Lemon

Cooking bulgur with turmeric turns it a bright yellow that contrasts nicely with the red and green of this zesty salad.

This exciting, inviting fruit salad is especially delicious served with grilled pork or chicken.

These creamy tarts will solve the problem of what to serve for dessert when you have company for dinner. Vary the yogurt and fruit combination to suit your family’s preferences.

Lemon juice and zest give this cake a refreshing taste. The sweetness of the apricot preserves balances the tartness of the lemon.

It’s important to avoid buying spaghetti squash that isn’t fully ripe. A spaghetti squash that isn’t ready will be extremely difficult to cut in half and won’t yield a nice, soft texture when cooked. Look for a squash that is a bright, solid yellow (not pale yellow or white in parts). Once the rind is penetrated with a knife, a ripe squash is fairly easy to cut in half. Also, be sure you have all the ingredients ready to go once the squash is cooked. You’ll want to toss everything together when the squash is still hot.

Juice bar smoothies have justifiably gotten a bad rap because they’re often chock-full of added sugar and calories. This twist on traditional raspberry lemonade uses only 1 teaspoon of honey, and the rest of the sweetness comes from real fruit. Note that it’s important to use frozen fruit in smoothies because if you use too many ice cubes to try to get that thick consistency, you’ll end up with a watery, not-as-good-as-the-juice-bar’s smoothie in minutes.

This strong, tart sweet drink—made with equal parts fresh lemon and lime juice—can stand up to plenty of ice, and the addition of chopped crystallized ginger gives each sip a tingly, refreshing heat.

Pat: This cool, creamy pie is as refreshing as a glass of lemonade—and it goes down just as easy. We use lemonade concentrate, sweetened condensed milk, and whipped cream to create a fluffy, light-textured filling, then cradle the filling in a graham-cracker crust and freeze the pie before serving. The result is a beat-the-heat, not-too-heavy dessert that can easily follow a big feast—and still disappear (not that anyone in our family is ever too full for dessert!). The lemon-zest garnish is not essential, but it sure is beautiful and fun to make, and it adds another little kiss of lemony love.

Pat: You know I like my burgers, but who ever thought that a burger could taste this good and be so healthy? My turkey-burger recipe (a favorite with the ladies) is a mixture of ground turkey, fresh marjoram, crushed red-pepper flakes, and garlic. The key to making these burgers taste as good as the old reliable is to use ground turkey that is 85 percent lean. This will yield an incredibly satisfying (and still virtuous) patty. Grilled tomatoes, silky avocado, and a sunny lemon condiment help keep the burger moist.

Gina: These days, with both of us being so busy, Pat usually smokes our holiday hams and turkeys at the restaurant (what can I say, it’s a perk of being in the barbecue business), but when we first got married we prepared them at home. Pat and I are holiday people. We love Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the festive traditions associated with each day. It’s a special time of year for our families, and Lord knows we have a lot to be thankful for. When it comes to the holiday table, I want the flavor and presentation of everything to be the best. With this bird you can’t go wrong. We’ve been serving it on the Neely holiday table for decades. We hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we do. The flavor, the juicy texture, and, most important, the love that inspires it are simply unbelievable.

A plain old grilled chicken breast can be a bit uninspired, so we like to jazz up our breasts (who said that?) in this version of grilled chicken salad that has plenty of moxie. The marinade of fresh lemon juice and zest, olive oil, and fresh herbs infuses the chicken with a bright, sunny flavor (so yummy that you’ll want to use the marinade again and again for grilled meats). Here we team the grilled chicken with potatoes, celery, green olives, pistachios, and a creamy mayonnaise dressing for an over-the-top texture-and-flavor combination. This recipe doubles or triples beautifully, so it’s great for special lunches (think birthday parties, anniversaries, or bridal showers). It’s also great with a glass of chilled white wine and a crackly baguette.

Granita is nothing more than a flavored liquid (in this case lemon) sweetened with sugar and frozen until crystallized. Understanding this makes it very easy to make any flavor granita that you desire. You can also use orange juice for granita; simply freeze it as is. Should you choose to flavor your granita with alcohol, don’t add it to the syrup—it will inhibit the freezing process. Instead, pour it over the granita just before you serve it. It will get slushy, but a good slush on a hot summer day might be just the right thing.

The part of the sponge cake that is left behind after the rounds are cut for the delizie makes a nice snack. Although these are traditionally served robed in plain white, you could crumble the leftover cake into crumbs and sprinkle them over the fondant before it has a chance to harden.

You know how much I love olive oil, but there is a time and place for everything. When sautéing foods that cook quickly, like these sole fillets, using some butter along with the oil helps the sole brown before they overcook. Thicker sole or flounder fillets are ideal for this dish, but if yours are thinner, you may find it easier to handle them if you cut them in half first. Traditionally, the fillets are simmered in the sauce, but I like to cook the sauce separately and spoon it around the sole fillets—they stay crispier that way.

The finished sauce will be lightly thickened by the bread crumbs that fall into it as the chicken bakes. My favorite way to serve this is with simply steamed green beans: set the chicken on top of the beans and pour the tasty sauce around the chicken, not over it—you want the bread crumbs to stay crunchy.