Mozzarella

Add a salad and your meal is set. Or serve small squares for an appetizer.

These delicious ravioli come from the hot Buenos Aires restaurant Social Paraiso. Freezing the Brie for 20 minutes will make trimming the rind easier.

At the restaurant, this dish is drizzled with tomato sauce, then garnished with salami and sautéed zucchini.

Allow this salad to sit a few minutes after tossing; the mozzarella milk and tomato juices emerge and add flavor to the dressing.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Cal-a-Vie Living: Gourmet Spa Cuisine and is part of a healthy and delicious spa menu developed exclusively for Epicurious by Cal-a-Vie. We would not think of removing this lunch from our repertoire! After a decade, we have only made it better with homemade low-fat chipotle mayonnaise and sliced mozzarella.

The pesto is also great on portobello mushroom burgers, chicken burgers, and turkey burgers.

Susan Elizabeth Fallon of Boxford, Massachusetts writes: "I love to create new recipes to share with my husband, nine-year-old son, and friends. For me, that's the fun and adventure of cooking. I believe that eating well means using fresh, high-quality ingredients, so I'm choosy about what I buy and I grow many of my own herbs." Here's just what to do with all those tomatoes you have now. This versatile dish is great as a side, on toasted baguette slices, as a zesty omelet filling, or atop grilled fish.

This simple one-dish vegetarian meal is hearty without being heavy.

This version of the Italian classic is an irresistible mix of crusty-chewy bread cubes and colorful roasted vegetables, all bathed in a lusty balsamic vinaigrette. Be sure to use a good-quality French-style baguette, as a lesser bread won't keep its texture.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Entertaining with the Sopranos. To read more about the cookbook, click here.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Joan Nathan's book The Foods of Israel Today. Nathan also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Nathan and Israeli cuisine, click here. I remember with pleasure the Turkish Spinach burekas we ate every Friday morning when I worked in the Jerusalem municipality. The ritual was as follows: Simontov, the guard at the front door downstairs, would appear carrying a bronze tray with Turkish coffee and the heavenly, flaky pastries filled with spinach or cheese, called filikas in Ladino. It is rare today to have such delicious burekas, in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel. Most of the dough is commercially produced puff pastry, much thicker and less flaky than the homemade phyllo used to be. A few places, like Burekas Penzo in Tel Aviv (near Levinsky Street), which has been making the pastries by hand in the Turkish style for more than thirty years, produce a close second to those I remember from my days in Jerusalem. Various Ladino names like bulemas and boyos differentiate fillings and distinguish a Jewish bureka from a Turkish one. If you can find the thick phyllo dough, that works well. Otherwise, try this. My fifteen-year-old makes and sells them for fifty cents a piece. They are great!

Homemade, at least the way Self does it, fills you up without filling you out, but it takes an hour to make. Freeze the leftovers for quick meals that are more healthful than most of the ones you find in the freezer section of the supermarket.

Slice advice: One of America's favorite pastimes — going out for pizza — doesn't have to be a caloric catastrophe if you stick with the basic (like Pizza Hut Hand Tossed cheese) and stop at two slices. Steer clear of cheese-filled crusts; they can add 10 grams of fat per slice. We gave our homemade pie an advantage by adding broccoli, but there's no reason not to put veggies on a fast food or frozen one.

Wish you were here in Philadelphia, eating a cheese steak. No doubt about it, cheese steak is the quintessential Philly food. Too bad it can pack more than 60 grams of fat. To keep the greasy drippings from staining shirts, Philadelphians have learned the "Philly lean," a way of bending forward to the cheese steak rather than bringing it to the mouth. Self's "Philly lean" features a trimmer cut of meat, less cheese and more peppers so it has about half the calories and a third of the fat of the original — and provides 60 percent of your daily vitamin C needs.

A taste of Chicago: deep-dish pizza. Chi-town pizza lovers may be die-hard advocates of the deep-dish, but no matter how you slice it, thin-crust has one major health advantage: It's considerably lower in calories. But if deep-dish is the pie of your dreams, try this one, made with turkey sausage instead of traditional Italian and part-skim mozzarella. We even added some green peppers to sneak in a veggie serving.