Gluten Free

Branches of rosemary are ideal for this dish, especially if you live in a Mediterranean climate where rosemary grows in shrubs. You can slide the food right onto them (in the direction of the needles, so as not to dislodge them), and they flavor it brilliantly; but so does some rosemary tucked in among the chunks of food. If you skewer on wood or metal skewers, turning will be made easier if you use two sticks in parallel for each skewer, separating them by about a half inch; you can also buy two-pronged metal skewers that do the trick nicely.

The dark rich meat of a chicken thigh responds brilliantly to the strong, equatorial flavors associated most closely with grilling. This Mexican-style treatment packs plenty of punch, even if you use the minimum amount of cayenne (as I do) or omit it entirely.

Properly grilled chicken is a pleasure, even when you dress it with nothing but lemon juice—or even salt. But if you make this Ligurian-inspired full-flavored dipping sauce based on anchovies, you can turn the simple grilled chicken into something really special. And the sauce can be used for whatever else you’re serving at the same time. When you’re grilling the chicken, don’t build too hot a fire and keep part of the grill cool—don’t put any fuel under it at all—so you can move the pieces over to it in the (likely) event of flare-ups. And you can broil it if you prefer: adjust the broiling rack so that it is about four to six inches from the heat source and turn the meat as it browns.

Eggplant is so strongly associated with the cooking of Italy and southern France that it is almost always prepared with olive oil and garlic. This need not be the case, of course, and with a few ingredient changes—like the addition of ginger—you can make a novel kind of “ratatouille,” which readily converts an ordinary boneless chicken breast into an unusual and appealing dish. Be sure to spend a few minutes thoroughly cooking the shallots before adding the eggplant, allowing them to brown and begin to soften; and don’t overcook the ginger.

Chicken breast are so bland that they demand something—a spice rub, a salsa, or a strong reduction sauce. If you start with strong-tasting solids and add a variety of bold liquids, reducing each one to a syrupy consistency, you end up with an intense and complex reduction sauce. The process can involve esoteric ingredients and procedures, or it can be quite straightforward, like this one, which is direct, quick, and easy, especially considering that the result is a dark, complex sauce that can be used in many ways (see the variations).

Small turkey breasts of about three pounds are perfectly adequate for a party of four or so, and larger ones—they’re available in sizes of six pounds and even more—can be counted on to serve about ten, especially if you make a few side dishes. The greatest advantage of roasting a turkey breast in lieu of a whole bird is that you can produce white meat that is truly moist—as opposed to the dried-out white meat that is the nearly inevitable result of roasting a whole turkey until the legs are cooked through. Perfectly cooked white meat (all you need is an instant-read thermometer) does not require tons of gravy to become edible, although you may like to serve it with a light sauce.

Fish breathes new life into the “sandwich” of Mexico and the Southwest, replacing mystery meat with an identifiable fillet of delicate white fish like cod to make fish tacos, a rarity on the East Coast. Instead of frying, as is common in tacquerias, I like to steam the fish in its own juices, which can be done on top of the stove or in a microwave oven (in fact, this is one of the few cooking tasks at which the microwave excels).

Shad the largest member of the herring family, migrates to the rivers of the East Coast every spring. It’s a big, bony fish (filleting it properly is an increasingly rare skill) with moist flesh that is not unlike that of salmon. But its huge egg sacs, which come in pairs held together by a thin membrane, are the real attraction. They’re filled with millions of eggs, which, if they are not overcooked, remain creamy and rich in a way that is reminiscent of fine organ meat—not quite foie gras, but not that far away either. As a bonus, the exterior membrane becomes slightly crisp. Most shad roe is sadly overcooked, but this need not be the case. Keep the cooking time for shad roe short, just long enough to firm up the roe and cook it to the equivalent of medium-rare. (It’s okay to cut into it for a look-see the first couple of times you try this, but it’s also pretty easy to get the hang of it, because the change in texture is rather dramatic.) Note that this recipe serves two; it’s easy enough to double, however; just use two skillets instead of one to avoid crowding the roe.

Roast chicken is one of the most basic dishes of home cooking, but there are a couple of challenges: You need high heat to brown the skin, but ultra-high heat may burn it. You need to cook the legs through before the more delicate breast dries out. And, if you’re interested in minimalist cooking, you must accomplish these things without a lot of fuss, such as turning the chicken over three times, searing it on top of the stove before roasting, or constantly adjusting the oven temperature. Plus, you want to do it all as fast as possible. Well, here it is: fast, nearly foolproof roast chicken.

