Cheddar

There are many flavors of sharp Cheddar out in today’s markets to choose from, so go plain or go wild! Among the choices out there in sharp Cheddars: five-peppercorn, smoked, dill, garlic and herb, roasted garlic, horseradish, chipotle, habanero, jalapeño—on and on!

This one reminds me of the California surfer scene. It’s a way-cool mega-rito, dude!

Though I haven’t lived on Cape Code since I was eight, this dish proves I’m not just a Red Sox fan but a true New England Patriot. With Chowda and Mac ’n’ Cheese in one dinner, you can get to Massachusetts in 30 minutes or less, even if you live in Michigan.

Eat this meal in front of the TV. Invite Clint Eastwood and the cast of your favorite spaghetti western (mine’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

I am the self-proclaimed “Queen of Burgers”—this is probably my 140th burger recipe! Ground meat is so versatile and accessible. Who doesn’t love a good burger? This one combines lean ground turkey breast with spicy horseradish, sharp Cheddar, and tangy cranberry sauce. Yum-o!

Recently I went with some close girlfriends to Nova Scotia. There’s a lot more than lox going on up there! At the Normaway Inn on Cape Breton Island our favorite meal was brunch; this is my version of their Eggs Benedict. It’s good for B, L, or D—breakfast, lunch, or dinner!

This one is good for B, L, D: brunches, lunches, or dinners.

Yup, this was a really good idea. Serve with oil-and-vinegar dressed slaw salad.

I know it sounds odd, but my girl LOVED butternut squash! This dog might even go for it before a steak, especially if there were also pasta and cheese involved in the deal.

We call this Cheddar tofu because of the texture. Imagine soft tofu, silky against your tongue, infused with a rich Cheddar flavor. It’s pretty awesome stuff. You can use it in exactly the same way that you would real tofu. It happily sits center stage as the main component in a salad or soup, or it can be diced and incorporated into a dish much like gnocchi or small dumplings. We use both the high- and low-acyl gellans at a ratio of 0.2 percent of the weight of the other ingredients. The gellan makes it relatively heat stable, and it holds its shape beautifully when cut or molded.

This dish was inspired by an incredible meal at Rasika in Washington, D.C. The chef, Vikram Sunderam, used Cheddar cheese in a tomato-based marinade for his black cod that was utterly delicious. If you didn’t know that the cheese was there, you wouldn’t have identified it as what gave the sauce its unusual depth of flavor. Here we’ve borrowed that technique for our braising sauce. Because we use canned tomatoes, the recipe makes two quarts of sauce, so we recommend that you freeze half for another time or double the amount of fish for a dinner party. Either way, this spicy yet delicate dish will transport you.

Yet another favorite of ours, this appears on our table in various guises every few weeks. The evaporated milk may seem like an odd choice but it serves a purpose, helping to stabilize the sauce. Evaporated milk is manufactured by exposing fresh milk to high heat in order to evaporate up to 60 percent of its water content. The resulting milk is concentrated in both flavor and nutrients. It usually has added stabilizers in the form of disodium phosphate and carrageenan. Although it is marketed as a substitute for fresh milk, it has a noticeably caramelized flavor that works nicely in sauces and soups. It produces an incredibly creamy sauce without the use of heavy cream or eggs. We’d like to say that we pair this mac and cheese with a salad or a vegetable, but truthfully, we tend to just savor the pasta with a glass of rich red wine or deep red berry juice depending on our age at the table.

This is comfort food at its finest. It blends Italian risotto with the idea of American macaroni and cheese to create a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. And because we love the crisp juicy flavor of apples with our Cheddar cheese, we decided to take things a little further and use cider to deepen the flavors of our risotto. That hint of tartness balances out the richness of the dish. If you happen to have them around, fresh chives are a wonderful finishing garnish.

This is a family dish we all loved. My mother accompanied it with yogurt. The fried onions and large amount of sharp cheese lift the usually somewhat insipid taste of zucchini.

This famously Greek dish is to be found throughout the Arab world without the creamy topping. Broiling or grilling instead of frying the eggplants makes for a lighter and lovelier moussaka. This one is made upof a layer of eggplants, a layer of meat and tomatoes, and a layer of cheesy white (béchamel-type) sauce. Serve with salad and yogurt.

This wonderful creamy Turkish pie is something between a savory flan and a cheese lasagna. The fillo turns into a soft, thin pasta, so don’t expect it to be crisp and papery. It sounds complicated but it is quite easy, and you will be delighted by the lightness and the variety of flavors and textures.

One legend surrounding the name of the sauce, hünkâr beğendi, which means “Her Majesty’s delight,” places it in 1869 when the Sultan Abdul Aziz entertained Empress Eugénie (my Istanbul grandmother was named after her), wife of Napoleon III, in his white rococo palace of Beylerbey on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. The empress was so enchanted by the pale, creamy, eggplant purée that she asked for the recipe to be given to her cooks. The sultan’s cook explained that he could not pass on the recipe because he “cooked with his eyes and his nose.” In Turkey, they use mature kasar, a hard yellow cheese, or Gruyère in the sauce, but mature Cheddar can be used too. Serve it with rice pilaf (page 193).