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Eggplant and tomatoes pair so well, there’s no shortage of recipes that use them together. This super easy recipe is one of my favorites. The only drawback this time of year is that it cooks for an hour in a very hot oven, and that’s not ideal on a hot summer day. But once you make a pan of this, you’ll be able to keep it in the fridge to serve at room temperature over several days. Sometimes I use the leftovers for a sandwich, other times I’ll toss it over hot pasta.

We especially love this dish with the Middle Eastern flavors of za’atar and tahini, but at the bottom of the recipe, I offer a version that uses Italian flavors.

Blueberries are pretty much Hank’s favorite fruit. If a dessert doesn’t have chocolate, he’d like it to have blueberries. He likes blueberries so much that every summer, after I pick blueberries with one of my former students whose family owns a blueberry farm, I make a large batch of blueberry barbecue sauce and keep it in the freezer in small containers to use throughout the winter. (I use Vivian Howard’s recipe, which I have dubbed “Blue-B-Q,” and I use it on much more than just chicken, which is what’s given in her recipe.) I also freeze the blueberries themselves to make any number of other items during the year, such as my grandmother’s blueberry crumb cake.

I saw it was going to be getting hot this week. Hot, humid, and sticky. So I decided I could use the oven while it was still on the cooler side and make a quiche to have for a few lunches.

In the recipe below I give the basic custard part of the filling, along with the extras I made this time. Be creative about whatever else you want to include! Many, many years ago, the first time I was in Chicago, a friend took me to Lou Mitchell’s the famous diner in the West Loop Gate. On their menu is an omelette with sausage, Cheddar, and apples. Perhaps that seems unremarkable now, but back then, adding the apple to a sausage and cheese omelette was pretty interesting and innovative, at least to me. I kept that idea in mind, and began to play with the combination of meat and cheese and fruit in quiche.

Although I am by no means a food historian, I think a lot about culinary stories and the formation, transformation, and transmission of culinary traditions and even of individual recipes. Some people may think fajitas come from Mexico, but they are rather from the Tex-Mex kitchen. The dish is an offshoot of Mexican cuisine, to be sure, but Tex-Mex is a distinct and legitimate food tradition. In fact, the new cookbook Amá is specifically Tex-Mex.

We love to make this easy, flavorful sauce when we grill swordfish. I am never sure what to call it, because listing all the ingredients would be cumbersome, but individually and collectively they are all so wonderful and deserve top billing!

This is not “real” paella for several reasons. First, there’s no shellfish because Hank is allergic; second, I don’t have a paella pan; third, we don’t have the special rice for paella. The last two are probably why we will never get a real socarrat when the rice at the bottom of the pan gets a nice crust.

Back when we all first started staying at home as much as possible, and not knowing how things would go as far as food shopping was concerned, we bought a few vegetables that would last, such as carrots and winter squash, and some frozen vegetables as well.

We really haven’t had any difficulty getting produce, and as a result one butternut squash was still sitting there, along with a pear from my Misfits Market box. So before the weather gets too warm, I decided to make a soup. Any variety of winter squash would work fine in this recipe.

The first time I made this dish for my boys, they tasted it and glared at me. It was the look of annoyance and disbelief that I had never made it for them before! It’s now one of their favorites, a frequent request when they come home to visit.

It’s not a very difficult recipe, but you will want to get sweet Hungarian paprika for it.