At heart, this custard is a rice pudding, but here it’s given the creme brulee treat. Studding it with dried cherries puts it into a luxe dessert category.

This recipe is from Dan Kraan, one of our recipe testers. He adds tomatoes, onions, and sometimes garlic to his macaroni and cheese. Honest comfort food.

Dinner couldn’t be simpler. Pasta is cooked then tossed in a sauce filled with green and red peppers, mushrooms, and spiked with a touch of sherry vinegar.

This Christmas and Thanksgiving dish of wild rice is combined with freshly roasted chestnuts, cranberries, and apricots then baked in the oven. The sweet and savory notes hit just the right spot with guests.

Bucatini with nettle-pecan pesto is tricky, mostly because nettles bite back. But follow Jess Thomson’s advice, and you’ll have an uncommonly good dish.

Rich eggplant serves as the crust for this timbale, or stuffed dish, filled with pasta, beef, sausage, mozzarella cheese, peas, and a lusty tomato sauce.

This is a complete winter’s meal. It’s hearty and vegetarian, rife with fat beans, fennel, and plum tomatoes sitting on top of creamy, cheesy polenta.

This is rice pilaf with cherries and pistachios is perfect side dish for poultry dishes. The pistachios add a bit of crunch and the cherries sweetness.

Make this rich, vegetarian walnut sauce with stuffed pasta for the ultimate comfort meal. The nut flavored sauce is thickened with Italian bread.

The warm lentil salad, filled with the earthy flavor of lentils, slab bacon, onions, and shallots, is tossed with a walnut oil dressing. A great side.

Bulgur is the heart of this vegetarian chile, giving it body, but other grains such as wheat, rye, kamut, spelt, hominy, and millet could be used.

For something different, try these Udon noodles cooked in green tea broth. A quick, easy to make vegetarian dish, the recipe includes garnish suggestions.

Cavatelli with turkey sausage gets flavor boosts form tomato and broccoli rabe. The cavatelli can be made in minutes, so have the family at the table.

This baked kibbeh is an easier-to-make cousin of the work-intensive classic. The ground lamb base is crowned with a savory onion and pine nut topping.

Sesame-peanut noodles, those slurpy, peanut butter-y wonders are the true test of Chinese restaurants. But you can make akiller version at home.

Paella, the classic Spanish dish, is given the full treatment here. You don’t need a paella pan to make this paella recipe, either. A Dutch oven will do.

For a quick, satisfying dinner, make this pasta salad with strips of seared sirloin ahead of time. Refrigerated or fresh, any flavor of tortellini will do.

Creamy risotto flavored with lemon zest and is studded with shrimp that’s sauteed in a garlic-chile pepper mix. Tangy, hot, sweet, silky.

These intensely flavored vegetarian main-course or side-dish cakes are rich with mushrooms, sticky rice, shallots, scallion, and black sesame seeds.

For this Italian recipe, rigatoni pasta is tossed with tomatoes, onions, mozzarella, eggplant, and a bit of cream. Pure comfort and kid-friendly.