This is an easy dish with fine simple flavors, especially if you use farm-fresh peppers and tomatoes in the summertime. 

It would be easy to jazz this up with some basil or marjoram, or some olives or chili peppers... but the simple flavor of the peppers is wonderful with the sole and it really should be allowed to come though in its own simple glory. 

Amatrice is a small city in very central Italy. Occupied since prehistory, it was nearly destroyed by an earthquake in 2016. Right after that tragedy, many Italian-American restaurants added this as a special to help raise funds for the stricken community.

It's a simple, delicious dish, but not quite as quick as it looks. Pancetta is rendered and then cooked with onions and tomatoes long enough to become soft and mellow, then it's tossed with pasta, typically spaghetti or bucatini. 

Here's a traditional New Year's Eve dish eaten all over Italy! The lentils are supposed to remind you of an abundance of coins, suggesting prosperity in the coming year.

Cotechino is an ancient variety of fatty pork sausage that goes very well with lentils. Fresh cotechino are hard to come by, but you can buy shelf-stable vacuum-packed precooked cotechino from Levoni - that's what I used here and it was delicious.

Here's a vegetarian dish that's easy to make and fun to eat. Scamorza is a very stretchy-stringy-melty cheese.

It includes a teaspoon of curry powder, which might seem out of place in Italian cooking. Remember Marco Polo! Italian chefs included eastern spices in their pantries long before the potato was introduced from the New World. 

This homey treat is a fixture at church picnics and art-show receptions, but it deserves much broader appreciation. You'll notice when they are set out at an event, they're among the first dishes to disappear. 

I like to make these on rainy or snowy days when we plan to be in the house all day catching up on chores. These make an easy protein-based grazing lunch when you don't want to take time to sit at the table an noon. 

This is a dish that rewards creativity, and you keep an eye on balancing flavors, you can't really mess it up. Here's the version that Lorna likes. 

I had some ground pork looking for a way to be useful and this recipe looked intriguing - I love it!

The pork is mixed with ground almonds and fresh rosemary and sage, then formed into meatballs that are cooked on skewers of the rosemary branches that provided the rosemary needles in the pork!

There's a lot of ingredients here, but nothing weird. The trickiest part is getting multiple soft, uncooked meatballs intact onto the rosemary skewers! 

This is a nice, light, colorful risotto, bright red streaks against a white-golden risotto, with great flavor too. 

It's vegetarian, and it could easily be made vegan by substituting something for the parmesan cheese that you stir in at the end. 

This is a popular combination: shrimp and peas on pasta in a light butter-white wine sauce.

It cooks up quickly and you can use frozen peas and shrimp and dried pasta so it's one of those recipes that you can whip up on short notice, and it makes an easy weeknight dinner.

A pasticciata is a mess of something, and many recipes based on polenta are called Polenta Pasticciata con something or alla someplace. This one is in the style of Valle d'Aosta, way up in the far Northwest, up against the French Alps, so that means is uses the famous Fontina cheese, of which the best is the name-protected Fontina Valle d'Aosta.

The cheese is not stirred into the polenta when it cooks, but rather you take a stiff cooked polenta and layer it with cheese and butter and then melt it all together into a rich golden gooey mess - a pasticciata. This is a hearty cold-weather treat.

I found some mutton chops at Brown's Farm in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I'd always been curious about mutton, so I bought them. I was surprised to see that the favorite Italian preparation of mutton chops is Costolette all'Inglese, or Mutton Chop in the English Style!

This is a very simple recipe. In my opinion, the best value of having it written down at all is just to be quite clear how very simple it is: just broil the chops with butter and serve with salt and pepper.

Mutton is meat from an adult sheep, as opposed to lamb from the young sheep. Even mutton is seldom from very aged sheep, which is said to be quite gamey, but I'd like to try it sometime.

This well-known favorite dates back less than a hundred years. It was invented on the Neapolitan island of Ischia in the 1950s by a creative host who had hungry guests and little in the icebox to work with.

In Italian, "puttanesca" means something like "trashy", and it can be applied to prostitutes and to pasta preparations. In this case the inventive chef gave his dish a provocative name that reflected its scrounged origins and delighted his guests!

This is an amazing recipe that works best as an appetizer if served on its own. You could make a supper of it served with pasta or rice because the sauce is quite flavorful and it really benefits from having something mild to balance it.

This recipe has many ingredients and it uses many pans and burners. It's fun to make, and the result is amazing, but you really have to read it through carefully and assemble all of your ingredients and utensils first. Believe it or not, this is a simplified version of the recipe in the The Silver Spoon Cookbook!

Tocco is Italian for Touch. I don't know why this classic Genoese pasta sauce is called Tocco, but it's delicious in whatever language you use.

