Gluten Free

Editor's note: Use this sauce to make Suzanne Goin's Sticky Toffee Pudding with Blood Orange, Tangerine, and Whipped Crème Fraîche . NOTE You can make the toffee sauce ahead of time and warm it up when you are ready to use it.

Yes, there is butter in the sauce, but the key ingredient is verjus. If you can't find it, use half white wine and half unseasoned rice vinegar.

One pepper has nearly a day's worth of vitamin A, an antioxidant key to healthy skin and teeth.

Created by Epicurious member Kathe Miller from Chelan, Washington, this beautiful salad has a wonderful presentation as well as a rich taste. Try it as a starter, or as a satisfying lunch. Miller recommends pears that are tender but crisp, giving the salad a divine texture and bite that is at once crunchy and juicy.

You will be surprised at how quick and easy it is to make real homemade caramel sauce.

Eggplants are sensitive to cold; protect them in plastic wrap before refrigerating.

In Latin America, achiote-colored lard or achiote-infused oil is part of any well-stocked pantry, traditionally stored in an achiotera, a special metal container with a spout. My friend and mentor Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, the brilliant Peruvian-born chef and author who created the Ballroom restaurant in Manhattan, loved the sunny color and subtle smoky flavor of achiote-infused olive oil. He used it for everything from marinating the luscious suckling pigs that he proudly displayed at the counter of his tapas bar to enhancing the color of his spicy mayonnaise to giving his lamb empanadas a gilded look. This recipe gives you both a seasoning and a coloring.

Editor's note: Use this with Maricel Presilla's Boiled Yuca (Yuca Hervida) . Ajilimójili (ah-hee-lee-MOH-hee-lee) is the wonderful whimsical name for this Puerto Rican–inspired sauce. How to translate this tongue-twister? It seems that it is a composite of the words ajo (garlic) and moje (sauce), but much more can be drawn from it. In Cuba and the Mexican state of Tabasco, ajilimójili is a colloquialism for the Castilian Spanish intríngulis, a hidden reason that is suddenly revealed, or the workings necessary to pull something off, or the key to making a difficult feat look simple. Why was this sauce called ajilimójili? Perhaps because it has its own ajilimójili—the "inner workings" to make any food it touches splendid. Serve with Puerto Rican Pasteles .

The Christmas season in Puerto Rico is blessed with balmy weather and clear skies. There is nothing like dining under the shade of a gourd tree on Christmas Eve, savoring every morsel of the earthy tamales called pasteles and adobo-flavored pork while looking at the sea. Puerto Rican women get together with their families to prepare pasteles by the hundred, freezing them until needed for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, family reunions, the Fiesta de Reyes, and the religious season called octavas that follows the Feast of the Epiphany. It is the blend of the tiny pepper ají dulce and broad-leaf culantro in the fragrant sofrito (cooking sauce) that gives an unmistakable Puerto Rican identity to these earthy tamales. A dash of vinegar lends the sofrito just the right amount of tang against the mild dough of malanga and plantain tinted orange-yellow with achiote-infused lard. I learned to make these in the traditional kitchen of the Puerto Rican side of my family. While one person took care of trimming the plantain leaves, others were busy grating the vegetables and making the sofrito. There the vegetables are grated by hand, though you can find machines designed specially for this purpose in any market or use a food processor. Puerto Ricans are extremely fussy about the wrapping—it has to be perfect and watertight because pasteles are normally boiled. But I prefer to steam them.

Watercress is the green of choice in Cuba, its peppery taste a perfect foil for the avocado and the sweet pineapple in this classic Cuban salad. I serve it with shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce called enchilado de camarones. In Cuba, the pineapple is never roasted, but this technique adds another dimension of flavor I find very appealing.

For seven centuries, Moors and Christians fought one another in Spain, but in the guise of black beans and rice they surrendered to each other's charms within the all-embracing New World pot. Like the hybrid culture that flourished in medieval Spain, the rice dish known as moros y cristianos is an exemplar of exchange between civilizations. It is feast food in Cuba, where you'll find it in the western provinces. Considering that there is a Veracruzan version of this dish and that Cuba always imported black beans from Mexico, we are left in doubt as to which version came first. Regardless of its place of birth, it is one of the most felicitous rice and bean combinations I have ever tasted. The flavors of all the other ingredients are absorbed seamlessly by the rice, the vinegar providing point and counterpoint to the mealy beans, the aroma of cumin and oregano a subtle backdrop for the meaty smoked bacon, which in turn joins forces with the olive oil to add aroma and sheen to the rice. And then the color, a dark brown or hybrid of white and black.

Editor's note: Pair this with Maricel Presilla's Puerto Rican–Style Ají Dulce Sauce (Ajilimójili) . Boiled yuca is a small miracle. I can hardly think of another vegetable so transformed just by simple boiling. The impenetrable tuber, which starts out fibrous and as hard as the tusk of an elephant, becomes a creamy and supple vegetable. Boiled yuca is also the stuff with which many other preparations start, and you will come back to it time and again. There is no single rule that will help you figure out how much time it will take to cook fresh yuca until fork-tender. A general estimate is 30 minutes, but it might take less time or much longer, depending on the type of yuca. Start testing the vegetable with a fork 15 minutes after the water comes to a boil and continue to test until you reach the desired texture. Usually I prefer to remove the central spindle after rather than before cooking. It takes some force to whack through it when you're cutting the raw yuca into chunks, but it is much easier to detach the spindle from cooked yuca. Serve the yuca with a sauce of your choice or with just a sprinkling of olive oil and some salt.

This heirloom family recipe has the distinctive allspice aroma of the cooking of my hometown, Santiago de Cuba, the only part of Cuba where this complex spice is used in a pork marinade. The combination of cumin and allspice is especially characteristic of my family's cooking. Originally a Christmas dish, cerdo brujo is now one of the most popular dishes at my restaurant Zafra, where we celebrate Christmas every day.

This garlicky sauce is the traditional accompaniment to the starchy root vegetables of the Hispanic Caribbean, especially Cuba. The acidic medium is usually Seville, or bitter, orange juice, though lime juice or white vinegar can be substituted. The mojo is at its best spooned or brushed over piping-hot boiled yuca, plantains, or other starchy tropical vegetables.

Forget the British way of serving rice pudding with a dollop of jam and go for the French way of topping it with a drizzle of caramel sauce.

A hint of lemon is perfect in a creamy baked custard. This one has no caramel to get in the way of the lemon flavor. Lemon juice would be too overpowering here. Instead, the subtle lemon flavor comes from steeping lemon zest in the milk for the custard mixture. The heat of the milk extracts the essential oil from the lemon zest skin, and the milk absorbs the delicate flavor. The hints of cinnamon and vanilla are there to support the lemon, not obscure it. Raspberry sauce makes a perfect complement. I wouldn't dream of serving the custard without it.

The lively flavor of this ice is a perfect accompaniment to fruit salad. The key to its smooth texture is making a ginger "tea," then combining it with the remaining ingredients, rather than simply incorporating pieces of ginger into the custard mixture.

This remoulade is a classic French dish and makes perfect use of an under-used vegetable. Choose from capers, parsley or gherkins (or any combination of all three), to add flavour and a pretty hint of green. The celeriac will discolour and brown as soon as it is peeled and sliced, so either use it straight away or soak it in water with lemon juice added, for up to 1 hour before using.