Blue Cheese

If you can’t find lemon thyme, use small, fresh basil leaves instead.

Just a little full-flavored blue cheese is enough to give a kick to this very-simple-to-fix entrée.

This pizza could be named Umami Pizza because it features the earthy flavors of mushrooms and Gorgonzola cheese. The radicchio provides a slightly bitter flavor for contrast and adds color. Sautéing the mushrooms and garlic in the wood-fired oven adds an additional layer of flavor.

When our late summer/fall cheater barbecue party guests deserve something fancier than sliced watermelon, we serve Swanky Figs. Like a good barbecue sauce, this dessert demonstrates the appeal of yin/yang balance—salty sharp blue cheese, creamy rich mascarpone, sweet honey, and tannic toasty walnuts. Go ahead and broil the figs early in the day. After dinner, discreetly step into the kitchen and reappear minutes later with a drop-dead platter of edible jewels.

A variety of cheeses work in this salad, but I particularly love St. Agur, a triple-crème French cow’s milk blue cheese. Its pungent and intense blue flavor is balanced by an unusually creamy and sensuous texture. When shaved into long thin ribbons, the cheese is elegant on the plate and delicate on the palate. To make thin ribbons, I use an old-fashioned cheese pull, a wide metal spatula-shaped utensil with a slotted blade in the center. Pears and cheese are always happy companions, so if you can’t find St. Agur choose another blue, or seek out a good sheep’s milk cheese, such as a Roncal, Manchego, or pecorino. We’ve had more than one customer order this salad as dessert, so you decide where it falls in the meal.

Local farmer Bill Coleman specializes in all sorts of exotic herbs and greens, such as curry leaf, epazote, purslane, and fenugreek. When he can, Bill travels to faraway places to source unusual herbs and spices and little-known fruits and vegetables. He carries home the precious seeds and plants them at his farm near Santa Barbara, providing a wonderful source of inspiration for us lucky local chefs. It’s always exciting to see what he will, literally, unearth next. A few years back, Treviso, a beautiful elongated relative of radicchio from the north of Italy, was his plant of the moment. Bill Coleman’s Treviso practically dared me to come up with a dish that would show off its striking magenta leaves and complex, slightly bitter flavor. I paired the Treviso with pungent Gorgonzola and drizzled both with sweet saba, a syrup made by reducing grape must with sugar. This salad-meets-cheese course is the perfect beginning (or ending) to an autumn meal.

My father hated salad. I remember him saying, “The only salad worth eating is one with green beans and foie gras, because it’s not all mucked up with lettuce.” And yet, somehow, I grew to love salads, especially the kind with leafy greens. This lettuce-free, classic steakhouse salad, made with first-of-the-season Early Girl tomatoes, sweet young red onions, and slabs of potent Roquefort, is a tribute to my dad, who I know would approve.

This not-too-sweet tart is the perfect ending to a spring meal. The key to keeping the pastry nice and crisp is to bake it ahead and then scoop out some of the center, to make room for the filling. Don’t overmix the ricotta filling or you’ll smooth away those luscious natural curds in the cheese. At Lucques, we add dried blueberries to the fresh blueberry compote, giving it an unexpected chewiness.

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are often derided as dry and bland. But I love pounding them and then grilling them until juicy. Their subtlety makes them perfect for a range of flavors—especially in salads. This is one I eat throughout autumn as a complete meal.

When watermelon ripens in the summer, I treat it simply to make it shine. Blue cheese turns it into a savory, refreshing salad and black pepper ties the whole thing together. To best match the juicy, crisp sweetness of the melon, I look for strong and sharp creamy cheeses. This tastes even better when the watermelon is cold and the cheese is room temperature and soft. In that case, it’s easiest to use a spoon to flick nuggets of cheese directly onto the melon.

This rich dressing spikes through the creamy goodness and answers that “why doesn’t my dressing ever taste this good?” question. This recipe works as well with Mini Buffalo Chicken Balls (page 9) as it does ladled over a thick wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with a few olives, carrot shavings, and crumbled bacon to create a more-than-satisfying classic salad. This dressing will keep for up to five days in the fridge.

This is a thick dressing perfect for dippin’ hot-from-the-grill Chicken Wings (page 19) in. If you want to serve it as a salad dressing, thin it down by adding a bit of milk slowly at the end.

Don’t get me wrong from the title—I treat these tender babies right. First you blacken ‘em in a smoking skillet and then finish ‘em off with a blue cheese-studded BBQ sauce. If that’s not respect, I don’t know what is.

Central and Western New York is “wing country,” so you’ve gotta have some good wings on your menu. Most places fry their wings according to the original Buffalo recipe, but we smoke ours. You can make them hot or mild on your grill just by changing the rub and the sauce you slather on at the end. We serve them with the traditional fixin’s—Blue Cheese Dressing and celery sticks.

In The All American Wine & Cheese Book, food writer Laura Werlin named Lively Run’s fresh goat cheese as one of the two best chèvres in the country. A concentrated burst of blue cheese flavor adds zest to an appetizer created by Steve and Suzanne Messmer of Lively Run.

Back in the day, when there was Sally Wong, when there was yellow pepper, and when there was tuna, David was doing endive salad and roast chicken. Although nonrevolutionary, this salad is always delicious. It’s on the menu often, especially in the winter when the garden is under a snowbank and the Parc Vinet Salad (opposite page) is a distant memory. Use Stilton in this salad; it works much better than other blues.

This recipe is from a trip that Fred took with Allison and her parents to the Czech Republic: “I was thirty, traveling in the back of an Opel minivan loaded with adults. The bottles of beer were always too small and the stops never frequent enough. This was back when I was ignoring a little gluten issue and drinking vast quantities of Czechvar/Budvar. Basically, this trip was like the Griswolds in Prague. “While visiting an old brewery’s beer garden, I noticed a ‘little things to eat with beer’ section of the menu. It was full of pickled herring, utopenec (pickled sausage), and cheese. We ordered them all, and when the cheese arrived, it was like a gathering of all of the cheese leftovers blended with beer. It was unsightly and completely delicious.” You will need four (4-ounce) cheese molds with holes or four Styrofoam coffee cups with holes poked in the bottoms and sides, plus four paper coffee filters to make the cheese.