You braise a chuck roast with some Mirepoix and beef stock low and slow to extract all the flavor of the beef. Then the beef goes in the fridge for some other use - it's the now extra-flavorful stock that you're after. This is often served with ravioli, but it works with any pasta.

This is a great winter recipe! It simmers on the back burner for hours, warming the kitchen and smelling delicious. And when it's done, you have that "boiled beef'' all tender and ready for some other use, maybe as a ravioli filling.

I have examined many versions of this recipe. Many of them use one shortcut or another, some use additional or fewer herbs; this one seemed the most promising, and it worked out really well. I expect to make it every winter! 

This was a surprise! I don't usually think of olives and cream together, but this was delicious, and really easy. 

For the olives, get good tender Kalamata or Gaeta olives in a jar or from the deli counter, not those woody little horrors that come in a can.

This is usually made with penne, but any short pasta will do. 

This is a flavorful way to wake up cod.

Most of the work is preparing a basic fresh tomato sauce, so you could save time by using sauce from a jar if you are in a hurry, or just doctor a jarred sauce with some white wine and fresh parsley. I prefer the texture of the diced tomatoes to a smooth sauce; maybe you can find a sauce like that.

This is an interesting recipe! The chicken is cooked between layers of thinly sliced onion, and the liquid comes from a 2:1 mix of white wine and gin that slowly mingles with the cooking juices from the chicken legs and the onion. The only seasonings are bay leaf and juniper berries, so the flavor profile is different from many other Italian dishes. It's simple and delicious.

These sugar snap peas are delicious cooked "in bianco", which is to say just olive oil, onion, and white wine. You want very fresh sugar snap peas or snow peas for this, and a good white wine - not the best in your cellar, but something that you would be happy to share with guests.

This is another simple dish for a weeknight.

It's just a white fish dusted with flour and sauteed in butter in which you have also cooked some fresh sage leaves to flavor the butter, just like the Pork Chops with Butter and Sage.

I like this with cod, which responds well to many flavors, but it does get delicate when cooked, and easily broken, so this might not be a great dish to serve company for a fancy dinner. I bet it would be fine with lemon sole or gray sole. 

It's delicious on its own, but even better with an unoaked dry white wine, or a chilled dry vermouth!

Here's a simple and fast pasta dish with capers that can go with pretty much anything. It can easily be vegetarian if you omit the anchovy, and even vegan, depending on the pasta that you use.  

This is traditionally made with spaghetti, but I like to use short pasta like shells or the lumaconi shown here so the capers don't all sink to the bottom of the dish. 

Here's an oddball with something of a pedigree. It's named for the Clover Club of Philadelphia, a private gentlemen's club that served that city's captains of industry from the late 1800s up to about the time of Prohibition.

There's the original Clover Club Cocktail which uses an egg white, and then this "royal" version that uses the egg yolk, and this one uses lime juice instead of lemon juice. Both call for raspberry syrup, but grenadine is an allowable alternative.

Here's a superfast one-pan recipe for swordfish. 

Lemon and capers are common in Italian swordfish recipes because the strong flavors go well together and stand up to the strong flavor of the fish. Many other recipes include tomatoes, which also go well but which require a little more cooking time. 

This translates to "Meatloaf in the style of Modena", but it's really more like a cross between a traditional American meatloaf and a French ballotine or galantine: It has many ingredients mixed into the meat, and then it's poached in a fish poacher rather than baked.

This is traditionally served with boiled vegetables and Salsa Verde Modenese. 

There's no turkey in this dish! Cape Cod Turkey is a classic 18th-19th Century New England fish dish made with fresh or salt cod and dressed with white sauce and hard-boiled egg. It's a close relative of the smokey Finnan Haddie.

The version described here is made with salt cod, which would have been common in most of New England more than a short distance from the coast. Salt Cod, even after it's been freshened, has a denser, meatier texture than fresh cod. 

Here's another classic Sicilian presentation of their beloved swordfish, this one "for the glutton"! 

It's a pretty dish, and hearty with cherry tomatoes and green olives, suitable for company but easy enough for a weeknight.  

I had this old classic at Leunig's Bistro in the charming Church Street plaza in downtown Burlington Vermont to celebrate Joe Biden winning back the "Blue Wall" rust belt states in 2020.

I wanted something that suits an old guy and that honors those rest belt states, and the venerable Rusty Nail was just the thing. 

Leunig's has excellent bars both upstairs and down, well stocked, and beautiful with Art Deco decor. The bartenders are knowledgeable, so of course they had the ingredients and the know-how to make this fine cocktail! 

Drambuie is a liqueur made of Scotch whiskey blended with heather honey and spices. It's quite lovely, but expensive for a home bar where it won't be used much - but it's a nice Christmas gift!