Red Skin Potato

This is a break from potato salads dressed with mayonnaise, and much tastier!

This is my version of the classic French salad I enjoyed time and again in Nice. Roasting concentrates the flavor of fresh green beans.

This is a wonderful Greek-style one-dish meal or a side dish for a party. Roasting brings out the flavors of the vegetables. You can prepare all the vegetables except the potatoes ahead of time.

These crispy, flavorful potatoes, a tasty accompaniment to any meal, are simple and quick to prepare.

Cook these irresistibly flavorful (and rich) potatoes along with a turkey or a roast, and though they will be done in about an hour, there’s no harm in letting them bake an extra 15 to 20 minutes. If you are worried about calories, use the low-fat evaporated milk alternative.

This is truly one of my favorite ways to cook tiny new potatoes. Sometimes when I buy a sack of potatoes, there will be a few larger ones, which I cut in half or in quarters to match the size of smaller 1- to 1 1/2-inch potatoes. No need to peel the potatoes, just scrub them.

Roast a selection of seasonal vegetables right along with the chicken breasts to make a delicious meal. Turnips, carrots, onions, and potatoes are perfect for a winter evening.

This is a simple country-style roast chicken with a garlicky wine marinade. Roast small red or fingerling potatoes while the chicken cooks. Add them to the oven after the chicken has cooked for 15 minutes. You can even add a pan of popovers (page 191) to the oven. They will be done in about 1 hour.

Roasting red bell peppers is a snap in the convection oven because the heat can be so intense that the skin on the peppers chars without cooking the flesh. Pureed and thinned with chicken stock, they turn into a stunning and flavorful soup.

This updated classic soup of Mexico is easier to make when you let the convection oven do the cooking. Add a squeeze of fresh lime juice to each bowl when you serve it.

When I say the word “pesto” to people in America (or anywhere outside Italy), I know they are thinking of pesto alla Genovese, with its lush green color and intense perfume of fresh basil leaves. Indeed, though there are countless fresh sauces that are also termed “pesto” in Italian cuisine (see box, page 105), it seems that pasta with basil-and-pine-nut pesto is so well known that it might as well be the national Italian dish! Traditionally, long, flat trenette or shorter twisted trofie is the pasta used here, though even spaghetti is great with the pesto. For the most authentic flavor, use a sweet, small-leaved Genovese basil for the pesto—perhaps you can find it at a farmers’ market in summer, or grow it yourself. Large basil will be delicious, too. Of course, use the best extra-virgin olive oil available, in the pesto and on the pasta, preferably pressed from the marvelous taggiasca olives of Liguria.

This soup exemplifies the Ligurian love of vegetables, which is one of the things I love most about that cuisine. It demonstrates that with vegetables alone—there’s no meat or meat stock in it—you can cook immensely flavorful and satisfying dishes. This is my re-creation of the heavenly vegetable soup served by my cousin Lidia Bosazzi when my parents took my brother Franco and me to Genova before we immigrated to America. With more kinds of vegetables than I could count—and that aroma of pungent garlic, which I have never forgotten—this is one of the most satisfying soups I know. More than most dishes, soups accommodate variation and improvisation, and, as usual, I encourage you to experiment with this recipe. You don’t need every vegetable in the exact amount listed for the zuppa—use what you have or like. And even the all-important garlic can be reduced (or increased) according to your family’s taste. A substitution or addition that I recommend, in fact, is to use all the aromatic onion-family members that come in springtime—fresh spring onions and spring garlic with green shoots, scallions, baby leeks. They make every soup better. At home I make this in large quantities, and that is how I share it with you. With all the work of washing and chopping vegetables, I like to have plenty of soup to enjoy right away and a couple of quarts in the freezer for a future meal. You can cut the recipe in half if you like, but I believe you go through your days feeling better when there’s a delicious soup stored at home, ready to be enjoyed and to sustain you.

Forget the salad. This colorful assortment of vegetables will stay fresh and snappy on the buffet all night long.

A twist on ratatouille, this beautifully constructed casserole swaps out tomatoes for sweet potatoes.

A 4-ounce fillet of mild-tasting tilapia has only 108 calories.

Breakfast meets dinner! Power up with salmon's protein; stay balanced with potato's blood-pressure-regulating potassium.

Look for potatoes of similar diameter so that they line up easily when stacked. You should be able to get 3 to 4 slices from the Yukon Gold and red potatoes and 5 to 6 slices from each sweet potato. To make these stacks hot and spicy, add cayenne pepper to the barbecue spice blend. You can also slice an onion into very thin rings, coat with the same spices and roast alongside the potatoes. Insert a roasted onion slice between each potato slice.
Parve
Non-gebrokts

Making a parchment envelope in which to steam a fillet of fish surrounded by aromatic vegetables may sound a bit fancy for just one, but cooking in parchment is actually one of the simplest and most effective ways of steaming, because it seals in the flavors. What a treat it is to have that golden-tinged, puffed-up half-moon of parchment on your plate, and then to tear it open and breathe in all the heady aromas. Moreover, you’ll have no cleanup afterward; just wipe off the Silpat mat and throw away the parchment after you’ve scraped and scooped up every last delicious morsel and its jus. If you want just one meal out of this, get about a 6-ounce fillet of flounder, halibut, salmon, red snapper—whatever looks good. Or, as I did recently, try tilapia, which is quite readily available these days and at a reasonable price. But bought almost twice the amount I needed, so I could play with the other half of the cooked fillet a couple of days later. I learned from Katy Sparks, whose book, Sparks in the Kitchen, is full of great cooking tips from a chef to the home cook, the trick of pre-roasting several slices of new potato so they can go in the parchment package. This way you have a complete, balanced meal-in-one cooked all together.