Italy

Here's one of those hearty rib-sticking dinners that must surely be unhealthy but it's mighty comforting on a cold January night!

This uses two very different cheeses: the Taleggio adds robust flavor, but you can substitute Italian Fontina or Parmigiana-Reggiano), and the Scamorza brings a stringy-zingy cheesy fun to the dish (a smoked Scamorza is just at stringy and adds a nice smoky flavor for a snowy night).  

This is an easy dish with fine simple flavors, especially if you use farm-fresh peppers and tomatoes in the summertime. 

It would be easy to jazz this up with some basil or marjoram, or some olives or chili peppers... but the simple flavor of the peppers is wonderful with the sole and it really should be allowed to come though in its own simple glory. 

Here's a traditional New Year's Eve dish eaten all over Italy! The lentils are supposed to remind you of an abundance of coins, suggesting prosperity in the coming year.

Cotechino is an ancient variety of fatty pork sausage that goes very well with lentils. Fresh cotechino are hard to come by, but you can buy shelf-stable vacuum-packed precooked cotechino from Levoni - that's what I used here and it was delicious.

Here's a vegetarian dish that's easy to make and fun to eat. Scamorza is a very stretchy-stringy-melty cheese.

It includes a teaspoon of curry powder, which might seem out of place in Italian cooking. Remember Marco Polo! Italian chefs included eastern spices in their pantries long before the potato was introduced from the New World. 

I had some ground pork looking for a way to be useful and this recipe looked intriguing - I love it!

The pork is mixed with ground almonds and fresh rosemary and sage, then formed into meatballs that are cooked on skewers of the rosemary branches that provided the rosemary needles in the pork!

There's a lot of ingredients here, but nothing weird. The trickiest part is getting multiple soft, uncooked meatballs intact onto the rosemary skewers! 

This is a nice, light, colorful risotto, bright red streaks against a white-golden risotto, with great flavor too. 

It's vegetarian, and it could easily be made vegan by substituting something for the parmesan cheese that you stir in at the end. 

This is a popular combination: shrimp and peas on pasta in a light butter-white wine sauce.

It cooks up quickly and you can use frozen peas and shrimp and dried pasta so it's one of those recipes that you can whip up on short notice, and it makes an easy weeknight dinner.

A pasticciata is a mess of something, and many recipes based on polenta are called Polenta Pasticciata con something or alla someplace. This one is in the style of Valle d'Aosta, way up in the far Northwest, up against the French Alps, so that means is uses the famous Fontina cheese, of which the best is the name-protected Fontina Valle d'Aosta.

The cheese is not stirred into the polenta when it cooks, but rather you take a stiff cooked polenta and layer it with cheese and butter and then melt it all together into a rich golden gooey mess - a pasticciata. This is a hearty cold-weather treat.

I found some mutton chops at Brown's Farm in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I'd always been curious about mutton, so I bought them. I was surprised to see that the favorite Italian preparation of mutton chops is Costolette all'Inglese, or Mutton Chop in the English Style!

This is a very simple recipe. In my opinion, the best value of having it written down at all is just to be quite clear how very simple it is: just broil the chops with butter and serve with salt and pepper.

Mutton is meat from an adult sheep, as opposed to lamb from the young sheep. Even mutton is seldom from very aged sheep, which is said to be quite gamey, but I'd like to try it sometime.