11 easy, cheesy recipes that taste like comfort (2024)

Kale and Fontina Pizza

Pizza with chopped meat, spinach and cream sauce (Getty Images/Eugene Mymrin)Image_placeholder

If you're in the mood for amping up the cheese quotient but a standard plain pie isn't your desired vibe, then this pizza is a top-tier option.

Copycat Hamburger Helper

Cheesy Hamburger and Macaroni Dinner (Getty Images/LauriPatterson)Image_placeholder

Toss that old box in your pantry out and make this instead. While you can customize, mix-and-match or swap as you see fit, the end result will be delicious, definitively cheesy and tailored precisely to your own tastes.With the unique inclusion of buttermilk powder, lots of cheddar and interesting notes of smoked paprika, you'll be amazed by this super-comforting dish.

As deputy food editor Ashlie Stevens writes, "This recipe takes a one-box convenience meal and turns it into a multi-ingredient dinner. Packed with surprising punches of flavor, itbelongs in your winter recipe rotation." Sounds like an A+ option, no?

Cheesy Turkey "Reverse Nachos"

Cheesy Chicken Reverse Nachos (Mary Elizabeth Williams)Image_placeholder

French Onion Soup

French onion soup (Getty Images/Anastasia Dobrusina)Image_placeholder

There's no need to wax poetic about French onion soup. It's an iconic dish and a stalwart for all of the right reasons. This version eschews beef stock and soggy bread, instead focusing on the highlights: a rich, sumptuous, dark broth and cheese atop of cheese atop of cheese, with some crispy, toasted bread (and lots of onions) to tie it all together.

Lasagna with Ground Chicken and Bechamel

Home made freshness beef lasagna with fine chopped parsley (Getty Images/haoliang)Image_placeholder

Lasagna is a true beacon of a dish. Aperfect one-pot meal, it's an easy dish to make and then wrap up with foil to deliver to a new neighbor or grieving friend. While lasagna doesn't require any sides, agreen salad, some crusty bread and some extra sauce andgrated cheeseon the side are certainly welcome at dinnertime.

Moreover, you can tweak the flavors, ingredients or inclusions as you see fit. I also love lasagna because it's a built-in leftover machine. If you make this recipe, you'll be having lasagna for lunch for the next few days. I don't know about you, but lasagna for lunch sure sounds lovely to me.

Dutch Baby Margherita Pizza

Dutch baby pizza (Mary Elizabeth Williams)Image_placeholder

As Williams writes, "I like this Dutch baby pizza in an easy to manage small portion, because it says 'dinner is served' when you don't even want to wait for takeout. The only trick is to show some restraint; this is ababyafter all, it can't handle a heavy hand with toppings."

Creamy Cheddar Mashed Potatoes with Mascarpone and Chives

Mashed potato in cooking pan (Getty Images/Anjelika Gretskaia)Image_placeholder

The culinary equivalent of a plush, warm pillow, thisdish is a dependable standard at every one of my holiday meals. Lush, soft, deeply cheesy and redolent with butter and cream, these mashed potatoes will never, ever go out of style.

While these potatoes are a holiday go-to for me, who says you can'tenjoy them on a particularly frenzied Wednesday afternoon? If you don't have mascarpone or chives on hand, no worries. All you really need here are potatoes, cheddar, cream, butter, water and salt.

Extra Cheesy Pumpkin Pizza with Onions

Pumpkin Pizza (Mary Elizabeth Williams)Image_placeholder

Williams writes that she "discovered my very favorite pizza in the world several years ago, on an autumn visit to a friend in Missoula. Normally, I would be skeptical of Montana as a pizza destination, but my friend is a former New Yorker and full-time Italian, so I trusted her. At Biga Pizza, we ate a magnificent creation of squash, caramelized onions and two kinds of cheese. I returned home determined to have as much of exactly that in my life as possible."

In her iteration of the pizza, Williams utilizes a can of pumpkin purée in a marvelous manner, combiningit with two cheeses, some herbs and a batch of caramelizedor sautéed onions. While some might lean into pumpkin (or pumpkin spice) only in the fall, there's no reason to limit your intake or minimize your pumpkin love to only one season. We eat butternut all year long, don't we?

Herbed Ricotta and Butternut Stuffed Shells with Brown Butter, Pesto Cream and Pepitas

Conchiglie pasta with pumpkin stuffing (Getty Images/VICUSCHKA)Image_placeholder

This stuffed shell recipe utilizes brown butter, pesto, cream and pumpkin seeds, along with butternut squash, herbs and ricotta to bolster your stuffed (and baked) pasta love to new heights. This recipe has a ton of different cheeses, herbs and flavorings, which will impress and tantalize even the most pasta-averse (if people of that ilk even exist).

On the recipe page, I write that "there's something deeply comforting and reassuring about stuffed shells: perfectly cooked, pliable pasta shells filled to the brim with the creamiest ricotta mixture imaginable,doused in sauceand cheese galore and baked until perfectly golden. It doesn't get much better than that, especially on a holiday." It doesn't get much better than this.

Fried Mozzarella Balls

Mozzarella Balls (Mary Elizabeth Williams)Image_placeholder

A smaller version of a mozzarella stick? We're in.

As Williams writes, "You can buy regular, low-moisture supermarket mozzarella, cube it up and fry it pretty effortlessly any night of the week. But there's something really cute— and really tempting— about those little cheese balls known as bocconcini. Round stuff is just fun."

Enjoy some piping hot, freshly fried mozzarellaat home with this stellar recipe. The cheese pulls will be truly Instagram-worthy.

Chicken Parmigiana

Chicken Parmesan Baked in Tomato Sauce (Getty Images/Lauri Patterson)Image_placeholder

Alas, the piece de resistance!

I worked really hard to develop this approach to classic chicken parmigiana, swapping the sauce-chicken-cheese parametersand instead going in a slightly different direction, which helps to place the focus on the crispness of the fried chickencutlets and the sheer amount of cheese used.

This is one of my favorite recipes of all time. I hope you will say the same after making it.