Italy

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.  

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 eh 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!

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.

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. 

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.