5 Ingredients or Fewer

Roasting gives amazing depth to vegetables, especially peppers. The simplest way to serve these is to drizzle them with extra virgin olive oil, along with some salt and pepper, but you can also add a few drops of vinegar. The next step is to garnish with anchovies, capers, and/or herbs.

The ease with which this dish can be thrown together and the range of meals it happily accompanies (menus with European, Middle Eastern, or Northern African accents are game, as are good old American cookouts) guarantee that it makes regular and frequent appearances on my dinner table. An assortment of olives is far preferable to just one kind. Try, for example, some oil cured, some big fat green Sicilians, and some Kalamatas just that simple combination will look bright and pretty. If you can lay your hands on more varieties, so much the better.

How to get great flavor out of ordinary white mushrooms? Add a handful of dried porcini. You will not believe the difference.

A big deal is often made of washing leeks—they can be very sandy but since you’re going to be chopping these, it’s easy.

Fennel remains exotic enough to be a treat for many people, and this simple preparation simply elevates its stature a bit. Trim and discard the hard, hollow stalks that jut out from the top of the bulb; if you get your hands on a bulb with its fronds still attached, roughly chop them and add them to the hot oil with the garlic.

This is an almost universal technique for vegetables, an honest, simple gratin with a topping of just a couple of ingredients. Since one of them is rich, flavorful blue cheese, butter isn’t even included. My vegetable of choice here is fennel—an underappreciated and almost always available bulb—but you could put this topping on almost any vegetable. For the cheese, you can use Gorgonzola, the soft Italian cheese; bleu d’Auvergne, a mild cheese from France; Maytag blue, the premier domestic variety; Stilton, the classic English blue; or Roquefort, which is made from sheep’s milk. All are good, but my preferences are for the stronger cheeses, such as Roquefort and Maytag.

During the summer, rushing home with a bag of farm stand corn which you can get in almost any part of the country—and cooking it out on the grill is a real treat. But if you can’t find locally grown, just-picked corn, you shouldn’t count yourself out of the fun—new breeds of corn retain their sweetness very well. Even if you are buying your corn from the supermarket, just remember that it declines in sweetness as it ages, so it will be best to cook it as soon as possible after you bring it home. If your fire is raging hot, remove the inner silks from the corn and grill them in their husks. But if it’s in the normal range, grill the shucked corn directly over the fire. Ideally, some of the kernels will brown and even char.

Grilling is an important part of this dish, as it gives the eggplant a smoky flavor that’s hard to come by otherwise. Serve this dip with grilled flatbreads or slices of baguette, or pitas.

Fall is the time for fresh figs, which people who live in Mediterranean climates (including many Californians) take for granted but which are a real treat for the rest of us. Fresh figs may be green or dark purple; color does not affect flavor (ripeness and variety do), but most people perceive purple figs as more attractive. This is obviously a fruit dish, but the fruit functions like a vegetable in this preparation.

Grown indoors in the dark, endives are among the perfect winter vegetables, usually used in salads but also lovely when cooked. This simple gratin benefits from good, dark stock, but the addition of Parmigiano-Reggiano will cover you if you resort to canned stock.

This dish of slow-cooked green beans yields soft and sweet beans. It is a perfect side dish for a midwinter meal because it does not depend on sun-ripened tomatoes or crisp just-picked beans for its appeal.

This Thick Beet Pancake cooked slowly on both sides until the beet sugars caramelize, sports a crunchy, sweet crust that, I swear, is reminiscent of crème brûlée. It must be cooked in a nonstick skillet, preferably a twelve-inch one (if you have only a ten-inch skillet, use only one and a half pounds of beets and the same quantity of the other ingredients), over moderate heat: too-high heat and too-quick cooking will burn the sugary exterior of the pancake while leaving the inside raw. Remember that beets bleed, so it is wise to peel them over the sink and wash the grater or food processor as soon as you’re done with it.

Beurre noisette is browned or nut-colored, butter, a French classic that fully qualifies as a sauce yet contains only one ingredient. If you’ve never had it, beurre noisette’s complex flavor and beguiling aroma, redolent of hazelnuts, will amaze you. And if you like it over broccoli, you’ll probably find that you like it over almost any other sturdy, full-flavored vegetable.

Like most bean dishes this puree is best if you use freshly cooked dried beans, but it is still good with canned beans. One-quarter pound of dried beans will yield about one cup, the amount needed for this recipe, although you can double the quantities if you like. If you use dried beans, cook them in unsalted water to cover (presoaking is unnecessary), with a couple of bay leaves, until very tender. If you use canned beans, you’ll need almost a full fifteen-ounce can to get one cup (there’s a lot of water in those cans).

Buy snow-white cauliflower with no brown spots; use broccoli or one of the hybrids (broccoflower, romanesco broccoli, and so on) if the cauliflower does not look good. And though it is a full-flavored dish, remember that cooking will mellow the assertive flavors of the anchovies and garlic, so don’t skimp on either. This dish is just as good warm as it is hot.

This is my favorite way of making a side of carrots to go with a meal. Part of its appeal is its ease and quickness; the other is how easy it is to vary. You can add almost any flavoring you like to these carrots during their final minutes in the pan, like a healthy grating of lemon or orange zest or a tablespoon of grated ginger or a clove of minced garlic, to flavor them to your taste.

This is the way to get tender, moist ribs without burning them. They take some time, but not much attention.

Spreading a roast with a sweet coating—apricot jam comes to mind—adds an interesting contrast of flavor, and the sugar encourages browning. But the results are often too sweet. So I decided to experiment with alternative coatings for a small roast of pork—one that would cook quickly enough to be considered for weeknight dinners—and settled on applesauce, which has a not-too-obvious benefit. Because applesauce doesn’t contain nearly the same percentage of sugar as jam, more of it can be used without overwhelming the meat with sweetness, and the thicker coating protects the meat and keeps it moist. This is important, because the superlean pork sold in supermarkets almost inexorably dries out as it cooks.

There are two things I love about pencil-thin asparagus: one is that it requires no peeling, because its outer sheath is far more tender than that of its thick cousin; the other is that it cooks much faster. This is especially important when you turn to methods other than boiling or steaming—most notably roasting. What I like to do is roast thin spears until they’re just about tender, then top them with a foolproof two-ingredient topping: coarse bread crumbs and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Run that under the broiler, and you get roasted asparagus with a crunchy, high-impact crust. Keep your eye on the dish while it’s under the broiler—the time needed there is only a minute or two.

This preparation favors thick spears of asparagus, which become tender and remain moist inside while their exteriors char. Those that weigh an ounce or two each—that is, eight to sixteen per pound are the best. The only difference between thick and pencil asparagus is that thick asparagus must be peeled before cooking to remove the relatively tough skin; use a vegetable peeler or paring knife.