golden raisins, and sliced olives. When skillfully assembled, with the best ingredients, its simplicity is irresistible.

The chopped salad—typically, but not exclusively, a mix of vegetables chopped up into uniform size and mixed together—is close to perfect summer or warm weather fare.

Keeping it cool, here’s a recipe for one of the more delicious “salads” the world offers, what the Vietnamese generically call “bun,” pronounced “boon” (written more exactly, “bún thit nuóng”). It’s much more than a salad, actually, and in its variations—only one such is given here—easily can stand for the main meal of the day. 

What we call “French toast” may well be one of the oldest recipes in our culture. A collection of recipes called “De Re Coquinaria” (“The Art of Cooking”), dating from the 4th or 5th century, calls for dipping stale bread in milk and frying it. And we’re off.

I used to say to myself “Why bother?” Sherlocking the sesame seed paste called tahini (that isn’t really rare to find anymore), pulling out and slopping up the food processor to grind a couple cans of chickpeas, peeling some garlic and squeezing some lemons to make hummus at home when I could find tubs of it—flavored in as many nights as are in Arabia—for $3-$4 on sale. Until I made my own.

The French word “mousseline” is used in a couple of culinary ways: it’s a mousse; it’s a sauce (a variation of hollandaise), but its original meaning is “muslin,” a fine weave of soft cotton. Making a mousseline in the kitchen turns anything into something that your tongue is happy to touch. Photo from Elena Leya on unsplash.

This moves the recipe outside and shows how deliciousness is eminently possible on camping and backpacking trips as much as at the home address’s dining table.

This piscine packet of pleasure roasts Alaskan halibut over a bed of bitter greens which become like steamed spinach but with a kicker of more flavor and texture.

Instead of steaming the clams on a stovetop, doing so over a charcoal fire adds a nice whisper of smokiness. Plus it looks way cool.

The savory-juicy umami just drips off these lamb chops.

A perfect summertime salad that uses the season's two most-appreciated red foods, accented with feta's tang and mint's cool.

"Tuscan style" means that the steak "sauce" is fruity extra virgin olive oil. Further, in true Tuscan style, serve the steak with a salad of dressed mixed greens garnished with flat-leaf parsley leaves. 

Cutlets are a great way to have something versatile to eat, in various seasons, and that often use cuts of meat that are difficult to prepare in other ways. The difficulty is plain: because cutlets are very lean meat, they’re easily overcooked.

This gazpacho is more a drink than a soup and is served that way in its place of origin, Sevilla, Spain. Unlike many gazpachos, this recipe uses no bread, a solid amount of Spanish extra virgin olive oil, and yellow tomatoes, not red.

This is a “bleached” twist on the standard tomato-and-red pepper gazpacho.