Seafood

This dish is only as good as the crab it's made with; buy the best you can get.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

This dish originates from Bizerte, the northernmost city in Africa. It is sweet and spicy and beautifully aromatic. It is adapted from a recipe kindly given to us by Rafram Hadad. Serve it as a main course with some plain rice or couscous and something green, like sautéed spinach or Swiss chard. Dried rose petals are available in Middle Eastern stores and also online.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

Green Goddess Dressing is a perfect example of the magic of anchovies—they amplify and deepen the herbal flavors in this sauce without ever announcing their presence. For more recipes and tips, see our Homemade Salad Dressing Primer.

Samaki har'ra is a dish that is very popular in the Arab world, especially in Lebanon and particularly in the port city of Tripoli. While my version may not look traditional, the taste is truly authentic. It's definitely something a little different from the usual salmon dish. Sea bass or snapper are also good fish for this recipe.

A change from tempura batter. Use the versatile knafe (also spelled kataife) pastry, a fine, vermicelli-like pastry, for this savory snack. It also makes a perfect lunch with a salad and a spicy dip on the side (like dakkous). The citrus nutty center is a lovely surprise inside the sweet prawn. These prawns are seriously crunchy. You could bake them but they taste better fried.

Washington, DC's renowned chef-owner of Citronelle has a special relationship with seafood: He was born in Brittany on the northwest coast of France. Chef Michel Richard has been decorated with nearly every cooking award, including the James Beard award, and he is known for combining fresh California ingredients with traditional French cooking. This recipe, a simplified take on a traditional French bouillabaisse, is sure to satisfy.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

Throw a pouch filled with clams on the grill when the fire's hot, and enjoy them while you cook the rest of the meal. Timing can vary a bit, depending on the size and stubbornness of the clams and the heat of the fire. You can tell if the shells have opened by feeling the top of the package with tongs or a spatula. If you open the package and see that some clams have not opened, reseal and return to the fire for a few minutes. If there are a few duds that refuse to open after 15 minutes or so, discard them.

A simple, quick-cooking dish of scallops basted in nutty brown butter and brightened with a squeeze of fresh lemon.

The cool flavors of basil and cilantro balance the spiciness of the harissa.

Two tips: To save time, you can buy 2 steamed whole lobsters or 2 cups of cooked lobster meat. And, when prepping the corn, save your cobs for corn stock.

Instead of using canned tuna, this recipe puts you in control of the quality of the tuna and how long to cook it. We like it on the medium-rare side.

Grilling whole fish is not as tricky as it sounds. We tie ours with kitchen twine, which makes them easy to handle.

Adding vinegar to the chorizo topping cuts the richness of the sausage and brightens the entire dish.

Just as easy and fun to cook as they are to eat, mussels deserve a spot in your weeknight dinner rotation.

Between the bacon (around 200mg of sodium per slice) and the scallops (over 330mg per 3 ounces), the classic dish is too salty for me to enjoy. But when the bacon is replaced with smoky zucchini ribbons and the scallops are swapped out for halibut rounds, you have a whimsical reinterpretation that actually tastes equally thrilling. I used smoked paprika and cumin to mimic the smoky fl avor of bacon and I decided to glaze the halibut rounds in honey and sugar to mimic the natural sweetness of scallops. The curry is purely for color and to balance the sweetness of the fish, and the spinach pasta lends a rich backdrop for the yellow-tinted "scallops."