Italy

This is wonderfully delicious and worth the time it takes to cook it. 

It calls for dried Porcini mushrooms, as pretty much all traditional Italian dishes do. Porcinis are the same as King Boletes (I've bought those in Polish markets) and Cepes (the French name).

You can use other types of dried wild mushrooms if you cannot find Porcinis, but the combination or Porcini mushrooms with red wine is a classic flavor of the Italian Northwest so it's worth the search.  

This is just a quick pick-me-up drink for a cold afternoon when you are cooking pasta.

The pasta water already has salt, and some starch from the cooking pasta.  You add a full-bodied inexpensive red wine, a pinch of pepper, and maybe a few flakes of dried red pepper if you like. 

This is particularly welcome after shoveling snow when you come in cold and wet and you smell dinner cooking! 

This is about a simple as it gets, and it's delicious in its simplicity. You must use fresh sage for this.

I have seen photos of this with the sage leaves visible in the finished frittata, but I have never yet had the patience to try one that picture-perfect when it will be in my belly in 5 minutes... 

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.