Italian American

Roasted bell peppers, prosciutto, and olives are added to the classic Italian trio of tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. Serve with plenty of crusty country bread.

The origin of this dish is unknown, but it's a common menu feature of many Italo-American restaurants of the red-sauce variety. In kitchen lingo, a shoemaker is a shortcutting, skillful hack; a shoemaker cobbles things, a meal, together from the meager things on hand. In Italian, scarpa translates as "shoe" and scarpariella is slang for shoemaker. The actual name for one who plies this trade is calzolaio. In Chicken Scarpariella, a spring chicken is "hacked" up in to small pieces and quickly cooked with a few common ingredients.

Active time: 15 min Start to finish: 30 min

The heat of the cooked spaghetti wilts the mixed greens in this lemony warm pasta salad. Dry Monterey Jack is an aged Jack cheese similar to Parmesan.

At the restaurant, the gnocchi are shaped in a time-honored manner that includes pressing each short dough piece against the tines of a fork. Home cooks may find it simpler to roll the dough along the wires of a whisk, as outlined here. Also, if you can't get ground chuck, buy a boneless chuck roast, and ask the butcher to grind it for you.

A salad, some crusty bread and wine are all that's needed with this hearty pasta dish. For the wine, consider serving a bottle of Chianti or Sangiovese.

Saturday night is typically pizza-making night for my family, and one of the standard features of these evenings is pizza with pesto and fresh tomatoes. I use a good store-bought pesto, and, although I once made the dough in my bread machine, I now purchase excellent dough at our local Bertucci's restaurant and keep plenty on hand in the freezer. The dinner is simple and delicious. A pizza stone is a worthwhile investment if you're partial to pizza with a crisp crust that doesn’t droop. For this recipe we used a large pizza stone (about 14 inches across). But don’t despair if you don't have one; we also achieved good results when we baked the pizza on a baking sheet.

The perfect picnic sandwich for summer.

Most self-respecting Italian-American cooks have a recipe for stuffed zucchini. It's a dish that's often hard to categorize, however. Is it an appetizer? A side dish? Can it function as a main course? This version, with veal, is a little heartier than most and can definitely be served as an entrée, but it can also function as a side dish or appetizer for a multicourse feast.

Purchased Boboli crusts make these pizzas a snap to prepare. Offer prosciutto and melon as another appetizer.

An inviting first course would be grilled or roasted vegetables tossed with olive oil and arranged on a platter with olives and spicy peppers. Buy some tiramisu for dessert.

Creating her own versions of restaurant dishes is a hobby of Christina's. This is her interpretation of a pasta she had while dining out in San Francisco.