Raw vegetable salads lend simplicity, convenience, elegance and a good dose of vegetables to a meal all at the same time. The basic formula is easy: choose three or four different vegetables you’d eat raw (corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, fennel, carrots, radishes, cabbage, radicchio, endive, sweet or green onions), add in some cheese (feta, mozzarella, Swiss, cubed parmesan) and / or toasted nut or seed (pecans, almonds, pine nuts), and toss it all with any simple vinaigrette and some chopped fresh herbs (parsley, marjoram, chives, thyme).

Raw vegetable salads are especially good in summer when the garden and farmers markets are bountiful. They’re refreshing and light, contrast nicely with grilled meats and simply cooked grains (rice, couscous, quinoa), and can even serve as the main taste and flavor component of a meal. They can be made ahead and chilled so their flavors have time to meld, then brought out an hour or so before you serve dinner to come to room temperature. Cut the vegetables into large pieces for a more traditional “salad,” and into smaller pieces for more of a relish feel.

Recipe: Tomato, Corn, Cucmber And Feta Salad
Recipe: Greek Salad
Recipe: Moroccan Carrot Salad
Recipe: Grated Beet, Frisée, Walnut And Goat Cheese Salad
Recipe: Fennel And Orange Salad With Pecorino
Recipe: Tomato, Mozzarella And Basil Relish

1. Use up those leftover herbs (and remember that parsley stems are your friend).

2. Give wilted lettuce a second chance.

3. Don’t trash those hardworking parmesan rinds.

4. Serve a carafe of Château-la-Pompe with dinner.

5. When life gives you scraps, make scrap soup.

With a few clever strokes of a knife, a pot of boiling water and an ice bath, slipping the stubborn skins off tomatoes takes minutes. Use peeled, seeded tomatoes in refined sauces and salads; to make edible, decorative tomato petals; or to simply remove the part of the tomato that tomato-haters tend to dislike.

Reference: How to peel and seed a tomato (Cookthink)

Once or twice each winter, when the Paris afternoon turns bitter cold or the sun refuses to come out for days, I meet a friend in a small café known by the neighbors for its above-average chocolat chaud — the French version of proper hot chocolate that consists of actual chocolate (not powder) and (whole) milk, gently simmered until thick. When you order it, they warn you that it won’t be served right away — like ordering a soufflé in a restaurant. Then they go and work their magic and you don’t mind the wait.

This hot chocolate isn’t the pale, frothy hot chocolate of my American youth, obscured with marshmallows or whipped cream or peppermint sticks. Instead, it’s almost pudding-like, as black as espresso and served in as tiny a cup, but so thick that you could (almost) eat it with a teaspoon. I wondered how they made that happen, and wrote it off to obscene amounts of chocolate. But I discovered a trick for making unctuous, spirit-raising hot chocolate that way myself when I put a pot of hot chocolate on the stove in preparation for a rendez-vous later in the afternoon with a man who loves his hot chocolate.

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The Cookthink kitchen has been shut down for a few days for renovations, and not having a kitchen has reminded me how much I enjoy cooking comforting, cozy food in winter.

The other day was the coldest so far this year, and as the afternoon rolled around I was craving a one-pot dish with pork and greens. Even though I couldn’t cook (and ended up getting takeout for dinner), I found myself fantasizing about a pasta dish with prosciutto, Brussels sprouts and cream that I made the night before the kitchen demolition started.

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Flaky pie dough recipes usually indicate that you should not over-handle the dough. But I never fully understood why until one day in culinary school, when my chef described how his grandmother made the best pie crusts in the last years of her life.

Besieged with arthritis and poor circulation in her hands, she couldn’t physically work the dough with her chilly fingers. This was an accidental boon, since the heat and action produced by younger, more energetic hands would have activated the gluten in the flour, creating a protein web that holds dough together instead of allowing it to break into delicious, buttery flakes.

Keeping your warm hands off the dough while mixing and rolling is the key to producing a tender, flaky crust that won’t shrink or change shape in the pan. The gluten web of wheat proteins is what shrinks up the dough as it heats in the oven, regardless of the filling or type of pan. Using a low gluten flour like cake or pastry flour will help to prevent any “accidental” gluten formation, but the trick is just to leave it alone!

I don’t even try to completely mix my dough anymore before first letting it rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes and then rolling it out. I simply wrap the 85 percent mixed rough dough into the cling film to keep it moist, and let the rolling action of the wooden rolling pin do the final mix on the dough.

Keeping my warm and fidgety hands off of it is not the easiest task, but it really does produce the best pie crust.

I always pick up a few good tricks when I watch Lidia Bastianich’s cooking shows.

One of the most useful techniques I’ve learned from watching Lidia’s Italy is how to make a “hot spot” — basically an empty spot among the ingredients already in a pan — before I add things like tomato paste, garlic, shallots, chiles and spices. The hot spot gives those ingredients direct contact with the bottom of the pan, caramelizing them and developing complex flavor that carries over into the finished dish.

When making a tomato-based pasta sauce, for example, start by sautéeing the sauce’s main ingredients — say, mushrooms and green onions — in olive oil. When it’s time to add the tomato paste to the pan, clear a spot with a spoon, add the tomato paste, and stir it around on its own for a minute or so before incorporating it into the other ingredients in the pan. This is also a good way to add a sweet nuttiness to garlic and shallots, and temper the raw flavor of flour and ground spices.

Are you spending this Thanksgiving with just one or two other people, or just don’t feel like a big traditional production, whole bird, side dishes and all?

These days you can buy the bird in so many forms — turkey pieces, turkey cutlets (or tenders), turkey sausages, smoked wings and legs, rolled or bone-in breast roasts — that there are endless options for cooking turkey.

With that in mind, we put together a simple, elegant saltimbocca that’s a take on the classic Italian veal saltimbocca. We substituted turkey cutlets, rolled up with prosciutto and sage, lightly fried, finished with a white wine pan sauce and served over a bed of pasta.

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We love turkey as much as any American, and have spent our share of Thanksgivings wrestling with the best way to master that monster of a bird — brining it, smoking it, deep frying it, roasting it smeared with butter. But to be honest, we’re usually not convinced that the end result is worth all that effort.

This year, we decided to give Thanksgiving a trial run and experiment with a no-brainer preparation that puts a turkey on the table without the stress and in just a little over an hour.

We asked the butcher to cut up a whole turkey into pieces, and roasted them until perfectly crisp, juicy and flavorful.

Here’s how:

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A bunch of radishes may look daunting for the uninitiated, but the subject of this week’s Root Source is actually one of the quickest and easiest vegetables to prepare. How you do so depends on the radish variety you choose, and on how (and whether you plan to cook them).

Start by thoroughly washing them: Cut off radish greens, leaving an inch or so attached to the radish, plunge them into a bowl of cold water and pat them dry.

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