This is a simple, homey dish, and a good combination for a ribsticking winter lunch.

Lorna had secured a big fat Eastham turnip, knowing how well I like those, so even though it's not an Italian variety, it did a great job in this dish. 

There's a lot of confusion in these parts with regard to the humble turnip. If you care about such details, I refer you to New England Heirloom Turnips & Rutabagas. The executive summary is this: turnips tend to be small and white inside, and the large yellow-fleshed root often referred to in New England is really a rutabaga. In the photo above there's only the Eastham turnip (white inside); the orangey pieces were colored by the sausage fat.

Here's a strange and delicious dish from the mountains of Valle d'Aosta.

It's odd to see fish and red wine together. It works here, but you want to use a lighter Piedmont red like a Dolcetto or a simple Nebbiolo, or an inexpensive Pinot Noir or Chianti. 

You make a sauce by preparing a regular soffritto and cooking it in the wine, then you thicken it with a roux, so there's flavor and texture that you want to complement the trout. The fish is baked whole or headless in the skin, so when the diner takes a fish and opens it on the plate, s/he can spoon on as much or as little sauce as desired.

Here's an easy potato dish when you want something lighter than a scalloped potatoes and more interesting than Steamed New Potatoes or Italian Roast Potatoes. Parsley, chives, and butter are all natural allies of the humble potato, and the shallots and white wine bring it to another level.

There's one tricky part to this recipe: you have to quickly peel and slice the potatoes when they are hot from boiling. To do this, I keep a bowl of cold water in the sink so I can cool off my fingers and the outisde of the potato while I work. 

This simple and flavorful recipe works with any white fish, including halibut and swordfish. It's great for a weeknight because it's easy, and while it's not as quick as some other recipes, you don't have to hang over the pan the whole time.

This is a really old classic, from not long after the American Civil War.

Legend has it there was a joke going around in those days, quite a fad, in which the joker would ask a victim if he knew Tom Collins. Back in the days before mass immigration and the coming of the Kowalskis, the DiFrancescos, the Sousas, the Suzukis, and the Rodriguezes, if you knew a hundred people there was a pretty good chance that you knew a Collins.

Well, the way the joke goes, Mr Collins had said something very rude about the victim, who would roll up his sleeves and storm off muttering "Why, I oughta..." before ending up in an embarrassing situation.

Like the Monkey Gland and others, the joke begat a drink, and this is it.

This pasta dish is characterized by the inclusion of a fresh chili pepper in a simple sauce of tomatoes cooked in garlic-scented oil. Arrabbiata is an Italian word for angry; that's the chili pepper. Naturally depending upon your tolerance for angry tomatoes, you can add as much chili pepper as you like. This version is quite mild, with just the taste of the pepper and very little heat.

You can use dry or fresh chilies. If you use dried chilies, don't chop them and then they are easy to remove so nobody accidentally get more than they expected.

This is traditionally served with short pasta like penne or ziti. 

This is another of those dishes that you see more often in American restaurants than in Italian ones, but this one is authentically Sicilian, as Marsala wine comes from Marsala town on the western tip of Sicily.

The original recipe calls for grilling the shrimp on skewers, but I do this even in inclement weather by pan-frying the shrimp instead. 

This is a humble classic dish of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta, in the mountainous northwestern corner of Italy.

Mushrooms are common in the cooking of the mountain regions, especially in the fall and winter months. Here, a mix of varieties is sauteed and served atop a hearty polenta enriched with a bit of aromatic local Fontina cheese.

This is a pretty dish with a tasty sauce of very lightly cooked tomatoes flavored with roasted green bell pepper. That's an ingredient I haven't seen much, but it works very well in this sauce with this fish. In fact, I saved the leftover sauce and had it with some broiled haddock, and it was great there too.

After the first time I made this, I liked the sauce enough that now I make double the amount of it to ensure some left over. The recipe below is for the double amount.  

A simple, homey favorite that opened our eyes when made with the right potato! We had recently made a long weekend trip to Maine's Aroostook County, where I had bought a 20-pound bag of local Potatoes of the Green Mountain variety. I had read that this variety is considered the tastiest and the best baking potato of all the types grown in Maine, and indeed was the potato that "put Maine on the map". 

We were so surprised that the next night I baked a couple more, and then the following night I bought and baked an Idaho russet potato alongside another Green Mountain potato for a real comparison.

There was no contest. The Maine potato had a far superior flavor. They both baked up nice and fluffy with nicely crispy skins, but the Idaho potato tasted like nothing. 

Now I am glad that I bought 20 pounds! 

Taranto is and industrial port city and naval base way south in Italy in the instep of the boot, facing North Africa. Its food is heavily influenced by that of nearby North Africa, as shown in this dish. With the layered aromatics and potatoes and other vegetables, the limited liquid and the slow cooking, this is clearly descended from the North African Tagine. In fact, the next time I prepare this, it will be in my tagine dish rather than the baking dish shown here.

It looks like a big dish, but it's not heavy and it's really good; the two of us ate the whole thing! 

This has to be the recipe with the name that's the most fun to say - say "ahl-yo ee ohl-yo" three times fast!

This piquant pasta preparation was a favorite lunch of mine many years ago when I worked in Milford, MA, and could get lunch at an unassuming watering hole that had a few old Italian specialties like this and Porchetta. 

It's not as spicy as you might think, but it's easy to amp up the basic recipe for more punch if you like it that way. 

This is one of those superfast dishes that you can whip up in the time it takes to boil the pasta!

