Nut

This slightly sweet mash tastes great with roast pork or lamb.

These cookies, a twist on traditional snowballs, are just the thing to enjoy with a spot of tea.

Improv: Instead of water chestnuts, try sugar snap peas or toasted walnuts.

This gorgeous winter salad would go well with the Mediterranean Supper Omelet. The seasoned rice vinegar takes candied walnuts from ubiquitous to inspired.

Cara Brunetti Hillyard of Hamilton, Virginia, writes: "I come from a long line of great cooks. My father owns an Italian market in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where my mother gets a lot of the ingredients she uses in her wonderful dishes. My mother-in-law is a recipe developer, and I've been known to sit next to my great-aunt Stella with a pen and paper as she details her amazing recipes. I live far from home now, but I reconnect with my family traditions every evening when I make dinner."

Serve with cucumber rounds, red bell pepper strips, and sticks of jicama.

After he went on the Blue Voyage, Boston chef Chris Schlesinger came up with the idea for this recipe, which brings together many of the characteristic flavors of Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Halibut works best, but you can use any mild, firm-fleshed white fish.

Why resort to takeout? This spicy coconut sauce, brimming with stewed tomatoes, is a wonderful way to make weeknight chicken tempting again.

Prized by gardeners during the Renaissance, celery root, or celeriac, has a light celery flavor and a dense flesh that is perfect for shredding into slaws. This salad is wonderful with the chicken and biscuits or the flank steak. Enjoy any leftovers the next day.

Homemade ravioli are well worth the effort, and making them is the perfect task to share with a kitchen full of cooks (even novices can get in on the fun). Mixing the pasta dough is a breeze in the food processor, but if you don't have one, don't worry — we've given the method for making the dough by hand as well. A brown-butter pine-nut sauce is light enough to let your efforts on the pasta really shine through.

This ice cream doesn't hit you over the head with the flavor of chestnuts. Mellow and creamy, it's great on its own — though when we're not having it with the Tarte Tatin, we like to serve it with a delicate butter cookie.

The garlic-nut sauce known as tarator, which sometimes also includes tahini, is a classic Turkish accompaniment to mussels and fried fish as well as vegetables. Here, it's used with cauliflower that is sliced — rather than separated into florets — so that it can be more easily browned, which gives it a nutty flavor that complements the tarator perfectly.

Piquillos are sweet Spanish peppers with a rich, full flavor.

These flavorful pancakes make a great breakfast (drizzled with maple syrup) or appetizer (topped with chives).