Cheese

In this delicious omelet, we borrowed the taste of garlic, caraway, and coriander from harissa, the classic Tunisian seasoning. The omelet can also be cut into wedges and served as an appetizer or as part of a tapas or antipasto platter.

This golden pudding sends out a wonderfully appetizing aroma as it bakes. You can keep it unbaked in the refrigerator for up to a day—just allow for more baking time.

This might be just the ticket when you’re looking for something tasty and really fast.

If you love spinach and feta, this simple supper is for you.

Because lentils cook quickly, they’re ideal for a simple supper. This thick, earthy stew, chock-full of protein, is most satisfying on a chilly fall or winter evening.

Is this really dinner? It is casual, messy finger food, but it has beans, grain, and cheese, it’s quite filling, and kids love it. We like Cheddar, Monterey Jack, or Mexican cheeses such asadero and queso quesadilla for this recipe.

This creamy, cold-weather casserole with a golden, crunchy topping can be assembled ahead and baked when you’re ready.

What a versatile dish! You can use almost any kind of cheese (or go vegan—see our suggestions below), and you can add leftover vegetables to the filling. Stuff the tomatoes one day and bake them the next—they’re just as tasty!

For a nice balance of color and flavor, use white potatoes and sweet potatoes in roughly equal amounts.

Feta cheese, garlic, and artichoke hearts are some of our favorite ingredients; here, they’re combined in a very simple pasta dish that packs a lot of flavor. For this dish, we make an instant creamy sauce by stirring hot pasta-cooking water into feta.

Here’s a simple supper to make in the chill of fall or winter, when the sweetness of the onions and the richness of the cheese is comforting.

Mustard greens and broccoli raab (also called brocoletti di rape, rape, and rapini) are somewhat bitter, a good counterpoint to creamy, subtly flavored ricotta cheese.

In Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl attributes the original recipe to Danny Kaye, but lemon and cream seems such a simple, natural combination that we suppose people were putting it on pasta long before Danny Kaye was born.

This sandwich came about in our favorite way: by visiting the greenmarket, picking up the cheese, and then meandering through the farmers’ stands to see what fresh offerings might be paired with it. It was June; we came away with beautiful asparagus, red onions, basil, and a rustic bread—all the fixins for an open-faced sandwich on the grill. (If you don’t have an outdoor grill, you can use a grill pan.) Thinking back to the days when cooks in diners put hubcaps atop burgers as they cooked, to steam them a bit, we recommend either closing the grill or inverting a metal bowl over the sandwich to keep the heat in and help melt the cheese. By the way, if you can’t find or do not care for Vacherin, substitute any good melting cheese.

The combination of the chewy cookie and the caramel–cream cheese filling has made this cookie many fans . . . so many, in fact, that though the cookie was originally introduced as a short-term special, our guests wouldn’t permit us to remove it from the menu. But to enjoy it at home, please note that unlike the other two cream’wiches, this cookie does not last long once it has been filled with the cream. It will begin to grow soggy after about four hours.

Perennially popular at Craft are the short ribs braised in red wine. For our ’wichcraft sandwiches, though, we wanted something a bit different, so we chose to braise the short ribs in dark ale with horseradish. The light pickling of the vegetables is so quick there is no time for fermentation; the vegetables retain their crunch and acidity, which contrasts well with the richness of the meat.

This is a sandwich that was so good we had to take it off the menu! Conceptually similar to a cheese steak, it was offered as a pressed sandwich, and when too many people ordered it at once, we had a traffic jam on our premises. So while you can no longer find it at ’wichcraft, you can make it for yourself. Flank steak is wonderfully easy to work with because it’s lean—there’s no waste, and it has an excellent texture for braising. There are many schools of thought about the right wine to cook with. Some advocate cooking with the best wine, or at least a wine that you would want to drink; others believe in using the cheapest wine available. We suggest going with the wine that you can afford to use for cooking or the one you have lying around. At home, whenever he has some leftover red wine at the end of a meal, if he doesn’t drink it the next day, Sisha puts it in a container in the freezer. He keeps adding to that container, and when he needs wine for braising, there it is. The blend is never the same twice—and always good.

While we provide a meatloaf recipe here, we know how particular people are about their meatloaf recipes, so feel free to use your own. You’ll often want to make this sandwich with cold, leftover meatloaf, which is perfect because it’s easier to slice. But how to heat it up without drying it out? This is where the liquid from the tomato relish comes in: Put the meatloaf slices into the sauce and pop them into the microwave or oven. The meatloaf is gently heated, absorbing all the flavor and moisture of the sauce. Now just layer on some aged Cheddar, bacon, if you like, and the tomato relish, and you have a hearty sandwich—the ultimate comfort food.

This recipe is based on a Cuban sandwich traditionally made with roast pork, ham, pickles, Swiss cheese, and mustard. We start with the same main ingredient—the pork. It can be a loin, a ham, even a shoulder, but it should be roasted so that it retains some texture. Then we ratchet things up. In place of the ham, we have coppa, which comes from the neck of the pig and is cured and dried like prosciutto. Standing in for the pickle, we have a pickled pepper relish. The sugar in the recipe cuts through the spiciness and acidity, rounding out the flavors in the relish. Instead of the Swiss cheese in a Cuban, we use fontina. We press the sandwich just as you would a Cuban, and presto! We have what we have nicknamed the Cubano-Italiano.