How can I add flavor (beyond salt and pepper) to a dish that tastes flat?

There's nothing worse than slaving over a dish -- from procuring every perfect ingredient to putting it all together -- only to realize at the end of all that work that the flavor is flat. I learned this little trick to "brightening" flavor from a friend who's a chef in a fancy restaurant here in Chicago: Add a few squirts of good vinegar to the finished dish. It's the balanced acidity in vinegar that gives food an extra shot of flavor -- without adding any extra fat.

It works with eggs, meat stews, soups (this Gazpacho sings with a few shots of red wine vinegar), mushrooms, and dishes with beans, like this White Bean Soup, and just about any dark green vegetable you can imagine. This recipe for Stuffed Red Peppers is healthy, but I found that the brown rice and light meat kind of sucked the flavor out of the dish. Adding a little bit of rice wine vinegar onto the bell pepper after it came out of the oven gave it the perfect boost. If you don't have time to make the sauce in this Artichoke Frittata, a few splashes of Champagne vinegar over the top works wonders.

I don't use apple cider or white vinegar because it can be a little too astringent, so I mainly use unseasoned rice wine or Champagne vinegar. Balsamic vinegar is my favorite. The first time I had balsamic-soaked strawberries (yes, strawberries), I think I put balsamic on everything I ate for a month just to see if it had the same stunning impact on the flavor. Try it. I dare you. (I use the cheap Star brand because the expensive stuff is, well, expensive, and you won't know the difference unless you've got Mario Batali's palate. Just make sure it's from Modena; otherwise, it's a knockoff.) I've also started using Chinese black vinegar, which works well in soups, stir-fries (like this Many Jewels Stir-fry), and anything else with typical Asian ingredients, like chicken, ginger, broccoli, scallions, pork, or dumplings.

-- Colleen Rush

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