Root Vegetable

Serve with cucumber rounds, red bell pepper strips, and sticks of jicama.

Serve these crisp roasted wedges (with their secret ingredient, a tiny bit of sugar) as a side to anything grilled or fried.

A far cry from the crisp-tender green beans of recent fashion, this is a classic example of the popular Ottoman-era dishes called zeytinagli, in which vegetables are cooked for a long time in olive oil, then served at room temperature so that the flavors are at their peak.

Inspired by croquettes, these brightly spiced fish cakes will transport you to sunnier shores. The recipe takes advantage of the large flake and meatiness of hake to give crab cakes a run for their money.

There are fluffy eggs, melting cheese, and golden hash browns in every bite of this one-dish meal. It makes a good stand-in for quiche, with potatoes acting as a crust.

Tender, faintly bitter escarole gives a unique, delicious earthiness to this double-crust pizza, which stands apart from its traditional saucy brethren.

Inspired by the street food in the grand plaza of Marrakech, food editor Ruth Cousineau recasts the sandwich.

Prized by gardeners during the Renaissance, celery root, or celeriac, has a light celery flavor and a dense flesh that is perfect for shredding into slaws. This salad is wonderful with the chicken and biscuits or the flank steak. Enjoy any leftovers the next day.

Salty, sweet, and tangy, the onion and pickle butter stands up beautifully to the rich oiliness of mackerel. Aside from their distinctive taste, the fish fillets have the bonus of broiling in just minutes.

This side dish plays the dual role of salad (with crunchy fennel and carrot and fresh parsley) and bed for the Cornish hens (recipe precedes) — the seasoning of these chewy grains echoes that of the olive butter tucked under the birds' skin.

Cornish hens have a distinctive, delicate flavor that can be easily overpowered. Perhaps surprisingly, the extroverted combination of olives and capers doesn't drown out the meat, but gives it an unexpectedly earthy and savory quality.

Homemade ravioli are well worth the effort, and making them is the perfect task to share with a kitchen full of cooks (even novices can get in on the fun). Mixing the pasta dough is a breeze in the food processor, but if you don't have one, don't worry — we've given the method for making the dough by hand as well. A brown-butter pine-nut sauce is light enough to let your efforts on the pasta really shine through.

Roasting the heads of garlic results in a less-pungent aioli — a nice quality in an appetizer, since too much raw garlic can hijack the palate for the rest of the evening.

Locro de papas This traditional Andean soup, warm with potatoes, milk, and cheese and bright with cumin and avocado, may be the ultimate comfort food.

Encebollado de pescado This hearty stew combines simplicity with deep, distinct flavors.

The crunch and hint of licorice from a fennel bulb and fennel seeds have the magical effect of making crab taste more intensely like itself in this simple, coyly romantic salad.

Tumis Sayur There are, I think, few things more purely satisfying than quickly stir-fried Asian greens. Indonesian cooks agree: Meals in the country are unthinkable without greens on the table. They're so popular that market vendors often sell as many as 15 different kinds, from the tender mustard shoots known as sayur sawi, similar to bok choi, to bitter young papaya leaves (daun papaya), which are stir-fried along with their small white flowers. On our shores, young, tender Asian greens with slender stems — such as water spinach, bok choi, baby bok choi, choi sum, and baby kai lan — work best for stir-frying. Chinese and Southeast Asian markets will likely carry at least two of these varieties at any given time; farmers' markets will have them stocked in the summer months (and year-round in places with temperate climates such as Southern California and Florida). Always buy unblemished greens that have no signs of yellowing, and cook them as soon as possible — they don't store well.