Ham

This recipe is part of a grill menu that includes Dijon and Tarragon Grilled Chicken and Grilled Corn with Roasted Garlic Butter . Since you'll be lighting the grill to prepare the chicken and the corn for this menu, try steaming the clams in a pot on the grill as well. The grilled bread slices are good for soaking up the rich broth; if it is easier, the bread can be toasted in the broiler.

This is a quick, attractive dish, terrific with softly fried eggs for a spring weekend breakfast, as an appetizer for lunch or dinner, or as a side vegetable with roast chicken.

Offer a plum-tomato salad with the sandwiches. Round out the meal with sliced strawberries drizzled with crème de cassis.

Roasted bell peppers, prosciutto, and olives are added to the classic Italian trio of tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. Serve with plenty of crusty country bread.

George Kelso of Edinburgh, Scotland, writes: "Although I grew up in Scotland and spent my early years as a chef here, I didn't start specializing in Scottish food until much later in my career. After working in London and at various restaurants in England, I returned to Scotland in 1988 to become chef at Ardsheal House in Argyll, where I started cooking exclusively with Scottish ingredients. We grew our own fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and even raised our own hens and ducks. That experience inspired the kind of cooking I do today at Haldanes, where I'm chef and owner. I keep the food preparation simple and use the freshest produce. That's why I use local suppliers as much as possible." Slices of prosciutto are fried until crisp for a delicious garnish.

This old favorite is a delicious way to use up cold turkey.

"Every time I visit my sister in Los Angeles, we make a point of having dinner at Mimosa, a popular French bistro," writes Frances Candler Brown of Birmingham, Alabama. "I like to think I'm an adventurous diner, but my order there has become only too predictable: a glass of wine, a salad and the restaurant's delectable version of macaroni and cheese." This French take on macaroni and cheese has a nice assertive flavor.

At the restaurant, the gnocchi are shaped in a time-honored manner that includes pressing each short dough piece against the tines of a fork. Home cooks may find it simpler to roll the dough along the wires of a whisk, as outlined here. Also, if you can't get ground chuck, buy a boneless chuck roast, and ask the butcher to grind it for you.

Lighter, brighter flavors make this old-fashioned salad new again.

For accompaniments, toss watercress and thin slices of red onion with Dijon vinaigrette, and add chopped fresh basil to stewed tomatoes. Pecan pie can top it off.

This can also be prepared with duck breasts, which is how it is often made in Tuscany. Either way, the dish is good with rosemary-flavored mashed potatoes and sautéed artichoke hearts.

Here's a rich, creamy pasta from chef Cory Mattson of the Fearrington House Restaurant in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

Chicken flavored with ham or bacon is an age-old Irish marriage. At Drimcong House in Moycullen, Ireland, the combination is translated into a stunning contemporary dish. Ask your butcher to skin and bone the chicken legs for you, which will make this easier to prepare.

At Thanksgiving, rice stuffings are standard on many southern tables. This one, a combination of white rice and wild rice, gets more regional notes from collard greens, pecans and ham.

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.

As all southerners know, eating Hoppin' John—black-eyed peas and rice—on New Year's Day ensures good luck. But it is the collards, traditionally eaten alongside, that bring good fortune! An added bonus to cooking up a mess o' greens is the resultant pot liquor—the delicious, nutritious broth left in the bottom of the cooking pot or serving dish. It is usually served as an accompaniment to that last piece of corn bread.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.