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If you’re going to a pool party and need to bring a salad, this one travels well because there’s nothing that can wilt. And you might as well make twice as much, because the next day you can pick up some shellfish and sausage on the way home and turn the leftovers into a great dish for six people.

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling

¼ cup finely chopped Spanish or sweet onion

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 cup coarse (no. 3) bulgur

3 cups water

Kosher salt and cracked black pepper

3 tablespoons capers

3 pale inner stalks celery, thickly sliced

½ cup golden raisins

20 leaves fresh mint

¼ cup small, picked sprigs dill

4 small fire-roasted red bell peppers (page 270), home-roasted or store-bought, cut into strips (see Note)

Small handful pale inner leaves from the celery heart

Sea salt

½ lemon

Put a saucepan over medium-low heat and add the olive oil. Add the onion and garlic, and sauté gently until tender. Add the bulgur and stir over the heat for 2 minutes to toast slightly without browning. Add the water and a generous amount of kosher salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, and remove from the heat. Cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, in a small pot of lightly salted boiling water, simmer the capers, celery, and raisins for 5 minutes. (This step hydrates the raisins, softens the celery, and soothes the strong briny flavor of the capers.) Drain and reserve. Roughly chop the herbs.

In a large bowl, combine the cooked bulgur, caper mixture, herbs, strips of pepper, and celery leaves. Season well with sea salt and cracked pepper and toss well with clean hands. Drizzle with a little olive oil and squeeze the lemon over. Toss again and taste.

Note: It’s easy enough to roast red peppers, but to save even more time, you may substitute imported, fire-roasted peppers from a jar, packed in olive oil or brine. Whenever you use ingredients that are packed in a jar or a can, make sure they are of the highest quality. You don’t want to destroy a dish you’ve worked on by compromising its integrity with inferior products.

Here’s a Greek paella, using mussels, clams, shrimp, and/or scallops: Open your shellfish in a hot pan over medium-high heat with a little white wine and garlic. Add this salad to the same pan, and toss everything together. To make it more like a traditional paella, you can render some sausage meat in the pan first, then add the shellfish, and deglaze the pan with the white wine. All of the flavor from the sausage gets incorporated into the liquid, which will permeate the toasted grains.

VEGETABLES AND THE LENTEN TRADITION

Because of the strong Lenten tradition and the relative poverty of so many of the Greek people over time, Greek food has a tremendous appeal to vegetarians and people who like to stay away from any sort of animal products. If they lived in the mountains, the Greeks were limited to what they could hunt, like quail and rabbits. Or, of course, if they lived near the sea, there were fish. But there was not a lot of protein for most people, so there is a long tradition of cooking vegetables, especially during the forty days of Lent, in which the Church says that you cannot eat anything that came from an animal with blood—no dairy, no eggs, no butter. But because the vegetables in these dishes are so substantial, they could easily make a main course with a hunk of bread.

ARTICHOKES & POTATO

AGINARES KAI PATATES

SERVES 4 TO 6, OR MORE FAMILY-STYLE, AS PART OF A LARGER SPREAD

This recipe benefits hugely from the flavor of the Artichoke Confit. It’s important to know that you are not just making Artichoke Confit here; you’re also making a wonderful artichoke oil. Always keep the remaining oil for another use. You should use the leftover oil from the confit to make the Ladolemono used here, so nothing is wasted. This is a sturdy salad that can easily stay in the refrigerator for thirty minutes, or wait on the table for an hour.

If you double this recipe, the next