Italy

This arugula pesto is a surprise winner in the pesto department! It has a fresh, tingly flavor and a beautiful color.

The trickiest part about making this pesto is that the arugula takes up a lot of volume, so if you use a small food processor (which is fine for other pestos) you quickly overfill it with arugula before adding th remaining ingredients! 

I dealt with this by chopping up 3/4 of the arugula first, then milling the remaining ingredients with the last quarter of the arugula, and then milling it all together. It came out fine. How anyone would ever do this with a mortar and pestle is a mystery to me.

The southern stretch of the Italian boot on the western side, Calabria, has its own cuisine and naturally its own pesto, this one with fresh tomatoes, red bell peppers, and ricotta. It's pink like Pesto Trapanese but with a completely different flavor thanks to the cooking, the red bell pepper and the ricotta.

It's traditionally served on long pasta or on bruschetta with a bit of fresh oregano.

Here's a bright red, robustly flavored pesto with a strong backbone of sun-dried tomatoes and sweetness from ground almonds and pine nuts and a little fresh basil. 

Sometimes when people mention "red pesto", they mean the traditional Sicilian Pesto Trapanese, which uses fresh tomatoes. That has a milder flavor and a lighter color than this burly condiment.  

This delight from Trapani in far western Sicily is the next-best known Italian pesto after Pesto Genovese. You can see it's very different: it's made with tomatoes and almonds, which gives it a pinkish-red color. 

Some people refer to this as "red pesto', but that's to differentiate it from its better-known green sister from the north. I also have a Pesto Rosso recipe that's truly red and more robust than this charmer.  

Fillets of sole sprinkled with a variety of fresh herbs and then rolled up and poached, the poaching liquid becomes the sauce: it's very simple, but it demands the freshest ingredients.

This was a happy surprise! It doesn't sound like much, but it's easy, tasty, and you can certainly serve it to company.

The original recipe calls for Hake, but finding hake is pretty hit-or-miss in these parts. It's a local fish, but it's not always pretty and it's not well-known, so many fish markets don't carry it. But cod cooks up about the same, maybe a little bit slower for a fat loin, so it's an easy substitution for this worthy recipe.