Sara Kate Gillingham

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.

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. It lends a nice crispy texture to the edges (think potato chip!) and a smoky flavor that you just can’t get out of a pot of boiling water.

You only need three ingredients, including the tequila.

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.

Cheers to summer — and pretending our front stoop is an Italian piazza.

Here is a simple, nourishing side dish for fall: a light gratin with shredded kale and potatoes. Our local farm has potatoes galore right now, and the kale is starting to sweeten up as the nights cool. This dish will take you into late fall and early winter and still be considered seasonal and local for those of us living in much of the northern hemisphere.

Ursula turned two yesterday, so we had a little party. We don’t do much sugar with her, but I was told by a trustworthy source that she needed “a proper cake.” So I set out to develop a cake recipe that was delicious, yet not packed with refined sugar and empty calories. One of the beautiful things about having a baby on September 28th was that it felt like a bountiful time to me. Harvest time. What better time to bring into the world a nice ripe, plump baby?

This is the time of year when I start craving savory tarts. This vegetarian tart has vinegar-roasted onions, mushrooms, and ricotta cheese, making it a great appetizer for a group, or a dinner for two when served with a side salad. Why not? It’s getting cold out there and sometimes you just need a dinner that feels like the food equivalent of sliding on a cashmere sweater: decadent and yet perfectly functional.

Close enough to classic coq au vin to feel like the real deal.

We have a lot to thank France for when it comes to mealtime, but perhaps one of my favorites is Lyonnaise Salad, or Salade Lyonniase: it’s a perfect combination of frisée, a curly bitter salad green, tossed in a warm vinaigrette and topped with a poached egg and crispy thick-slab bacon pieces. It’s one of those timeless dishes that hits the spot every time and can transport you to the banks of the Seine even if you’re stuck in your sweltering American apartment.

I recently came across a really old recipe post that I wrote about having a sweet potato for breakfast, and I noticed the date: May 2006, which put me at about four-and-a-half months pregnant at the time. My mother was in town to help me with a project, and one day, she made me breakfast out of a leftover sweet potato with yogurt.

What I love about summer is the fruit. There are peaches and plums for pies, nectarines for dribbling down your chin, apricots for tarts, cherries for snacks, and all sorts of berries for breakfast — plus other melons, like cantaloupe and honeydew, to wrap ham around.

We started this website to help people cook more often and more joyfully, with the idea that the kitchen is the hearth of the home, the warm place. It is by spending time there that we connect and grow. But sometimes it gets so hot in the summer, you have to draw the line. A few straight days of humidity and 90°F weather, and I do not feel like being in the kitchen at all, let alone putting together a big meal.

This is the light, fragrant stew created with spring celebrations in mind. Unlike the rich beef stews you cozied up with in winter, this one opts for a subtly spiced, brothy base studded with ultra-tender chunks of lamb and vegetables. It’s casual enough for a simple Sunday supper, although if you spoon it over a bowl of buttery couscous and top with a splash of fresh herbs, it becomes the centerpiece of a dinner party.

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.

Our piece aboutJamie Oliver’s chicken in milk got me thinking about other possibilities for cooking a whole chicken in milk — what could be easier than filling a pot with liquid and spices, turning on the heat, and walking away until what’s left is the most succulent fall-off-the-bone bird? So I decided to try the sweet and pungent flavors of coconut milk, lemongrass, and star anise.

This is the soup my one-fourth Mexican mother used to make all the time, and for that reason alone, it is authentic to me. Yes, go to Mexico and you will have a pretty different soup, but this is the way she fed me as a child, and so it is how I make it today. It has a lot to do with using up leftovers. If you don’t have a sweet potato, a yellow or red potato will work fine if that’s what you have on hand. Again, potatoes came into the soup in the first place because of leftovers.

Every season, there’s that moment when the whole idea of “seasonality” wears thin — when you’re done with a particular variety of produce before it’s done with you. Or maybe it’s just the inundation of summer squash, zucchini, and tomatoes that bring on those feelings. When it does, I throw together this simple little casserole and fall in love all over again.

