Chicory

Eating your spinach (and radicchio) has never been more pleasant.

A lightened version of a first course that traditionally precedes choucroute garnie.

The dressing for this salad is based on an old Pennsylvania Dutch recipe.

Active time: 45 min Start to finish: 1 1/2 hr

(Suprêmes de Canette à la Coriandre, Endive Braisée, Sauce Aigre-Douce à l'Orange) See how to grate citrus.

Team this hearty side dish with a pork or chicken entrée, or just add some crusty bread and make a meal out of it.

Preparing the zucchini for this dish won't heat up your kitchen — simply salting thin slices is enough to tenderize them. Active time: 30 min Start to finish: 30 min

This recipe makes more dressing than you'll need. The remainder makes a great everyday dressing for any type of green salad, or a delicious dip for chicken wings or raw vegetables.

Gorgonzola cheese adds great flavor to this southwestern winter salad.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

This is a lovely first course or side dish.

Serve this appetizer with crusty bread and enjoy.

Easy to prepare and impressive to serve, this dish is perfect for an impromptu week-night dinner party.

The chef's salad is a familiar yet fading star in the salad world. In delicatessens, diners, and airport snack bars everywhere, we find its faithful components: lifeless leaves of iceberg lettuce, suspiciously blue-hued slices of hard-boiled egg, wedges of pallid tomato, and rubbery chunks of cheese, ham, and turkey. To top it all off (or perhaps sitting alongside): gloppy, high-calorie dressing. But this still-beloved salad may have had a noble beginning. Though nobody has ever stepped forward to claim the title of the chef in "chef's salad," the dish has been attributed by some food historians to Louis Diat, chef of The Ritz-Carlton in New York City in the early 1940s. He paired watercress with halved hard-boiled eggs and julienne strips of smoked tongue, ham, and chicken. (The concept of the chef’s salad dates still earlier; one seventeenth-century English recipe for a "grand sallet" calls for lettuce, roast meat, and a slew of vegetables and fruits.) No matter how the salad has evolved, its underlying virtue remains unchanged. This is a no-cook meal that satisfies our cravings for greens and protein. And, in these dog days of summer-when cooking is sometimes the last thing we'd like to do-a main-course salad is especially appealing. In our updated take on the classic recipe, we used a selection of lettuces (early chef's salads were not always made with iceberg alone), and, in a twist on the norm, small but flavorful amounts of sugar-cured ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Feel free to improvise with ingredients depending on what looks good at your farmers market. Summer savory or dill can flavor the dressing in place of the mixed herbs, and many kinds of ham and cheese will work well.

If desired, grate a little extra Parmesan cheese for passing; a sprinkling over the soup will echo the flavor in the meatballs.