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 outside of the potato while I work. 

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 an industrial port city and naval base way south in Italy in the instep of the boot, facing the Ionian Sea and 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.