The Brasato al Barolo is a rightly celebrated main dish of Italy's Piedmont region, traditionally made using the local Barolo wine.  That can become very expensive in this country, but driving through the Piedmont I was astonished to see €10 bottles of Barolo on endcap displays in highway rest areas! The best Barolos can fetch $1,000 and more; that's not what you braise a chuck roast in!

I was surprised when I first saw this. It's so simple, with no hard-to-get ingredients, that I would expect to see it on menus and at picnics and other al fresco dining opportunities. It seemed at first counterintuitive, but Tartar Sauce used to be used for many things beside fried fish, and this is just one simple example. 

This is best in late spring and early summer when you can get fresh local asparagus. There are plenty of brands of commercial tartar sauce available on store shelves, or you can make your own. 

Here's a hearty cheesy dish from Italy's Piedmont region, and it's really simple and fast.  Piedmont is at the foot of the Alps, and it's easy to see this as something nourishing and hot after hours of playing in the snow on a mountainside.

Because it's so heavy and caloric, it may be better to halve the servings as part of a more balanced meal!

Here's another French dish with a creamy sauce, this time sparked up with paprika. You bake the breasts in a savory onion-butter-paprika base, then use that base on the stovetop to prepare a creamy sauce.

When you're done, you'll have a lot of sauce, but it goes great over rice or with boiled new potatoes. If you want a more elegant presentation than shown here, you can serve the breasts with minimal sauce and pass the rest in a gravy boat.

This dish of chicken breasts with mushrooms and a cider cream sauce is a hearty fall or winter dish. The chicken breasts (or thighs) are sauteed in butter with mushrooms, then flamed with calvados and braised in cider until tender and cooked through. Then the sauce is finished with heavy cream and an egg yolk to thicken it, making it awesome comfort food. 

The sauce is delicious, so consider serving this with rice or potatoes, or crusty bread - you will want to get every bit of the sauce!

This recipe is built from three simpler recipes. First you poach the fish and save the poaching liquid, then you turn the poaching liquid into a Sauce Parisienne. At the same time on another burner, you make 1 quart of Mussels in White Wine. Then you enrich the Sauce Parisienne and add mushrooms, truffle, and shrimp.

I made this for our Feast of Normandy. This is double the size of the base recipes because I make it for dinner guests.

If you have made the Fillets of Sole Bercy, then this richer, more elegant Parisian version will be easy. It's essentially the same recipe but the sauce gets a little more attention, including thickening it with egg yolks.

After you make a Sauce Parisienne, you can garnish it in various ways to make it Normande, Dieppoise, Nantua, Bonne Femme, etc.

I made this one with halibut, but any white fish will work.

This is a delicious side dish to accompany roast chicken or pork. I use the frozen pearl onions, the plain kind with no sauce, because this is so easy that it can be part of a dinner after a hard day.

This Chou Rouge a la Limousine is a wonderful hearty fall-and-winter recipe to accompany roast pork or pork sausages, or roast goose. It's one of my favorite things to prepare when the cold weather finally returns to Plymouth!

It's easy to turn this into a full Porc Braise aux Choux Rouges dinner by cooking a 3-lb pork loin in with the cabbage.

Here's a delightful side dish that can accompany many northern dishes (that is, dishes of the northern butter clan as opposed to the southern olive oil clan). It can be made with fresh or frozen spinach, so it's a handy recipe for when you have surprise dinner guests.

This is from the French Riviera, with the typical bright flavors of sunny Provence, but less complicated than the similar Sicilian Swordfish alla Ghiotta. 

The sauce from this, if you have any leftover, is great on black squid-ink pasta, along with any leftover swordfish. I often cook some shrimp with the swordfish with the plan to have leftovers on pasta.

These big predator fish can have a strong fishy flavor that improves when it's marinated for an hour or two. One batch of marinade is enough for two good-sized steaks or 1.5 pounds of cubed fish.

Steak au Poivre is awesome and awful - you really need to know what you are signing up for.

Steak with cracked pepper can be a fine combination if you keep everything in balance. This classic French recipe does just that. Rather than burn the aromatic pepper by searing it with the steak, you cook the steak properly and then dress it with a peppercorn cream sauce.

Some recipes call for crusting the steak with crushed peppercorns and then grilling it or searing it on a hot griddle. That's a bad idea. The best flavor of pepper comes from the volatile oils that provide that peppery zing. But exposing volatile oils to a screaming hot griddle burns them into smoke leaving only charred pepper-husks. Try it yourself and see. Then try this recipe.

Note: Black pepper is no friend to wine. Green and pink peppercorns work better, but they're not awesome. In my opinion, this recipe is best with no wine, but some fine cognac works wonders...   

This feisty Sicilian (is that redundant?) recipe was inspired by the feisty protagonist in the classic opera Cavalleria Rusticana. Here I made it with the corkscrew pasta fusilli because it seemed to fit the theme, and because the long pasta works well with this chunky sauce.