Here's a humble, very traditional cool-weather dish: slow-cooked lentils.

Lentils are serious business in Italy; they are supposed the bring luck for the new year and are an indispensible part of those festivities, and in the cooler months they are served in soups or cooked like this and served with sausages - a rib-sticking dinner, as my dad would say. 

There are different varieties of lentils. These are La Colfiorito lentils from Umbria, like the Castellucio lentils from Umbria, a green-brown variety that holds its shape after cooking like the gray-green Puy lentils from France. That's important for this dish, so it doesn't become a mushy mass.

Perfection and elegance are embodied in this simple summer salad, when it's made with fresh, good ingredients and an eye for attractive presentation. When we were in Italy in 2015, Lorna had this every day for lunch while she grew comfortable with  authentic Italian cuisine. 

Many American restaurants make up for low quality factory farmed tomatoes by drizzling it with cheap oversweet Balsamic vinegar, but this only ruins good ingredients. I only make this when tomatoes are in season locally; it's something worth looking forward to the whole rest of the long year!

An amazingly simple and flavorful treatment for an inexpensive steak cut - thin-sliced and cooked in a pungent tomato sauce. Sometimes on Fridays I see steaks marked down so I grab one for lunch. One little steak makes two lunches, and it's so easy that it doesn't disrupt my day.

There are, of course, a thousand variations on this, some quite fancy, but from my reading this seems a common way, and I like it best.

The taste of late summer, to me, is that of very fresh tomatoes from the farm, tomatoes that never saw the inside of a refrigerator or rode on a tractor-trailer across state lines.

If you can't make this with farmer's market fresh tomatoes, don't use supermarket tomatoes! Canned tomatoes were at peak freshness when they went into the can, but supermarket tomatoes are bred for shippability and picked unripe, then artificially "ripened" in the truck with ethylene gas. Of course, artificial ripening is artificial, away from the sun, and it's the sunshine that the plant uses to make the fruit sweet.

We got lucky a couple of times this summer when our favorite fish market got in some fresh trout. Here is an Umbrian recipe for trout cooked in the simple style of the anglers who pull them from the tumbling mountain waters of the River Nera and grill them with fresh rosemary and parsley over a campfire. 

In my dreams, there's a bottle of Frascati chilling in a quiet pool of the river, and a few branches of dried old rosemary in the fire! 

I got this recipe from a delightful blog out of Genoa, but of course I had to substitute cod for sea bream, and I used my braising pan instead of the somewhat messier parchment because it does almost the same thing. 

The key thing, in any event, is the seasonings. That's what makes this a Ligurian-style recipe: fish cooked with capers, pine nuts, olives, and plenty of fresh herbs all feature prominently in the cuisine of this little northwestern-most coastal province, home of Genoa.

This is one of those homey recipes that can be great for kids but that is also easy to dress up for company. 

When I was a kid, my mom used to put peas in everything, I suppose as a way to get us to eat a green vegetable. To this day I am still suspicious when I see a perfectly good dinner with peas lurking inside... But this really is a good recipe. 

This is also traditionally made with salmon, and of course salmon and peas are a famous combination, but  it takes a little more care to cube the salmon and cook it without breaking it all to pieces, so I like this version for a weekday night.

Here's a delicious way to serve sole, one of my favorite fish!

The fish is dressed with a fine egg-yolk-thickened sauce and served over sauteed mushrooms.

If you have never tried an egg yolk thickened sauce, there's nothing to be afraid of, and this is a good recipe to practice on because even if it goes badly you still have the sole and mushrooms for dinner!

This is another simple 30-minute dinner that relies upon top-quality ingredients that are, fortunately, readily available in coastal New England for most of the year. 

The original for this recipe calls for hake, a different flaky white fish, but haddock cooks the same way and the flavor goes very well with the shallots and lemon juice. So this is an Italian preparation made with local New England fish. It's not that hake is not local to our waters; you can sometimes find hake at bigger fish markets, but it's not nearly as popular as haddock, which you can get everywhere around here and it's every bit as good as or even better than hake in this preparation, in my opinion. 

This was yummy and simple, just pan-fried fish served with tender cooked thinly-sliced leeks. The mild flavors complemented each other nicely. 

In the photo here, the leeks are closer to you, and the red onion beyond is Cipollata Calabrese, which made a nice contrast both visually and in flavor, while staying in harmony. 

Here's a wonderful dish suitable for company and a beautiful table. The halibut sits on a bed of pureed seasoned potatoes and is surrounded by littlenecks and dressed with a savory saffron sauce. It's exquisite!

There's a lot to this recipe, both ingredients and steps, but none of it is particularly rare or difficult; you can make this any time that halibut is available, and after the first time it is really not hard. 

Salmoriglio is a classic Sicilian sauce for grilled fish and meats. It showcases flavors typical of Sicily and Greece (2500 years ago, Sicily was a major part of Magna Graeca). 

This is great with strong flavors like grilled beef and oily fish like swordfish (shown here). In the fridge, it solidifies to a spreadable consistency, but then it melts into seasoned olive oil when spread on hot food.  

Messina is in northeast Sicily, at the point closest to the boot of mainland Italy; that's where the ferries come in from Reggio di Calabria.

