Italy

This is a particularly nice way to serve that old favorite Spaghetti with White Clam Sauce. It's really easy, and attractive if you can get the fresh shellfish. 

The only trick to this is supplementing the dried angel-hair pasta and the canned clam sauce with some fresh shellfish for presentation (and nutrition, to be sure), and cooking ingredients for them. 

Of course, you can go "all in" and make the sauce entirely from scratch, and even make the pasta at home, and while you're at it, how about you go and dig those clams yourself? So this is the version for people who can't do all that, and you can feel free to put in any extra labor that works for you. (Don't forget to update the Preparation Time!)

This recipe is for Turbot (use Halibut on this end of the Atlantic) cooked in sparkling dry white wine and mushrooms. It's delicate and wonderful!

I was gifted a bottle of Anno Domini prosecco by a neighbor. We don't drink prosecco very often, but I had seen this recipe and couldn't resist. And the recipe needs just a cup, so there's enough left to serve two for dinner!

White button mushrooms or baby bellas are good with this. If you use mushrooms that are too flavorful, you overpower the sauce which is really quite nice if you let it be. 

This was an amazing discovery!

Not a discovery for the world, in the sense that Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin meant it when he said "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star." No, it was just luck on our part that it came out so well. 

I'm glad, too, that I thought to prepare it in a pan that could be brought to the table, so I could assemble it nicely while it was still cooking.  

I'd been researching Italian pasta and risotto dishes, and I kept bumping into mentions of the black squid ink pasta. I'd seen it in shops but never had a reason to buy it. 

But during the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020, I was actively pursuing interesting pasta dishes, so one sunny Saturday afternoon we donned our face-masks and went to Lo Adoro on Rte 6a on Cape Cod. I've bought plenty of research materials there this spring, and I remembered seeing the black tagliatelle.

By the time we got home, I had assembled this Tagliatelle ai Frutti di Mare in my head for Friday, and it was wonderful! I hope you enjoy it. 

Potato Gnocchi with butter and sage is another easy and delicious marvel of Italian design.

This is one of those handy recipes that uses only a few common ingredients. The Potato gnocchi can be made ahead of time and frozen. 

You need fresh sage for this. If you don't have it in the garden, then you'll want to get some. The other three ingredients may already be in your pantry or refrigerator! 

I love fusilli! In many ways it's just another dried pasta, but its long, long corkscrews sure make dinner into something different.

I found a couple of recipes for fusilli or other pasta with mushrooms, so I tinkered a bit and came up with a winner.

One of the recipes that I saw included about a cup of chopped tomatoes. That might be good, but in my head I could taste the mushrooms coming together and decided to save the tomatoes for another day.

I think this would be great with any dry Piedmont or Tuscan red.

Everyone knows that classic Italian favorite Fettuccine Alfredo! But most of what we get in this country is a rich, somewhat bland mass-consumption version of a very fine (if labor-intensive) recipe from Rome. The original version is well known and the technique is brilliant - this one is well worth making.

We had this all over Sicily and then in Rome. It's a classic Sicilian dish of simple ingredients that must be fresh and well-prepared. Make this in summertime when the eggplant is fresh and flavorful. The tomatoes can be fresh in season or canned, but canned tomatoes without preservatives are better than "fresh" tomatoes out of season (the tomatoes were fresh when they went into the can). I like Cento brand canned tomatoes.

Bistecca alla Fiorentina is maybe the original foodie's steak, with much lore about the great care needed in getting and cooking the perfect steak. 

There are also many misconceptions about this wonderful and expensive pinnacle of carnivory. While in Tuscany, I engaged in grueling research to get to the real facts of the matter. ;-) 

Bistecca alla Fiorentina, or Florentine Beefsteak, is a T-bone steak prepared with the finest beef and minimal other ingredients. It's all about the technique and the quality of the beef. 

That's where the first problem arises. Bistecca alla Fiorentina is prepared from the beef of the white Tuscan Chianina cattle. This is not your basic Black Angus or fancy New Zealand ribeye - the Chianina is very lean, but the cut used for the steak is tender as long as you don't overcook it. It's dry-aged 15-30 days. Of course, being so lean, you have a very small window to get it right, and its expensive so you can't afford a lot of practice. 

The steak is unseasoned, except for a dusting of salt. It's cooked over very hot charcoal, very briefly, and served rare or on the light side of medium rare. 

It's a huge piece of beef, typically sold by the hectogram (100 grams, about 4.5 ounces), but you cannot order a 1 hectogram sample; the cook carves off a steak and sends it out for approval. The one I got was 1.3 kilos and, at 5 euros/hg, cost 65 euros. (It's OK to share one steak with a couple of friends, but I had the good sense to dine with two vegetarians!)

Then it's carved tableside, and served, both the sliced meat and the remaining bone that you can hack at at your leisure. A traditional side dish is white beans with olive oil.

I had mine at Tar Tufo in Siena, one of the few places that guaranteed Chianina beef properly aged and cooked. That's important because I saw the "Bistecca alla Fiorentina" served at a number of places, most of which refused to answer the question of sourcing, or else admitted that they used Irish or French beef as less vulnerable to overcooking and more similar to what tourists expect of a steak. 

There's no reason that you can't make any American cut with the same care. It's all about the quality of the beef, and the precision technique is a factor of the leanness of the beef made worthwhile because of its great flavor. This maybe the way to go if you can get your hands on great grass-fed beef at your local farmers' market!

This hard-to-find, visually-unappealing, finicky vegetable is worth the hunt and the longish preparation.

I had searched for cardoons for years every late fall/early winter, with no success. Albie's Produce in the North End and even Eataly in Boston's Back Bay had failed me. 

Then a double-stroke of good luck brought me success! The produce manager at my local Stop & Shop acidentally got a shipment of cardoons from California, and I happened to be at the store on that morning.  

I sort-of recognized this long-sought vegetable, but I wasn't sure. Fortunately they were labelled Cardones, the Italian name for the vegetable, so it was easy to connect the name. 

The raw vegetable is very bitter, but 30 minutes of boiling extracts most of the bitterness, leaving only a bracing aftertaste that complements a rich buttery or cheesy sauce.