Onion

Pass hot pepper sauce and warm buttered tortillas to complete this easy dish.

A simple salad with a tangy dressing-perfect for and April picnic.

Briefly cooking the spices brings out their oils and enhances the flavor. Before pureeing the soup, be sure the carrots are tender. Once the orange juice has been added, reheat the soup over very low heat.

Turnips stand in for the usual potatoes, giving this gratin a rich, hearty taste.

Maple syrup in the corn bread adds a touch of New England to this traditional stuffing. The leftover bread is also nice with scrambled eggs or omelets.

New herbed chicken broth is used in this soup; adding the cheese-garlic bread makes it a filling entrée. Serve with a salad of chopped tomato and herbed olives tossed in bottled or fresh balsamic vinaigrette with chopped fresh marjoram. End with slices of pound cake spread with bottled lemon curd and surrounded by tangerine sections.

Serve this delicious curried chicken dish with steamed basmati rice or Indian flatbreads.

More supermarkets are carrying fresh rabbit, as people rediscover its delicate flavor. Braising helps to keep it moist and tender. If you have trouble finding rabbit, however, you can substitute bone-in chicken, skin removed.

We adapted this from the recipe for Supper Onion Pie, in the "Savoury Pies" section of Nigella Lawson's _How to Be a Domestic Goddess._We played with the crust to make it lighter and substituted a yellow onion for the red ones (they turned an unappetizing mauve). We love the way Lawson's books are written—and agree she's got some great ideas—but we think you should know you may need to tinker with the recipes before they yield dishes that appeal to an American palate.

The dumplings can be assembled and chilled up to eight hours before steaming.

There are generally two kinds of wheat berries available at natural foods stores: hard (high-protein), which are reddish brown, and soft (low-protein), which are blond. We prefer the chewiness of the hard variety for this recipe. Active time: 15 min Start to finish: 1 1/2 hr

These rice-coated meatballs, commonly referred to as zhen zhu, meaning "pearls" in Chinese, are often prepared at home in New York City's Chinatown. Steaming them on lettuce leaves helps prevent them from sticking to the steamer rack. They are traditionally made with sticky rice (sometimes called sweet rice), but we've used long-grain rice, which is easier to find.

The classic Hungarian dish relies on sour cream both to thicken the sauce and to balance the heat of the paprika.