Cheese

Coeur à la crème (cream heart) is a classic French dessert traditionally served with strawberries.

Meet the most creamy, comforting, flavor-packed baked pasta dinner you can make without any actual pasta.

As long as you’ve got frozen spinach, cream cheese, and heavy cream, you can throw this together in a flash.

Rather than being cooked in salted water, the pasta is treated like risotto—simmered in stock and stirred until cooked and creamy—which gives it plenty of time to pick up meaty flavors.

Two kinds of melty cheese make this dip extra luxe.

It's hard not to love this classic Italian pasta—it's just the right mix of spicy and sweet.

Cook barley until chewy and tender, then top with an assortment of crisp, golden brown mushrooms that have been pan-seared and basted in a fragrant, thyme-infused butter.

Although it may sound purely indulgent, this steak dinner is packed with nutrients, from home-sprouted lentils to flavorful nutritional yeast. (But yeah, it tastes pretty decadent, too.)

A doubly crunchy topping marks a breakthrough moment for creamy roasted fennel.

Try this with white beans on toast, in salads, or puréed and spread on pita.

Roman cauliflower (also known as Romanesco) grows as a peculiar spiky, conical head, and instead of florets as in regular cauliflower, it projects cones with tiny cones upon cones—a kind of fractal of nature's making. It comes in various hues of white, purple, and green and has a nutty, more intense flavor compared with regular cauliflower. Unfortunately it's not always easy to find in many stores in the US, though sources like farmers' markets often carry it, as do Italian specialty shops. You can substitute standard cauliflower for this if you can't find the Roman variety. It breaks into florets and cooks the same way.

Store-bought puff pastry makes these savory "elephant ears" an easy bite-sized appetizer for your next party.

We combined the rich and indulgent cheesiness of Pommes Aligot and the beautifully swirled rosettes of Pommes Duchesse into one super-luxe casserole that looks fancy but is surprisingly simple to make.

I get a lot of inspiration from staring at the supermarket shelves, and seeing what items are grouped together. I made this recipe because I found the smoked oysters next to the anchovies in the canned fish section and decided to try them out instead in my Caesar dressing. Once I did that, I decided to riff on the croutons a bit too. In this recipe, the smoky oysters complement the rich egg yolks, which in turn get cut by a healthy dose of lemon juice. Do you like other canned fishies? All are good Caesar salad material, providing they are packed in oil, which amps up their flavor almost to a condiment level of oomph. If you want to get real crazy, find the canned seafood section in an ethnic market.

These sparkly cookies take classic gingerbread and turn up the volume with three variations of ginger and a decadent cream cheese filling.

You'll make more dressing than you need for one batch of salad with this recipe, but that's a good thing.