Recipes from Matt and Ted Lee

The sauce for these tender beef short ribs is intense. To round out the tang and heat from the tomatoes and chiles, cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee add a little semisweet chocolate. "It's mellow and sweet," says Ted. "The chocolate puts everything in balance."

"This is an easy way to bring height-of-summer cookout mojo to our favorite vegetables without fussing with a charcoal or gas grill," The Lees say. Cooking the corn and okra on the stove in a heavy skillet gives them a superb char.

When they're in South Carolina, the Lees make this recipe with wreckfish, a local, sustainable catch; striped bass works, too. They advise leaving the skin on the fish because it crisps up so nicely.

Most supermarkets sell pickled tomatoes, but those can't compare to these supereasy homemade ones. Slicing the tomatoes thinly allows them to really soak up the wonderfully tangy brine.

The Lees created this gazpacho as a riff on a recipe from The Virginia Housewife, a seminal Southern cookbook first published in 1824 that is still in print. They sweeten the cold tomato soup with watermelon and make it fiery with habanero and poblano chiles.

Leigh Magar loves the fresh taste of edible flowers. For her, Matt Lee and Ted Lee created a new version of a Tuscan classic, fried squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta. They mix the ricotta with pimentos--an homage to pimento cheese, a Southern favorite--and serve the blossoms raw.

These "flash-pickled" figs need only an hour of soaking in a mixture of vinegar, salt and water. As a clever time-saver, the soaking liquid for the figs also forms the base for the salad dressing.

The secret to this delicate and refreshing butter bean salad is the dressing, made with cold, tangy buttermilk, olive oil and lime juice. The Lees call it "the flavors of a Southern summer."