Lorna's been revisiting the flavors of her childhood, and one of them was the humble banana. She only likes them practically green, so she'd buy a bunch and then it was not very many days before I'd inherit three or four perfectly ripe bananas. Naturally this was my first idea, but there are many, many recipes for Banana Bread online.

I tried a few recipes, each with their own strengths, and this was my favorite. It's from James Beard's workhorse Beard on Bread.

We thought this sounded wonderful, but in the end it seems to invite further experimentation before setting before distinguished guests.

The recipe comes from the normally excellent Silver Spoon Cookbook, which inclines me to work more with this. There are only a few ingredients, so it's easy to overdo one of them. 

This quick and easy veggie dish has an unusual mix of flavors that works out well as a side dish in hot or cold weather.

When you start "tasting it in your mind", it suddenly seems copacetic with all sorts of dishes, from beef and pork to poultry to seafood. There's not much to it except for a brilliant combination of just a few flavors. 

This is best with a light vegetable or chicken stock. A beef stock would overpower the raisins. I don't know how well a fish stock would go.

This can be made a day ahead and reheated in the microwave. Leftovers store well. 

This is very simple and delicious! I've made it three times since learning of it maybe 5 weeks ago.

Halibut is a dense, meaty fish with a delicate flavor that responds well to light sauces.

It only takes a little while to cook this up and it requires just a few common ingredients, so it doesn't require much planning or preparation to have a nice dinner after work.

You can do this with sole as well.  

This vegetable side dish is easy to make and the presentation is pretty. Leftovers work fine as a cold salad, but reheating it can overcook the beans.

In Italian, you would call this Fagiolini Glassato al Sesamo.  

This was a special request from Lorna, reminiscing about her mom's kitchen. It's easy to make, requires only a few common ingredients, and it's not too sweet.

I liked this best with a cup of black coffee. I thought ice cream or whipped cream would be overdoing the dairy. 

This is baked at a pretty slow 300 degrees. A lot of ovens become less accurate at lower (and higher) temperatures, so it may take longer than you expect; it's a good idea to have an oven thermometer. 

This is a particularly nice way to serve that old favorite Spaghetti with White Clam Sauce. It's really easy, and attractive if you can get the fresh shellfish. 

The only trick to this is supplementing the dried angel-hair pasta and the canned clam sauce with some fresh shellfish for presentation (and nutrition, to be sure), and cooking ingredients for them. 

Of course, you can go "all in" and make the sauce entirely from scratch, and even make the pasta at home, and while you're at it, how about you go and dig those clams yourself? So this is the version for people who can't do all that, and you can feel free to put in any extra labor that works for you. (Don't forget to update the Preparation Time!)

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. 

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! 

When we explored Ireland in 2016, this was the most universal food we experienced. Everywhere we stayed, there was brown bread in the morning. There was some variation, but it seemed to be more a matter of creative license than anything regional; I remember that the brown bread in Derry in the north was very like what we had in Kinsale on the south coast.

I have seen many recipes for Irish Brown Bread; this one comes the closest to what we remember from that trip. 

Irish Brown Bread is not the same thing as Irish Whole Wheat Soda Bread. It's a little sweeter and moister, heavy enough to be substantial with a cup of tea for breakfast. 

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 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! 

I love fusilli! In many ways it's just another dried pasta, but its long, long corkscrews sure make dinner into something different.

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.

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!

This delicious bit of decadence came from my late friend Dexter, a past president of the Old Colony Club. We often serve it at gala events at the club.

This is one of those simple recipes that any fool can make (that is, the technique is simple), but it requires the finest ingredients that you can get, and the experience can be immeasurably improved in the right environment. This would work just fine at a Super Bowl party, but it responds very well to a fancy event!

This traditional Italian semolina bread is delicious and fun to make, but it doesn't keep very well. Fortunately it does freeze well.

The dough is easy to work with. It can be baked into many shapes; the sesame-sprinkled s-shape shown here is the occhi di Santa Lucia, or the eyes of Saint Lucy.

