Roast

Silvia and I have made this often over the years, the first time in my (illegal) home kitchen for an Easter catering gig when we made the entire meal twice, timing it so that the second roast was perfectly blistered and crispy when we arrived back home with a car full of dirty pots and pans to have dinner with our own families. It goes well with wilted spring scallions, roast potatoes (basted in the drippings), lightly dressed spicy arugula, and beans in all forms. One favorite bean dish for this ham is from Amanda Hesser’s The Cook and the Gardener: flavorful white beans simmered with hearty herbs and crème fraîche until slightly thickened.

These subtly spiced pears have an attractive crinkly look and are a lovely finish for an autumn meal. They keep nicely in the refrigerator for 4 or 5 days.

Warm caramelized plums are delicious paired with cool and creamy mascarpone. You can also cook the plums under a broiler for about 10 minutes or on a tabletop grill for 5 minutes.

Roasting mellows and sweetens the pungent flavor of raw garlic. Roasted garlic is useful for enhancing salad dressings, sauces, soups, and stews, and it can be used as a spread on bread all by itself.

These crescents are perfect simple supper fare; there’s hardly any prep time involved, and while they bake, you can make the rest of the meal.

Roasting intensifies the natural sugars in sweet potatoes. These sweeter sweet potatoes come out of the oven soft in the center and crisp around the edges.

After you taste these perfectly seasoned potatoes, you’ll never go back to butter-drenched ones.

Let your oven do the work on this juicy, piquant fish and the succulent red and orange roasted vegetables.

Any firm fish is fine for this intensely flavored and aromatic dish. If you use thick fillets, such as salmon or tuna, and you have the time, coat the fish with the spice mixture and then cover and refrigerate for an hour or two to marinate.

This salmon, quickly roasted, is moist and flavorful with its sweet-salty glaze of mirin and miso.

Up to a day before baking, Tortilla Melts can be assembled, wrapped in foil, and refrigerated. Bake in the foil for about 15 minutes and then remove the foil and bake for about 5 minutes more for the tortillas to crisp. Leftovers can be refrigerated for up to a week and reheat well.