Swordfish alla Messina is a classic local dish. Every summer when the swordfish pass through the Strait of Messina, the local fishermen go out in specially-modified boats called feluccas to bring them to the table fresh daily.

When we went to Italy in 2018, we stayed a night in Chianalea, a fishing village along the waterfront of Scilla, on the east bank of the Strait of Messina. The village is built on the swordfish fishery, and you get the freshest fish there. I enjoyed a very memorable Pistachio-Crusted Swordfish that night!

This dish brings together some of the classic flavors of Sicily: almonds, capers, and tomatoes. If you were in southern Italy or Sicily, you would use the celebrated oblong sweet red onions of Tropea, just north of the toe of the boot, but regular red onions work OK too.

I found some beautiful green cauliflower at Beth's Farm Market in Warren, Maine, so I knew that it was time to make this interesting and delicious veggie pasta dish that I'd had my eye on. It includes golden raisins and pine nuts, and a little bit of saffron, like many Venetian recipes.  

This is a Sicilian recipe, and Sicily produces some enormous cauliflowers in purple, green, and golden colors. At Beth's the green one looked the best, so that's what I used for dinner for the two of us, but if I were making a bigger batch I'd like to mix colors and see how that looks. 

The original Italian recipe called for John Dory or Pomfret, but we don't find that in our local fish markets so I tried it with haddock, and I recommend it. 

This recipe is a little different from most fish recipes here so far because the haddock is pan-fried. Haddock around New England is traditionally sold with the skin on, but you don't really have to skin it as long as you remember to tell your diners which side is up! 

This should work equally well with cod. 

These braised onions from the northwestern foothills of the Alps are simple and delicious, especially since perfectly good pearl onions are available frozen year round.

Serve this with any meaty dish, especially those from the Piedmont and Lombardy regions, and substitute appropriate stock for the vegetable stock. On the other hand, you can make this vegan by following it as written and substitute the more oil for the butter. 

This is a logical  variation on a nineteenth century recipe, recognized by Enrica at the delightful A Small Kitchen in Genoa blog.

In the photo, the whole mussels are just a garnish; the real point of this recipe is the sauce, made from seasoned finely chopped cooked mussels. It was delicious, and not at all difficult to make! 

One of the tricky things about trying to cook Italian recipes in New England is that many of the ingredients are different, especially with regard to seafood. Most of Italy is far closer to where the crops are grown than New England is to California's Central Valley, so their produce tends to be fresher all year round. But for seafood, the fish and shellfish in our waters are in most cases very different from Mediterranean waters.

This recipe calls for Maine shrimp, the delicious little cold-water shrimp from the Bay of Fundy that are not the same as "salad shrimp" that you can get at some food service outlets. Italy has shrimp of all sizes, including little shrimp like these, but I doubt that they are the same species in those warmer waters. Nevertheless, they get us closer to the way this recipe would be made in Venice or Genoa.

A favorite pasta dressing from Genoa.

This was great with boxed penne pasta, but it was absolutely sublime when made with all the best ingredients to dress Mandilli a Saea (see Fresh Pasta ) for a birthday dinner!

In much of Italy and in some parts of this country, rosemary grows year-round and people have hedges of it, but in Plymouth this is one of those taste-of-summer dishes.

It's an easy and flavorful vegetarian pasta dish. It's mostly just chopped tomatoes with a blast of fresh rosemary, a great combination.

Here's a subtle and delicious creamy white pasta sauce that is easy to prepare in just the time that it takes to cook the pasta. 

You want to use good pasta, because the flavors are not strong and a good pasta shines through. We used Garofalo pappardelli in this photo, but I think it would work fine with most types of pasta.

This is a good primo dish before chicken or fish main dishes.

Here's a light sweet blast of summery fresh flavor for long pasta, like the fat round bucatini shown here.

As with many Italian recipes, there are not many ingredients, and quality is paramount. In this case, the usual olive oil, garlic, and onion are accompanied by garden fresh red and yellow bell peppers, a little cream, and a pinch of fresh marjoram (or oregano if you can't get marjoram). 

Use farm-fresh peppers if you can; they have more flavor than the supermarket variety because they can be sold within a day or two of harvesting instead of spending a week in a refrigerated truck! 

I found this elegant recipe in the excellent Classic Food of Northern Italy by Anna del Conte. It's not hard to make, it cooks quickly, and it's fine enough to serve to guests as a course at a fancy dinner.

You have to use good saffron to get the full effect of this dish. The sauce is exquisite as it pairs with the delicate sole. 

Here's a simple, sturdy vegetable dish with what Americans might think of as a peculiar mix of flavors, but they go well together. I especially love how olives are transformed when they are cooked into a dish!

The original recipe calls for fresh beans and tomatoes. I tried it with frozen beans and canned tomatoes and it came out fine, and it was much less work!

The original recipe also called for quartering the olives, but I left them whole and didn't even pit them; as I said I really like cooked olives in a dish and I prefer the flavor blast of getting them whole (and it makes it easier for Lorna to pick them out!) 

This reheats well, so the next time I make it, I will double or triple it and have the leftovers with lunches, where I really should get more vegetables.