Cheese

Goes great with: Salad of butter lettuce, radicchio, roasted pears, and toasted walnuts. What to drink: Red Burgundy or Pinot Gris.

These good-for-you sandwiches are low in fat and meatless.

Boneless chicken thighs give a moist result, but chicken breasts work well, too. Mix wild mushrooms with cultivated button mushrooms for a deeper flavor. Goes great with: Mashed potatoes flecked with chopped fresh parsley or tarragon. What to drink: Chardonnay or Merlot.

Hearty ingredients make this a perfect dish for a cold night.

This colorful salad is a modern, egg-free take on the classic.

Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Eric Ripert and Michael Ruhlman's book the A Return To Cooking. To read more about Ripert, click here. Here salmon is poached simply in salt water and served very rare with mushrooms and a mushroom broth, along with creamy polenta. The polenta adds a starch that the salmon needs, but it is also delicate and won't overwhelm the flavors of the fish. Mushrooms and polenta are a great classical pair, and a sturdy, satisfying match for the meaty salmon.

This beautiful pasta dish features a classic trio of Italian ingredients. Bottled roasted chestnuts make preparation surprisingly quick.

Macarrones con Crema y Queso Poblano and serrano chiles give a mild kick to this cheesy Mexican pasta.

Zuppa di Cozze Come la Fanno a Bosa Like other coastal towns on Sardinia, Bosa also has an excellent maritime cuisine. An example is this excellent mussels soup. Two ingredients unique to it are the grated sheep's milk cheese that cooks along with the mussels, deepening their flavor, and the bread crumbs—some Sardinian cooks use couscous instead—that add texture and density to the mussel juices.