Fruit

This dish of shatteringly crisp chicken skins tossed with peanuts, chiles, and lime is a riff on Chinese salt-and-pepper squid.

If you want a shortcut for this quince and chamomile panna cotta recipe, purchase quince paste at a specialty shop and heat it slowly to create a syrup, then simply spoon it over the custards.

Natalie Chanin is famous for her dead-simple but delicious apple crisp, which is often on the menu at the café in her Alabama Chanin store.

Ron Zacapa Centenario is a dark rum produced in Guatemala and adds warm, sweet, and smoky flavors to any cocktail.

Even if you’re not a huge fan of bitter greens, don’t substitute regular lettuce here; the slightly sweet dressing will taste cloying without some sharp contrast.

Almost any fresh fruit (pears, apples, berries) can replace the figs.

You can stuff this slawlike salad inside your pita, or eat it on its own.

When in doubt, add soda. The resulting highball (about 2 oz. of any booze filled to the top with soda) is refreshing—and impossible to mess up.

Sandwiching the puff pastry between two baking sheets ensures that the pastry rises perfectly even.

Crunchy, bitter, acidic, juicy: If these words don’t make you think of salad, this gorgeous dish is about to expand your vocabulary.

Turn this iced tea into a cocktail with a little gin.

Though it can be made with other small plums, this cake is the tastiest with the Italian variety—but keep in mind that they are in their peak season only a few weeks a year, in late summer to early fall.

With some store-bought roti paratha and a pot of hot oil, Talde re-creates McDonald's classic deep-fried apple pie.

Console yourself about the end of tomato season (sad!) by eating your weight in juicy fall grapes.

Pre-roasting apples and stone fruits before putting them into pies, cobblers, cakes, or crumbles is an easy way to add flavor and reduce the sog factor in your fruit desserts.

Perfect wedges of citrus every time, no pith allowed.

Here's how to buy, store, and cook with grapes, in season in September.

Chef Mullen cooks his eggplants directly in the coals of his wood-burning oven, a great technique to try the next time you’re grilling, or you can try this in a fireplace. But you’ll get the same effect (minus a little less smoky flavor) by using a broiler.

Don't just pick up any old watermelon at the market. Find the very best, ripest one. Here's how.

If you want to change up the mix of nuts and seeds in these bars, go for it. Just make sure the total quantity adds up to 3 cups total (you could use sunflower seeds in place of the pumpkin seeds, sesame for flaxseed, peanuts for pecans, etc.).

This is also great with maple syrup; you can use any kind of pear or apple, too.

If you chop up the granola in a food processor, you can sprinkle it on fruit or ice cream or dip ice pops into it.

The strawberry syrup is perfect for topping ice cream and yogurt or mixing into butter for spreading onto biscuits, pancakes, and French toast.

If you can’t find Garrotxa cheese, use another salty, semifirm Spanish cheese, such as Manchego, instead (but be warned: Gato chef Bobby Flay may not approve).