Ways

Every June. I lose five pounds. I don't try to. It's all the shockingly flavorful greens we get when our CSA farm share kicks in. There's not much room left on the plate for everything else. So you eat a lot less of the high-calorie stuff. And you get inventive with lettuce.

A salad cross-dressing as a soup. Lettuce and herbs with milk. Amazing how flavorful it is. 96 degrees when I made this perfect cool, light meal. Better. Cheaper. Chilled. No oven, no stove, no sweat. Use a food processor and get it done in three minutes. Less than $1 per serving.

Tart rhubarb. Really ripe strawberries. So sweet you won't even think about adding sugar. A deeply sweet and wonderfully refreshing Way to end a meal on a hot day.

Nothing better than a handful of fresh strawberries, with the possible exception of Strawberry Shortcake. You can make the shortcake biscuit dough in five minutes flat. Seven to ten minutes in a 450-degree oven and you've got a killer dessert for $1.

Nope, not a cooking technique or a recipe. The wolf is the wolf at the door. M.F.K. Fisher wrote How To Cook A Wolf at the tail end of the last Depression. The wolf was hunger. Or, more generally, scarcity. Or just anxiety about scarcity. Something that's very right now for a lot of people, don't you think?

I love wild salmon. I really love it grilled. But there was always this problem: when you flip a filet over on the side without skin, a lot of the salmon sticks to the grill. Wastes salmon. Looks ugly. Here's the solution.

With basil dressing. Wow, this was delicious. Luxurious in your mouth. When your fork hits the egg, the yolk runs into the basil and magically makes a rich but light and bright sauce for the asparagus. Ten minutes to prepare. $2.50 per serving.