Pecan

This recipe plays on my favorite combination: spicy and sweet. Don’t worry about the chicken drying out in the oven—all of the flavor and juice is sealed in by the crunchy pecan glaze. Drumettes are the part of a chicken wing that, when separated from the rest of the wing, looks like a miniature drumstick. You can carve the wings yourself, ask your butcher to do it, or purchase frozen drumettes in the freezer section of the supermarket (thaw them overnight in the refrigerator).

If you can find the rare (and shockingly expensive) true bay scallops from Nantucket or Long Island, by all means use them in this dish, but reduce the cooking time. Do not, however, try this dish with the tiny calico scallops (sometimes mislabeled as bays), which, despite your best efforts, will overcook before they brown.

We love to laze about in our pj's over a big breakfast, but we love it even more if our jeans still zip when we get dressed. That's why we're wild about these yummy yet healthy cakes, created by SELF contributing experts stephanie Clarke, R.D., and Willow Jarosh, R.D. These beauts pack whole grains for energy, plus fruit for extra tang. Pass the maple syrup! —Lindsey Palmer

True pansotti are stuffed, with a mixture like this, but I rarely feel like filling pasta, and this way it makes a very fast meal and tastes just as good (it tastes even better with fresh pasta, page 541). Like Tarator or Skordalia (page 600), a terrific use of nuts as sauce.

There are many ways to serve this simple classic, but I like to pipe the meringue into a ring on a baking sheet, then fill the center with the puree and top it with a little sour cream. The result is a surprising, rather elegant winter dessert that’s not too heavy but certainly sweet enough and fun to eat.

This is what I think of as real coffee cake—not extraordinarily sweet and for some people not even a dessert. If you want it more cakelike, double the sugar in the dough and consider adding a couple more tablespoons of butter. But this is wonderful with a cup of coffee in the afternoon or toasted, with a little butter, in the morning. With the food processor, this dough becomes quite quick to make; just keep the processing to a minimum. You want to avoid building up the gluten in the flour so it doesn’t become tough. If you don’t feel like braiding the dough (it really is fun, though, and takes only a few extra minutes), by all means bake this in a loaf pan.

Hands down, this is Michael’s favorite cake. It’s a sweet, scrumptious memory of the days when his mother, Carmel, would bake it for him. In the Groover household, it was a family tradition that on your birthday you chose your favorite cake. Michael remembers this cake becoming his favorite at age five, and his request has not changed to this day. So naturally this just had to be his groom’s cake.