Here's an old Yankee favorite! 

I'm told that it used to be that a fisherman who caught a halibut would sell the fish but keep the cheeks for his own dinner. I don't know if it's still done that way sometimes, but I got these from a fisherman who didn't eat them. 

They are tender and delicious, and they can be prepared pretty much any way you would use sea scallops. I like them dredged in cornmeal and fried in butter or baconfat.

Some people add a dipping sauce of some kind, but I like them hot from the skillet with nothing else.

The original recipe for this was tasty but difficult, so I've modified it slightly: please see the notes below for details.

The flavor is good, and the combination of pumpkin and artichoke is a fine one to open an autumn dinner with friends.

Here's a colorful, simple, and delicious pasta recipe, traditionally served with spaghetti or other long dried pasta, and never served with cheese.

This old recipe took a while to bring into the 21st Century. It uses air-dried cherry tomatoes, which are much more tender and delicate than sun-dried tomatoes. In the old days in southern Italy, cherry tomatoes would be threaded onto strings and hung to dry as a means of preservation and to contentrate their flavor. Today's tomatoes are bred to be shipped to markets far from where they are grown, and their skins are tougher so they don't dry as well. However, preserved semi-dried cherry tomatoes have the same concentrated flavor, see the Notes below. 

I'm told that this is the most common way of serving pasta with pesto in Genoa, the home of Pesto Genovese, or basil pesto.

Trofie is a dense, chewy pasta with a short, twisted shape that holds lots of little flecks of basil and tiny fragments of pine nuts. With fresh pesto, you get a real mouthful of flavor! A small serving is a great introduction to a larger meat or seafood course.

I don't know why this is called Carbonara, literally "in the style of the charcoal-makers", but it's rich and delicious, and (as my sister pointed out to me) with some kinds of pasta, it's low in carbs!

I remember this as a sort of "breakfast pasta" because it's made with bacon and eggs. It's easy and very fast to make, but you may want a big bowl for the last-minute tossing with the eggy-cheesy dressing if your skillet isn't big enough for that messy step.

Here's a great savory fall dish that highlights that autumn star, sugar pumpkin, in a way that complements both meat and fish dishes, and is excellent on its own for the vegetarians.

An awful lot depends on your pumpkin, both the size and how long since it was picked, as well as how thin you slice it. A fresh new pumpkin can be cut thicker and be ready sooner, but it's hard to overdo it, so don't get stressed - it's going to be terrific.

This would be a fine side dish to go with the Thanksgiving turkey!

I stumbled upon this recipe in a cookbook that I inherited from Richmond and Annette, with the page corner turned down. Naturally I had to investigate. It's summery, delicious, and very easy!

This is a simple savory dish suitable for a work night. The sauce is simple and tasty, good over rice!

The original recipe calls for perch, but like many dishes for the flaky white fish, the same recipe works fine for cod and haddock and other fish common in New England waters. This recipe has delicate flavors, so I like it best with cod.

Nothing could be simpler than this epicure's favorite from centuries past - good pasta tossed with a Great Single-Estate Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and savory bottarga, like gold dust on your dinner.

Bottarga is the dried, compressed roe of either mullet (Sardinian bottarga) or tuna (Sicilian bottarga). The ancient Romans used bottarga as a salty-fishy seasoning similar to the way we use anchovies today, but the gratable form offers more culinary options. Of course, they had no pasta a millennium before Marco Polo's famous voyage of discovery, but we do now, and it's a very fine match indeed!

We were in Ireland in 2016 during the time that strawberries were being harvested in Wexford. They were available all over Ireland, fresh and flavorful, and this rapidly became Lorna's favorite dessert. If I remember correctly, she had it in Kilkenny, Waterford, Bantry, Galway, Derry, Belfast, and Dublin!

You really have to make this with local strawberries, because the flavors are few and delicate, and the perfume of a truly fresh strawberry brings an ethereal specialness that you just can't get from those little plastic horrors that come from California in November.

I like to garnish it with fresh mint leaves and toasted almonds, but that's optional. 

You can make your own meringue, but drying the meringue is very time consuming, especially on a humid July day. You can buy decent meringues at a bakery and save all of that time.

Here's a humble, very traditional cool-weather dish: slow-cooked lentils.

Lentils are serious business in Italy; they are supposed the bring luck for the new year and are an indispensible part of those festivities, and in the cooler months they are served in soups or cooked like this and served with sausages - a rib-sticking dinner, as my dad would say. 

There are different varieties of lentils. These are La Colfiorito lentils from Umbria, like the Castellucio lentils from Umbria, a green-brown variety that holds its shape after cooking like the gray-green Puy lentils from France. That's important for this dish, so it doesn't become a mushy mass.

Perfection and elegance are embodied in this simple summer salad, when it's made with fresh, good ingredients and an eye for attractive presentation. When we were in Italy in 2015, Lorna had this every day for lunch while she grew comfortable with  authentic Italian cuisine. 

Many American restaurants make up for low quality factory farmed tomatoes by drizzling it with cheap oversweet Balsamic vinegar, but this only ruins good ingredients. I only make this when tomatoes are in season locally; it's something worth looking forward to the whole rest of the long year!

An amazingly simple and flavorful treatment for an inexpensive steak cut - thin-sliced and cooked in a pungent tomato sauce. Sometimes on Fridays I see steaks marked down so I grab one for lunch. One little steak makes two lunches, and it's so easy that it doesn't disrupt my day.

There are, of course, a thousand variations on this, some quite fancy, but from my reading this seems a common way, and I like it best.