Dill

Hedy's favorite cucumber salad and one she prepares often, it's particularly good with poached salmon, trout, pike, cod, almost any fish. Hedy says that cucumber salad is often paired with sausages and potato salad. "That's quite traditional."

Tender pieces of short rib and barley add body to a delicate herbal broth you can make ahead and enjoy for days.

Light and ultrasavory, this is a spread that's definitely worth making — it requires a minimal amount of work and tastes better than any store-bought version. And if you have any left over, you're in luck — it also tastes wonderful on bagels the next morning.

A fresh summer catch from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, bluefish has a rich, fine-textured flesh that makes it perfect for baking, broiling, or grilling.

For easy serving, ladle the soup into pretty bowls, and set them on the buffet table.

This salad is great for picnics. It has all the components of a family favorite: beautiful color, satisfying crunch, and a delicious dressing. The recipe is adapted from one developed by freelance recipe tester Penelope Hoblyn, who often makes the salad for large gatherings.

Traditional Scandinavian fare, this rich stew is comfort food at its best — think chicken potpie without the crust. Boiled potatoes are the perfect starch to balance the sweet carrots and parsnips.

Goat cheese makes a lovely base for fresh herbs, carrying their flavor and punctuating their brightness with its gentle tang; in this spread, it tastes particularly mild because of the little bit of whipped cream folded in. Take the cheese out to soften before heading for the farmers market, and by the time you get back, it will be ready to mix with whatever herbs you've found there.

Cucumbers provide visual appeal and help keep the fish fillets delightfully moist.

Pitas, or savory pies, are ubiquitous in mountainous Epirus, in no small part because their portability suited itinerant sheepherding families. Even when you are staying put, this one is well worth making. Its homemade phyllo is rolled out much thicker than the commercial kind, making something more akin to a tender piecrust, and it's imbued with rich flavor from yogurt.

(Kuku-ye sabzi) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Najmieh Batmanglij's book A Taste of Persia. Batmanglij also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Batmanglij and Persian cuisine, click here. A kuku is a baked omelet somewhat similar to an Italian frittata or an Arab eggah; it is thick and rather fluffy, and stuffed with herbs, vegetables, or meat. It may be eaten hot or cold — it keeps well in the refrigerator for two or three days — as an appetizer, side dish, or light main dish with yogurt or salad and bread. Kukus are traditionally made on the stovetop, but my oven version is much simpler. A fresh herb kuku such as this one is a traditional New Year's dish in Iran. The green herbs symbolize rebirth, and the eggs, fertility and happiness for the year to come.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown's Weekends. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here.

SALAT TIS LESVOV Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of the Greek Islands. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. From the first October rains up until the end of April, the greengrocers of Mytilini, the capital of Lesbos, sell each head of romaine lettuce tied together with two or three sprigs of borage (often with its little blue flowers), two or three scallions, several sprigs of peppery arugula, four or five sprigs of dill or fennel fronds, a few sprigs of peppery wild cress and either fresh mint or a little wild celery. Once home, these essential ingredients for the local green winter salad are thinly sliced and tossed with a simple vinaigrette. It's important to cut the greens at the last moment and to slice them very thin. If they are coarsely cut, the salad will taste different.

