Weeknight Kitchen

Portobello mushrooms have a meaty quality that makes them a healthy stand-in for the steak that you might expect to find in this kind of Chinese-style stir-fry. (But you can add some sliced steak, if you wish.) Broccolini is great for stir-frying because its thin stalks cook quickly. Don't confuse it with broccoli rabe, which it resembles -broccolini is much milder. This stir-fry also gets a non-Asian seasoning of thyme, which works beautifully with the other flavors.

This salad has much more than an assortment of flavors and textures. The beans and eggs can be cooked ahead, while the vinaigrette can be made several days in advance, leaving assembly of the salad for the last minute. It's lovely for lunch or as the anchor to dinner. Dress the beans in advance of eating to absorb the flavors of the vinaigrette.

This recipe was inspired by our local Belgian beer place, which has several different versions of moules frites on the menu: an enamel pot of mussels comes with a cone filled with crispy French fries and a mayonnaise dipping sauce alongside. My favorite is the Malaysian style, which is a riff on laksa, a coconut curry soup with Chinese-Malay elements. At home, mussels take literally minutes to prepare and need only a crispy baguette to sop up all the delicious juices.

We've all had those post-farmers'-market moments when, while unloading your goodies, you remember that you actually bought three pounds of zucchini in an optimistic moment and now what the heck are you going to do with it? Well, this is what.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

I must admit something embarrassing. Whenever I think of chicken salad, I think of the recipe for Waldorf salad that a customer keeps screaming at Basil Fawlty: chicken, apples, celery, and walnuts! I have that frantic scene locked in my head. Chicken salad = Fawlty Towers. Except, I went back to see that scene again to write this headnote (and get a little comic relief) and realized there's no chicken in a Waldorf salad. Oops. Well, this one's still great.

A long with muscadine grapes, butter beans are among the farmer's market treasures of late summer in Charleston—reason to wake up with gusto to another day of stultifying heat and oxford-soaking humidity. We do all kinds of things with butter beans: we make a hummus-like spread for the cocktail hour, we simmer them with seasoning meats of all sorts, and we compose marinated salads aplenty. But this may be our most simple treatment yet, and one of the most satisfying.

Simple but delicious! Wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, this is a popular breakfast for people on the run. Often, the Vietnamese will simply pull up with their motorcycle at their favourite banh mi cart to pick one up on the way to work.