Grate bittersweet chocolate over red sauces: barbecue and pasta dishes, for example (hold the grated cheese). Beyond grating, chocolate provides richness in savory recipes: chocolate with meat and chocolate with chicken, for example.

Savory chocolate dishes go back a long way. Mole (pronounced MOE-leh) poblano, perhaps the most famous dish in Mexico, was created in the 16th century in Puebla, by nuns in the Convent of Santa Rosa in Puebla de los Angeles. The sauce has some 20 ingredients, including chocolate.

You can include chocolate in every meal. We’ve attended a few such dinners, and have salivated upon reading reports of others. Ideas include:

 
Find a wealth of cooking-with-chocolate recipes at AllChocolate.com.

Try these recipes for:

 
And check out the book, The Essence Of Chocolate: Cooking And Baking With Fine Chocolate, by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, founders of Scharffenberger Chocolate. Read our review of the book.