Ground Beef

Beef and Roquefort have a long-standing culinary partnership, but the thick and sweetly smoky slices of barbecued red onions are what really make these burgers great. Keep the meal all-American with chilled beer, homemade lemonade and iced tea. A fresh peach pie with vanilla ice cream is a perfect dessert.

(Zucchini Meatballs) This dish, like stuffed artichokes and many others of this kind, is one of the many ingredients that go into a couscous. However, like the others, it is so tasty and delightful that it can be served as a main dish, and nobody will miss the couscous.

Grill thick slices of parboiled potatoes alongside the beef and serve a chunky tomato salad dressed with a simple vinaigrette. Purchased vanilla custard or pudding topped with fresh berries is a lovely way to end the meal.

A true demi-glace — the luscious sauce made by reducing homemade stock and red wine to a rich concentration — needs to simmer for several hours, making it the perfect activity for a lazy winter Sunday.

Located in a century-old coal warehouse that stoked the train coming from Albuquerque, the Zia Diner is in the National Register of Historic Places—and on many lists of favorite neighborhood restaurants. Regulars fuel up with such popular dishes as chicken-fried steak and meat loaf with green chilies and pine nuts. The latter provided the inspiration for another Zia Diner classic: spaghetti with chili and pine nut meatballs.

Serve these over rice as a main course, or offer as an hors d'oeuvre.

Made with spicy sausages and smoky grilled onion, these are not your standard burgers.

The people who count such things say that scrambles now outrank all other egg preparations in America's affections. This San Francisco creation — claimed by almost every Joe who's owned a restaurant in the Bay area — helps to explain the popularity. With the addition of ingredients as basic but as unlikely as ground beef and spinach, the namesake cook (probably Italian-American) turned straightforward scrambled eggs into a distinctive treasure of tastes. For a full sense of place, serve the eggs with good sourdough toast.

This dish, a specialty of northern Italy's Emilia-Romagna, is named for the regions capital city. Although the meaty sauce is classically paired with tagliatelle (ribbon pasta just slightly wider than fettuccine), it also marries well with a variety of pasta shapes that trap the savory sauce.

I love cheeseburgers, but I think that I like this meatloaf even better, especially when served with sesame-seed rolls and french fries.

This recipe is from Winnie Spazano, my second mom/housekeeper, who by day ran an elementary school cafeteria and by night cooked "something special" for my brothers and me. The following is a standout. As it was placed in front of my nine-year-old face, I thought, "I can't each something this large!" To this day, I don't understand the name.

Like American-style chili, picadillo is great over rice or with warm tortillas.