Cheddar

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.

Serve with waffle-cut frozen fries, cooked to package directions, or fancy specialty chips.

This spicy meal fills you up without filling you out!

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.