Deep in a cold New England winter, we had John and Christina over for a Sicilian feast to brighten things up. Most of these recipes came from a fine cookbook called Sicily, and most of these were dishes that we had enjoyed in Sicily. The Sicilian names are similar to Italian but not the same, for example "cu" for "con" - Sicilian is an old and proud dialect!

I list this as Eastern Sicilian because all of the showstopper recipes are from the Eastern and Southern slopes of Mount Aetna from Messina to Siracusa and west to the ancient Greek temples at Agrigento; someday I'll do a Western Sicilian dinner that touches on Palermo, Trapani, Sciaccia, and Marsala.

We started light with two appetizers before moving on to soup, salad, fish, meat, and dessert courses:

Maiale cu Cioccolatu is a Sicilian dish of pork loin with an exquisite savory rich chocolate sauce.

The town of Modica, in inland south-eastern Sicily, is known for chocolate. We went there in 2018 as part of our Sicilian vacation, but the town itself was crowded and the driving was not fun so we got out of there, having already acquired bitter Modican chocolate at the farmers market in Siracusa.

This dish, called (more or less) Pisci Spata in Crusta ri Fastuchi in Sicily the Cookbook is a pistachio-crusted swordfish very like what astonished me in Chianalea, the swordfishing port of Scilla at the very tow of the boot of Italy. I say more-or-less because that recipe is for monkfish, but Scilla is all about swordfish and that's how I had it. In all other particulars, this is how to replicate that heavenly dish.

This Caponata Croccante is the "crunchy caponata" on p135 of Sicily the Cookbook. 

A caponata is often a melange of flavors, typically based in eggplant and olive oil, to be served as a side salad or on crostini or bruschetta. 

This fresh caponata is finished before the final "stewing" process, making it "crunchy" but the vegetables are soft enough that it's not a problem but rather a benefit. The flavors are zesty and fresh, and it's a brilliant accompaniment to Passaluna to start a Sicilian dinner.

This large (336pp), colorful, and well-researched book by Sicilian-born NYC restaurateur Melissa Muller is a wealth of ideas to brighten a cold winter night with dreams of sunny slopes and seashores.

Two of my favorite ways to pass a winter night are planning vacations and planning feasts, and especially planning feasts that relate to vacations! In 2018 we went to Sicily, so the following January, when it was mighty un-Sicilian outside our Plymouth door, we made a feast!

I've made a number of the recipes in it, and they have all worked out well. Of course I have a mental backlog of more recipes to try...

It's amazing what happens when you heat olives. 

We think of olives as a kind of garnish or as a no-effort hors d'oeuvres served cold, but they respond well to heat. It unlocks rich flavors that pair with zesty ingredients like the orange and chili in this recipe.

Passuluna means specifically Sicilian salt-cured black olives, which have a wrinkly appearance. You rinse the salt first, so if you cannot find true passuluna, good black olives (not those woody horrors in the cans) work out pretty well. 

Of course you can tone down the Sicilian heat by using just one or even no chilies, but this recipe is very good as written. 

The origin story of this ancestor of the Martini is shrouded in fog, but it seems that it was developed in San Francisco (near Martinez, CA) in the mid-to-late 1800s, after the Manhattan but before the modern Dry Martini. The basic idea, equal parts vermouth and gin with bitters and a touch of Maraschino, is a clear descendant of the fancy cocktail formula of spirit + triple sec + bitters, except that vermouth adds complexity and Maraschino replaces the triple sec as the sweetening agent.

There's a ton of research on this classic, and a number of recipes have emerged. This version is a commonly-accepted one today, but it should by no means be considered canonical.

I did some careful reseach on this in 2019, during a vacation up the Pacific Coast from LA to Juneau, during which I sampled a number of Martinez cocktails at some very fine bars with knowledgeable mixologists. In fact, that's about the only place that you will find the Martinez, so it's good to know the recipe! 

It's still a good drink, especially to play with different gins and vermouths. It's much less alcoholic than a Martini, so it's good to have when you're out, if you're at a bar that has Maraschino. If not, try Triple Sec.

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.

This strange-sounding summer-time salad came to my attention when I was planning a feast to celebrate the Kentucky Derby; something similar is made at a ritzy hotel at Churchill Downs.

This is a simpler version and in my opinion better able to showcase excellent ingredients.