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ItalyRombo allo Spumante This recipe is for Turbot (use Halibut on this end of the Atlantic) cooked in sparkling dry white wine and mushrooms. It's delicate and wonderful! I was gifted a bottle of Anno Domini prosecco by a neighbor. We don't drink prosecco very often, but I had seen this recipe and couldn't resist. And the recipe needs just a cup, so there's enough left to serve two for dinner! White button mushrooms or baby bellas are good with this. If you use mushrooms that are too flavorful, you overpower the sauce which is really quite nice if you let it be. Genoese Walnut Sauce This is the classic partner to Pansotti, a traditional Ligurian ravioli filled with Preboggion (a mix of herbs of the Italian Riviera). We can't get that, so I had to use a store-bought spinach ravioli. But the Walnut Sauce is the star of the show... I saw a few recipes, and this one from the charming blog A Small Kitchen in Genoa looked really good. It was certainly easy enough. I made only two changes: she calls for fresh marjoram and I substituted the more readily available (in Massachusetts in April) Oregano, and she skips the common step of soaking the walnuts in boiling water (which I did, without the unnecessary step of rubbing off the skins). So we had this with spinach ravioli, and it's not Genoa, but it was still mighty tasty! Black Tagliatelle ai Frutti di Mare This was an amazing discovery! Not a discovery for the world, in the sense that Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin meant it when he said "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star." No, it was just luck on our part that it came out so well. I'm glad, too, that I thought to prepare it in a pan that could be brought to the table, so I could assemble it nicely while it was still cooking. I'd been researching Italian pasta and risotto dishes, and I kept bumping into mentions of the black squid ink pasta. I'd seen it in shops but never had a reason to buy it.  But during the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020, I was actively pursuing interesting pasta dishes, so one sunny Saturday afternoon we donned our face-masks and went to Lo Adoro on Rte 6a on Cape Cod. I've bought plenty of research materials there this spring, and I remembered seeing the black tagliatelle. By the time we got home, I had assembled this Tagliatelle ai Frutti di Mare in my head for Friday, and it was wonderful! I hope you enjoy it. Potato Gnocchi
There are many recipes online. I'm sure there are lots of good ones; this is a good one, and it's simpler than many. You don't have to get too fancy with gnocchi (as long as they aren't heavy) because when they're on the table, the secret's in the sauce. Sometimes I'll make a batch of mashed potatoes for dinner, and plan to have enough for this recipe or for the Potato-Caraway Bread. Gnocchi con Burro e Salvia Potato Gnocchi with butter and sage is another easy and delicious marvel of Italian design. This is one of those handy recipes that uses only a few common ingredients. The Potato Gnocchi can be made ahead of time and frozen. You need fresh sage for this. If you don't have it in the garden, then you'll want to get some. The other three ingredients may already be in your pantry or refrigerator! Fusilli con Funghi
I found a couple of recipes for fusilli or other pasta with mushrooms, so I tinkered a bit and came up with a winner. One of the recipes that I saw included about a cup of chopped tomatoes. That might be good, but in my head I could taste the mushrooms coming together and decided to save the tomatoes for another day. I think this would be great with any dry Piedmont or Tuscan red. Fettuccini Alfredo, original Everyone knows that classic Italian favorite Fettuccini Alfredo! But most of what we get in this country is a rich, somewhat bland mass-consumption version of a very fine (if labor-intensive) recipe from Rome. The original version is well known and we'll worth making! Orange Sauce for Sicilian Fish
This is a revelation with the Pistachio-Crusted Swordfish , but it's also great with other oily predator fish.
Pasta alla Norma We had this all over Sicily and then in Rome. The photo here was taken in Siracusa, southeast Sicily. It's a classic Sicilian dish of simple ingredients that must be fresh and well-prepared. Make this in summertime when the eggplant is fresh and flavorful. The tomatoes can be fresh in season or canned, but canned tomatoes without preservatives are better than "fresh" tomatoes out of season (the tomatoes were fresh when they went into the can). I like Cento brand canned tomatoes. Bistecca alla Fiorentina Bistecca alla Fiorentina is maybe the original foodie's steak, with much lore about the great care needed in getting and cooking the perfect steak. There are also many misconceptions about this wonderful and expensive pinnacle of carnivory. While in Tuscany, I engaged in grueling research to get to the real facts of the matter. ;-) Bistecca alla Fiorentina, or Florentine Beefsteak, is a T-bone steak prepared with the finest beef and minimal other ingredients. It's all about the technique and the quality of the beef. That's where the first problem arises. Bistecca alla Fiorentina is prepared from the beef of the white Tuscan Chianina cattle. This is not your basic Black Angus or fancy New Zealand ribeye - the Chianina is very lean, but the cut used for the steak is tender as long as you don't overcook it. It's dry-aged 15-30 days. Of course, being so lean, you have a very small window to get it right, and its expensive so you can't afford a lot of practice.  The steak is unseasoned, except for a dusting of salt. It's cooked over very hot charcoal, very briefly, and served rare or on the light side of medium rare. 
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Potato gnocchi are easy to make and quick to cook, and they freeze well so you can have some set aside for when you need them.
I love fusilli! In many ways it's just another dried pasta, but its long, long corkscrews sure make dinner into something different.