Every once in a while during the summer, I stumble on the sale of the season. I’m not talking about clothes or shoes — this is far better. I’m talking about fresh, ripe raspberries for $1 per pint. Considering these berries can be upwards of $5 at the grocery store, I stock up! While I could easily eat my way through pint after pint, popping berries from the container straight to my mouth, I do my best to show a little restraint.

A classic bowl of comfort that needs nothing but good, crusty bread.

Now and then, a girl needs a little magic to get through the day and fly above it all. I have a couple of pretty gigantic projects going on right now, and while moving a mile a minute isn’t my preferred way to live, it’s been a reality. At times, I move so fast that I forget to eat, and I get clumsy and frantic. That’ll knock the wind right out of a lady’s magic fairy wings. To make sure I stay on top of it all, I need a nourishing and energizing breakfast.

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.

Five years ago, we hosted our 10 full-time staff members for a weekend retreat in the country, and I was in charge of the cooking. We were hungry worker bees, stretching our brains all day, decoding the secrets of site design, traffic analytics, and reader satisfaction. Tried as I did to push the healthy snacks on my coworkers, it was a plate of dark chocolate walnut cookies that won for best snack.

You may remember from last week that I’ve been involved in the creation of a meal around a very challenging theme: space. Last week I shared with you the Tang Cocktail that kicked off the evening. Today, I’m sharing the dessert. This dinner had been an auction item at a fundraiser for my daughter’s school, and in addition to the space theme, the friend who ultimately bought this dinner also wanted to celebrate her partner’s birthday. My challenge was the cake.

How did I end up with half a dozen astronaut high-ball glasses and a 20-ounce container of Tang powder? It’s a long story that starts last December at my daughter’s school fundraiser where we auctioned off dinner for six at my house. Bidding far exceeded expectations, and the winner ended up being a friend who bought the dinner for her partner’s birthday.

It’s true: Cookbook writers actually do cook from their own books. I keep copies of the books I’ve written at close reach in my kitchen, dog-eared and stained. One of the recipes I make over and over again is the Overnight No-Knead Bread from The Kitchn Cookbook. Between morning toast, school lunches, afternoon snacks, and mopping up the evening’s soup, we can easily blow through a few loaves of this every week.

Winter storms have a way of making me want to cook something that has me over the stove for a good stretch of time. I love a fish stew, but these days you need to be careful if you want to make environmentally responsible seafood choices. The lists of what’s sustainable and fine to fish versus what’s not can shift often. I also wanted a dish with some heat and depth, without being too thick and heavy — no cream, this isn’t a time for chowder. The result?

If you know me just barely, you know that I’m summer’s biggest fan, and after 20 winters in the Northeast, I still moan and groan over winter’s double-whammy: no fresh vegetables in season and freezing temperatures. So today, in frigid Brooklyn, I give you a piece about a hot tomato soup a friend brought back from a recent trip to Egypt.

Winter has me baking a lot — bread, especially — so this week when it got unbearably frigid outside I came up with a bread for breakfast and snack-time that pulls inspiration from three very different recipes: my grandmother’s English muffin toasting bread, a thin dark 100% rye I used to be able to find in health food stores but alas no longer, and the fruity, nutty, seediness of my “truly everything bagels” recipe.

The fridge-clearing soup is a staple at my house. In fact, fridge-clearing in general is a good way to characterize my cooking style. But there is something about a sack of lentils that brings out the best of vegetables that have seen better days. After three straight weeks of intense eating and carrying on in honor of the holidays, a soup that requires no shopping for ingredients is just what I need. Clean, simple cooking. Join me.

I’ve been writing about this wreath on the site since 2008, each year updating the story, because I think it’s worth reminding you how perfect this bread is to start a holiday morning. When I say I make it every year, I’m not kidding. It weaves its way deeper and deeper into our family’s memory each holiday.

This week I’m really feeling the briefness of the December daylight and the deepening of the cold temperatures. While I normally make a big effort to eat only small amounts of meat and to eat clean and light, especially at night, this dreary week I have braises and rich sauces on my mind. It seemed only right to pop out to the butcher, buy a whole oxtail, and cook it into slow submission.