Recipe Sifter

Cream of mushroom soup uses a pureed mushroom-onion base plus sliced mushrooms for double texture. Finished with cream, sherry, and thyme for a restaurant-style soup at home.

Fish escabeche features fried fish fillets bathed in a hot vinegar marinade with peppers, onions, leeks, carrots, and garlic. A make-ahead Spanish dish that gets better overnight.

Set-it-and-forget-it slow cooker French dip with tender beef roast simmered 10-12 hours in savory broth with herbs and peppercorns. Shred, pile on toasted rolls, dip in the au jus. Effortless comfort.

Fruit Cornish hens: classic Chicken Marbella scaled up for small birds. Cornish hens marinated with garlic, oregano, prunes, apricots, green olives, and capers, then roasted until golden with brown sugar glaze.

Try something new for dinner with this succulent dish made with ground pork, ground lamb and pecorino-romano cheese.

The sauce was too much like spagetti sauce. I cooked the pork chops in the sauce for hours and it was tender, but the pork flavor was diminished; I would prefer to taste the pork more.

Greek mushroom salad: button mushrooms simmered in olive oil, white wine, and lemon with bay, thyme, coriander, and fennel seed. A meze-style cold mushroom salad served the Mediterranean way.

Ham bone and bean soup made from leftover holiday ham scraps simmered with beans, onion, garlic, and a homemade aromatic stock. A thrifty, waste-nothing soup that turns a spent ham bone into dinner.

Haricot beef casserole: an old-school British braise of beef chuck and skirt with haricot (white navy) beans, tomatoes, garlic, and a fresh-herb bouquet of parsley, bay, thyme, and marjoram. Slow-baked in the oven for fork-tender meat.

Old-school Hasen pfeffer, German-style braised rabbit marinated two days in spiced vinegar, browned in butter, and finished with a swirl of sour cream. Traditional Pennsylvania Dutch comfort food.

Three-bean vegetable soup with kidney beans, chickpeas, Great Northern beans, tomatoes, and zucchini simmered together with basil and bay. A pantry-friendly meatless soup that feeds ten and freezes beautifully.

Dutch spiced chicken soup (Hollandse Kippesoep) slow-simmered with mace, cloves, rosemary, and thyme. Rich bone broth with vermicelli and tender pulled chicken.

Use this stock as a base for mushroom soup or a mushroom sauce. For the latter, deglaze the pan with some of the stock after sautéing the protein. Then add sautéed mushrooms and either reduce the fluid or add flour to make a gravy.

Hot rough tomato soup simmered with fresh tomatoes, ghee, dried red chiles, whole cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaves. An Indian-spiced, chunky vegetarian soup with real heat.

Hearty beef borscht with browned chuck, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, and dill, finished with a swirl of sour cream. A chunky, stew-like take on the Eastern European classic.

Ingelegde vis, a Cape Malay pickled fish with poached cod or flounder in a tangy curry-onion sauce. Traditional South African Easter dish served cold after a mandatory chill.