TASTElist

Drop biscuits are the fastest and easiest biscuits you can make—all you do is whisk together the dry ingredients, stir in the liquids, and drop lumps of dough onto a baking sheet. The secret to getting these drop biscuits light and tender: beer. If beer isn’t your thing, substitute the same volume of buttermilk. We recommend serving with a hearty dish, like the best chili recipe ever.

A simple, fast, and healthy treatment for sweet potatoes, adapted from a recipe on the website Health. Experiment with different sweet potato varieties—just make sure to choose small, evenly sized ones so you end up with manageable wedges.

Frozen puff pastry reduces the fuss factor in this recipe. Diced pears meet up with cinnamon, dried ginger, nutmeg, and light brown sugar, and bake in light, flaky pastry envelopes topped with crunchy sliced almonds.

Stuffed peppers were one of the first things I cooked for my wife when we started dating. They were completely undercooked, burnt yet crunchy. The couscous I packed inside turned into a semolina puck, anchored to the pepper bottom by cheese cement. This recipe is none of those things. The peppers end up perfectly cooked, and the outer skin peels right off. The quinoa keeps it healthy, the feta makes it taste rich, and the beans make it substantial. In short, the perfect healthy Sunday dinner.

Shrubs, a.k.a. drinking vinegars, were popular in Colonial America. At their most basic, shrubs are infusions of fruit in vinegar, sweetened to soften the tart edges. This one combines two quintessentially autumnal fruits—apples and cranberries—in a shrub that can be used as the base for various celebratory drinks. Game plan: Use this to make a refreshing, nonalcoholic Cranberry Shrub Spritz. For something stiffer, try a Rum-Cranberry Shrub Cocktail.

In this update on a Colonial favorite, rum meets the old-fashioned fruit-and-vinegar infusion known as a shrub. There’s no added sugar in this cocktail—we like its tangy edge, but if you prefer something a little sweeter, you can add 1 teaspoon of simple syrup to the cocktail shaker. What to buy: A richly flavored dark rum works best here. Try Cruzan Estate Dark or Barbancourt 3 Star.

Chicken breasts easily turn dry unless you use fattening things like cream or cheese as accessories for flavor and texture. That became the jumping-off point for this recipe: how to get juicy, mouth-watering chicken breasts while keeping things healthy. Poblano peppers turned out to be the answer: They’re mild, but infuse everything they touch with a rich green-chile flavor.

A hot toddy is the perfect comfort drink for cool nights. In this honey-sweetened rum and cider version, a touch of Fernet-Branca—herbal and bracing—keeps things interesting. What to buy: A richly flavored dark rum, such as Cruzan Estate Dark or Barbancourt 3 Star, works best.

Food writer and cooking teacher Nadine Abensur introduced us to this superpunchy pestolike sauce from North Africa in her book The Cranks Bible: A Timeless Collection of Vegetarian Recipes. Chermoula is delicious with grilled fish and grilled or steamed vegetables, a secret flavor weapon for making healthy stuff taste great. Game plan: Chermoula is best right out of the food processor, but it will keep for up to 1 week in the fridge.

Tender on the inside and craggy with baked cheese on top, these ham and cheese scones are rich and savory, ideal for brunch or to serve alongside bowls of Basic Vegetable Soup for lunch or supper. What to buy: Black Forest ham is dry-cured and smoked—you can substitute another kind of smoked ham.

Gluten-free muffins made with a mix of almond flour, rice flour, and tapioca starch, plus butter, dark brown sugar, and yogurt. Dried cranberries and toasted pecans add a seasonal touch that makes these perfect for holiday brunches. What to buy: Almond flour (also known as almond meal) is available at well-stocked markets.

The G and T has become the dominant warm-weather gin cocktail, maybe because it’s one of the simplest: just gin, tonic water, and an aromatic boost from a lime wedge. Variations on the gin and tonic include taking it Barcelona style. And if you want to try making your own spiced tonic water, go for it.