This delight from Trapani in far western Sicily is the next-best known Italian pesto after Pesto Genovese. You can see it's very different: it's made with tomatoes and almonds, which gives it a pinkish-red color.
Some people refer to this as "red pesto', but that's to differentiate it from its better-known green sister from the north. I also have a Pesto Rosso recipe that's truly red and more robust than this charmer.
Caper Pesto is a zippy, zesty paste of capers with a little celery leaf and garlic with olive oil, which is to say there's not much to interfere with the caper flavor. It's great topping for bruschetta, and it's good on pasta in small amounts when accompanying a dish that's not bursting with other flavors. We had it on angelhair with plain broiled haddock and it worked out very well.
Fillets of sole sprinkled with a variety of fresh herbs and then rolled up and poached, the poaching liquid becomes the sauce: it's very simple, but it demands the freshest ingredients.
This was a happy surprise! It doesn't sound like much, but it's easy, tasty, and you can certainly serve it to company.
The original recipe calls for Hake, but finding hake is pretty hit-or-miss in these parts. It's a local fish, but it's not always pretty and it's not well-known, so many fish markets don't carry it. But cod cooks up about the same, maybe a little bit slower for a fat loin, so it's an easy substitution for this worthy recipe.
Here's a subtle and delicious creamy white pasta sauce that is easy to prepare in just the time that it takes to cook the pasta.
You want to use good pasta, because the flavors are not strong and a good pasta shines through. We used Garofalo pappardelli in this photo, but I think it would work fine with most types of pasta.
This is a good primo dish before chicken or fish main dishes.
Here's a light sweet blast of summery fresh flavor for long pasta, like the fat round bucatini shown here.
As with many Italian recipes, there are not many ingredients, and quality is paramount. In this case, the usual olive oil, garlic, and onion are accompanied by garden fresh red and yellow bell peppers, a little cream, and a pinch of fresh marjoram (or oregano if you can't get marjoram).
Use farm-fresh peppers if you can; they have more flavor than the supermarket variety because they can be sold within a day or two of harvesting instead of spending a week in a refrigerated truck!
I found this elegant recipe in the excellent Classic Food of Northern Italy by Anna del Conte. It's not hard to make, it cooks quickly, and it's fine enough to serve to guests as a course at a fancy dinner.
You have to use good saffron to get the full effect of this dish. The sauce is exquisite as it pairs with the delicate sole.
Here's a simple, sturdy vegetable dish with what Americans might think of as a peculiar mix of flavors, but they go well together. I especially love how olives are transformed when they are cooked into a dish!
The original recipe calls for fresh beans and tomatoes. I tried it with frozen beans and canned tomatoes and it came out fine, and it was much less work!
The original recipe also called for quartering the olives, but I left them whole and didn't even pit them; as I said I really like cooked olives in a dish and I prefer the flavor blast of getting them whole (and it makes it easier for Lorna to pick them out!)
This reheats well, so the next time I make it, I will double or triple it and have the leftovers with lunches, where I really should get more vegetables.
This is a full-flavored fall dish, bursting with mushroomy goodness.
It's not as rich and decadent as Barolo and Porcini Risotto, so you don't have to save it for a special occasion. It's great with big beef dishes and hearty dry red wine from the Piedmont!
The best flavor here comes from a mix of mushrooms, both fresh and dried, with their soaking liquor. There's a real boom in mushroom cultivation now, so it's much easier to find good fresh mushrooms of interesting varieties than it was even a few years ago.
This was an invention of necessity another time that Lorna bought (expensive) halibut hoping for the Halibut in an Orange Sauce, only to learn that we had no good oranges in the house.
So I followed the same technique, but I used herbs and cherry tomatoes and used herby dry vermouth instead of the sweet simple syrup. The orange-gold color in the sauce comes from the tomatoes; I saw that a few had burst, so I helped the others along. It was pretty and tasty too!
