Sauce

Spread on a roast pork or turkey sandwich, or use as a dip for grilled shrimp or as a dressing for a fruit salad.

If most of the coconut sauces you've encountered have been heavy and cloying, this one — light and frothy, with delicate flavor — will be a delicious surprise. It would also be perfect for spicing up poached skinless boneless chicken. This recipe is an accompaniment for Pistachio Sea Bass with Crab Salad and Coconut Sauce .

Cardamom pods can be found in the spice section of most supermarkets; 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom can be substituted.

"Lidia's in Kansas City, Missouri, serves a rustic white bean and potato soup that would make a perfect meatless entrée for a winter evening," writes Deborah Johnson of Columbia, Missouri. "I order it every time I go there. Do you think chef Dan Swinney would part with his recipe?" Start this recipe a day ahead so that there's time for the beans to soak overnight.

Also delicious with steaks or roast chicken.

The dried figs add a chewy sweetness to this delicious sauce.

This dessert combines two confections that are popular in Chile: caramel and the small cream puffs called profiteroles.

The sauce is a twist on raita, the cooling yogurt side dish served with spicy foods. Like all the best buffet dishes, the eggplant is equally good warm or at room temperature.

Drained nonfat yogurt—rather than mayonnaise or sour cream—provides the creamy texture. Start making this dip a day ahead, and try it with apple or pear slices.

This recipe is an accompaniment for Braised Pork with Mojo Sauce .

Though fresh horseradish is in season around Easter, you can substitute drained bottled horseradish. We recommend using the cooked beets left over from the pickled quail egg recipe , but if you're not making the eggs, you can substitute canned beets.

In the kitchen of Piedmont's splendid country restaurants it is usually a woman who rules. Invariably, she has been schooled not by chefs, but by her mother, and her professional accomplishments are founded on the region's home cooking, a cuisine that, for finesse and variety, is unsurpassed in Italy, or even in Europe. One of the most gifted of these women is Ilvia Boggione of the restaurant Vicoletto in Alba. Among her specialties is this deft rendition of a classic game bird that is sometimes served with tajarin — thin homemade noodles. To call it sauce may be misleading, however, particularly if one's idea of a pasta sauce is something juicy and all-enveloping. There is nothing runny or sauce-like about this one. Quail is cooked until its meat slips succulently off the bone, and small bite-size pieces of it are nestled among the pasta strands. A more accurate description of the dish would be pasta with quail. Suggested pasta: Homemade noodles make the only satisfactory pairing for this sauce, particularly thick, square shaped tonnarelli or the broad pappardelle or fettuccine. In Piedmont (as noted above) they use tajarin, a thin noodle that in restaurants is made almost exclusively from a large number of egg yolks.