Oven Bake

Buttered potatoes accompany this simple, sophisticated dish at Gugelhof restaurant.

Cook: Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Source: Cucinaamore.com It's difficult to imagine a more mundane-sounding dish than Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce — and yet this extremely simple pasta is a breakthrough, not like any other you've ever eaten. And so good you'll make it again and again. The sauce is made from roasted cherry tomatoes, very ripe ones. These diminutive tomatoes with the big taste are then covered with a cheesey-garlicky-bread crumb mixture and set in the oven. Just before serving, you tear some basil leaves into the roasted tomato mixture and that's your sauce, right in the oven dish: add some corkscrew or butterfly pasta and you have dinner. Italian cookbook author Nancy Harmon Jenkins points out that the ony trick to this dish is using really ripe cherry tomatoes'which are easy to find all year long. If they're not available, use any red, ripe tomatoes and quarter them.

Put the dressing in the oven as soon as the turkey comes out to rest before it's carved.

This recipe was created for my ten-year-old friend and cooking student, Evan Chender, who used it for his Thanksgiving feast one year. Fresh ginger really spices up the sweet, meltingly tender yams.

An easy-to-make side dish.

Poulet aux Quarante Gousses d'Ail Active time: 15 min Start to finish: 50 min Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic was a recipe that allowed us to be provocative without being downright offensive. It presents the softer side of garlic — the "stinking rose" — mellowed by long, slow cooking.

(GNOCCHI DI SPINACI ALLA BAVA) Spinach adds great color and flavor to these light dumplings. The topping consists of melted butter and Fontina cheese, a product made in the neighboring region of Valle d'Aosta but used for many local dishes.

This Basque dish is essentially a fish pâté or pudding, called budíns in Spain.

For decades, the restaurant Lutèce—with chef André Soltner behind the stove—was the pinnacle of French cuisine in New York City. Soltner's Alsace onion tart, one of the best we've ever tasted, was the inspiration for this version.

These chops become extra special with a highly seasoned crumb coating usually pressed onto rack of lamb.

If you can't find sorghum syrup, a combination of honey and molasses works nicely.

Active time: 3 hr Start to finish: 4 hr