Side

Alexis Watson of Irvine, California, writes: "You could say I'm a bit obsessive when it comes to cooking. Often I'll take a particular recipe and spend months perfecting it, as I've done with the Caesar salad here. My wife wanted an easy do-ahead dressing that was creamy but didn't use egg yolks. Now we make this salad several times a week, so it was certainly well worth the effort."

Here's a very simple trick for making pasta dishes as delicious as possible: cook them in the classic Italian fashion by adding almost-cooked, drained pasta to the pan or pot with the sauce and let it finish cooking there. Instead of swelling with more salted water during the final minutes, it'll drink in as much flavor as possible, in this case, the potent essence of sautéed mushrooms, red onion, cream, and herbs.

In Malaysian cuisine, at least one pickled dish (acar) is offered with every meal — it provides a bold flavor contrast to the other dishes. Our recipe isn't traditional, but it serves the same purpose.

If your mushrooms are dirty, allow time for wiping them clean with slightly dampened paper towels before lighting the charcoal.

If you're making your vinaigrette with white-wine vinegar, use 1/2 teaspoon sugar (instead of 1/4 teaspoon) to balance the higher acidity.

These thin cornmeal fritters go nicely with the flounder in jalapeño cream. They are made from the same type of batter as hush puppies, but not deep-fried.

Executive Food Editor: Zanne Early Stewart
Father: Hobe Early, Wilmette, IL
Our family first encountered tomato pudding nearly 50 years ago in northern Michigan, where we rented a summer house on Lake Charlevoix. It quickly became the mandatory side dish to whatever Dad was cooking on the grill.

Food Editor: Shelley Wiseman
Father: John Wiseman, Somerset, England
When my father and stepmother moved from Mexico to England, my father started to help with the cooking. The first thing he learned to make was this Caesar salad.

To minimize untended grill time, bring the stuffing and reserved cheese to the grill along with the mushrooms.

Vinaigrette is the French word for oil and vinegar dressing. At the restaurant they have an olive oil tasting every year to decide which kinds to buy, because each year's crop of olives tastes a little different. Olive oils come from Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, and California. The dark green "extra virgin" oils taste the most like olives. The cooks use extra virgin olive oil for salad dressing, not to cook with. The paler, yellow oils labled "pure olive oil" taste milder, and those get used for cooking.

Be sure to use fresh spring peas for this classic side dish. Save the frozen ones for something else.