Lidia Bastianich

Garlicky, buttery shrimp scampi is an Italian-American restaurant staple that takes little more than a skillet and 15 minutes of your time to make at home.

A generous dash of crushed red pepper cuts through the sweet, rich tomato-cream sauce of this Italian-American classic.

If you have enough individual baking dishes, divide the shells and sauce among them, then top with cheese, keeping in mind that you might need a little more cheese to top individual servings than is called for in the recipe.

This is one of the simplest and yet tastiest preparations of eggs I've ever had. One afternoon, a friend and I unexpectedly dropped in on my friend Mario in Trieste. It was lunchtime, and he had a big basket full of fresh eggs he had brought down from the Carso, the high plateau surrounding Trieste. Eggs it was for lunch, served with a bowl of radicchio salad. We were just a few people that day, but this recipe is so very easy to modify for smaller or larger groups.

Just about everyone loves chicken breast. It is one of the most Googled terms in recipe searches. I also love this recipe when it's done with drumsticks. If you decide to do that, make sure to double the wine and increase the cooking time until the chicken is done.

Crunch-crunch-crunch will end up as munch-munch-munch when this salad is served. Flavor is obviously crucial in food, and certainly this salad has flavor, but tactile sensation is also a very important factor in our food perception and appreciation. We want pasta al dente, celery crunchy, bread grilled. This salad has a lot of texture to enjoy.

Panino alla Primanti
Just down Smallman Street from our Lidia's restaurant, I have serious sandwich competition in Primanti's, a Pittsburgh institution. I am charmed by their incredibly oversized warm capicola sandwich stuffed with French fries and coleslaw. I am not sure where in the U.S.A. this tradition of stuffing a sandwich with French fries became Italian, but the sandwich was so tall that I could not open my mouth wide enough to get my first bite. Primanti's started as a sandwich pushcart, manned by Joe Primanti, in the Strip in the 1930s, selling sandwiches to truck drivers. One night, a trucker wanted to check if his load of frozen potatoes were good, so Joe Primanti cooked them up. Customers began asking for them, and to expedite the service they were added to the sandwich.

Panino MuffulettaThere are so many versions of the muffuletta sandwich around New Orleans, but it seems that Central Grocery in the French Quarter is the place to go. The store is charming enough, but at the back counter, seated on a stool with a muffuletta sandwich in front of you, is where you want to be. We sat down across from a man who told us he'd had his first muffuletta sandwich here fifty years ago and came back regularly for more. Next to him were a couple who have been coming to Central Grocery to enjoy the muffuletta sandwich for more than forty years. We ordered one without any hesitation. The large hamburger bun-like bread was soaked significantly with the olive-oil dressing of the olive salad; then layers and layers of the salad and col cuts were added. The sandwich was cut in four and wrapped in parchment paper. It was ten in the morning, one would say time for breakfast, but the two of us savored the muffuletta sandwich as did all the other customers.

Bastoncini di Mozzarella Fritta
This great, very tasty appetizer could also be turned into a vegetarian meal. The Italian title says it's "Roman," and that is how it has been named on most Italian American menus, but mozzarella and anchovies are a well-known combination in southern Italy. There are mozzarella-and- anchovy fritters; and zucchini flowers are stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies, then fried. In this recipe, the mozzarella is fried between layers of bread, and then topped with a puckery sauce of lemon, capers, and anchovy.

This thick soup has a texture almost like porridge.

Brovade(萝卜已经发酵了几个月)我s a common dish in Friuli. This recipe has a similar acidity—and is ready in an hour.

Because the veal shanks are so impressive, Lidia likes to bring the veal (still on the bone) to the table for guests to admire. She then takes the meat back into the kitchen, carves it, and serves it family-style.

The delicious breadcrumb crust was probably created when white flour wasn't readily available in Friuli.

For perfect gnocchi, don't work the dough too much and add as little flour as possible. It's okay if the dough is a little sticky.

I know you might do a double take at the name of this recipe. But I assure you it is a simple, delightful rendition of spaghetti in quickly cooked tomato sauce. The unique touch comes from shreds of fresh apple, which lend the sauce a lovely aroma and flavor and feel good in the mouth. When I tasted this for the first time in the Val di Non of Trentino, I wondered, Why didn’t I think of this long ago? Spaghetti is my choice of pasta here, but linguine, ziti, or rigatoni would be just as good.

Cavatelli 'ncatenatiIn times past in poor regions like Molise, when meat was scarce, eggs were an available and affordable source of protein. A dish of pasta dressed with eggs combined the nutrients of two staple foods for a meal that was naturally nutritious and sustaining. I love these pastas sauced withe eggs, and tasty versions can be found all over Italy, especially in Abruzzo, Molise, and Lazio (Rome), where the most famous dish of this type,spaghetti alla carbonara,originated. This Molisano version is particularly appealing, with cavatelli, scrambled eggs, and bacon, and with grated Fontina Val d'Aosta tossed in at the end—a bit out of region, but absolutely delicious here. In Molise they would use grated pecorino, of course, and it is lovely that way, too.

One of the delights of making tiramisù is its versatility. This recipe makes a family-style dessert in a large dish, but you can easily compose single servings in dessert glasses, wine goblets, or even elegant teacups for a more impressive presentation, in the style of Signora Garatti's original "coppa imperiale." And while the conventional version of tiramisù calls for espresso soaked savoiardi, I've found that other flavors can be incorporated into the dessert with great success. Here, the brightness of fresh lemons and limoncello liqueur lace the cream and soaking syrup to make for a tiramisù that is refreshing and irresistible.

Traditionally, calamari are cooked with the skin on—it is the skin that gives a purple hue to the sauce. But if you want, you can peel it off.