MAGIRITSA Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of Greece. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. Magiritsa is made with the parts of the lamb not used for the spit-roasted Easter lamb, which is usually very small (about 20 pounds). In the classic recipe, all the innards — heart, lungs, and so forth — go into the pot, but they do not really contribute to the taste. The flavor of the stock comes from the boiled head and neck, and the soup gets its distinctive taste from scallions, fresh dill, and the egg-and-lemon mixture. There are lots of different magiritsa recipes. A friend described to me the one her family prepared in Halki, a small island that is part of the Dodecanese. In her family's version, no innards were used because, in Halki as in all the Dodecanese, they do not roast the lamb on the spit but instead stuff it with rice and the innards. So in Halki's magiritsa, many lambs' heads were boiled to make a very tasty stock, to which egg and lemon sauce is added at the end. The heads were not boned, but as they cooked for many hours, even their bones became soft. Each member of the family got one head and ate it with the broth. No scallions or dill were added to the magiritsa. My recipe for Easter soup was given to me by my cousin's wife, Katy Kremezi, whose mother came from Smyrna (Izmir) in Asia Minor.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Joan Nathan's book The Foods of Israel Today. Nathan also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Nathan and Israeli cuisine, click here. I remember with pleasure the Turkish Spinach burekas we ate every Friday morning when I worked in the Jerusalem municipality. The ritual was as follows: Simontov, the guard at the front door downstairs, would appear carrying a bronze tray with Turkish coffee and the heavenly, flaky pastries filled with spinach or cheese, called filikas in Ladino. It is rare today to have such delicious burekas, in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel. Most of the dough is commercially produced puff pastry, much thicker and less flaky than the homemade phyllo used to be. A few places, like Burekas Penzo in Tel Aviv (near Levinsky Street), which has been making the pastries by hand in the Turkish style for more than thirty years, produce a close second to those I remember from my days in Jerusalem. Various Ladino names like bulemas and boyos differentiate fillings and distinguish a Jewish bureka from a Turkish one. If you can find the thick phyllo dough, that works well. Otherwise, try this. My fifteen-year-old makes and sells them for fifty cents a piece. They are great!

If you have a nice sharp chef's knife, this is a breeze. (Or if you don't, you should buy a sharpening stone, and you'll never have blunt knives again.) The idea for this recipe came about when we were catering a HUGE job on a TINY budget. They wanted tuna tartare, but I knew it would be expensive, and it's best eaten soon after it's made or it starts to get all gummy. Gravlax, on the other hand, needs at least a couple of days to cure, so I decided to use diced salmon instead of tuna, for economy, and to marinate it with our gravlax spice mix a day before the event, freeing up the chefs for other last-minute things. In my test run, I added orange zest, thinking, isn't orange good with salmon? Normally you would put something like this on a cucumber slice and that would be fine, but the juniper in the marinade suggested potato, so we served it on a slice of crisp potato, and it was ravishing in the extreme. The potatoes can be made ahead of time too, as long as they're cooked until they're completely crisp and stored in an airtight container until you need them. Any potato not cooked all the way through will soften the others; if that happens, pop them all in a 350°F oven for five minutes, or until they've crisped up again. The salmon can be sticky, so use two teaspoons to put it on the potato. I could never remember of which there was more in the gravlax cure, sugar or salt (since in the basic gravlax recipe one is three tablespoons and one is four). So after years of irritably looking up such a short recipe, I decided to THINK for a second and realized salt has four letters so salt is the four tablespoons. Welcome to my world.

The flaky dill biscuit crusts that top these creamy pies look impressive, but they're surprisingly easy to make.

A quick dip in egg and matzo meal creates a light, crisp crust for this boastworthy fried chicken. The perfect foil? A refreshing salad of mesclun greens, baby artichokes, and asparagus enlivened with a smooth, dill-flecked vinaigrette.

If your child is a truly adventurous eater, the Thai chile in the pineapple sauce won't faze her and will help sneak the fish in. If she balks at spiciness, on the other hand, replace the chile with a milder pepper, such as jalapeño, and remove the seeds and membranes. Or skip the hot stuff altogether—the sweetness and saltiness of the sauce will still be delicious.

Hard-boiled eggs, sour cream, and onion are traditional accompaniments for caviar. In this longtime staple of community cookbooks, they are turned into a shallow cake and spread with caviar. We used supermarket lumpfish caviar, but if you're feeling flush, use the good stuff, or even Japanese tobiko (flying-fish roe).

his delicious vegetarian soup is a take on the Persian dish ash-e reshteh.