Italy

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. 

Tuna is popular in Sicily; it's used in this classic Sicilian dish, usually made with a long pasta like spaghetti, or the bucatini shown here, dressed with green olives. 

This is an easy recipe that comes together quickly so it's suitable for a weeknight after work.  

You don't use BumbleBee fancy white albacore tuna for this, but the more tender Italian preserved tuna belly in olive oil that we usually see in glass jars. You can always find it in an Italian market and sometimes in better supermarkets. 

This is a simple vegetable side dish that went great with halibut and again with a fancy dinner of shellfish on pasta.

I like how fennel pairs with seafood, and this recipe is very quick and easy.

This is a handy recipe to keep in mind. The fresh fennel is always available at the Stop & Shop supermarket near us, and it looks nice when served, too!

I use Trebbiano d'Abbruzzo for my cooking white wine, when I have it, but for this dish I was out of that so I went with my trusty standby, the Martini & Rossi Dry Vermouth - it goes with everything!

This beautiful golden risotto is rich and warming, and wonderful for a special occasion.

Risotto Milanese is not just a risotto in the style of Milan, but a real classic of Milanese cuisine with an origin story that features the wedding of the daughter of a master glazier from the cathedral.

It a pretty simple risotto; the magic is in the quality of the ingredients and the use of real saffron and top-quality parmigiano-reggiano cheese. The marrow is traditional but not often used in this country; I omitted it to keep the dish vegetarian.

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.