Italy

Here's a great savory fall dish that highlights that autumn star, sugar pumpkin, in a way that complements both meat and fish dishes, and is excellent on its own for the vegetarians.

An awful lot depends on your pumpkin, both the size and how long since it was picked, as well as how thin you slice it. A fresh new pumpkin can be cut thicker and be ready sooner, but it's hard to overdo it, so don't get stressed - it's going to be terrific.

This would be a fine side dish to go with the Thanksgiving turkey!

I stumbled upon this recipe in a cookbook that I inherited from Richmond and Annette, with the page corner turned down. Naturally I had to investigate. It's summery, delicious, and very easy!

This is a simple savory dish suitable for a work night. The sauce is simple and tasty, good over rice!

The original recipe calls for perch, but like many dishes for the flaky white fish, the same recipe works fine for cod and haddock and other fish common in New England waters. This recipe has delicate flavors, so I like it best with cod.

Nothing could be simpler than this epicure's favorite from centuries past - good pasta tossed with a Great Single-Estate Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and savory bottarga, like gold dust on your dinner.

Bottarga is the dried, compressed roe of either mullet (Sardinian bottarga) or tuna (Sicilian bottarga). The ancient Romans used bottarga as a salty-fishy seasoning similar to the way we use anchovies today, but the gratable form offers more culinary options. Of course, they had no pasta a millennium before Marco Polo's famous voyage of discovery, but we do now, and it's a very fine match indeed!

Here's a humble, very traditional cool-weather dish: slow-cooked lentils.

Lentils are serious business in Italy; they are supposed the bring luck for the new year and are an indispensible part of those festivities, and in the cooler months they are served in soups or cooked like this and served with sausages - a rib-sticking dinner, as my dad would say. 

There are different varieties of lentils. These are La Colfiorito lentils from Umbria, like the Castellucio lentils from Umbria, a green-brown variety that holds its shape after cooking like the gray-green Puy lentils from France. That's important for this dish, so it doesn't become a mushy mass.

Perfection and elegance are embodied in this simple summer salad, when it's made with fresh, good ingredients and an eye for attractive presentation. When we were in Italy in 2015, Lorna had this every day for lunch while she grew comfortable with  authentic Italian cuisine. 

Many American restaurants make up for low quality factory farmed tomatoes by drizzling it with cheap oversweet Balsamic vinegar, but this only ruins good ingredients. I only make this when tomatoes are in season locally; it's something worth looking forward to the whole rest of the long year!

An amazingly simple and flavorful treatment for an inexpensive steak cut - thin-sliced and cooked in a pungent tomato sauce. Sometimes on Fridays I see steaks marked down so I grab one for lunch. One little steak makes two lunches, and it's so easy that it doesn't disrupt my day.

There are, of course, a thousand variations on this, some quite fancy, but from my reading this seems a common way, and I like it best.

The taste of late summer, to me, is that of very fresh tomatoes from the farm, tomatoes that never saw the inside of a refrigerator or rode on a tractor-trailer across state lines.

If you can't make this with farmer's market fresh tomatoes, don't use supermarket tomatoes! Canned tomatoes were at peak freshness when they went into the can, but supermarket tomatoes are bred for shippability and picked unripe, then artificially "ripened" in the truck with ethylene gas. Of course, artificial ripening is artificial, away from the sun, and it's the sunshine that the plant uses to make the fruit sweet.

We got lucky a couple of times this summer when our favorite fish market got in some fresh trout. Here is an Umbrian recipe for trout cooked in the simple style of the anglers who pull them from the tumbling mountain waters of the River Nera and grill them with fresh rosemary and parsley over a campfire. 

In my dreams, there's a bottle of Frascati chilling in a quiet pool of the river, and a few branches of dried old rosemary in the fire! 

I got this recipe from a delightful blog out of Genoa, but of course I had to substitute cod for sea bream, and I used my braising pan instead of the somewhat messier parchment because it does almost the same thing. 

The key thing, in any event, is the seasonings. That's what makes this a Ligurian-style recipe: fish cooked with capers, pine nuts, olives, and plenty of fresh herbs all feature prominently in the cuisine of this little northwestern-most coastal province, home of Genoa.