Food for July 4th: Grilled Hot Dogs, Honey Mustard Potato Salad and Berry Sheet Cake

The older I get, the more I love the Fourth of July. (This might be because, as a kid, I cared about only the promised pyrotechnics: fireworks, sparklers, kissing my seventh-grade crush on the Ferris wheel at the county fair.) When the calendar flips from June to July, it activates some sort of happy Pavlovian response in me. Bring on the hot dogs and the corn on the cob, the neighborhood parades and the John Philip Sousa marches, the mini flags in one hand and melting dip cones in the other!

Speaking of hot dogs — Ali Slagle has figured out how to make grilled hot dogs that keep their juicy snap and don’t turn into dried-out husks. “Instead of setting the dogs perpendicular to the grates,” Ali writes, “nestle them between the rods like the ones rotating in cases at a ballpark or convenience store. This setup exposes more of the meat to the flame, toasting the dogs more quickly and preventing them from rolling.” Pair your hot dogs with Eric Kim’s delightful pink lemonade or, for something just as sour but with a little more kick, Robert Simonson’s daiquiri.

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Grilled Hot Dogs

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We have lots of excellent recipes for your Fourth of July feasts on New York Times Cooking. If you need a potato salad, here’s Eric’s new honey mustard potato salad, the flavor for which was inspired by those snack-aisle honey mustard pretzel nuggets. There’s also Melissa Clark’s vegan lemon potato salad with mint (a reader favorite) and Kenji López-Alt’s umami-rich Japanese potato salad with mentaiko. These are all superior spud-based sides.

Or maybe your salad needs are more pasta-based? Melissa’s classic pasta salad, as she rightfully notes, has everything you’d want in one bowl: loads of ripe tomatoes, chunks of mozzarella, sliced olives, salami and plenty of fresh green herbs, all tossed in a garlicky, oregano-spiked red-wine vinaigrette. Eric’s new angel-hair pasta salad is light and bouncy, mixed with a simple mayonnaise-vinegar dressing with lots of crunchy vegetables. And whenever I make Ham El-Waylly’s corn and miso pasta salad, I eat at least two helpings — it’s that good.

It’s not the Fourth of July without pickles, whether served sliced on hamburgers and hot dogs or in a giant open jar next to the potato chips. Ali’s new dill-pickle tzatziki is an easy dip that’s full of pickly tang; I’d also gladly swipe some grilled chicken through it. More Ali Slagle pickle power: smashed pickle salad, green bean salad with dill pickles and feta, and vegan avocado ranch dressing (which uses dill-pickle brine).

And then: flag cake. Or, for those of us who want to cram more berries onto a cake than the Old Glory design will allow, there’s Yossy Arefi’s jubilant berries and cream sheet cake. The recipe tumbles whatever mix of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries you desire on top of a sour-cream cake swirled with a superlight cream-cheese frosting. Serve your glorious cake well before sunset so you have plenty of time to stake out a good spot at the park for fireworks. (I still like fireworks.)