Italy

This pasta-with-mushrooms dish is different from the fusilli recipe, a little more tricky to make and I think more interesting. 

The original recipe uses dried and fresh porcini mushrooms, but the fresh ones are hard to get here so I used button mushrooms and the they they are cooked they were still memorably delicious. 

Bucatini is a long round pasta somewhat like a fat spaghetti. You could substitute spaghetti or linguini. 

Ragù is a generic word for sauce, except that for a lot of people the only sauce they mean is this super-classic meat sauce from Bologna. It's very rich, but well-balanced, and it's delicious with many wines.

This is usually served in generous amounts on small quantities of broad flat pasta like a tagliatelle. 

This uses a million ingredients and it takes some time to prepare, but you can easily double or triple the recipe and freeze the extra. Don't cut corners on the ingredients; they are all here for a reason, and together they make a great harmony of flavors. After all, if you were staging an opera and had no tenor, you wouldn't substitute a baritone and figure nobody will notice!

This piquant Lombard classic is best used as a side dish. The creamy-smooth risotto packs a pungent punch of Gorgonzola deliciousness, a little of which goes a long way.

This is a good side dish for a strongly flavored main course of beef or turkey, and with vegetable sides that will hold their own.  

If you want to serve this as a bigger part of the meal, then you may want something sweet to balance it; I think sliced pear or apple would go very well with this. 

This traditional Genoese recipe is fun and very easy.

Mandilli de Saea means "silk handkerchiefs", and the name comes from the very simple nature of the pasta: squares of very thinly rolled fresh pasta. Being so thin and fresh, they cook up in no time! These are best with a fresh-made Genoese basil pesto made with the best ingredients that you can get.

The Italian recipe that I have for this calls for porgy, but I can't get porgy so I used halibut and it came out great.

Fresh fennel is a great flavor to go with white fish. That's good, because there aren't many other flavors here to work with so the match has to be a great one! 

This is another of those recipes that goes great with pasta because you need a pot of boiling water anyway. 

This is totally decadent dish from the Piedmont region is suitable for most American vegetarian diners. It's expensive, so be sure to use top-shelf ingredients throughout. 

Unlike other mushroom risottos, this one uses only dried authentic porcini mushrooms. The Barolo wine is a luxury product, too, but you need just a cup for the risotto so you can save the rest for the table. 

Sedano alla Molisana is a simple and delicious preparation of a vegetable that is sadly underappreciated in American kitchens: the humble celery. The trick that turns it from watery crunchy diet "food" into something worth serving to company is easy: you boil it first for 10 minutes! That means it's a great side dish if you are cooking pasta for supper because you already have a pot of boiling water, just be sure to cook the celery first!

After that, it's just a matter of good, common ingredients. You don't even need much patience for this one! 

I think any Genoese recipe is bound to be interesting, and this simple spinaci alla genovese recipe doesn't disappoint. For starters, it includes golden raisins and anchovies!

That's not as weird as it sounds. A lot of Italian cooking uses anchovies as a seasoning, in small quantities; it's way more interesting than salt! And the golden raisins are also used in a lot of northern Italian recipes, along with pine nuts and various spices, all thanks to the region's medieval dominance of Mediterranean sea trade from the Orient. Venetian cuisine is equally fascinating.

Here is a nice, easy summer dish to go with grilled meats. It's essentially just beans with sage. 

The name means "beans like little birds" and nobody is really sure where the little birds come in, except that the seasonings are typical of those used in poultry dishes. 

You can optionally add tomatoes, but I like these with just the delicate flavors presented here along with some grilled meat or maybe a strong-flavored fish like swordfish or salmon.

You can use canned beans, but you get better flavor if you use the dried beans and refresh them yourself, as described here.