Spinach

Crunchy pine nuts enhance this side dish with their distinctive flavor.

For a light entrée, serve this richly flavored mixture over brown rice.

Gina: Ours is a spinach salad with some serious attitude. In addition to the bacon and creamy blue cheese dressing, we add sweetened pecans and tart dried cranberries, and the overall effect is to give this salad a festive feel. It’s a great dinner party starter, and it’s especially good partnered with a fat grilled steak. The spiced pecans are good enough to eat on their own as a snack, but try to save them for the salad! And even though we call for dried cranberries, you can substitute a variety of dried fruit, including dried cherries or golden raisins.

I love the flavors of spinach and chives in these timbales when served with the Scampi on page 287. Vary the herbs and greens, or include other members of the onion family—sautéed leeks or onions, for example—if you are serving the timbales alongside other dishes. You can make the timbales up to a couple of hours in advance and leave them at room temperature, but try to avoid refrigerating them. That will change the flavor, and not for the better.

You may be used to the large, pizzeria-size version of calzones, but I’m offering you this more typical Neapolitan version. Once you have the knack of making and filling the dough, the rest is easy. You can put whatever you like inside. Just make sure the fillings are drained of most of their excess liquid—the way I drain the ricotta overnight or squeeze the excess moisture from the spinach.

I always roast meats by adding some liquid to the roasting pan first, then allowing it to cook away and the meat to brown. The aromatic steam penetrates the meat before the surface of the meat is seared by the heat. Then I add more liquid as the meat cooks, to make a delicious pan sauce. Mortadella is one of those ingredients that give a tremendous amount of flavor to meat-based ravioli or cannelloni fillings. Think of mortadella as the Italian version of bologna, seasoned with Italian spices and studded, mosaiclike, with pistachios and cubes of seasoned pork fat. Thinly sliced mortadella is delicious as part of an antipasto assortment or in a sandwich. Add the mortadella to the meat and vegetables when they’re fresh out of the oven: the steam coaxes the flavor out of the mortadella. To grind the meat-and-vegetable mixture, you can use a hand-cranked meat grinder or a grinder attachment for an electric mixer. In either case, choose a disc that is fine but not too fine. Although it isn’t absolutely necessary, when I have besciamella handy, I like to stir a little into the meat filling. It helps to bind it and adds a smooth texture. You can prepare this filling with a combination of beef, veal, and pork, or with leftover roasts, like turkey, pork, or beef. If you’re making this filling with leftover meat, reheat it by simmering it with its own gravy and the porcini-soaking liquid, the soaked porcini, and some vegetables, like diced onions and celery and shredded carrots. When the meat is warmed through and moist and the vegetables are tender, season them, add the remaining ingredients, and grind as above.

This pasticciata can be prepared entirely in advance and refrigerated for up to 1 day. Let the refrigerated pasticciata stand at room temperature for about an hour before baking.

You have all seen those large, wax-coated provolone cheeses hanging like oversized pears in Italian groceries. When the same cheese is made into smaller shapes, which are hung to dry only briefly, they are sold as a softer, milder cheese known as provola. The wonderful soft texture of the cheese is perfect for this reinforced soup. If you cannot find provola, substitute a young soft cheese like Fontina or fresh Pecorino. You can use fresh mozzarella, but it will be very stringy when ladling and eating the soup. Boiling the meatballs before adding them to the soup may seem a little odd, but it removes some of the raw-meat flavor and helps keep the clear flavors of the soup intact.

When I make a brodo—clear soup with a little something in it—I think of my father. He loved all kinds of soup, but especially these simple and elegant ones. My father was a very proper man who insisted on beautiful place settings and crisp linens. When we were young, my grandmother made this soup with duck eggs, chicken eggs, or even goose eggs—whichever type was freshest. Prepared without the spinach, this is a perfect soup for infants.

This is the way we first served spinach salad at Ristorante Buonavia—and the way it was served in a lot of other Italian-American restaurants at the time. I love it just as much with sliced, roasted or boiled beets in place of the mushrooms. If you don’t have bacon, or don’t want to use it, make a spinach-and-mushroom salad with an oil-and-vinegar dressing (using about 1/4 cup olive oil to 3 tablespoons of vinegar). With a vegetable peeler, shave 1 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and toss it in at the end.

Here’s a great steakhouse side dish that can do more harm than the red meat itself. Standard preparations make a bad boy out of an otherwise extraordinarily healthy vegetable. The problem with spinach is that it’s very lean and often bitter—which is why we sauté it in butter or douse it with cream. All-natural Greek yogurt has been employed here to help clean up its act.

Meunière is fancy French for a brown butter sauce. So why would I take on a dish whose deliciousness is dependent on butter—the enemy of healthy people? Well, because first of all, it’s not—the enemy, that is. The key to good taste and good health is moderation, which, as we know, is the key to many good things. Second, because I love a challenge—and because I know you’ll love the result.

Almost all of the fat in this dish comes from the salmon. Fish fat is a “good” fat, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to reduce cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. While this specific dish may not be an American classic yet, salmon sure is, and it’s a wonderful ingredient to include as a staple in your diet. Its rich flavor, ease of use, and availability make it a perfect three-times-a-week feature. Dijon mustard, citrus, and spinach are some of my favorite flavors for salmon. You can cook this in minutes under a broiler or on a grill.

Oysters Rockefeller was created in New Orleans at the turn of the last century. It was named for John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in America at the time, because he and the dish had something in common. If you don’t overcook them, oysters are juicy and creamy and taste luxuriously rich. Without changing too much from the classic recipe (aside from reducing the loads of butter), the fat content went from 22 grams to just under 6 grams—with most of that coming from the oysters themselves. This dish is a fabulous throwback that won’t set you back. Oysters Rockefeller are baked in piles of coarse salt not just to anchor the liquid in the oyster shell but also because salt is an excellent conductor of heat.

Although artichokes are delicious, don’t try to take down a fresh one. Even chefs have a hard time with them. Instead, use the best quality canned or jarred artichokes you can find. Just stay away from oil-packed artichokes, unless you want to turn this classic dip back into a high-fat dish. Using water-packed artichokes gives us wiggle room to use astonishingly tasty Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.