City Kitchen: Spicy Chicken Wings for the Super Bowl or Chinese New Year

RESOLUTIONS to eat more vegetables may wilt in the cold of January, when heartier foods beckon and Greenmarket offerings dwindle. But don’t give up: quick winter pickles can satisfy the desire for crunch and put a new, fresh taste on your plate. 

Year round, Chicagoans embrace giardiniera, a satisfying mix of cauliflower, carrots and peppers that are brined, then marinated in a zesty dressing. Giardiniera (pronounced jar-deen-YAIR-uh and Italian

THE gratinéed onion soup at Benoit, the French bistro in Midtown Manhattan, was everything you’d imagine it to be: golden crusted and bubbling, gooey and rich, beefy and fragrant. It was also exceedingly messy to eat.

My friend, dressed to the nines, wondered aloud as the strings of cheese and onion broth sloshed onto her scarf, “How do people eat this when they’re wearing nice clothes?”

Dale Talde inspects a mid-20th-century hand-painted Italian ironstone tureen at Circa Antiques in Brooklyn; $185, (718) 596-1866, circaantiquesltd.com.  

DALE TALDE might be known to many people as one of the more memorable contestants on the Bravo show “Top Chef.”

But Mr. Talde, a Chicago native, has also worked for Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Vong-Chicago, for Masaharu Morimoto at Morimoto and as the chef de cuisine at

There was a time when the only root vegetables anyone paid attention to were carrots and potatoes. (I know potatoes are tubers. Whatever.) Turnips were déclassé, celeriac unheard of, beets a pain to clean. The perception has changed, in part because it was all wrong; in part because if you’re going to eat seasonal and local, you are going to eat roots in winter, even if you live in California; and in

Updated funeral potatoes.

JUSTIN SOELBERG, the chef at Communal restaurant in Provo, Utah, has heard all the jokes about Mormon food. “People think it’s just casseroles and Jell-O all the time,” said Mr. Soelberg, 30, who grew up Mormon in Idaho and graduated from the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.

Rachael Hutchings, a Mormon food blogger, spent three years in Japan.

“The basic

A WHOLE roasted fish is the aquatic analogue to roast chicken.

It’s easy to prepare, forgiving and adaptable.

Drizzle on some oil, season it with herbs and spices or pretty much leave it alone, and bake it at almost any oven temperatures along with anything else you want to roast, like cauliflower sprinkled with cumin. You can stuff it with chilies, garlic and citrus to perfume its tender flesh.

THERE are lots of crab-meat salads out there. Some are fine, but many tend to be rather indifferent mixtures of crabmeat and bottled mayonnaise.

One memorable crab salad is the war horse from San Francisco known as crab Louie. It used to be featured at all the old fish restaurants, but now is seldom seen, except for the most touristy places, where it is usually served with frozen crab meat. At

Time: 40 minutes

2 bunches cilantro

2 bunches scallions

2 jalapeño peppers

1/4 cup drained capers, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

3 limes

1/2 cup plus 8 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

Black pepper

4 whole fish, like sea bass or black bass, 1 to 1 1/2 pounds each

3 teaspoons coarse