Dairy Free

There are two varieties of persimmons available on the market, fuyu and hachiya. Fuyu are round and flat and are eaten while still crisp; they make colorful and tasty salads. Hachiya are elongated with a pointy tip, and are tannic until ripe and very, very soft.

This North African condiment is made from puréed sweet peppers and chiles. Use it to spice up a soup, roast meat, or grilled vegetables; as a sandwich spread; or as a sauce with rice or couscous dishes.

This is a variation of a North African condiment. It is redolent of coriander and complements saffron rice with vegetables or fish.

This salsa is so easy to make and tastes so much better than anything you can buy in a jar! Use fresh ripe tomatoes in the summer and canned whole tomatoes the rest of the year.

This bright-tasting sauce is a great accompaniment to grilled foods of all descriptions—steak, chicken, shrimp, or vegetables—and it is also wonderful as a dip for tortilla chips or as a sauce for tamales.

Gremolata is a mixture of chopped parsley, garlic, and lemon zest. Persillade (pronounced “per-see-odd”) is simply chopped parsley and garlic. Although these are not technically sauces, I use them as a fresh bright finish to sprinkle over roasted or braised meats, pastas, and anything grilled.

This salsa is a fresh complement to grilled or baked fish or fish tacos.

This is best made from a variety of bones: knuckles add body from cartilage and tendons, shanks, and neck bones add meaty flavor (the meat from shanks can be cut off and used as the meat to brown). Don’t skimp on either meat or bones. They both add specific flavors and qualities that the sauce needs.

Pan gravy is classically made with the drippings of a roast. This method applies to any number of roasted meats: beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey. It’s easiest to make the gravy right in the pan that the meat was roasted in.

Serve this sauce with breaded fried sole or oysters.

There are many varieties of avocados, and all may be used, but the Hass avocado is the ideal choice. The flesh has a rich, nutty, and herby taste. It is a good keeper, it peels easily, and the pit is easily removed. An avocado is ripe when it yields to the gentle pressure of your thumb.

Simply rinsing olives and warming them a little refreshes their flavor; adding some herbs and garlic and a little zest makes them even more delightful.

You can prepare any greens this way—rapini, mustard greens, beet tops, spinach, rocket, kale—but cook them separately, because they all have different cooking times. The sturdiest greens, such as kale, take longest. Once cooked, they can be mixed together in any combination, dressed with this simple olive oil marinade, piled warm on croutons, or cooled and wrapped in slices of prosciutto.

In Italian, biscotti means “twice-cooked.” Biscotti are baked first in long loaves, then sliced into thick cookies, and baked again until lightly toasted. The cookies are crisp and dry, and store well; and I like the fact that they are not extremely sweet. Various ingredients such as nuts, chocolate, spices, liquor, and dried fruits are added for flavor. I make biscotti flavored with lightly toasted almonds and aniseed. They go equally well with a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of wine. The biscotti recipe I use most often has no butter. Eggs and sugar are beaten together until they increase in volume, turn light in color, and form a ribbon when you lift up the whisk or beaters. This means the mixture will fall back onto itself slowly and thickly in a ribbon-like pattern. When the eggs are warm it will take about 3 or 4 minutes to beat the eggs to this point; when they are cold, it can take up to 10 minutes. If you have forgotten to take the eggs out of the refrigerator in advance, warm them for a few minutes in their shells in a bowl of almost-hot water. Air trapped in the beaten egg mixture lightens the texture of biscotti. Be careful to stir in the flour only until it is just incorporated, and then gently fold in the other ingredients so as not to deflate the eggs. Form the dough into long loaves on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. The dough will be very wet and sticky. Wet your hands before touching it to keep them from sticking. Use a spoon and your hands to smooth the logs. Bake them until golden and set. When removed from the oven, the loaves are quite delicate until cooled. Carefully pull the whole sheet of paper with the loaves right onto a cooling rack. When cool, slice the loaves with a long serrated bread knife (on a diagonal, for longer cookies). Spread the cookies out on the baking sheet and bake again until golden and toasted. They will keep for up to a month in an airtight container.

Ices and sherbets are frozen desserts made from fruit purées or juices. They should be the essence of fruit, with intense, clear flavor. An ice, sometimes called a water ice or granita, has a pleasantly grainy texture, while a sherbet or sorbet is frozen in an ice-cream maker, giving it a velvety smooth texture. Fruit and sugar are the basic ingredients in sherbets and ices. They can be enhanced with a touch of vanilla extract or liqueur and a tiny pinch of salt. The fruit needs to be ripe and full of flavor. Taste it critically; bland fruit will make bland sorbet or ice. As long as it can be turned into a juice or purée, any fruit can be frozen into an ice or sherbet. Tender fruit can be puréed while raw in a food mill or food processor and then strained to remove seeds. I usually heat berries with a bit of sugar just until they start to release their juices before puréeing them. Harder fruits, such as pears and quinces, need to be cooked until soft before they can be puréed. You don’t have to strain citrus juice: remove the seeds by hand, and leave the pulp in for more texture and flavor. Sugar not only adds sweetness, it lowers the freezing temperature of the mix, which inhibits the formation of ice crystals. This is particularly important for achieving the velvety texture of a sherbet. Chilling and freezing mutes, or dulls, sweetness. For proper flavor when frozen, add sugar until the mix tastes overly sweet at room temperature. (For a very revealing experiment, take 3 separate tablespoons of purée or juice and add different amounts of sugar to each one. Freeze them, and taste each one for both sweetness and texture.) An ice is literally fruit juice or purée that has been frozen. The puréed fruit or juice is generally sweetened and then poured into a shallow glass or stainless-steel dish and put to freeze. When adding sugar, go slowly and test a small spoonful of the mix to see if more sugar is needed before adding more to the whole batch. You can also freeze a sample of the mix before freezing the whole lot to verify how it will taste when frozen. Once the mixture is in the freezer, stir it now and then to break up the ice crystals and to keep it from separating. The more often the ice is stirred while it is freezing, the finer the crystals will be in the end. I like to stir an ice once after the top and sides have started to freeze, and then again when it is slushy but not solid. When the ice is solid but still soft when poked, take it from the freezer and chop it. Scrape across the top down to the bottom with a fork, or use a pastry scraper and chop up and down and across the pan until the ice is completely broken up and fluffy. Let the ice re-chill before serving. Give it a light fluff and scoop it with a fork into a bowl or cup. Serving an ice with the same fruit that it was made from, either tossed with a bit of sugar or poached, provides a beautiful contrast of taste and texture. Sherbet is made much the same way as an ice, but it is frozen in an ice-cream maker. The important difference is that sherbet needs to be sweeter to acquire the right texture. To find the amount of sweetness required, you should experiment a bit at first and sample small frozen amounts. Once you have done this a few times it will become second nature. Chill the mixture well before putting it into the ice-cream maker. This helps the sherbet freeze quickly, which helps keep the ice crystals small. It is a great treat to make more than one kind of sherbet, either from complementary fruits or from different varieties of the same one, and serve them together.