Crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside, these salsa-topped cakes make a lovely vegetarian entree. They offer a great way to use leftover basmati rice; if you're starting with cooked rice, use about 1 1/2 cups. Add mixed greens to the plate for even more color.
Chicken bacon roulades, chicken breasts, pounded thin, stuffed with bacon, shallots, and Parmesan, rolled up, browned, roasted, then served sliced, with a creamy white sauce.
A riff on Laurence Jossel's fantastic NOPA beans - plump, creamy beans baked in a bright, chunky chipotle tomato sauce, topped with crunchy breadcrumbs, plenty of oozy queso fresco, and an emerald drizzle of cilantro pesto.
Though filling enough as a main dish, you can also serve smaller portions of this creamy, cheesy casserole as a tasty side to scrambled eggs. We enjoyed the way the Classic Melts cheese blend melted over the casserole; substitute cheddar cheese if you can't find this product.
Panera Broccoli Cheese Soup is a wonderfully rich, creamy, and cheesy broccoli cheese soup. You can make soup that tastes like theirs with this recipe.
Falafel, a popular recipe from the Middle East, consists of seasoned pureed chickpeas that are shaped into patties and usually fried. It's worth the effort to seek out Greek yogurt, which is thick, rich, and creamy. Make the sauce up to three days in advance and the falafel mixture up to one day ahead; bake falafel patties just before serving.
The combination of tender cauliflower, creamy sauce, crisp bacon, smoky flavor, melted cheese, and crunchy topping make this dish especially appealing, as well as comforting at some deep level. It is the kind of dish I can imagine Julia and Paul Child eating half a century ago in their Paris apartment. And yes, I just saw Julie and Julia.
At Eataly's pasta and pizza counter, Mario Batali's team serves three different pasta shapes with a choice of about five different sauces ("made by some crazy dudes," says Batali). For the first time ever, he's going to let his customers match the sauce with the pasta shape. This sauce, an ever-so-slightly creamy ragù made with ground beef, pancetta and ham, is flavored with tomato paste instead of canned tomatoes.
Green Goddess dressing—a mix of mayonnaise, sour cream, herbs, anchovies and lemon—was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the 1920s, as a tribute to an actor starring in a play called The Green Goddess. The creamy dressing is typically tossed with a green salad, but it's also addictive in Melissa Rubel Jacobson's chicken salad, made with a rotisserie bird.
