Here is a simple, Italian country bean soup with escarole. The beans are cooked, the escarole is wilted, and garlic, celery, and parsley are sauteed and added. Halved cherry tomatoes add color and a burst of summer flavor, and their acid brings out more flavor from the escarole and the beans. A good quality olive [...]

Orecchiette, which means “little ears”, are a great pasta shape for vegetable pastas, as their rounded, earlobe shape catch the vegetables and the sauce. At the restaurant I work at now, we serve an orecchiette dish with sun-dried tomatoes and broccoli rabe, in a sauce of olive oil, garlic, and chile flakes. While browsing through [...]

Here is a simple, delicious pasta dish from Puglia, Italy. The noodles, Bucatini, are tossed with a sauce full of Southern Italian flavors: olive oil, garlic, chile pepper, sun-dried tomatoes, almonds, black olives, orange zest, and basil. There are so many great flavor combinations at work here. It may seem like a lot of ingredients [...]

Minestrone is the classic Italian vegetable soup, and an excellent way to enjoy the bounty of summer. In Italy, the soup is often finished with pesto, which adds its beautiful, bright green color, as well as a great deal of flavor. The salty Pecorino or Parmesan cheese in the pesto also seasons the soup – [...]

Cauliflower is a tricky vegetable – it has an interesting flavor, but it must be coaxed out of it. There’s nothing nice about bland, soggy, boiled cauliflower. In this recipe, the cauliflower is braised in the juices of delicious cherry tomatoes, so its flavor is retained in the sauce, rather than being lost to a [...]

Here is a great contorno, or vegetable dish, from Mario Batali’s The Babbo Cookbook. Escarole, a delicious chicory, refreshing and not as bitter as radicchio and arugula, is quickly sautéed and paired with roasted shallots. The shallots add deep flavor to the dish – roasting greatly transforms them and brings out their sweetness, which balances [...]