Italy

This is one of those homey recipes that can be great for kids but that is also easy to dress up for company. 

When I was a kid, my mom used to put peas in everything, I suppose as a way to get us to eat a green vegetable. To this day I am still suspicious when I see a perfectly good dinner with peas lurking inside... But this really is a good recipe. 

This is also traditionally made with salmon, and of course salmon and peas are a famous combination, but  it takes a little more care to cube the salmon and cook it without breaking it all to pieces, so I like this version for a weekday night.

Here's a delicious way to serve sole, one of my favorite fish!

The fish is dressed with a fine egg-yolk-thickened sauce and served over sauteed mushrooms.

If you have never tried an egg yolk thickened sauce, there's nothing to be afraid of, and this is a good recipe to practice on because even if it goes badly you still have the sole and mushrooms for dinner!

This is another simple 30-minute dinner that relies upon top-quality ingredients that are, fortunately, readily available in coastal New England for most of the year. 

The original for this recipe calls for hake, a different flaky white fish, but haddock cooks the same way and the flavor goes very well with the shallots and lemon juice. So this is an Italian preparation made with local New England fish. It's not that hake is not local to our waters; you can sometimes find hake at bigger fish markets, but it's not nearly as popular as haddock, which you can get everywhere around here and it's every bit as good as or even better than hake in this preparation, in my opinion. 

This was yummy and simple, just pan-fried fish served with tender cooked thinly-sliced leeks. The mild flavors complemented each other nicely. 

In the photo here, the leeks are closer to you, and the red onion beyond is Cipollata Calabrese, which made a nice contrast both visually and in flavor, while staying in harmony. 

Here's a wonderful dish suitable for company and a beautiful table. The halibut sits on a bed of pureed seasoned potatoes and is surrounded by littlenecks and dressed with a savory saffron sauce. It's exquisite!

There's a lot to this recipe, both ingredients and steps, but none of it is particularly rare or difficult; you can make this any time that halibut is available, and after the first time it is really not hard. 

Salmoriglio is a classic Sicilian sauce for grilled fish and meats. It showcases flavors typical of Sicily and Greece (2500 years ago, Sicily was a major part of Magna Graeca). 

This is great with strong flavors like grilled beef and oily fish like swordfish (shown here). In the fridge, it solidifies to a spreadable consistency, but then it melts into seasoned olive oil when spread on hot food.  

Messina is in northeast Sicily, at the point closest to the boot of mainland Italy; that's where the ferries come in from Reggio di Calabria.

Swordfish alla Messina is a classic local dish. Every summer when the swordfish pass through the Strait of Messina, the local fishermen go out in specially-modified boats called feluccas to bring them to the table fresh daily.

When we went to Italy in 2018, we stayed a night in Chianalea, a fishing village along the waterfront of Scilla, on the east bank of the Strait of Messina. The village is built on the swordfish fishery, and you get the freshest fish there. I enjoyed a very memorable Pistachio-Crusted Swordfish that night!

This dish brings together some of the classic flavors of Sicily: almonds, capers, and tomatoes. If you were in southern Italy or Sicily, you would use the celebrated oblong sweet red onions of Tropea, just north of the toe of the boot, but regular red onions work OK too.

I found some beautiful green cauliflower at Beth's Farm Market in Warren, Maine, so I knew that it was time to make this interesting and delicious veggie pasta dish that I'd had my eye on. It includes golden raisins and pine nuts, and a little bit of saffron, like many Venetian recipes.  

This is a Sicilian recipe, and Sicily produces some enormous cauliflowers in purple, green, and golden colors. At Beth's the green one looked the best, so that's what I used for dinner for the two of us, but if I were making a bigger batch I'd like to mix colors and see how that looks. 

The original Italian recipe called for John Dory or Pomfret, but we don't find that in our local fish markets so I tried it with haddock, and I recommend it. 

This recipe is a little different from most fish recipes here so far because the haddock is pan-fried. Haddock around New England is traditionally sold with the skin on, but you don't really have to skin it as long as you remember to tell your diners which side is up! 

This should work equally well with cod.