Cashew

Satisfy a hankering for high-fat Alfredo sauce with this light, no-dairy version. Oat milk and cashew butter stand in for heavy cream, keeping calories and saturated fat low.

Chocolate caramels with cashews are dipped in bittersweet chocolate for a very chocolaty and nutty candy. These are my husband’s favorite caramel candies.

A pleasing composition using a minimum of exotic ingredients, this traditional Asian dish becomes somewhat offbeat through the use of fresh tomatoes and basil.

Here’s a delicious, substantial grain dish that’s ready in minutes, leaving you plenty of time to build a meal around it.

This bountiful rice dish offers a variety of flavors and textures. I especially like the burst of sweetness provided by tiny orange sections.

The first time I made this lively dish, I realized that it had elements in it that each member of my family didn’t like: My husband is not crazy about tempeh, my younger son doesn’t particularly like nuts in cooked dishes, my older son is not a sweet potato fan, and I’m not that big on garlic. Why would I bother with such a dish, then? Surprisingly, the unifying element is kale, something everyone in my family has grown quite fond of. Taken as a whole, this colorful and supremely nourishing dish is a big hit, with no one singling out the separate parts they don’t like.

Salted nuts balance the sweetness of caramel in these candy-like cookies. These bars are quite rich, so feel free to cut them in half.

For those who like their baked goods chunky and nutty, these cupcakes, inspired by the popular bar cookies, are nearly bursting with cashews, butterscotch chips, and toffee bits. If you can’t find toffee bits, chop a small chocolate-covered toffee bar, such as Skor or Heath, to use instead.

This gluten-free, dairy-free, no-cook tart relies on dates and pecans for a sturdy crust, maple syrup for sweetness, and bananas and coconut for tropical flavors. The cashew “cream” is made by grinding cashews with water and vanilla-bean seeds. Soaking the nuts overnight in water ensures a puddinglike texture once they are ground. All in all, it makes an enticing dessert, even for those without food allergies or sensitivities.

Salted cashews—both ground into a butter and chopped—give these cookies deep flavor. Soft caramel candies are melted and drizzled over the tops of the baked cookies for an easy embellishment.

These scrumptious bar cookies are dense with plenty of cashew chunks, toffee bits, and butterscotch chips.

Given that tofu itself does not add much body to a dish, you need a substantial sauce, like one with canned coconut milk as its base, to make up for the tofu’s blandness. Like heavy cream, coconut milk will thicken a sauce, making it luxurious in almost no time. The onion must be browned carefully and thoroughly: keep the heat high enough so that this happens in a timely fashion—it should take about ten minutes and in no case more than fifteen—but not so high that the onion burns. I call this level of heat “medium-high,” but all stoves are different; the oil should be bubbling but not smoking, and you must stir the onion every minute or so.

Stir-frying—the fastest cooking method there is—can change your life. You can use it for almost anything, and it can be so fast that the first thing you need to do is start a batch of white rice. In the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes for that to cook, you can not only prepare the stir-fry but set the table and have a drink. For many stir-fries made at home, it’s necessary to parboil—essentially precook—“hard” vegetables like broccoli or asparagus. So in this fastest possible stir-fry, I use red bell peppers, onions, or both; they need no parboiling and become tender and sweet in three or four minutes. If you cut the meat into small cubes or thin slices, the cooking time is even shorter. I include nuts here for three reasons: I love their flavor, their chunkiness adds great texture (I don’t chop them at all), and the preparation time is zero.

A classic stir-fried noodle dish, just about the paradigm. You can make this with pork, chicken, shrimp, or any other bit of meat or fish you have or keep it entirely vegetarian; it’s eminently flexible and an important part of every home cook’s repertoire. The variation that follows is a traditional dish for New Year’s celebrations and wedding banquets. E-fu noodles, which are long, thin, flat egg noodles, symbolize long life. Most Asian groceries carry them, but if you cannot find them, regular egg noodles are fine too. The meat will be easier to slice thinly if you freeze it for 30 to 60 minutes first. (This is always the case with any boneless meat or poultry.)

PAT Gina would happily eat cashew brittle any time of day or night. She calls it “a crunch of heaven.” When I’m in the doghouse, this is usually what gets me back in my bed and off the sofa. So, fellows, if you are like me and never know the right gift to purchase for your wife or girlfriend, make this fantastic dessert (featuring a smooth and buttery pudding to dip the brittle into) and she will forget all about whatever mistake you may have made (or wrongheaded gift you may have bought). GINA This butterscotch-pudding recipe is very special to me. Growing up, I was always fidgety (especially in church). So my mom and my great-great-grandmother (Mama Callie) would always give me butterscotch candies to keep me still. To this day, I go all soft and quiet when I taste its buttery, rich, and smooth flavor. But the cashew brittle has a story to go with it, too. When I was pregnant with Shelbi, brittle was the only quick fix for my cravings. Pat would buy it by the pound; I’m sure people thought he was crazy, but at the time he didn’t know how to make it. We finally made it on the show as a tribute to that crazy time in our lives. Combining these two favorite flavors, with so much meaning and good memories behind them, is my version of sweet, salty, smooth, and crunchy heaven. This is as good as Christmas morning—new-shoes-and-a-handbag happy.

Everybody likes something to munch on for extra energy, or to accompany that glass of wine earned by a day of unpacking! You may think you’ll never find ancho-chile powder, but McCormick packages it, and it is readily available at most grocery stores. It’s really important to keep the heat on low in this recipe, because the nuts and spices are inclined to get too brown.

When we first conjured up the notion of this dessert, we weren’t sure if people would go for the chocolate and basil combination in the mousse. But apparently everyone else dug the combination—the basil’s minty quality freshens up the chocolate taste—as much as we did: we couldn’t make these fast enough. When the scorching Crescent City summer rolled around, the kitchen got so hot and humid that the meringues wouldn’t bake properly (they need dry heat to crisp up), so we had to take them off the menu. We still like to make them from time to time when the temperature finally decides to drop.

You can purchase bottled Thai green curry sauce in most supermarkets, but this recipe proves how quick and easy it is to make your own. Refrigerate any leftover sauce, covered, for up to 3 days.

Look for hoisin sauce and rice vinegar in the Asian foods section of your supermarket. Although ingredients vary, hoisin is generally made with soybeans, chiles, and spices. It’s used as a seasoning at the table and in cooking.

While I was in college (along with 49,999 of my closest friends at the University of Texas at Austin), I was one of the many nonvegetarian fans of Mother’s, an iconic vegetarian restaurant in Hyde Park, where I’d pretty much always get a smoothie and a huge spinach salad with this pungent dressing. Besides cashews, the main ingredient is tamari, a richer version of soy sauce that’s traditionally (but not always) made without wheat. Decades later, Mother’s is still going strong, reopening after a 2007 fire and still serving this dressing (bottling it for retail sale, even). Thanks to the glories of Google, I was able to track down a recipe for it from Rachel MacIntyre, a personal chef in Austin who blogs at thefriendlykitchen.com and used to work at Mother’s precursor, West Lynn Cafe. I lightened it a little bit, but it’s as addictive as ever. I toss it onto spinach and other salads, of course, but also baked potatoes, broiled asparagus, steamed carrots, and more, including Charred Asparagus, Tofu, and Farro Salad (page 144).

If nut brittle is my muse, blondie pie is our love child. It is, to date, my favorite pie we’ve ever created. Dense, sweet, salty, nutty, chock-full of textures large and small, it’s perfect to grab a piece of on the go and crush as if it were a slice of pizza.