On the first night of Spring, I made a casual but special dinner of pickle-brined fried chicken with creamy mac and cheese and crisp green beans on the side, with chocolate-covered graham cracker cookies for dessert.

The easiest, most flavorful fried chicken ever, Pickle Brined Fried Chicken is great on its own but even better in a sandwich that blows the fast food version away.

These perfect soft chocolate chip cookies have craggy tops and moist gooey middles packed with semisweet, milk chocolate and white chocolate chips.

Cherry Crumble Tart has a glossy, intensely fruity, jewel-toned filling between a tender shortbread crust and a buttery crumble topping.

Does Sweet Potato Casserole qualify as a vegetable, with its crispy crunchy topping of brown sugar and pecans? Who cares, it’s the holidays.

This easy Pumpkin Bread is moist and dark, deeply spicy, studded with walnuts and topped with a crunchy cap of cinnamon sugar. 

This easy, no-bake Pumpkin Spice Icebox Cake has lighter-than-air layers of fluffy pumpkin mousse spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove, smothered with whipped cream and scattered with shards of chocolate-covered toffee.

Forget dunking your grilled cheese in this thick, creamy, slightly spicy, deeply tomato-y soup – it’s already in there. Cubes of grilled cheese become “croutons” that are much more than a garnish in this warming, hearty soup.

No crumbly oat topping on this Old Fashioned Apple Crisp. Instead, a brown sugar, pecan-studded batter forms a cake-like cap that encloses the soft, cinnamon-scented apples underneath.

Sweet, creamy-textured, pan-seared sea scallops rest on a medley of fresh corn, red pepper, onion and smoky bacon in a silky, slightly-spicy sauce.