It took an awfully long time for me to find a recipe for a calve's liver dish that I liked. As was the case with many of us, my mom made it from time to time, a big slab of strange-looking, strange-smelling, strangely-textured strangeness that nobody wanted to eat. But this one I liked a lot, and I and my friend Andy both took additional helpings. 

I had to try this recipe because it's a Venetian classic, and how could it become a classic if it were at all like what my mom made? 

The differences in this dish are twofold, one part of the recipe and the other was the liver itself. 

I decided a long time ago that I did not trust liver from cattle raised on factory farms fed who knows what feed and drugs, because all of that ultimately is processed by the liver. I found some Caldwell Farms calf liver at the Belfast Coop in Belfast, Maine. I knew it was going to be as good a piece of liver as I am likely to find, so I bought it for this recipe.

The recipe insists that the liver be sliced very thinly before cooking. Andy and I agreed that this was a major improvement, getting past the worst of the texture strangeness, ensuring all of it was cooked through but not overdone, and enabling tastes of the liver to go along with the onions in a pleasing way. I will make this again, when I can get the good liver.

This is another fine, simple Italian recipe using pearl onions.  Supermarket frozen onions work fine in this recipe, and they save a ton of time and sore thumbs from peeling.

I keep a bag or two of frozen onions in the freezer for this and similar recipes because they go with so many dinners, especially winter cooking. If you will be serving these with meat, consider replacing the dry vermouth with chicken stock. Of course, you can use just water, too.

In the United States, Marinara sauce has come to mean a simple, vegetarian tomato sauce, but it isn't that way in Italy. Marinara means "in the mariner's style", which emphasizes thrift and availability of local, inexpensive ingredients, sometimes but not aways including  some sort of seafood that might have been by-catch.

Remember that not all marinai were fishermen, and dinner might have been prepared at sea or back in port. This recipe provides a base from which you can unleash your inner galley-cook!

This feisty pasta dish is named for the fiery protagonist of Cavalleria Rusticana, an opera by Pietro Mascagni (who scored this timeless hit in a competition as a young man, and then never had another hit).

Like his brilliant little opera, this dish served a place in your permanent repertoire! Bravo!

This punchy little lunch dish goes great with some crusty bread! 

Here is a presentation somewhat more restrained than the Swordfish Provencal or the Sicilian Swordfish alla Ghiotta. 

After serving these steaks for dinner, I cut up the leftovers and tossed them in the sauce to use over pasta for lunch the next day.

This is a hearty winter dish, bursting with flavor and calories! I think this would be good after shoveling snow for an hour. It's quite easy, you just boil potatoes and then simmer them in cream and top with cooked andouille sausage. The andouille is spicy (especially if you use an American Cajun variety), but the cream and the potatoes moderate the punchiness to a fine degree; this is easy to gobble down more than you should.

The Fonduta Valdostana is the Italian form of the French/Swiss Fondue, popular in the Valle d'Aosta on the southern slopes of the French Alps. The key differences are:

• It's made with only Fontina Val d'Aosta, not a blend of cheeses.
• It's thickened with egg yolk.
• It's served in individual bowls or cups, not communally.
• It's eaten with a spoon and bread, not with long forks and a variety of foods for dipping.

The recipe isn't difficult, but you must plan ahead both for the soaking step at the beginning, and then to be sure that it is hot and ready to serve at the right time for your diners. 

As for the fontina cheese, there are three broad classes of it. The red-coated Danish variety is not suitable for this dish; it has an insipid flavor and an objectionable consistency. The brown-wrapped mass-produced Italian variety and the related Fontal are acceptable and surely used in many households. For a special event (and certainly I you have the white truffle!) you want to get the artisanal Fontina Val d'Aosta from a good cheese market or Italian gourmet shop.

A fougasse is a French focaccia, often cut into elaborate shapes for more crusty surface area. If you are in the area of Kittery, Maine, you can find excellent full and half-size fougasse at Beach Pea Bakery that you would be proud to bring to any family event.

You can make it yourself, if you have a few hours to allow time for the dough to rise; baking takes under 30 minutes. If you want to do the traditional sourdough version and you don't have a starter, you can make one but it takes a few days to get really active, or you could try the Biga Starter, which is ready in a day.

The cuts are important. They serve to provide more crusty surface for the bread. This bread is not a light, airy load, it's all about the olive oil and salt and other flavors that you include. It's great with wine and cheese.

This has been called the most expensive omelette in the world, which it may be at 35 Euros if you get it at its birthplace in the shadow of the imposing Mont St-Michel on a little island off Normandy. There's some lore about it that seems to be more a matter of effective marketing than of actual tradition.

So what is it? It's a very fluffy omelet with nothing else. Much has been written about how to achieve the proper fluffiness, but the official recipe is a secret of that restaurant and the various attempts that you see online cover a wide range of efforts. 

From what I can pull together from the history, a brief description by Mere Annette Poulard herself, the many articles about it, and my own attempts, I think I have something that is very close to what she would have served in her little kitchen in 19th century Normandy.

I first enjoyed herb-stuffed Roman artichokes in Rome, where they were naturally well-prepared. It was a delicious dish that I vowed to reproduce one day, not knowing that there's a lot to learn about preparing artichokes. 

The basic principle is easy enough: you trim the tough outer leaves and the tips, scoop out the fibrous choke, stuff with parsley and mint, and cook. Well, trimming and scooping takes some time if you're not a long-experienced Roman sous-chef!

This is a wonderful and comparatively simple dessert from the mountains of northern Italy, but it requires a food mill to get the proper texture and look. I made this one for a feast that focused specifically on Italy's Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta regions. The city of Val d'Aosta and the region are at the foot of that famous Alpine mountain on the border between Italy and Switzerland. It is traditionally topped with whipped cream to resemble the snow-capped mountain. In the photo it is surrounded by Marrons Glace and foil-wrapped gianduia (chocolate hazelnut candies) from Torino.

Some recipes put this on a base of Swiss Broyage, which is nice but it adds over an hour of cooking time to whip and dry the meringue.

To get the rugged traditional appearance, sweetened chestnut paste is passed through a potato ricer, forming long threads of paste. You might be able to reproduce that look by forcing it through a colander, but I've never tried that.

You can make quite a pretty salad if you have access to good mushrooms, which is getting easier in New England now that several farms have started in Maine. This one includes Chestnut Mushrooms, Lion's Mane, Blue Oyster, and Button Mushrooms, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice with sea salt, fresh basil, and parsley.