Easy

Pelau, rice cooked with meat and vegetables, really exemplifies Trinidadian cuisine because it is an admixture of various cooking styles. 

This sherry-Cynar Negroni riff was created by bartender Dan Greenbaum at The Beagle in New York City.

This isn’t your typical super-puffed Dutch baby; it’s creamy and custardy on the inside and airy around the edges, thanks to the inclusion of canned pumpkin purée.

This scalloped potatoes recipe is a classic from Gourmet, simply made with softened onions, an easy roux, and thinly sliced potatoes.

Cube your salmon and roast it at high heat for a perfectly charred exterior and tender, flaky interior. The creamy marinade in this recipe brings flavor, while also keeping the salmon moist.

Tomato brown butter is the deeply savory—and slightly sweet—result of swirling fresh, raw tomato purée into fragrant brown butter. Drizzle it over roasted vegetables, grilled fish, or grain bowls.

When I was growing up, my mother served a lot of canned vegetables, but the one thing she always made from scratch was acorn squash, which she roasted with butter and maple syrup. When I revisited her old method, I found it was just as good as I remembered. The sweet squash filled with a big puddle of melted butter and sweet syrup is so irresistible!

Turmeric, chiles, and chewy-nutty cooked grains balance the sweetness of fresh corn in this loose vegan riff on creamed corn.

This dish of seared paneer channels flavors traditionally found in matar paneer—coriander, cumin, chile, and ginger—by incorporating them into a quick-cooking cherry tomato sauce.

This reimagined chicken salad is lighter and leafier than your standard picnic lunch. Tender poached chicken, crisp greens, cukes, and scallions get tossed with a sesame dressing that takes its cues form gomae, a Japanese spinach salad.

This super-flavorful dish spins the flavors of shish barak—lamb and pine nut dumplings from the Levant—in a pasta direction.

This dish is inspired by a classic Cantonese preparation, which is traditionally battered and deep-fried. Here, the fish is pan-seared in hot oil, but still gets plenty of texture and flavor from ginger, caramelized scallions, and lots of freshly ground black pepper.

Some would call showering potato salad with potato chips “gilding the lily.” We would call it “extremely sensible and incredibly tasty.”

Tender lettuces get topped with juicy spiced chicken, ripe mangos, soft avocado, and cherry tomatoes. There's so much flavor and texture going on that there's barely a need for a dressing: just a hit of lime juice, salt, and EVOO, and dinner is done.

Adding sweetened condensed milk to the crust gives this cake a candy-like texture that reminds me of a Twix bar (a childhood weakness I rarely get to indulge since marrying a chef!). That same sweetness accentuates the buttery quality of ripe avocados. Chill it thoroughly, then let the cake sit at room temperature for a bit before you slice it. It’s so refreshing on a hot day.

Zucchini keeps this cake incredibly moist, while scattered chocolate chips (or chocolate pyramids) and chopped walnuts add texture and dimension.

This is a light pasta dish, filled with ribbons of fresh chard and tossed with a little garlic-infused butter and balsamic vinegar.

Eating fruit tarts is great. Rolling out dough on a brutally hot day isn't. Good thing this stunner has a no-fuss press-in crust.

This coconut rice recipe appears in Leela Punyaratabandhu's cookbook, Bangkok, as part of a meal that includes green papaya salad, sweet shredded beef, and chicken red curry.

Triple the sesame, triple the fun. Tahini teams up with toasted sesame seeds and toasted sesame oil to balance the sweetness of late summer peaches with rich, earthy nuttiness.