This eye-catching brunch dish gets its zesty taste from marinated cucumbers. Make them a day in advance and you’ll cut prep time to minutes.

Hard-cooked eggs figure prominently in many Spanish dishes. With this sauté of spring vegetables, they elevate a side dish to meal status.

I was inundated with recipe requests when I took this salad to a dinner party recently. It features incredible extra virgin olive oil plus an ingredient you might not be familiar with—guindilla peppers. These small slender peppers, typically sold pickled, hail from Basque country. Find them in the international section of your supermarket or online. (Another option: Substitute pickled banana peppers.) Guindilla peppers are also great on charcuterie boards, as a tapa, or in martinis or Bloody Marys.

If you’re new to lentils, this flavorful recipe makes a great introduction. I’ve streamlined the number of spices used in traditional recipes because garam masala already incorporates the essentials—coriander, black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, among others. This makes a hearty meatless meal, a soup, or a side dish—scoop it up with a piece of your favorite Indian bread.

This recipe makes Caesar salad more nutrient-rich in two yummy ways: using kale instead of Romaine lettuce and replacing croutons with roasted chickpeas, which can be seasoned any way you like. Both ingredients add texture as well as taste.

Using sweet and tart vinegars adds complexity to this vinaigrette, which is a delicious foil for the slightly bitter greens and sweet pears.

This is a zesty alternative to steamed green beans, with ingredients that reflect the colors of the Italian flag.

Carrots in various hues make a glorious presentation.

In Southern Italy, mashed potatoes are often worked into focaccia dough, but I like to use thin slices of potato as a topping. Fingerling potatoes yield perfectly sized discs, but you can also use creamer or new red potatoes. Getting the slices as thin as possible is more important than the diameter so that they’ll cook and crisp in the time it takes to bake the dough. Serve as an appetizer or even as a hearty side dish at holiday meals.

Flatbreads like focaccia are very forgiving—you don’t need to be an expert baker to create this crispy-on-the-outside, spongy-on-the-inside Italian classic. In fact, it’s the perfect beginner recipe to take the mystery out of dough-making. Plus, you can customize the toppings to your taste—slivered onions are at the top of the list for many. Leftover squares can be sliced horizontally and turned into panini.

Tiny new potatoes are made even creamier by adding olive oil, butter, and great spices. Note: All bolded spices are included in the new spice collection from the T. J. Robinson Curated Culinary Selections.