Nowadays most experienced home cooks grill tuna, but there are alternatives. Top of my list is tuna au poivre, yet another recipe that plays on tuna’s similarity to beef steaks. How finely to grind the pepper turns out to be a matter of taste. Mine dictates “coarsely ground” as opposed to “cracked.” That is, ground to the point where there are no large pieces left, but not to the point of powder. The coarser you make the grind, the more powerful the result will taste.

Although aquaculture has made fresh salmon a year-round product, wild salmon does have a season, from spring through fall. At those times it’s vastly preferable to the farm-raised fish, because the best salmon—king, sockeye, and coho—has so much flavor of its own that it needs nothing but a sprinkling of salt. But a simple formula of salmon, oil or butter, and a single herb, combined with a near-foolproof oven-roasting technique, gives you many more options and makes even farm-raised salmon taste special. Be sure to preheat the pan in the oven—this allows the fish to brown before it overcooks. (If you start the same fillet in a cold pan, it will simply turn a dull pink and will not brown until it is as dry as chalk.)

Cooking in packages requires a small leap of faith to determine that the food is done, because once you open the packages you want to serve them. This method works well.

Because the sauce is so moist, swordfish treated in this way will take a little longer to grill than usual; the interior, after all, has what amounts to a thick liquid cooling it off. So instead of cooking a one-and-a-half-inch-thick steak—about the right size for this procedure—for eight to ten minutes, I’d estimate twelve to fourteen. The actual time will vary depending on the heat of your grill or broiler, but you can assume a little bit longer than what you’re used to. Check by cutting into the fish when you think it’s done; the interior can be pearly but should not look raw.

Slow cooked onions are good enough by themselves, but when you combine them with the liquid exuded by olives and tomatoes you have a gloriously juicy bed on which to serve any fish fillet or steak. This combination, I think, is best with grilled tuna or swordfish—their meatiness gives them the presence to stand up to the richly flavored mass of onions, creating an easy dish that is strikingly Provençal and perfect for summer.

I used to make an understated but impressive dish of monkfish with a meat sauce that was simple in appearance but tiresome in preparation, because the sauce was a reduction that began with meat bones, continued with roasted vegetables, and required four or five steps over a two-day period. The result was delicious, but so ordinary looking that only the best-trained palates ever picked up on how complex it was. Now I make the same sauce with pan-roasted vegetables, a simple combination of onion, carrot, and celery, darkly browned in a little bit of butter, and a can of beef stock. It takes a half hour or less, and although it doesn’t have the richness of my original work of art, no one to whom I served both could tell the difference with certainty.

The sturdy texture of monkfish is ideal for roasting, but certain other fillets will give similar results: red snapper, sea bass, pollock, wolffish, even catfish

Although this minimalist but infinitely variable technique of herb-coating salmon is about as straightforward as can be, allowing the fillets to sit for a while after coating will encourage the fragrant seasonings to permeate the flesh of the fish; try fifteen minutes or so at room temperature or up to 24 hours in the refrigerator.

The intense orange color, meltingly tender texture, and wonderful flavor of gravlax give it an allure shared by few fish preparations—not bad for a dish whose name means “buried salmon” in Swedish. The curing process intensifies the color, tenderizes the texture, and enhances the flavor. Although most chefs jazz up gravlax with sauces and side dishes, it is brilliant on its own or with just a few drops of lemon or mild vinegar. And the rankest kitchen novice can make it at home. Be sure to check your salmon fillet for pinbones, the long bones that run down the center of the fillet; these are not always removed by routine filleting. Press your finger down the center of the flesh and you will feel them; remove them, one at a time, with needle-nose pliers or similar tool.

This mysterious, dark extraordinarily delicious sauce is a kind of gastrique, a relatively simple sauce based on caramelized sugar. Note that if the sugar turns black and begins to smoke, you have burned rather than caramelized it. Throw it out and start again, with lower heat and more patience this time. And if the caramel sticks to your pan and utensils when you’re done, boil some water in the pan, with the utensils in there if necessary. The caramel will loosen right away.

An Andalusian dish with a sweet, aromatic sauce. Do not use canned chickpeas here.