This week I’m doing for this column what I often do at the end of a long day, cooking something quick and easy and pleasing.

I try hard to plan my work days, but I frequently end up working too late. And then it’s supper time. I am not a person who skips her evening meal, but I am a person who doesn’t like to take a lot of time cooking that meal when she is feeling worn out.

My stand-by quick things to eat are eggs. I like them scrambled, fried, omelet-ed, or poached, with or without leftover vegetables and cheese. A hearty salad can also please me in the evening.

On a recent evening, however, neither of those appealed. So I turned to a dish my mother used to whip up when she was running late and the family was hungry: Welsh Rabbit.

Welsh Rabbit, as most readers probably know, isn’t rabbit at all. And it may or may not be Welsh. (An argument for the Welsh moniker is that the Welsh do love cheese.) It’s basically gussied up grilled cheese.

I always thought that the dish’s formal name was Rarebit and that my mother called it Rabbit just to entertain herself and the rest of us. I learned recently, however, that it was called Rabbit long before the fancier term Rarebit (meaning a delicacy, a rare bit) came into use.

Various stories account for the use of the word “rabbit.” Some historians believe it stemmed from the traditional disdain of the English for their Welsh brethren. (They also looked down upon the Irish and the Scots.)

In her book “Rare Bits,” Patricia Bunning Stevens wrote, “The English, the Scots, and the Welsh do not always get along as well as most Americans might presume. The English traditionally scorned the Welsh as poor and not always trustworthy … When a new dish of melted cheese on toast was devised in the eighteenth century, it was jokingly called Welsh Rabbit, meaning that a Welshman, too poor to have meat, would call his cheese a rabbit.”

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Cheese enthusiast Evan Jones was a little kinder to the Welsh.

“I like the story that this dish, so much like fondue, got its name when Welsh wives, waiting anxiously, spied their husbands or sons returning from a hunt empty-handed and set cheese before the fire to melt, as a substitute for a dinner of game,” he wrote in “The World of Cheese.”

As a child, I never looked upon Welsh Rabbit as a substitute for anything. It was a beloved dish at the Weisblat table. We all were, and still are, cheese lovers.

I don’t have my mother’s recipe for Welsh Rabbit. I don’t think she actually had a recipe. She just threw cheese sauce together when it was needed. I have looked through a number of cookbooks and websites to identify common elements I liked, and the recipe below is what I came up with.

We’re not quite in tomato season, but I found a decent looking tomato in the grocery store and decided to add it to my dish. Welsh Rabbit isn’t exactly awash with vegetables so the tomato adds both flavor and nutrition. Another time I would probably chop it up a bit to make it easier to eat on the toast.

I sprinkled some chives on top of my Rabbit as well, and I followed it with a salad to add to the greenery.

Many Rabbit lovers like to assemble their toast and cheese and then melt the resulting goo under the broiler. My mother preferred to make a cheese sauce and ladle it over toast to that’s what I did here. The sauce is a little goopy, but the bread sops it up.

I have leftover sauce. (I can never prepare enough food for just one or two people; I always go a little overboard.) I’m refrigerating the sauce and will pop it onto some toast and then broil it for a future meal.

If you’re serving teetotalers, you may substitute a little milk or cream for the beer. The alcohol pretty much cooks off, however, leaving you with a pleasant, complex flavor.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup beer or ale or stout, divided

1/2 pound sharp Cheddar cheese, grated

1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard (Dijon or country) or dry mustard

1 pinch cayenne pepper (I couldn’t find my cayenne so I used crushed red pepper)

1 egg yolk, beaten

salt to taste

4 slices bread

1 small tomato, cut into slices

chopped chives for garnish

Instructions:

In a heavy-bottomed pan or a double boiler, combine the butter, half of the beer, the cheese, the mustard, and the cayenne. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the cheese melts. Remove from the heat.

Add a little of the cheese mixture to the egg yolk to temper it, and then add a little more. Stir the cheese yolk into the saucepan, and toss in a pinch of salt. (You can always add salt more later. The cheese is quite salty.)

Stir in the remaining beer or ale, and cook the mixture until it is warm but not boiling. Remove from the heat again.

Toast the bread, and butter it if you wish. (My mother thought buttering the bread helped the tomato and cheese stick to it.) Place a piece of tomato on each slice of bread. Ladle a generous amount of the cheese sauce onto each slice, and top with chopped chives. Serves 4.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning food writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.