Here is a classic sweet that we had in Sorrento, Pompeii, and surrounding areas. It's not desperately sweet, and it's heavy and moist so you can serve it in thin slices. It's great with fresh espresso!
A favorite pasta dressing from Genoa.
This was great with boxed penne pasta, but it was absolutely sublime when made with all the best ingredients to dress Mandilli a Saea (see Fresh Pasta ) for a birthday dinner!
When we explored the tip of Calabria and Eastern and Southern Sicily, pistachios were used everywhere, in all sorts of dishes, the way pine nuts are in the north.
This pesto is Sicilian, but it's not spicy and it goes with many dishes. I like it on broiled fish.
Use a good olive oil, but one with a mild flavor, as a more fruity or peppery oil can wrestle with the flavor of the pistachios.
This arugula pesto is a surprise winner in the pesto department! It has a fresh, tingly flavor and a beautiful color.
The trickiest part about making this pesto is that the arugula takes up a lot of volume, so if you use a small food processor (which is fine for other pestos) you quickly overfill it with arugula before adding th remaining ingredients!
I dealt with this by chopping up 3/4 of the arugula first, then milling the remaining ingredients with the last quarter of the arugula, and then milling it all together. It came out fine. How anyone would ever do this with a mortar and pestle is a mystery to me.
In much of Italy and in some parts of this country, rosemary grows year-round and people have hedges of it, but in Plymouth this is one of those taste-of-summer dishes.
It's an easy and flavorful vegetarian pasta dish. It's mostly just chopped tomatoes with a blast of fresh rosemary, a great combination.
The southern stretch of the Italian boot on the western side, Calabria, has its own cuisine and naturally its own pesto, this one with fresh tomatoes, red bell peppers, and ricotta. It's pink like Pesto Trapanese but with a completely different flavor thanks to the cooking, the red bell pepper and the ricotta.
It's traditionally served on long pasta or on bruschetta with a bit of fresh oregano.
Here's a bright red, robustly flavored pesto with a strong backbone of sun-dried tomatoes and sweetness from ground almonds and pine nuts and a little fresh basil.
Sometimes when people mention "red pesto", they mean the traditional Sicilian Pesto Trapanese, which uses fresh tomatoes. That has a milder flavor and a lighter color than this burly condiment.
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.
