By Sara Moulton The Associated Press

Cheesecake is usually served cold. So brace yourself for something a little different.

This time of year, with the weather getting colder, I love to serve soup for supper. It’s an easy sell at my house, where The Husband is a soup-aholic. But with a soup this good, I firmly believe you can sell it to anyone. The trick is to amp up the flavour, vary the texture and make it substantial.

This recipe is a template for topping sauteed steaks or chops of most any kind with a wilted salad, a splendid dish for an early fall dinner.

Given how quickly it cooks, fish stands out as the perfect candidate for a weeknight meal, especially in the fall, when the resurgence of school and work can seem like the onset of hurricane season.

Watermelon and Cantaloupe Gazpacho takes advantage of the wonderful melons that are abundant at this time of year. It’s a refreshing end-of-summer soup and a choice dish with which to launch a Labor Day party. I call it a gazpacho, but I’m using the term very loosely because it makes no use of tomatoes.

Have you ever whipped up a spicy dish chili, for example and realized when it’s too late that you somehow overdid it and added way too much of the hot stuff? Happily, there are two very simple ways to restore some equilibrium: adding dairy and/or sugar. It’s a balancing act performed all over the world. The Indians serve their vindaloo with yogurt.

These days there’s never a time when we can’t find blueberries at the supermarket. But summertime is the season for the homegrown varieties. They’re abundant right now and can be used in all kinds of recipes.

If there’s ever a time when you can have too much of a good thing, it might be right now, when fresh summertime herbs are beyond abundant. Happily, this recipe for Fresh Herbed Yogurt Cheese is just the ticket when you’re looking to put a dent in the stockpile of herbs overflowing in your garden or taking up too much space in your refrigerator.

Everyone knows Joyce Kilmer’s love song to trees ‚Äî “I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree.” That’s the way I feel about tomatoes. Accordingly, Chilled BLT Soup puts the “T’’ in BLT. Yes, there’s bacon and lettuce, and some toast, too, in the form of croutons. But the star of this show is the tomato in its season.

Summer squash reproduces so energetically that calling it prolific is understating the case. Still, why not take advantage of its bounty? Here I slice the squash into long ribbons and employ it as “pasta.” Use a mandoline (be sure to use the guard that comes with it), although a Y-shaped peeler will also work. The resulting “pasta” is more flavourful and less caloric than pasta itself.