Meal Prep

This recipe comes from Chef Barry Maiden, of Hungry Mother Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's wonderful with any pie filling, but do try it with his scrumptious Hungry Mother Spicy Peanut Pie. His piecrust uses a combination of butter and shortening. The butter delivers flavor, while shortening provides a flaky texture. The soft texture of this dough makes it best for single-crust pies.

This sweet-tart relish has 7 fewer grams of sugar than the canned kind, and it supplies disease-fighting antioxidants.

The technique: To show off the tangy freshness of cranberries, don't cook them at all. The payoff: Chopping the berries in the processor gives them a coarse texture, which is great alongside the turkey and the trimmings. Plus, the recipe comes together in 20 minutes.

The technique: Simmering (to cook at about 185°F) cooks the berries and other ingredients at just the right rate. How to tell if your sauce is simmering? Small bubbles should break the surface around the edges of the pan.
The payoff: Simmering softens the berries and allows enough time for all of the flavors to meld.

Shelf Life: 2 years Tomato marmalades are the perfect partners for crackers, cornbread, or sourdough. They have a long history in the United States, where they were traditionally seen as a way to use up extra fruit during summer's long tomato season. Like tomato jam, they tended to be heavily spiced with cinnamon and cloves. For this lighter version, I have introduced saffron into the mix. The result is magic.

A mixture of maple syrup and brown sugar tames the tang of the cranberries.

The sauce would also be wonderful with baked apples or drizzled over ice cream.

Cheese balls were all the rage in the 1970s, an easy, tasty, fab party food for any occasion. What's old is now retro-chic—this lightened-up cheese ball seduces with the sweetness of dates, the savory bite of blue cheese, a hint of shallot, and a teasing whiff of lemon zest.

Dry mustard and five spices transform regular old ketchup.

Tosi has found a way to incorporate this sweet, savory, creamy component into many of her desserts. This recipe makes enough Milk Crumbs for either the cake or the cookies .

Escoffier codified the mother sauces of French cooking. In the Italian-American tradition, there is only one: tomato sauce. Call it marinara (we do), call it gravy (we don't), call it whatever your grandma called it. It's tomato sauce. There's almost nothing we won't cook in it or put it on. The real deal—what we grew up with and the way we would do it if we had our choice (and didn't have so many vegetarian friends and customers) would be to make that sauce, then simmer up a batch of braciola or meatballs in it, and then use the resulting meat-infused product as our "tomato sauce" in all its myriad applications. And if you're not catering to vegetarians, we advise doing just that: make a triple batch of sauce, use it to simmer up braciola or meatballs and then use that tomato sauce, fresh or from the freezer, whenever tomato sauce is called for in these pages. Use good Italian canned tomatoes and high quality olive oil when making this sauce, and take your time—there's no rushing it. When you're cooking the garlic, you want to very, very slowly convert the starches in it to sugars and then to caramelize those sugars. Slow and steady. Then get the tomatoes in and let them simmer. Not a ton happens over the four hours—no epic deepening of color or furious reduction—but it cooks as much water out of the tomatoes as possible without turning them into tomato paste.

You'll use some of the dressing for the grilled chicken and the rest for the noodle salad .

Our dough is a little wetter than a standard bread dough, but this style produces the best results with our method of cooking: we use a hot griddle to parcook the pizza crusts. Our pan of choice is my own enameled cast-iron pizza griddle, but you can also use a 10-inch enameled cast-iron frying or grilling pan or a smooth cast-iron pancake griddle.

This sauce is the American version of crème anglaise, a vanilla custard sauce. Our recipe makes a basic vanilla sauce that goes well with every dessert. To enhance the sauce, you can add liquor (Calvados or pear brandy comes to mind). This sauce does not require heavy cream to taste sinful. Here, we use a milk base to create a simple, decadent sauce.

This crumb topping can be used on many recipes because it is so versatile. With a little customizing of this recipe, you can make a topping for any fruit crisp. Double or even triple the recipe and keep the extra topping in the freezer; that way, you can make a crisp on the spur of the moment.