Summer

The next time you're serving a salad, add some herbs. Think of them as you would any other green; toss handfuls of dill, mint, basil, and more into peppery leaves like arugula, mizuna, or mustard greens, all of which are assertive enough to allow the herbal notes to shine without overpowering the dish. Top it all off with grilled steak, pork, or chicken, and you've got a perfect summer supper.

The key to a tender biscuit is to handle the dough as little as possible.

As summer progresses and apricots go out of season, try these desserts with ripe plums instead.

Serve unsweetened tea with this syrup on the side.

The combination of creamy ricotta, sweet fruit, rich olive oil, and a little salt is addictive. We'll be serving this for breakfast, brunch, and dessert all summer.

This cocktail is from Ashley Christensen's Fox Liquor Bar in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Soaking seeds makes a healthier, creamier pesto, but you can skip it if you're in a rush.

Adding veggies to the marinade while warm helps them absorb more flavor.

If you have a mandoline with a julienne attachment or julienne peeler, use it here. For the best texture, stop cooking before the squash goes limp.

"Paris chef Alain Passard, who is famous for unusual pairings, inspired this dish." —Chris Morocco, associate food editor

Cooking on a bed of salt helps evenly conduct the high heat and infuse the shrimp with seasoning.

When Snow's BBQ in Lexington was named best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine in June 2008, Tootsie Tomanetz became an instant star in the barbecue world. It's odd that her significant skill as a pitmaster was "discovered" only after more than thirty years of tending pits. As one of thee rare female pitmasters in Texas, she says some folks insist on calling her a chef because they don't feel comfortable applying the pitmaster moniker to a woman, but Tootsie is no doubt a master of the many pit types out behind Snow's. Even several years removed from the initial stardom, she still gets asked every Saturday morning to pose for photos. Always humble, this reluctant star says she is just a "plain old country girl" who has lived her entire life in either Lexington or Giddings, just seventeen miles away, and would just as soon keep a low profile. That's going to be tough if she keeps showing up at 2 a.m. every Saturday to cook some of Texas' best pork, and she has no plans to stop, even at age seventy-seven.

Since the fruit is tart and acidic, the taste for sour cherries right off the tree is an acquired one. When tamed with sweeteners, like sugar or honey, this fruit becomes a natural for liqueurs, preserves, and syrups.

Some describe the flavor of lemon verbena as a cross between a very subtle licorice and camphor. I love it for its lemony finish. Herbal and bright, it's sometimes used in cooking as a replacement for oregano. As a soda flavor, lemon verbena is modern and crisp, with an herbal complexity. It's great as a stand-alone drink for cocktail hour and as a complement to light, simple meals.

Don't use your best Champagne for this dessert—any affordable bottle of cava or Prosecco will do. The key ingredient in this machine-free sorbet is the apricots: Choose the ripest, most fragrant ones you can find.

Bloomfield loves making this salad with black mint, which you'll find in spring and summer at farmers' markets.

Marinated white anchovies bear little resemblance to the pungent salted brown ones packed in oil. They're plump, vinegary, tender, and addictive when paired with the crisp frisée and chewy bread in this sandwich.

The slight tang of this dessert is complemented by the sweet and sour flavor of the vibrant topping. Because the panna cotta can be made so far in advance, it's an ideal choice for a party.

She-crab soup might just be this city's most overworked culinary icon—so much so that in restaurants of quality in Charleston, you can detect more than a few chefs assiduously avoiding it. But an expertly made she-crab soup is a rare pleasure at home, and should be a part of every cook's repertoire. When we were in our teenage years, the soup seemed extra special because it's seasoned with sherry and traditionally served with a cruet of the fortified wine, the latter to pass around the table in case you wanted to add an extra jolt. But she-crab soup isn't about the sherry (and in fact, we've come to realize that too often the sherry overpowers the crab), it's about the roe; and we don't think we'd ever truly reckoned with how important that roe is—coupled with the freshest crab meat you can find, of course—until the recent spring day we picked and cleaned an entire bushel of crabs (eighty, give or take) in a sitting. Since female crabs with roe inside are most prevalent in the spring, we found crab roe inside many of the adult females, called "sooks," as we cleaned them, after cooking. When you remove the carapace (or top shell) from the body of the crab, the crab roe—if it's there—will appear as a mass of bright orange in the middle of the body, and sometimes you may also find more roe tucked in the sharp left and right points of the carapace. The roe has an earthy-briny flavor, and adds a pale orange color to this soup. In our recipe, we blend it into the soup itself and also use a portion to garnish each bowl. Is it possible to buy crab roe alone? Unfortunately, no. So when we make this soup now, we buy picked crab meat and a half-dozen female crabs with roe from our local market. Any fish market that takes the time to sell hard-shell blue crabs will know how to spot a female with crab roe, because the roe makes the underside of the carapace appear light orange. It really is worth going to the trouble to find the real deal; you won't be disappointed! Regarding the sherry: recently we've taken to giving each guest his or her own shot glass full of fino sherry (one of the most delicate expressions of the fortified wine) to drink as a paired beverage, instead of sending a cruet around the table.