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You may be surprised to find recipes with chicken, veal, and pork cutlets in my vegetable chapter. But the inspiration for this distinctive group of dishes is the vegetables that cover and surround the small portions of meat. When zucchini, eggplant, and (especially) tomatoes are at their best in the summer—and when I’ve an abundance of fresh tomato sauce in the refrigerator and freezer—I cook these beautiful one-pot dinners. I call these “skillet gratinati” because a large skillet or sauté pan is an essential part of the cooking. First you sauté your vegetables (in some instances) in the skillet; then you gently brown the meat cutlets in the skillet; then you layer lovely individual servings in the skillet; and then you develop your sauce in the skillet. Finally, you place the whole skillet in a hot oven, where the meat and vegetables cook until tender, the sauce thickens, and the crowning layer of grated cheese turns into a golden, crisp gratinato. (The whole cooking process takes little more than half an hour.) The first stage, on top of the stove, is the most fun, when you create your main dish and sauce in one pan in minutes. Having all your components ready and staying close to the pan will ensure success with this simple dish. The gratinati here are similar in technique but offer different ideas for ingredients. The most detailed instruction is in the main recipe that follows, with briefer descriptions in the equally delicious variations (page 315 and page 317). Once you understand the process, do experiment, using different meats, vegetables, herbs, and sauces—make the skillet-gratinate technique your own.

Poached zucchini, cut into rounds or cubes, is a terrific salad ingredient. This salad is a lovely combination of tastes and colors, but you can follow the same basic approach without the potatoes, without the eggs, or even without the onions. If you are preparing zucchini and potatoes for salad, it’s easy to cook them in one pot of water. Start boiling them together and remove the zucchini when they are “droopy,” as described in the main recipe. Usually the potatoes will need to cook a bit longer, until they are easily pierced with a fork or sharp knife. Let everything cool, then toss your salad and dress it just before serving.

Another wonderful way to use bread—something that we always have in abundance in our house, fresh, day-old, and dried—is as an element of many savory dishes. It is used in appetizer gratinate, soups, and salads, and day-old bread is great in desserts. Here bread slices are the base and substance of a summertime vegetable lasagna, in place of pasta. I give you two versions, one with raw zucchini, one with briefly sautéed eggplant slices. Assembly and baking are the same for both. You could multiply the recipe and make this as a big party or picnic dish. It’s wonderful warm or at room temperature as a hearty side dish. To vary: use egg-battered zucchini strips (page 21) for a scrumptious lasagna; or roast the eggplant instead of frying it; or combine zucchini and eggplant (sauté zucchini slices first, though). The good flavor comes from Summer Tomato Sauce. The recipe on page 256 will give you enough for a big casserole and for several pasta dishes too. But you could use other sauces, such as a marinara or a plain tomato sauce.

With its developed flavor and moist, saucy consistency, risotto is still special the day after—it’s not just cold rice. Riso Sartù is a dish I always enjoy when visiting my cousin Clara Pacelli in Naples. It is one of the most wonderful ways I know to transform cooked risotto into something new. The risotto is blended with meat sauce, green peas, and lots of grated cheese and packed into small molds with morsels of egg, prosciutto, and mozzarella hidden inside. Baked and then unmolded, the cakes are crisp and crunchy outside—as you can see in the photo below—and creamy and chock-full of treats inside. This recipe makes six cakes with 2 1/2 cups of risotto and a cup of Ragù alla Bolognese (page 143) as the meat sauce. It is easy to multiply the formula if you have more risotto and sauce, and ovenproof cups to serve as molds. This dish might be made today with leftovers, but traditionally it was the specialty of the Neapolitan aristocracy, and risotto was made expressly for it.

I love making risotto for family meals. It’s not something I have time for every day—it takes a good 30 minutes, mostly at the stove—but it is one of those special dishes that focus my attention and engage all my senses in the amazing processes of cooking. I smell, see, and taste what’s in the risotto pan, of course, but I am listening too: for the clicking sound that tells me the rice grains are sufficiently toasted and it’s time to splash them with wine; for the distinctive bubbling as each addition of cooking liquid disappears in the pot, which tells me the rice is ready for more. If I’ve stepped away from the stove—I do take a break from stirring risotto now and then, and you can too—that sound brings me back. I add more liquid and stir (and stir and stir), and feel, through the wooden spoon in my fingers, the corner of the pan where the rice is almost sticking, the resistance that tells me yet another cup of broth is needed before I wander away again. The Basic Risotto recipe that follows is one that will give you this marvelous engagement of the senses. It’s a simple formula that will let you focus on the critical steps in cooking—in the end, creating a great risotto is 100 percent technique—not on a long list of ingredients. You can make this right out of the cupboard, building flavor and superb texture with just olive oil, onions, rice, wine, water, salt, and cheese. Nothing else, not even butter, is necessary. I give you choices, though: use butter or leeks or broth if you want, or more or less of the ingredients listed in ranges. I want you in the driver’s seat, following your senses and tastes, to achieve the texture and flavor you like best (see more on these choices in the box on page 228). With risotto, you see, it is more important that you understand what you are doing than that you add things in prescribed amounts. When you are in control of what’s happening in the pot, you will feel how powerful a few ingredients and a few techniques can be in creating an outstanding dish. To sharpen your focus, you’ll find each step of the recipe instructions accompanied by a brief explanation of its purpose and the chemistry of risotto—these are short, and, believe me, you will have plenty of time to read them while you are stirring! And if you have further questions about risotto, write me at www.lidiasitaly.com. I love teaching about this precious treasure of Italian cooking.

