Nut Free

Mayonnaise is a breeze to make when the blender is enlisted to do most of the work. For more about mayonnaise and other salad dressings, see our Homemade Salad Dressing Primer. Note that raw eggs are not recommended for infants, pregnant women, the elderly, or those with a compromised immune system. To avoid the risk of salmonella infection, use pasteurized eggs instead.

Keep this staple in your fridge so you'll have it on hand for nonalcoholic cocktails and, of course, their boozy counterparts.

To make this recipe vegetarian, omit the bacon and add a splash of oil.

Applying the rub to the chicken ahead of time infuses it with flavor.

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

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.

Grilled peaches turn this simple chicken and arugula salad with mustard dressing into something worth swooning over.

Cooked gently over a low heat, lamb shank becomes meltingly tender—perfect for an elegant, restorative broth.

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.

This is a great technique if you want to serve a mixture of vegetables, like a stir-fry, with your grilled meat or fish. Start the vegetables 10 to 15 minutes before you grill your main course, so that they can get a head start. Move them to a cooler part of the grill to keep warm once they’re done. Grill baskets of all shapes and sizes are available in grocery stores or cooking shops.

Rich in protein, essential fatty acids and fiber, chia seeds are harvested from Salvia hispanica, a herbaceous plant native to central Mexico that was as an important food source of the Mayans and Aztecs.

Sweet and sour are two of the five flavors of classical Chinese cooking (along with salty, pungent, and bitter), and go lo yuk, as the dish is called, is a favorite way to prepare pork in Cantonese cooking. I prefer fresh pineapple, but if you like your dish sweeter, use canned pineapple and reserve some of the juice from the can to add to the sauce in place of fresh pineapple juice.

Lemon makes a tart, grown-up jelly, infused here with basil for an herbal aroma that sets off the summer sweetness. (Leave out the basil if you just want simple lemonade jelly.) One lemon tip, which I picked up from the Jellymongers themselves, Bompas & Parr (two young jelly-obsessed Brits who have filled rooms with alcoholic mists and created models of architectural monuments out of fruit gelatin): Adding a bit of orange juice turns otherwise pale lemon jelly into exactly the bright yellow you would expect from its tart, sunny taste.

This yogurt mousse is an exercise in nostalgia for me, evocative of two different memories. The first is recent: cold lassi spiked with cardamom, a favorite drink at Indian restaurants. The musky flavor of cardamom just plays well with the tangy, refreshing taste of yogurt. And so does honey, which brings me to my second memory. My mother often served me and my siblings big bowls of plain yogurt with honey swirled in—it was a favorite summer lunch. I remember how the honey laced the yogurt in thick ropes of sweetness. This is a plain yet comforting dish, the two flavors marrying perfectly. I bring these three tastes together here in this dish, and finish it all off with fresh summer apricots. Top the finished mousse with apricot slices, or get fancy and pipe the chilled, set mousse into apricot halves and garnish with mint.

I prefer caramel that flirts on the edge of burnt, especially in this rice pudding, which is inspired by classic Italian risotto. Here, cooked until it's very dark, with a smoky, bitter edge, the caramel balances the milky sweetness of the rice. This is also an unusual pudding in that it forgoes much of the milkiness of the other grain puddings in this chapter. I cook the rice in water, with just a little milk. The liquid is gradually evaporated when the rice is mixed with the caramel, leaving an intensely flavored sauce. This is very rich pudding, but that quality comes almost entirely from the caramel itself—not the dairy.

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

Once in a while in the BA Test Kitchen, there's a dish that we can't get enough of. This simple, layered dessert is so good, we fought over the last bite.