One-Pan Zucchini-Pesto Orzo With a Bright Caprese Topping

If you only master two cooking fundamentals this summer, let it be these: cooking meat, fish, tofu and vegetables in utterly simple ways and making an easy sauce to go with them. Yewande Komolafe’s steak recipe brings both skills together in one dish, giving you instructions for grilling the meat and blending up a sauce of scallions, garlic, parsley and chiles. Likewise, Ali Slagle’s baked BBQ chicken comes down to properly roasting bone-in chicken leg quarters in a sticky-sweet blanket of barbecue sauce. Melissa Clark’s new orzo recipe leans on golden brown sautéed zucchini and pesto for instantaneous flavor.

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1. One-Pan Zucchini-Pesto Orzo

Melissa Clark thinks you should keep pesto on hand (and I agree). It immediately boosts a dish like this one: An easy recipe made with zucchini, orzo and a summery mozzarella-tomato topping.

2. Grilled Steak With Sauce Rof

Yet another sauce you need this summer is rof, a bright green relish that comes from Senegal. Yewande Komolafe serves it with grilled steak (and uses it as a marinade, too); chicken and fish are very good alternatives.

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3. Oven BBQ Chicken

More sauce! This time, it’s barbecue sauce in its tangy-sweet perfection. This recipe from Ali Slagle takes some time to bake, but what you sacrifice in speed you more than make up for in ease in this no-chop recipe. Ali also uses a clever trick that makes both the chicken and the sauce extra delicious.

4. Cashew Celery

This recipe comes from Hetty Lui McKinnon’s latest cookbook, “Tenderheart,” for which she is rightly being celebrated. Hetty cooks with vegetables in ways that are simple but often feel enlightening. Take this stir-fry, which highlights celery’s fresh fragrance and crunch. If you’re able to buy celery at a farmers’ market (or something like it), do it. It’s radically different from what you get at the supermarket.

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