This is an American dish, unknown in Italy except through American tourism. In Milan, veal gets the treatment that we think of as piccata. That's because in Italian, the word piccata means a thin escalope of meat, usually veal. It's commonly dressed with a lemon or lemon-caper sauce, and called Piccata al Limone or something similarly descriptive.

In the USA, the Italian-Americans from Lombardy served it in the traditional Milanese fashion, and restaurants would call it Veal Piccata, or escalopes of veal served in the usual way. Americans came to think of Piccata as being the sauce rather than the cut, and extended it to chicken and fish as well.   

This treatment works great for sole, too, and Lorna doesn't eat veal, so here you have Sole Piccata.

Here's an old Yankee favorite! 

I'm told that it used to be that a fisherman who caught a halibut would sell the fish but keep the cheeks for his own dinner. I don't know if it's still done that way sometimes, but I got these from a fisherman who didn't eat them. 

They are tender and delicious, and they can be prepared pretty much any way you would use sea scallops. I like them dredged in cornmeal and fried in butter or baconfat.

Some people add a dipping sauce of some kind, but I like them hot from the skillet with nothing else.

The original recipe for this was tasty but difficult, so I've modified it slightly: please see the notes below for details.

The flavor is good, and the combination of pumpkin and artichoke is a fine one to open an autumn dinner with friends.

This delicious dinner came from an old cookbook that has great photos and numerous text errors. Every recipe must be thought through carefully to see if anything is missing, measurements are suspicious, etc. But it has some great ideas, like this one. For example, this one is called "Mussels with a Sea Tang", but there's nothing that I see as maritime except for the mussels themselves! Anyway, it's delicious.

Here's a colorful, simple, and delicious pasta recipe, traditionally served with spaghetti or other long dried pasta, and never served with cheese.

This old recipe took a while to bring into the 21st Century. It uses air-dried cherry tomatoes, which are much more tender and delicate than sun-dried tomatoes. In the old days in southern Italy, cherry tomatoes would be threaded onto strings and hung to dry as a means of preservation and to contentrate their flavor. Today's tomatoes are bred to be shipped to markets far from where they are grown, and their skins are tougher so they don't dry as well. However, preserved semi-dried cherry tomatoes have the same concentrated flavor, see the Notes below. 

On Friday, 9 October 2020 we had a Beef Fancy & Plain feast in the backyard of Lance and Lynda Hylander. There were 8 diners, of which the 6 men stayed outdoors but the two women went indoors when it got too cool for them. We were dining outdoors to limit the risk of Covid19.

This whole event came about through seven different kinds of luck, starting with the improbability of the celebrated Tuscan Chianina cattle now being raised by an enterprising rancher in El Paso; see the TuscanCattle link below. On top of that, we had friends with a roomy backyard, perfect weather, (mostly) great wines from the cellar, a truly skilled grillmaster, and best of all, great dining companions!

Here's what we had:

I'm told that this is the most common way of serving pasta with pesto in Genoa, the home of Pesto Genovese, or basil pesto.

Trofie is a dense, chewy pasta with a short, twisted shape that holds lots of little flecks of basil and tiny fragments of pine nuts. With fresh pesto, you get a real mouthful of flavor! A small serving is a great introduction to a larger meat or seafood course.

I don't know why this is called Carbonara, literally "in the style of the charcoal-makers", but it's rich and delicious, and (as my sister pointed out to me) with some kinds of pasta, it's low in carbs!

I remember this as a sort of "breakfast pasta" because it's made with bacon and eggs. It's easy and very fast to make, but you may want a big bowl for the last-minute tossing with the eggy-cheesy dressing if your skillet isn't big enough for that messy step.

Here's a great savory fall dish that highlights that autumn star, sugar pumpkin, in a way that complements both meat and fish dishes, and is excellent on its own for the vegetarians.

An awful lot depends on your pumpkin, both the size and how long since it was picked, as well as how thin you slice it. A fresh new pumpkin can be cut thicker and be ready sooner, but it's hard to overdo it, so don't get stressed - it's going to be terrific.

This would be a fine side dish to go with the Thanksgiving turkey!

I stumbled upon this recipe in a cookbook that I inherited from Richmond and Annette, with the page corner turned down. Naturally I had to investigate. It's summery, delicious, and very easy!

This is a simple savory dish suitable for a work night. The sauce is simple enough that you can double it so you have extra to go over rice!

The original recipe calls for perch, but like many dishes for the flaky white fish, the same recipe works fine for cod and haddock and other fish common in New England waters. This recipe has delicate flavors, so I like it best with cod.

Nothing could be simpler than this epicure's favorite from centuries past - good pasta tossed with a Great Single-Estate Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and savory bottarga, like gold dust on your dinner.

Bottarga is the dried, compressed roe of either mullet (Sardinian bottarga) or tuna (Sicilian bottarga). The ancient Romans used bottarga as a salty-fishy seasoning similar to the way we use anchovies today, but the gratable form offers more culinary options. Of course, they had no pasta a millennium before Marco Polo's famous voyage of discovery, but we do now, and it's a very fine match indeed!

We were in Ireland in 2016 during the time that strawberries were being harvested in Wexford. They were available all over Ireland, fresh and flavorful, and this rapidly became Lorna's favorite dessert. If I remember correctly, she had it in Kilkenny, Waterford, Bantry, Galway, Derry, Belfast, and Dublin!

You really have to make this with local strawberries, because the flavors are few and delicate, and the perfume of a truly fresh strawberry brings an ethereal specialness that you just can't get from those little plastic horrors that come from California in November.

I like to garnish it with fresh mint leaves and toasted almonds, but that's optional. 

You can make your own meringue, but drying the meringue is very time consuming, especially on a humid July day. You can buy decent meringues at a bakery and save all of that time.