Steam

A northern specialty, this dish traditionally features oc buou (apple snail), a freshwater mollusk with a shell that resembles the escargot shells sold in plastic tubes at gourmet markets. The chewy mollusk meat is made into a stuffing with mushroom and scallion and then steamed in the original shells with strips of ginger or lemongrass leaves. To eat the snails, you pull up the leaves, which lifts out the stuffing, and then you dip the stuffing into a ginger-lime sauce. Finally, you pour the aromatic cooking juice left over in the shell into a spoon and sip it like a fine consommé. Because fresh Vietnamese snails aren’t available in the States, I replicate this delicious dish with frozen apple snail or periwinkle meat. The yellowish chunks are sold in one-pound packages at Chinese and Vietnamese markets; sometimes periwinkle is available thawed and packed in Styrofoam trays. (Or, substitute conch or other sea snails normally used for chowder.) Without shells to stuff, I use ceramic egg cups or tall sake cups. The presentation isn’t as provocative, but it is still lovely. Ribbons cut from lemongrass stalks, more aromatic and more readily available than ginger leaves, harness the stuffing in the cups and give the cooking juices a heady citrus flavor.

I got the idea for packing pungent combinations of toppings onto fish before it cooks from Nate Appleman’s gorgeous book, A16: Food + Wine. I like to take it a step further and cook the fish over saffron-infused beads of Israeli couscous. This recipe is a great use for my 12-Hour Tomatoes (page 2), but if you don’t already have some in your refrigerator, you can substitute three or four sun-dried tomato halves packed in oil. Eat this fish with sautéed greens or a salad.

When the cooking times match up, it only makes sense to cook a protein and a starch together, as in this combination of fish and rice. It’s almost a one-dish meal, and I say almost because you do need to pull out a little bowl to make the spicy-sweet salsa while the pot simmers on the stovetop. This features my favorite way to make rice, an adaptation of the traditional coconut-milk rice that tastes good but is high in fat. The proliferation of coconut water as a healthful drink found in most supermarkets gave me a lighter—and, frankly, better—way to do it, and I haven’t looked back. Be sure to buy juice labeled 100% coconut water, as some juice-pack brands have other flavorings you wouldn’t want here, and some canned products include sugar and preservatives, defeating the purpose altogether.

With its nutty flavor and beautiful dark green color, this is a good make-ahead brunch dish that tastes best chilled, but it’s also good at room temperature. If you prepare it in advance, taste for seasonings before serving; you may need to add a little extra salt or lemon juice.

Crisp toast, lightly burned at the edges, with a cargo of melting cheese is to my mind the ultimate snack. Spike it with mustard and I am probably at my happiest, but I do play around with the genre too: a layer of apple or homemade chutney under the cheese; a few bitter leaves of chicory or hot watercress on the side; a few capers, maybe. Sometimes I take the recipe up a notch to give something that is more of a meal than a snack. Like when I trap a layer of cooked spinach between bread and cheese, or just mix the two together and give them a crust of toasted Parmesan. I could add that this is also a sound way of using bits of cheese that have accumulated in the fridge.

Making creamed spinach without the traditional backbone of white sauce produces a quicker, greener, and slightly fresher-tasting result. It makes up in speed and greenness what it loses in nannying quality.

The affinity between potatoes and parsley is usually demonstrated by tossing new potatoes in butter and the chopped herb. I like to take it one step further and put the parsley in a soft, almost sloppy purée of potatoes. It excels as a side dish for white fish.

There is a Spanish stall at the market. Each Saturday in midsummer I wait patiently at the counter while the jamon is carved. I am unsure which is more beautiful: the long, elegant leg on its steel stand or the fluid, methodical way in which the carver slices the gossamer-thin morsels of meat from the bone. I never take much, its price is breathtaking, but once home I savor every mouthful, as much out of respect for my wallet as for the pig. If I find young fava beans, or the ones in the garden are ready to pick, I marry the two—a simple plate of densely flavored, fat-besplodged ham the color of dried blood and fresh, bright-green beans. There is usually soup on the table too, watercress or spinach or fresh pea, and some scraps of dry, mild-tasting Manchego.

Any of the brassica family is good to go here. Most successful are gai lan (kai lan) and choy sum.

Carrots have been one of my quiet successes. The carrot thinning salad has become a regular weekly addition throughout the summer. Root vegetables no bigger than your little finger have a charm to them that insists you leave them whole. Cooking them, in shallow water so that they steam rather than boil, takes barely a minute or two. I dress them as soon as they are out of the pan, sometimes with a light, lemony dressing, other times with cilantro. To turn this into a main-course salad, add spoonfuls of ricotta or cottage cheese to which you have added pepper and some of the dressing.

Sprout tops share a luxury of growth and strong flavor with many of the Asian greens. One cold day in November I married them to an impromptu sauce of essentially Chinese ingredients. It worked. The tricky bit was working out what, in future, they needed to share a plate with. A slice of ham steak; a piece of lamb’s liver; a fillet of mackerel, its skin crisped on the grill; a pile of sticky rice with some finely sliced air-dried sausages; a grilled mushroom the size of a saucer. All will work. Eminently.

Easy to prepare, baby artichokes require only half the work needed for the larger globe variety. Because they’re so small, they haven’t formed the fuzzy inner choke that requires so much trimming, and they are fully cooked in 20 minutes or less. The herb chervil is in the same family as fennel and has a mild licorice taste. It is slightly sweet and adds a cooling herbal zing to summer dishes.

Ginkgos are infamous for the acrid smell of their fruit, but the nuts hidden inside are a treasured ingredient in Asian cuisine. In and around the Chinatown neighborhoods of many cities, you can find people under trees collecting the nuts in autumn. Go out and join them, but be sure to wear protective gloves when touching the fruit and extracting the nuts; otherwise, the smell will remain on your hands. Remove the flesh outdoors—the less you bring into your home the better. You can find canned or dried ginkgos in Asian grocery stores.

Shumai is a Chinese import that’s a popular dish in casual restaurants, and is also a staple of Japanese homes, where it’s enjoyed as a snack or a dinnertime side dish (but never as the main course). Leftovers hold up well and can be polished off the next day, or packed into a lunchbox or picnic basket and eaten at room temperature. You can also freeze uncooked shumai for up to a month. Follow the instructions below to steam frozen shumai—no need to defrost; simply add a couple of minutes to the cooking time.

The secret to this cool, summertime dish? Steaming the chicken. When you steam chicken, it stays moist and juicy even if you serve it cold. And caramelizing the skin beforehand adds lots of wonderful flavor. These are both techniques I borrow from Chinese cuisine. The angel hair pasta in this dish plays the same role as somen noodles: not too chewy or overwhelming when enjoyed cold.

Fresh and colorful, this salad is a far cry from the concoction made with canned green beans and pinto beans. Wax beans are a yellow version of the snap bean. They remain pale yellow once cooked and are a nice color contrast to the green beans and red tomatoes.

Steaming bread in the slow cooker is a terrific, hassle-free way to bake bread of all kinds. Traditionally, the batter for this brown bread was poured into coffee cans and placed in deep kettles filled with water, then hung for hours over the fire to steam. Serve it with New England Baked Beans (opposite page) or toasted for breakfast with cream cheese.