Summer

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

Here's an opportunity to enjoy the best summer fruit. Serve this dessert with butter cookies from the bakery.

Serve this dense, moist cake with a big bowl of lightly sweetened strawberries.

Fragrant smoke from the mesquite wood chips makes a fine counterpoint to the sweetness of the lobster in this salad. Finish the meal with lemon ice drizzled with tequila, and pass a plateful of sugar cookies.

From the Inn at Perry Cabin—St. Michaels, Maryland. At the inn, this classic English dessert comes with clotted cream. A blend of whipped cream and sour cream is a nice substitute.

When you brush the bottom pie crust with an egg wash, you keep the fruit from making the pie soggy as it bakes. By sprinkling the top crust with sugar, it makes for a great sugary crust.

This colorful dish plays with the Basque sauté of red and green bell peppers. The Sherry wine vinegar gives the salad a delicious sweet-tangy edge.

Few sauces are as simple to prepare as this low-calorie, nonfat one.

Using purchased puff pastry as a crust gets these simple and sensational tarts ready in no time.

Tender, biscuit-like dough is formed into a lattice atop this easy treat.

An easy dish that uses some traditional Japanese ingredients, including miso. Made from fermented soybeans, miso paste comes in various shades, with the darker ones being stronger in flavor. This recipe calls for white miso (also called shiro-miso), which is sweeter and more delicate.

This salad was inspired by a classic Salade Niçoise with its fresh anchovies, potatoes and green beans, and one offered to me by Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, who comes to France every year to avail herself of, among other things, the fine green beans of summer.