For a Mexican dinner, I substitute tomato salsa and guacamole for the Mango Salsa. Sautéed sweet red peppers and onions make a delicious side dish.

Adapted from The Fondue Cookbook by Gina Steer (Whitecap Books).

I ordered a wedge salad on one of my first dates back in the 1960s and felt very grown-up doing so. This satisfying salad fell out of fashion for many years but is now popping up on restaurant menus again.

Nothing blah about them. Crisp bacon and lettuce teamed up with avocado is an inspiring threesome. Go BLA!

Recipe courtesy of Lobel’s Meat Bible (Raincoast Books).

Tuck the grilled chicken pieces into a pita, or lay them on top of hot buttered rice. For a great taste variation, try using turkey, pork or lamb in place of the chicken. You can also roast or broil the meat in the oven instead of grilling it.

Christine Sharp submitted this recipe for Tidings' Maple Syrup Recipe Contest

She makes a simple applesauce to accompany pork that all of her guests rave about.  It has a certain je ne sais quoi, except that only she and her husband know exactly what the "quoi" is. She likes the fact that no one can really tell what makes it taste so good.  The secret is a tablespoon each of maple syrup and calvados.

Tired of bacon that's too salty or watery? Try making it yourself at home. It may take a while, but the effort is certainly worth it. This is a really basic recipe for a rubbed dry cure bacon.

You can substitute any kind of meat in this recipe. Make the patties large enough to fit a hamburger bun, small enough to be bite-sized hors d'ouvres or shape them around a skewer as perfect picnic fare.

I love this cut of meat. It’s nutrient-dense with a high level of B vitamins plus phosphorous, zinc, magnesium and selenium. Because pork tenderloin is lean, it’s best prepared with a marinade or sauce. Experts now say you can cook pork just until the center is pink, but I prefer to give it a full 40 minutes in the oven or until it reaches 170˚F on a meat thermometer. This recipe includes the twenty-first-century champion of the culinary world — the ubiquitous chipotle. It remains to be seen what hot new darling will replace chipotle in ’08, but let’s hope pork tenderloin holds its own well into the next millennium.

Change the toppings, grill it on a charcoal or propane barbecue .... This recipe is quick, easy and delicious.

Pull out the slow cooker for this easy to prepare, but oh so tasty dish. Add your own favourite vegetables, and spice it in different ways -- mustard makes a nice addition.

This was made for two, but can be scaled up for just about any number... as many as your cooker will hold.

This recipe is a family heirloom. We all make some version of it. New brides in our family get the recipe and a large pasta bowl along with unsolicited and long-winded advice on how to make it. My niece Katie actually wrote a paper on it for school, following its history and its many versions through the family tree. This dish never appears at family gatherings since we all make it at home. But we often talk about how we make it and argue over whose version is best. Unlike the rest of my weight-conscious family, I use an entire pound of bacon, easily making mine the best — or the worst, depending on how you look at it.

This is a quick and delicious recipe I updated from an old issue of Sunset Magazine.

Purchase 2 pork loins, 9 bones each. Ask the butcher to trim the backbones for easy carving, and have him tie the roasts together to make a crown. Serve with Tangerine Scented Rice.

As always, recipes are often a case of personal taste. And while this recipe may not exactly match the classic, it more or less matches many that produce this always-comforting meal. I sometimes make this with scratch pastry, but not always. You’ll be excused if you purchase puff pastry from the supermarket.

Recipe courtesy of the Dairy Farmers of Canada.

Serve with very thinly sliced cucumber marinated in seasoned rice vinegar.

A Portuguese-inspired dish from Goa, Vindaloo is one of my favourite curries. Not only is it flexible, versatile and easy to prepare but it delivers precisely the sort of soul-searing heat I crave. Though traditionally hotter than the ninth ring of hell, feel free to accommodate or challenge your own personal threshold. This is an adaptation of Madhur Jaffrey’s Pork Vindaloo (ironically from a book called Quick and Easy Indian Cuisine). Her trick of using grainy mustard rather than mustard seeds and vinegar saves both time and fuss. Like the mulligatawny, this is the sort of recipe wherein once you’ve got it going, you can walk away and do as you please for an hour or so. I’ve used pork shoulder or lamb and both have been delicious. This would, however, work equally well with duck, chicken, beef, venison … anything you can kill really. So long as you’ve got two pounds of it. You’ll definitely want to serve this with mountains of rice so if you don’t have a rice cooker, I’m afraid you’ll just have to make some the old-fashioned way.