Ricotta Salata

The salty cheese and piloncillo makes these gorditas go wonderfully with a hot chocolate or champurrado.

Turn any extra hardy greens or herbs you can find in your fridge into dinner tonight with this pesto pasta.

Spelt spaghetti has an incredible nutty taste and is a great alternative to regular spaghetti, as it's high in wheat bran fiber, or beta-glucans, which help keep our cholesterol levels in check.

With super fresh tomatoes you don't need much more! This toast combines sharp ricotta salata cheese with plump green tomatoes and lemon juice for a refreshing bite. We like green zebra tomatoes for their pretty yellow stripes and bright, floral flavor, but any ripe green tomato will work in this dish.

This salad of melon, sweet pepper, salty cheese and earthy basil recalls the watermelon salad that we all love so much, but its elegant components make it more refined. Salt is key to marrying the flavors, so be generous, tasting as you go. Be liberal, too, with a very good extra-virgin olive oil—it is very much a part of this salad.

Ricotta salata is a firmer version of fresh ricotta; it is perfect for shaving over salads.

Focaccia is one of the easiest flatbreads to make: No shaping is needed because the dough is stretched and spread out in the sheet pan. This recipe uses a very wet dough, resulting in a moist flatbread about 3/4 inch thick. You can substitute shavings of Parmesan for the ricotta salata cheese, if you like. Focaccia is best eaten the day it is baked.

I was raised by a beet-hating mother, so we never ate them when I was growing up. But when I left the nest and actually tasted a “forbidden” fresh beet, I was smitten with its sweet earthiness and beautiful color. For years, my mother and I battled back and forth: I relentlessly tried to convince her of beets’ many virtues, and she adamantly hung on to her contempt for them. One Sunday, she called Lucques to ask me what we were serving for supper that night. And then I did it—I lied to my mother. I couldn’t help myself, and made up the name of a beetless dish that I knew would tempt her. I told myself it was all for a good cause. When Mom came in that night and tasted roasted beets, bathed in toasty cumin vinaigrette and arranged on the plate with so many delicious treats, like Nyons olives, fried chickpeas, and slivers of dried ricotta, I knew I had cured her of her beet-hating ways.

We should all be eating more dark leafy greens, but sometimes a side dish of steamed chard is a tough sell. Not so with this pasta, which is full of bright colors and flavors. If you’re not familiar with ricotta salata, it may remind you of feta cheese but with a milder flavor and creamier texture. This is a pasta dish I really feel good about eating, and with all those greens and the protein contributed by the garbanzos, it’s a complete meal.

Sicilians are passionate about both food and opera, so it is no surprise that one of the island’s most celebrated dishes is pasta alla Norma. What better way to honor the composer Vincenzo Bellini, a native son of Catania (on Sicily’s eastern coast), than to name a delicious pasta for Norma, one of the great operatic masterworks of all time? I love both the opera and the dish, and, I can assure you, aside from their name, they’re quite different. Those of you familiar with opera know that the title role of Norma is so difficult that only the greatest sopranos ever sing it. On the other hand, this recipe is simple and easily made.

Barley replaces the traditional Arborio rice here for a textured, nutty-tasting whole-grain risotto. Soaking the barley overnight reduces its cooking time. Gold beets have a sweet, mellow flavor. When roasted with the skin intact, their beautiful color is preserved. Wait to salt the risotto until you’ve added the ricotta salata; as the name implies, it is quite salty. This aged ricotta does not melt, but instead retains a pleasant firm chewiness.

Leaving a little skin on the eggplants will add color and texture to the dish. The small, firm eggplants are not too bitter and when they are firm, they will not soak up as much oil, so they do not need to be salted and pressed. However, if you leave all the skin on, especially when you use baby eggplant, the skin overpowers the flavor of the flesh and the texture is too tough, overall.

I love this dish, Pasta alla Norma. Traditionally, it is made with 1 whole cup of EVOO and lots of chopped baby eggplant. It’s good, but if you don’t find just the right eggplant to use, the dish can be greasy and bitter. The recipe below is a take-off on Norma that includes all the same elements, but it is never bitter and uses much less oil (making Norma’s figure a little better!).

We found the greens for this salad by foraging in the woods and fields. You can forage farmers’ markets for tender young dandelion greens, purslane, wild fennel, and pea shoots to make a tasty salad. Even your refrigerator or kitchen garden might yield some goodies, like chives, tender young Italian parsley, thinly sliced red cabbage, or the yellow leaves from celery hearts.

Sweet nibbles of butternut squash temper the bitter edge of radicchio in every bite of this healthful, satisfying pasta.

Grilled fruit is a newcomer to the traditional Mediterranean table. This dish was inspired by a friend and chef, Nena Ismirnoglou, and then adapted by me for the menu at Pylos, a Greek restaurant in Manhattan's East Village.

Though you may not be familiar with the name, chilaquiles are the forebears of modern nachos. But the abundance of fresh, flavorful toppings—cool cilantro, salty queso fresco, crisp red onion—makes even the most fluorescent "nacho cheese" seem colorless.

These tasty cornmeal cakes can be found grilled, baked, or fried in several Latin American countries. We love this Colombian version—the outside fries up crisp and golden, while the cheesy middle stays wonderfully moist. They can be eaten as a side dish or paired with hot chocolate for an afternoon snack.

The classic frittata offers an elegant solution for those times when you have only eggs and cheese in the fridge. Combined with some of spring's freshest flavors, it provides a healthy dose of fiber, omega-3s, and vitamins A and D.

The classic cold soup seems almost restrained next to this lusty dish — gazpacho ingredients are grilled, then tossed with pasta and cheese (some of the vegetables are puréed to make a tangy sauce that lightly cloaks the whole). The sausages are cooked separately, so this recipe will come in handy when there are vegetarians around.

A few simple ingredients come together in an unexpected way to create a delicate beginning for a luxurious dinner.