Fruit

This melon dessert will help keep you hydrated on scorching days.

Move over, ice pops: There's a new dessert making waves this summer. A blend of just four ingredients, these frozen pops are irresistibly creamy, with a sweet and tangy taste. Opt for our lemony take on this kid-friendly dessert, or substitute in Key limes, grapefruit, or orange for your own citrus twist.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef. The recipe calls for making homemade stock—using bones from game hens, chickens, or pigeons—to cook the farro in, but if you're short on time, you can substitute purchased low-sodium chicken broth.

Lemon dressings often incorporate other flavors, such as herbs, garlic, and anchovy, but sometimes a simple lemon vinaigrette is all you want.

Mayonnaise is a breeze to make when the blender is enlisted to do most of the work. For more about mayonnaise and other salad dressings, see our Homemade Salad Dressing Primer. Note that raw eggs are not recommended for infants, pregnant women, the elderly, or those with a compromised immune system. To avoid the risk of salmonella infection, use pasteurized eggs instead.

Applying the rub to the chicken ahead of time infuses it with flavor.

A change from tempura batter. Use the versatile knafe (also spelled kataife) pastry, a fine, vermicelli-like pastry, for this savory snack. It also makes a perfect lunch with a salad and a spicy dip on the side (like dakkous). The citrus nutty center is a lovely surprise inside the sweet prawn. These prawns are seriously crunchy. You could bake them but they taste better fried.

Sweet and sour is a recurring theme in Arabic cuisine. Pomegranate molasses has this distinct taste. Here I've mixed it with other flavors, but it can be used on its own to enhance a salad, a dip or a savory pastry. The pepperiness of the arugula and the soft buttery eggplant along with the sweet cherry tomatoes are unforgettable.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

Grilled peaches turn this simple chicken and arugula salad with mustard dressing into something worth swooning over.

This is a winning-contestant recipe from Season Four of FOX's MasterChef.

Rich in protein, essential fatty acids and fiber, chia seeds are harvested from Salvia hispanica, a herbaceous plant native to central Mexico that was as an important food source of the Mayans and Aztecs.

Sweet and sour are two of the five flavors of classical Chinese cooking (along with salty, pungent, and bitter), and go lo yuk, as the dish is called, is a favorite way to prepare pork in Cantonese cooking. I prefer fresh pineapple, but if you like your dish sweeter, use canned pineapple and reserve some of the juice from the can to add to the sauce in place of fresh pineapple juice.

Lemon makes a tart, grown-up jelly, infused here with basil for an herbal aroma that sets off the summer sweetness. (Leave out the basil if you just want simple lemonade jelly.) One lemon tip, which I picked up from the Jellymongers themselves, Bompas & Parr (two young jelly-obsessed Brits who have filled rooms with alcoholic mists and created models of architectural monuments out of fruit gelatin): Adding a bit of orange juice turns otherwise pale lemon jelly into exactly the bright yellow you would expect from its tart, sunny taste.

This yogurt mousse is an exercise in nostalgia for me, evocative of two different memories. The first is recent: cold lassi spiked with cardamom, a favorite drink at Indian restaurants. The musky flavor of cardamom just plays well with the tangy, refreshing taste of yogurt. And so does honey, which brings me to my second memory. My mother often served me and my siblings big bowls of plain yogurt with honey swirled in—it was a favorite summer lunch. I remember how the honey laced the yogurt in thick ropes of sweetness. This is a plain yet comforting dish, the two flavors marrying perfectly. I bring these three tastes together here in this dish, and finish it all off with fresh summer apricots. Top the finished mousse with apricot slices, or get fancy and pipe the chilled, set mousse into apricot halves and garnish with mint.

Once in a while in the BA Test Kitchen, there's a dish that we can't get enough of. This simple, layered dessert is so good, we fought over the last bite.

Feel free to use cooked bulgur, barley, or couscous instead of quinoa