Garlic Shrimp (Gambas al ajillo)

One of my favorite Spanish tapas is also one of the easiest. I can prepare this in about 15 minutes once I’ve assembled all the ingredients.

Thin Crispy Focaccia (Sciacchiatine Croccanti)

Impress your guests — or yourself — with these quick and flavorful bread crisps. You may also know them as Sardinian flatbread or pane carasau. They’re perfect for an appetizer or snack. This is the kind of crispy flatbread that fine Italian restaurants and trattorias offer at the start of a meal. I wanted to replicate it at home, so I went online looking for it, and I found it at this wonderful website: https://anitalianinmykitchen.com/thin-crispy-focaccia/. It’s yeast-free, and so quick that you can start making it an hour before your meal and have it ready in plenty of time. Season it however you want: with simple coarse sea salt and olive oil, rosemary and oregano, or freshly grated parmesan cheese — or all of the above.

Farro and Asparagus Salad

Recently while looking for a new idea for a refreshing but substantial salad to serve for Easter brunch, we found this gem on Allrecipes.com.  We liked it so much that we served it two more times within a month.  Once we substituted barley for the farro with excellent results.  The other time, we replaced the asparagus with fresh steamed green beans, which were delightful.

Charkhlis Mkhali (Georgian Beet Salad)

The Georgian table is always filled with a vast array of salads and appetizers.  Often at a Georgian restaurant, I don’t even make it to the main dish because I stuff myself on starters.  This is one of the culprits.  Mkhali (or pkhali) is a general term for a vegetable puree mixed with herbs and ground walnuts.  Yesterday I made the version with beets.  You could just as easily substitute spinach or other greens.  This recipe comes almost verbatim from Darra Goldstein’s masterpiece The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, one of my all-time favorite cookbooks.

Lobio (Georgian bean salad)

Along with generous amounts of khachapuri, the other item that I almost always order in a Georgian restaurant is lobio.  It comes different ways.  This particular recipe is fairly standard.  This recipe is a perfect example of how the Georgians can take something as ordinary as kidney beans and turn them into something wondrously exotic.  If your friends are deathly allergic to walnuts, you can leave them out, and the dish doesn’t suffer too much.  This dish can be served either at room temperature or hot.  The hot version usually has the consistency of a stew and is often made with hot pepper.

Chipotle Shrimp Salad in Tortilla Cups

I found this recipe in Cocktail Food: 50 Finger Foods with Attitude, which we bought on a whim at the Williams-Sonoma outlet one day.  (A fantastic book, by the way — highly recommended.)  I made it in 2008 for an office party at the State Department, and it received rave reviews.  We soon moved on to our new assignment in Moscow, and my wife wowed many of her catering customers with this recipe.  When we returned to Washington in 2011, a colleague from the Department noticed my name on an e-mail and wrote to me, not having seen me in almost four years, and remembered the shrimp cups from that office party.