Cookbooks

Who says pigs can't fly? Take a few boneless pork chops, add some bacon and a little creativity, and Pig Wings are on the menu! The bacon adds great flavor and keeps the loin meat from getting dry. These look delicious and are a little unusual, so they make a fabulous smoked appetizer with barbecue sauce for dipping. The kids will love them.

After a lot of years of making barbecue rubs, I've used up all the good names, so sometimes I just use numbers now. Numbers 67 and 68 are a little tip of the hat to the band named after my hometown, Chicago. This one is a great all-around rub for the new barbecue cook because it's good on just about everything.

A ham may be fully cooked and usually smoked as well, but another round in the smoker and a tasty glaze really take it to the next level. The apricot-soy combo here adds a sweet/salty taste to the outside of the ham. This recipe calls for a bone-in ham, but you can easily adapt it to any cooked ham. This is a great way to impress the family for the holidays and leave the oven available for other dishes.

Sausage-wrapped "Scotch" eggs are a tasty and interesting dish when breaded and fried in the traditional manner, but cooking them on the smoker makes a very special treat. The homemade sausage gets a nice crust on the outside and, if you get it cooked just right, the egg yolk will have a little bit of ooze on the inside. Just make sure to seal the sausage all the way around the egg before smoking. I like to serve these as an appetizer, but they are also fine as a nice smoked addition to a lunch salad.

In this unusual pairing, the string beans and baby arugula work wonders for each other. Wilting the arugula with the hot, garlicky grilled beans is a nice trick for bringing the two together. While you can use regular arugula if you must, baby arugula is far milder in flavor, so try to find it if you can.

Chilling Time: 2 hours or overnight
Shelf Life: 1 week This recipe was inspired by the malted ice cream at Herrell's in Massachusetts. They were doing smush-ins long before anyone else, and it was there that Anne first tried malted vanilla ice cream with Heath bar pieces mixed in. It was love at first bite!

If you like hot wings, I mean really, really like HOT wings, try this grilled version made with seitan! Boasting the same texture and knock you on your ass flavors as regular hot wings, especially when you pile on the cayenne, you won't miss a beat.

Nothing puts a smile on people's faces faster while at the same time setting their tongues ablaze, like these grilled jalapeño poppers. Sans cheese, and debuting with a snazzy new look, these Shiny Happy Poppers are every bit a modern twist on what still remains a classic firebrand when it comes to pregame appetizers. However, a word to the wise: Having an ice-cold beer nearby is highly recommended, should this blaze get out of control.

Chilling Time: 2 hours or overnight
Shelf Life: 1 week Kris loves to tinker with ice cream. Every time she tries a new flavor that she loves, she goes home and re-creates it with her own spin, like with this recipe. The original was good in theory, but it was overloaded with candied ginger and gingerbread and simply had too much going on. Kris thought, "If it just focused on a few ingredients, it would be so much better." The result is proof that the simple combination of brown sugar, ginger, and caramel is all you need for an amazing explosion of flavor. This started out as a Christmas flavor because it pairs so nicely with spiced things like gingerbread. After the holidays were over and we stopped making it, people demanded that we bring it back, so now it's always in the case and our guests enjoy it all year long.

Every spring people make a hullabaloo about ramps, the wild leeks that grow in the forests of the East Coast, for good reason: they're wonderful, with a garlic-heavy leek flavor and a subtle sweetness. I pickle the ramps, put them in just about everything we eat (they're particularly great in omelets), and give them away by the armload. This pasta is a simple way to highlight their flavor.

My grandmother came up with ways to use all of the black walnuts we get at the farm, where the trees grow like weeds. They're literally tough nuts to crack (my grandfather would drive over them with his tractor). Regular English walnuts are a less labor-intensive and milder substitute. My Aunt Janet sent me a copy of my grandmother's original handwritten recipe, which I've modified only slightly. This is a dense cake and doesn't need a frosting, but a scoop of ice cream makes it even better.

Garlic scapes are the soft, lime-green-colored stems and unopened flower buds of hard-neck garlic varieties. Scapes have a mild garlic flavor and a slight sweetness, which makes them a prized addition in the kitchen. You can find them in the early summer and midfall at farmers' markets. If you grow your own garlic (which is easy), trim the scapes off before their flowers open. This forces the plant to focus on bulb production and increases the size of the garlic cloves. My Aunt Denise introduced me to the idea of garlic-scape pesto. Here I use it to sauce pasta; you can also spread it on crostini or use as a pungent dip for crunchy vegetables. If all you have are salted pistachios, forgo the salt in the recipe and add salt to taste at the end.

Editor's note: Use this Peanut Brittle to make Bi-Rite's Malted Vanilla Ice Cream with Peanut Brittle and Milk Chocolate Pieces. Cooling Time: 1 hour
Shelf Life: Up to 2 weeks Peanut brittle is truly an indispensible ingredient for us at Bi-Rite Creamery. We break it into large pieces and sell it as candy around the holidays, but we also chop it finely and use it year round in ice cream and buttercream frostings. It can be used to add a little extra sweetness and crunch to just about any baking recipe. It is important to use raw peanuts in this recipe; toasted nuts will overcook during the candymaking process.

This is a gem from my mother's notebook of Nonna Mary's recipes. I remember Nonna Mary serving these tomatoes along with assorted grilled meats during the summer in Cesenatico. They are also a perfect accompaniment to veal cutlets, and together they make a great sandwich, one of my favorite lunches that my mother would pack for me to take to school.

When I was growing up in New York, from third grade through high school, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend my summers in Italy. I would stay with my grandmother in Cesenatico, hang out at the beach with my friends, and eat the wonderful food my grandmother cooked. I have never become accustomed to the traditional American breakfast of eggs and fried pork products, or even cereal. Some fresh bread with butter and jam and caffèlatte is my preferred breakfast, with the proportion of coffee to milk increasing as I have gotten older, from just a drop in a large cup of milk when I was little, to mostly coffee with a splash of milk as an adult. But even better than bread and butter is a breakfast sweet such as my grandmother's ciambella. She always seemed to have some on hand. It's very easy to make and keeps wonderfully on the kitchen counter for as long as a week. It may well keep even longer, but I've never been able to resist eating it for long enough to find out. The classic shape of a ciambella is a ring; in fact, there is a saying for when something doesn't work out: non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco, which means, "not all ciambelle come out with a hole." My grandmother always made hers in the shape of a loaf—it was no less delicious for it, and that is how I still prefer to make it.

Soft, creamy risotto topped with warm roasted vegetables makes a complete meal in a bowl. If you don't like the idea of standing at the stove and stirring risotto to a perfect consistency, this is the method for you. Thirty minutes in the oven and this risotto comes out cooked to perfection while you and your beloved wind down from your day. If you've made Roasted Winter Vegetables earlier in the week, you can reheat leftovers as a topping here. If not, roast a favorite combination {mine is winter squash, yellow onion, and tomato} in the oven with your risotto.

{like his mother made} Rösti or hash browns done well are potatoes perfected. I learned this from my husband's mother in Hungary, but you'll find similar versions that are the pride of many a mother and a young bride in homes all over Central Europe. In our home, few things raise bigger enthusiasm than the smell of rösti cooking when András walks through the door. You'll love them for brunch or dinner, or a whole meal {vegetarians take note} with a poached egg and chopped herbs. Add in rosemary and you've got a really heady, flavorful substitute for French fries with your steak dinner. They key to a crispy outside and soft inside not laden with oil is to get the oil very hot before you add the potatoes, in which case they will absorb very little of it and leave nothing but flavor and crunch for you to devour the instant it hits the plate.