Polenta pasticciata is a layered baked dish, just like lasagna, but made with warm, fresh polenta instead of pasta. And, like lasagna, it is marvelously versatile: you can put all manner of good things in between the layers of polenta—cheeses, vegetables, meats, or sauces, or a combination. I’ve narrowed down the possibilities for this pasticciata, which is filled with one of the savory long-cooked sauces on pages 134 to 155. Most of them make great fillings, with intense flavor and chunky texture that complement the mild sweetness and softness of the polenta. So I am leaving the final choice of sauce to you: whether you decide to use one of the guazzetti or meat Bolognese or the mushroom ragù or Savoy-cabbage-and-bacon sauce, the procedure is exactly the same. Perhaps you have one of these in your freezer right now! If you’ve got 4 cups, that’s enough to fill a pasticciata that will serve eight as a main course, or even more as a side dish, perfect for a buffet or large dinner party. But don’t give up if you only have 3 cups of mushroom ragù or guazzetto. If you also have Simple Tomato Sauce (page 132) on hand, blend in a couple of cups to extend your base sauce; or simmer up a quick marinara to use as an extender. You have lots of flexibility with polenta pasticciata: use the cheeses you like in amounts you are comfortable with. To make a deep pasticciata with thick layers, which makes a great presentation unmolded, assemble it in a 3-quart baking dish or a 12-inch cast-iron skillet, filled to the brim. For a crispier texture and for more golden gratinato on top, spread the layers thin in a wide shallow casserole. Use besciamella to add moistness and richness, or do without it. With good basic polenta and a deeply flavored long-cooked sauce, your pasticciata will be delicious however you make it.

I suggest you use duck legs to make this guazzetto, because they are juicier. But if you can’t buy duck legs separately, you can cook the whole duck. Another way to skin this cat is to remove the duck’s breasts, make the guazzetto with the rest of the duck, and sear the breasts to be served as a second course or a treat for another meal.

Potato flour (not potato starch) makes pasta with a delicious and distinctly potato-ey flavor. The dough will feel stiff when just mixed, but after resting it gets soft and easy to roll and cut.

Italians enjoy many traditional foods made with farina di castagne—chestnut flour—especially cakes and sweets. Pasta with part chestnut flour is delicious too, as I hope you will discover. Imported farina di castagne is widely available in specialty markets (and from Web sites).

Flour from dried ceci—the Italian name for garbanzo beans or chickpeas—is one of a number of bean flours with which one can make pasta. Like the others, this yields a good pasta with a different nuance of flavor—complex, buttery, with a tinge of sweetness from the bean. It’s a great carrier for vegetable, game, or nut sauces.

This is one of the oldest pastas in Italy. The Romans would call it lasagnum—wide strips of pasta dressed with honey, cheese, and herbs. I love this pasta. When cooked, it is light and has a silky texture.

For this pasta use instant polenta flour. The cornmeal gives the pasta great texture, flavor, and color.

If you are at all interested in eating healthfully from “whole foods,” you have probably learned about flaxseed, hailed as a great source of fiber, beneficial fatty acids, and other good stuff. But did you know that it makes a really tasty fresh pasta too? Note that you need ground flaxseed meal—available in whole-food markets—for this dough.

Semolina is the grind of durum wheat—the wheat that makes the best dry pasta. Here, mixed one-to-one with all-purpose flour, it makes a fresh pasta that is nutty and resilient to the bite.

I love buckwheat for the earthy, gritty character it brings to many dishes. Flour made from the buckwheat seed (it’s not a relative of wheat) is used in Japanese soba noodles and is traditional in Italian pasta too. In the Valtellina they make a dish called pizzoccheri, buckwheat pappardelle dressed with cabbage and bacon and Fontina.

Corn, polenta, came to Italy from the New World, and yet, along with pasta and rice, it is one of the beloved starch dishes of Italy. Polenta was for the northeastern regions of Italy what potatoes were for Ireland. Corn grew in abundance there and fed many people and still does, so much so that the people of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region are known as polentoni, polenta eaters. I come from the region, and I grew up eating polenta and still do eat it often. As a child I had just cooked or leftover polenta for breakfast with milk and sugar or with caffe latte, or pan-fried with some sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top, as well as in endless ways accompanying vegetables, meats, fish, and cheeses. It is rather simple to cook—all you need is cornmeal, water, salt, olive oil, and a few bay leaves. When done, you can enjoy the polenta piping hot or let it cool and take shape, then cut and fry it, or grill and bake it, topped with anything you choose. In this chapter you’ll find it with leeks, with bacon lardoons, with Montasio cheese, or with just an egg yolk nestled in a piping-hot mound of polenta. Beyond the flavor of polenta, I look for the mouth feel, and that depends on the grind. Instant polenta will give you a smooth puddinglike texture, the medium grind a bit more texture, and the coarse will have almost a raspy feel in your mouth. There is also white polenta, milled from white corn, which is used much in the Veneto. And the polenta taragna, which has buckwheat milled along with the yellow corn, has much texture and flavor. The one important caution in cooking polenta is to get it smooth. Start it in cold water and whisk well while it cooks; it may take a bit longer but ensures lump-free polenta. Even though polenta might look done, make sure you cook it the recommended time; its digestibility and flavor increase with longer cooking time.

Gnudi means “naked dumpling,” because it’s truly a stuffing without a pasta shell. So if you love those stuffings in ravioli, skip the pasta—this dish is for you.