Required reading

The reason the cooking of the sunny lands around the Mediterranean ocean is so memorable, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, is the respect for ingredients and techniques that allows their flavors to shine. And though the Spanish, the Moroccan, and the Nicoise cook may all use them differently, certain ingredients are common to all their kitchens.

Accordingly, Jenkins' book, The Essential Mediterranean (Harper Collins; $29.95) is organized in chapters around ingredients. Salt, olive oil, legumes, tomatoes and peppers and wine each get their own chapter. The salt chapter includes recipes for salt-baked fish, Provencal salt-cod puree, anchovy-garlic dip and tapenade. The legume chapter includes a Tunisian fava-chickpea-bulgur soup; an Adalucian stewpot of chickpeas, beef, pork and vegetables, and Italian crostini with lentil-green olive spread.

Timely Tip

Men's Health magazine announced its second annual Munchie Awards in their June issue. Editors determined the best healthy convenience foods that taste good. Here are a few of their "Best" picks:

• Chocolate bar: Dove dark

• Hot Cereal: Quaker Instant Oatmeal Express Cinnamon Roll

• Regular Pretzel: Rold Gold Honey Wheat Braided Twists

• Corn snack: Original Corn Nuts

• Instant Macaroni and Cheese: Kraft Easy Mac Original

• Canned vegetables: Taylor's Sweet Potatoes

• Best English Muffin: Thomas Honey Wheat

We tried it

Baker's Chocolate has introduced a new product, its first in nine years. Baker's Dipping Chocolate is made for chocolate-covered treats, and is packaged to make that especially convenient. It comes in milk chocolate and semi-sweet, at $2.39 a container. Both are packaged as small discs, in a plastic, microwavable container. You just microwave the whole thing for a minute and a half, stir, then dip whatever you want in it.

My daughter and I tried the milk chocolate, with some impromptu candidates for dipping. We tried fruit like strawberries, slices of pear, banana chunks, dried apricots and grapes. The chocolate coated the fruit nicely, and if we were very careful in how we laid it on wax paper to dry, they all looked smooth and shiny: not quite professional, but pretty. The chocolate itself tasted a bit waxy. I'd rather dip in something higher quality. But if you're doing it for looks, say a few covered strawberries on top of a cake or on a platter of fruit, this is convenient.

We got carried away with our dipping and discovered what I think is a fabulous taste sensation: chocolate-covered corn nuts. You can't dip each one, but you can make a crunchy chocolate corn cluster that is fabulous. Trust me.