Sara Kate Gillingham

You only need three ingredients, including the tequila.

There is a particular bottled salsa on every table in Costa Rica. It’s called Lizano and the first time you taste it you have to stop and think a minute. Do I like it or not?

I once went to the Caribbean and actually got sick of piña coladas. It happens to the best of us. Midway through the vacation, I asked my bartender to switch it up a bit and it turns out that the same drink made with mango is just as good, if not better. The bartender kept the pineapple slice garnish as a nostalgic nod to our journey together through a week of seaside cocktails. If you don’t want to bother tracking down a ripe mango and slicing it, use frozen mango.

This may sound crass, but I have yet to find a lemon sorbet from the grocery store whose flavor doesn’t remind me of cleaning fluid. Luckily, lemon sorbet is an easy dessert to make at home, and it’s so worth it. You don’t even need an ice cream maker to get good results. As we know from Some Facts About Ice Cream, sorbet contains more sugar than ice cream, but has less fat. It’s also non-dairy and is usually flavored with fruit.

I recently spent a few days with Najmieh Batmanglij — known to many as the “Queen of Persian Cooking” — who opened me up to the cooking of her native Iran, and in particular to a rice dish called jeweled rice, or Javaher Polow. When I took my first bite, I almost cried from a near overload in flavor, fragrance, balance and a notable infusion of love in the grains of rice, tart little barberries, and strands of candied orange peel.

We love a good soup or stew around here. But do you know what elevates soup into a whole cozy experience? Bread. Picture it: Spoon in one hand, a nice chunk of crusty bread in the other, ready to soak up all the flavors. We have so many warm and comforting soup recipes for chilly weather. And right here we have the absolute best breads to accompany those soups — like, soup soul mates. For real.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara: When it’s good, it can make your eyes roll back in your head with pleasure. It lurks there, beckoning, batting its eyelashes on Italian menus. When you don’t order it, you usually end up wishing you had. This pasta dish seems easy to make at home, requiring only few ingredients like bacon, eggs, and pasta.

Salads at 4th of July cookouts and summer picnics tend to fall into a few worn-out categories. Mayo-laden potato salad. Greasy pasta salad. Maybe a tomato salad if you’re lucky. Salads and side dishes get short shrift next to the blazing grill and charcoal taste of those cheeseburgers, or the splendor of the blueberry flag cake. Well, that shouldn’t be so. Here are 15 summer salads that offer delicious summer taste, and something fresh, something new for your summer picnic table.

A version of this post was originally sent to our email subscribers on April 17th. To sign up for our weekly email (not daily as the box indicates) sign up in the column to the left or click here.Maybe I jumped the gun a bit, but a few weekends ago, I grilled pizza up on a bluff. We served it right there, in the damp April evening. It was only about fifty degrees, but green things are emerging from the ground, I thought. Let’s celebrate. It’s normal spring behavior for me.

Which traditional Thanksgiving foods can you not do without? Is it the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes? Where I come from, it’s almost criminal if a Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t have a side of gravy. How else are you going to deal with Aunt Helen’s dry bird? This year, offer to make the gravy and learn a skill that can be utilized all year-round — make this gravy with chicken, too!

It happens every year at this time and you know it. Whatever your normal — and hopefully healthy — eating pattern is, you lose it. Normally I have a very balanced dieteggnogroast beef Take Tuesday night for example: I went into a dinner party situation wanting to eat light and not drink alcohol. Two blinks of the eye later I found a margarita in one hand and a goat cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped date in the other. Pretty soon there were pork loin sandwiches and chile rellenos.

If you’re just craving a classic Caesar, here’s a clean, refreshing style of Caesar dressing without egg, so it emphasizes the garlic, anchovy, and lemon instead of hiding them behind a mayonnaise mask. Make a batch and keep it for a week’s worth of homemade dressing. Leave the cheese out for a great meat marinade. It’s easy enough to throw together some vinegar and oil and call it dressing — I remember when I was in college and figured that one out.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for a week and we’ve already grilled artichokes three times. While the earth in my neck of the woods back east still snores through its winter slumber, agriculture is full-on here. Given the warm weather, we decided to grill as much as possible so we’ve been finishing off the ‘chokes on the grill.

Just listen to the word. Chimichurri. It dances right out of your mouth. I bet you’ve already paused and said it in your head more times than I’ve written it. If the word alone feels this good in the mouth, wait until you taste it. Chimichurri is an Argentine sauce that is traditionally used on meats, although I can think of about fifty other ways to eat it. It’s used in Argentina the way we use ketchup in the U.S.

What is it about lemons and summer? If you happen to live in a citrus-growing region, you know that it’s possible to find ripe lemons on trees year-round, but that they are actually in peak season in the dead of winter. I think it’s thanks to the summertime tradition of lemonade stands that makes me associate the tangy flavor with the hot months.

Come January, the hum and buzz of juicers everywhere builds and I hear of more and more people making resolutions to clean out their systems and drink more juice, at least temporarily. No judgement; in fact, last year at this time I was on a five-day juice cleanse so my juicer was working hard and I was feeling alive and clean. This year, though, I am more in the mood to make my ice cream machine hum rather than my juicer.

As the leaves start to whiz around the streets of New York and I unpack my scarves and wool socks, I also start making a lot more soup. That makes me reach back into my treasure trove of food memories. Is it because soup is so comforting — spooned tenderly into our mouths as children, satisfying one-bowl meals as adults — that when I think of soup, I rarely turn to cookbooks and almost always reach way back into my family history for ideas?

The DIY feature from Faith, our new Editor-At-Large, will offer options to that jar or packet at the grocery store by giving you recipes for foods you might not think to make yourself. Homemade bread, peanut butter and jam – they’re much easier than you think. Dulce de leche, cajeta, milk jam, confiture du lait – whatever you call it, it’s delicious.

One way of dealing with salads while speaking the language of winter is to cook them. I once had a fantastic grilled romaine salad with a super creamy vinaigrette, sort of a cooked take on the classic wedge salad. Then, last weekend I had another cooked salad; this one with big half-rounds of griddle-seared purple radicchio, chopped walnuts, and mushrooms. I liked the idea of a salad with a flash-cooked winter green like radicchio, but didn’t dig the walnuts and mushrooms.

Last week, when Meat/Un-Meat month was covering lamb, pork and goat, I gave a quick Goat Meat 101 but getting a recipe up was a different matter. It took the better part of the week and weekend to find it, cook it, and serve it, let alone write about it. So here, a bit belated, is my goat taco post. I bought my 8-pound goat leg from Ottomanelli’s in the West Village. Frank, the butcher, cut the leg, bone-in, into 2-3″ chunks.

When I was little, my dad and I spent Sunday mornings on the Santa Monica beach. Before heading home we’d sometime hike up to the pier and buy a newspaper cone of freshly made potato chips from a little stand there and share them on the ride home. They were warm, and slightly soft in the middle, just out of the fryer.

When she was still with us, my grandmother baked Mexican wedding cookies every Christmas Eve. Today these nutty, powdered sugar-coated cookies take me back to her little house in San Fernando, where it was warm on most Southern Californian Christmases; I sensed these cookies were her way of giving us snow for Christmas.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s Egg Week here at The Kitchn. There are plenty of egg projects I’d love to share with you — scrambling an ostrich egg, making my beloved rye sours with leftover egg whites — but instead I want to talk about the perfection of an egg. I’ll take eggs in most forms, but to me it’s a soft boiled egg — six minutes — that makes the best breakfast.