Italy

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 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 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.