Make Ahead

This entire dish (salad and dressing) can be made and assembled up to eight hours ahead. The trick? A layer of zucchini slices keeps the rest of the ingredients separated from the dressing until you're ready to toss and serve.

In this side dish, the vegetables are dressed in a classic red wine vinaigrette. Chiles add smoky heat.

Asian ingredients—from soy sauce to sriracha—flavor the pork burgers. Wrapping it all up in Bibb lettuce leaves adds a fresh touch.

Summery and light, this vivid salad and its tangy dressing help balance the tuna and its rich glaze. Salting the zucchini slices takes the edge off their rawness while preserving their pleasant snap.

You would be hard-pressed to find something more refreshing than watermelon. This cooler is easy to make, beautiful to behold, and not too sweet. You'll want a pitcher of it in the refrigerator all summer.

To keep things simple, we don't peel the fruit before baking it. As a result, it's best to avoid ''fuzzy" fruits such as peaches and apricots.

You'll turn up your nose at plain old chocolate chip ice cream once you try this cool, stracciatella-flavored concoction—stracciatella being a vanilla-flavored cream with thin ribbons or chips of chocolate (which melt on the tongue) running through it. The stracciatella cream fills this semifreddo-like cake, which also shines with a toasted-almond cookie-crumb base, a toasted-almond topping, and a drizzle of espresso fudge sauce.

Small pasta like acini di pepe and orzo make wonderful room-temperature salads, since they mix so thoroughly with the other ingredients and never go stiff. Garlic, olives, and chile flakes lend a lot of zip to this quick side dish you'll come back to all summer.

Thinly sliced pancetta goes a little crisp, its salty porkiness complementing the asparagus. Though the spears are wrapped, they cook through perfectly and even pick up some grill flavor.

In Guadalajara, this is not an uncommon breakfast, served with warm tortillas and sometimes rice and beans—since it is tequila country, we can only imagine that it's probably an excellent hangover remedy—but it's definitely flavorful enough to be a big hit at dinnertime, too. We particularly like the richness and suppleness of skirt steak, but any cut of beef with a pronounced grain, like flank or brisket, will do.

While soufflés often sound difficult to make, this recipe is easy to follow and yields impressive results. We like to serve ours with high-quality vanilla bean ice cream or a dollop of whipped cream.

This refreshing soup makes a great first course for a summer dinner party.

Editor's note: The recipe below is from Perfect Parties, by Linnea Johansson.

As with many European desserts, this recipe calls for no salt but does use salted butter rather than unsalted.

This well-balanced stew is intense yet mellow. The prunes soak up the fragrant spices, and long, slow cooking turns the lamb fork-tender.

Inspired by the floral qualities of Japanese teas and sweets, this cool jelly's lightly flowery flavor is enhanced by orange Muscat.

Food editor Maggie Ruggiero became enamored of a sesame-dressed salad at Donguri, a Japanese home-cooking restaurant in New York City. This is her take on it. Because the sesame seeds are unhulled, they have a richness that flatters the freshness of spring vegetables—here, cool kohlrabi and sweet pea shoots.

The Japanese are wild about pickles, pickling practically every vegetable and root they come across—and in sweet, salty, sour, and bitter incarnations to boot. In this classic, a hit of wasabi powder adds a subtle heat to these savory quick pickles.