Seafood

Adapting a technique we learned in Barbados, grilled mahi mahi gets a flavor boost by saucing it twice — first with a bright lime and brown sugar rub before grilling, and then a fiery but fruity habanero sauce afterward. 

You can substitute swordfish or halibut, but if the pieces are thicker than 1 inch, they will take slightly longer to cook. If the fish you purchase was previously frozen or seems particularly wet, refrigerate it on a paper towel-lined plate for a few hours before marinating. This will remove excess liquid that will otherwise prevent the fish from browning.

The chewy, nutty brown rice that forms the base of our grain bowl was supereasy to make: We just poured it into plenty of boiling salted water and cooked it like pasta. While the rice cooked, we spread sliced carrots and shiitakes on a baking sheet and started roasting them in a hot oven and prepared pickled cucumbers to add crisp brightness to our bowl. When the vegetables were half-roasted, we cleared a space in the middle of the baking sheet and added four small salmon fillets, brushed with hoisin to boost their flavor and color.

We started our Greek-style shrimp recipe (shrimp saganaki) with jumbo or extra-large shrimp because they made peeling and deveining a relatively quick process. We used a simple marinade to give them a jump-start on flavor. Simmering the shrimp and canned diced tomatoes together allowed for an exchange of flavors and a full-bodied dish. We used onion, garlic, and bell peppers for a Mediterranean sauce for our Greek-style shrimp, and then rounded it out with dry white wine and ouzo.

This is truly the best way to cook salmon. Slowly roasting an already fatty fish in an even more luxurious fat (here, olive oil) makes it nearly impossible to overcook. Plus, you can flavor that oil with whatever you fancy — spices, herbs, citrus, chiles — which, in turn, will flavor the fish. It's a very simple method for cooking any large piece of fish (cod or halibut work well here, too). This makes it the ideal dinner party trick, sitting perfectly in the center of a Venn diagram where “looks impressive” and “not a ton of work” overlap. It also doubles beautifully.

The beans (we thought canned were just fine) are the heart of our shrimp and white beans recipe, but the shrimp play the starring role. Most shrimp and white beans recipes boil or poach the shrimp before tossing them with the beans, but we found this approach made the shrimp too bland. It occurred to us that searing the shrimp would deliver all the flavor of high-heat cooking in a matter of seconds right on the stovetop. We coated the shrimp, then seared them in an extremely hot skillet.

It seems like mere moments after I get the last dish dried and put away, it's time to make dinner again. Is it me or are the days actually getting shorter, whizzing by in a blur and then coming to a screeching halt at 6 p.m. when every person in my household starts wandering into the kitchen, casually asking what's for dinner, usually while opening up a cupboard to peruse available snacks?

Our pan-seared salmon is first brined to season it and to keep it moist as it cooks. It is then placed in a cold, dry nonstick skillet skin side down over medium-high heat. The skin protects the fish from drying out while cooking and is easily peeled off and discarded once the fish is cooked. The skin also releases fat into the pan, which is then used to sear the second side until it is golden brown and crisp.

This is a typical fisherman’s stew. No need to make a fish stock; water, aromatics and anchovies will suffice. Use anchovies even if you don’t like them, as they add great depth of flavor, not to mention omega-3 fats. And don’t worry: the dish won’t taste like anchovies.

Minced anchovies and garlic add a complex salinity to seared salmon, enriching and deepening its flavor. To get the most out of them, the anchovies and garlic are mashed into softened butter, which is used in two ways: as a cooking medium and as a sauce. Used to cook the salmon, the butter browns and the anchovies and garlic caramelize, turning sweet. When stirred into the pan sauce, the raw garlic and anchovies give an intense bite that’s mitigated by the creaminess of the butter.

Chile powder adds sting, honey lends sweetness, and butter gives a creamy richness to these succulent roasted shrimp. Even better, the dish comes together in minutes, making it an ideal after-work meal or extremely speedy appetizer. The shrimp are also excellent tucked into a baguette for a shrimp sandwich. If you happen to have a jar of hot honey (chile-spiced honey), you can use that instead of combining the honey and cayenne. Just be sure to use a light hand with the lime juice at the very end; hot honey also contains vinegar, so taste as you go.