Fish

If you prefer, use honeydew melon for an equally good salsa. Offer buttered new potatoes and sautéed spinach with the fish. Afterward, serve slices of pound cake with rum-soaked raisins and store-bought caramel sauce. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

These steaks are delicious served with creamed spinach and roasted new potatoes.

The flavorful olive salad is also nice with sea bass, red snapper or tuna. Serve with steamed new potatoes, and uncork a Sauvignon Blanc to go with dinner.

Note: To slice the cucumber in the following recipe into a paper-thin spiral, we used a Japanese rotary device known as the Benriner vegetable slicer.

This recipe can be prepared in 45 minutes or less. A spicy pepper coating and an Asian-style sauce give these tuna steaks an intense flavor. Joan serves mashed or oven-roasted sweet potatoes alongside. Look for the sesame oil in the Asian foods section of the supermarket.

Liptauer gained its name from the provenance of the fresh sheep's milk cheese with which it was originally made, Lipto, Hungary. Our version of this seasoned spread is made with cream cheese.

(Buckwheat Yeast Pancakes with Three Caviars)

Begin making the coleslaw two days ahead and the whitefish one day ahead. Pour a Chardonnay or Pinot Noir with dinner.

With uniformly sized fillets, the cooking time can be gaged precisely, resulting in the kind of lovely individual pieces of salmon served in restaurants. For four servings, buy one and a half pounds of skinned salmon fillets, taken from the thick (not the tail) end of the fish. Cut across the fillet to make four pieces of equal size. Although the technique is about as straightforward as can be, allowing the fillets to sit for a while after coating will encourage the fragrant seasonings to permeate the flesh of the fish; try fifteen minutes or so at room temperature, or a couple of hours in the refrigerator.

Serve this rustic tomato mixture over pasta or as part of an antipasto platter.

Look for black sesame seeds in the Asian foods section of a specialty market. If you can't find them, use white seeds instead.

This tuna sandwich is all about olive oil. Use the French stuff if possible; otherwise, any mild olive oil will do—save that fancy super-Tuscan for something else. The tuna and the bread are crucial, too. Forget about tuna packed in water. It's flavorless. You want the kind packed in olive (not vegetable) oil. We thought ortiz's Bonito del Norte, newly exported from Spain, was the closest thing to Ni‧oise tuna, but it can be tough to find. (We ordered ours from Citarella; 212-874-0384.) Of the brands commonly available in the United States, we preferred Progresso light tuna. Other brands of canned light tuna that we are fond of are Genova and La Giara. This last is very expensive—about $10—and is available at many specialty foods shops and by mail order from Citarella.

With boiled potatoes and grilled vegetables, you have an easy dinner. Lemon sole or red snapper could be substituted for grouper. The sauce—our take on a Spanish classic—can also be used as a dip for vegetables or to spread on grilled bread.

Roasted fries complete this quick take on fish and chips.

Wrapping the fish in foil enhances its flavor and keeps it extremely moist. In summer, it can be cooked outdoors on the grill.