Cheddar

The Kentucky sandwich. Built on a base of savory French toast, this open-faced sandwich needs no doubling up. Thick slices of turkey breast and juicy tomatoes are topped with a decadent cheese sauce, broiled until bubbly and golden brown, then crowned with crisp slices of bacon. It’s no surprise that this dish, named for its birthplace at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, has become Kentucky Derby lore.

This is the ultimate grilled cheese. Forget about American cheese; this grown-up grilled cheese features the real deals. I love goat cheese, but you couldn’t do this sandwich without the cheddar; goat cheese can be too crumbly to melt well, and cheddar—beyond having great flavor—gets all nice and gooey when melted, bringing all of the tasty components together. Tart green tomatoes balance the salty bacon, which is a big part of what makes this sandwich so amazing. One final note: A key factor in making any grilled cheese is to be sure the bread is well toasted.

Cowboy nicknames for their cattle-drive cooks—biscuit shooter, dough puncher, and dough belly—suggest how important sourdough biscuits were to hungry, range-riding wranglers. No self-respecting chuck wagon cook traveled without a dough keg for his prized sourdough starter, the fermented yeast needed to make sourdough biscuits. I covered this macaroni and cheese with a generous blanket of buttered sourdough breadcrumbs in honor of chuck wagon cooks of the past. The rest has little to do with old-time chuck wagon cooking, but I don’t know a modern cowboy or anyone else who would turn down a bubbling pan of freshly baked mac and cheese.

It took my mother years to convince Chef Heinz at the Beaumont Country Club to share his recipe for brandied Cheddar cheese soup. Once she got the recipe, it became one of her favorite party soups. I’ve tweaked it a little, substituting beer for brandy and omitting the Cheese Whiz (it was the 1960s, after all). Serve it in little bowls, shot glasses, or espresso cups, so friends can pick it up and enjoy this rich, tummy-warming combination in a few sips, without a spoon.

I keep a batch of these buttery, cheese-laden cookies on hand for drop-in guests year round as they’re better than a bowl of mixed nuts and just about as easy to make. Versatile, attractive, and positively addictive, they’re great for a before-dinner nibble, a cocktail party hors d’oeuvre, or a pre-theater or movie snack with a glass of wine.

For those who don’t speak Tex-Mex, chile gravy is a smooth sauce made with reconstituted dried chiles, broth, flour or some other thickener, and fat. The canned version—enchilada sauce—is stacked in grocery aisles all over the country. It’s worth the effort to make homemade, though, because fresh chile gravy is about as far from the canned stuff as Texas is from Toronto. I serve my cheese enchiladas topped with gravy, diced yellow or sweet onions, and sides of refried beans (page 161) and Rosa’s Mexican Rice (page 161).

Miso is a common ingredient in vegan versions of cheesey recipes, because it helps make up for the sharp complexity that’s missing without any dairy products. I love cheese too much to ever leave it out, so why choose? Combining the two together, and adding mushrooms, makes for a powerfully flavored dish that packs a punch of umami. This is a light dinner for one that you can bulk up with a salad.

One of Austin’s oldest restaurants is the venerable Texas Chili Parlor; its motto is “E Pluribus Chili,” and its signature dish comes in three levels of heat: X, XX, and XXX. The X is fantastic: plenty spicy, but you can still taste the other flavors. To my taste, XX is just slightly over the line between hot and too hot. And the XXX—well, let’s just say they make you sign a waiver before you can order it, and I never have. Besides the basic chili, my favorite item on the menu is the cheese enchiladas topped with the chili. They call them Frieda’s Enchiladas, and in all the years I went there, I never asked who Frieda was. I guess my mouth was always full, on fire, or both. This is my interpretation based on countless samplings. Now, this recipe may make enough for two servings, depending on your appetite and whether you eat beans and rice on the side, but I confess: I’m usually a four-enchilada man, meaning I have to commit to some extra time at the gym, but it’s worth it.

My brother Michael once told me the two questions I should ask anyone who claims to make real (i.e., Texasstyle) chili. Question one: What kind of beans do you put in it? Question two: What kind of tomatoes do you use? Both are trick questions, of course, because the answer to both is none. There are no beans and no tomatoes in real Texas chili. The full name is “chili con carne,” and that’s what it means: chile peppers with meat, and very little else. When done right, it’s a beautiful thing. With only one kind of chile and at least 6 hours of simmering, it’s got the round flavors and slow-burning heat that define a “bowl o’ red.” If you want something hotter, add up to 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, or to taste. I usually make at least two servings, because after eating the first one (with saltines, grated Cheddar cheese, chopped onions, and, okay, even pinto beans as long as they’re on the side), I love the second serving on a hot dog or burger, or as part of enchiladas (page 64).

One of my college hangouts was a scruffy Austin restaurant called Les Amis, which my friends and I called “Lazy Me,” in honor of the decidedly unhelpful service. The food was dependable even if the waitstaff wasn’t, and a standby for me was a simple bowl of black beans, rice, and cheese, priced so even students without trust funds could afford it. Later, I learned that the combination of beans and rice is one of the most nutritionally complete vegetarian meals possible. While beans are one of the vegetables that takes better to canning than others, if you make a pot of your own from scratch (page 47), the taste and texture are incomparable. When Les Amis finally closed, torn down to make room for a new Starbucks, I missed not just the peasant’s bowl, but those inattentive waitresses, too.

These delectable muffins are so rich they can be served with nothing more than a large green salad for a luncheon.

This bread is wonderful served along with our Baked Spaghetti (see page 76) and a fresh salad.