European

The way most people make Italian sausage and peppers is to smother the sausage in lots of sautéed peppers. It's good, but I expand on the theme with plump, juicy tomatoes and a big handful of basil. And turkey sausage adds a healthy twist to this traditional dish. Try it spooned over pasta for a truly Italian experience.

(Lamb with Saffron, Sardinian Style) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Giuliano Bugialli's book Foods of Sicily & Sardinia. We've also added some helpful tips of our own, which appear at the bottom of the page.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown Entertains. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here. Focaccia is a porous, nonflaky but crusty bread from Italy. It is very "in" now due to the relative ease of preparation—and you can really put anything you want on it...it can be a whole meal!

(Pão) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Jean Anderson's book Process This!. Anderson also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Anderson and Portuguese cuisine, click here. What I wanted to do here was turn the food processor into a bread machine, that is, to see if I could proof the yeast, mix and knead the dough, even let it rise in the processor. I'm pleased to say that it worked perfectly. I don't recommend this technique for bigger batches of yeast dough, for more complex recipes, and certainly not for wimpy food processors with small work bowls (you need at least an 11-cup capacity). For this simple five-ingredient loaf, however, a big, powerful machine does it all. This "daily bread" of Portugal is both crusty and chewy thanks to the steam ovens in which it's baked (I bake my bread at very high temperature over a shallow pan of water). Because Portuguese flours are milled of hard wheat, I've fortified our softer-wheat all-purpose flour with semolina and find the texture exactly right. This dough is unusually stiff and for that reason I use the metal chopping blade throughout — the stubby dough blade merely spins the dough against the sides of the work bowl. I also use high-speed churning throughout (the ON button) instead of a "dough mode" because it does a better job of developing the gluten (wheat protein) that forms the framework of this bread.

Maccheroncini al Pesce Spada This dish epitomizes what I have found true Sicilian cooking to be: fresh tasting, light, and fragrant.

MAGIRITSA Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of Greece. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. Magiritsa is made with the parts of the lamb not used for the spit-roasted Easter lamb, which is usually very small (about 20 pounds). In the classic recipe, all the innards — heart, lungs, and so forth — go into the pot, but they do not really contribute to the taste. The flavor of the stock comes from the boiled head and neck, and the soup gets its distinctive taste from scallions, fresh dill, and the egg-and-lemon mixture. There are lots of different magiritsa recipes. A friend described to me the one her family prepared in Halki, a small island that is part of the Dodecanese. In her family's version, no innards were used because, in Halki as in all the Dodecanese, they do not roast the lamb on the spit but instead stuff it with rice and the innards. So in Halki's magiritsa, many lambs' heads were boiled to make a very tasty stock, to which egg and lemon sauce is added at the end. The heads were not boned, but as they cooked for many hours, even their bones became soft. Each member of the family got one head and ate it with the broth. No scallions or dill were added to the magiritsa. My recipe for Easter soup was given to me by my cousin's wife, Katy Kremezi, whose mother came from Smyrna (Izmir) in Asia Minor.

Uova Ripiene di Tonno Recipes are some of my favorite souvenirs of memorable dining experiences. Whenever I make these eggs, for example, I am reminded of the first time I ate them at Belvedere, a favorite restaurant in La Morra in Piedmont. The owner told me what was in them, and at home I experimented with the proportions of the ingredients to get the flavor I remembered.

MELOPITA SANTORINIS Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of the Greek Islands. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. Individual cheese tarts similar to this one are prepared in Crete and on most of the Greek islands during Easter time. The olive-oil-and-beer pastry, based on a recipe from Paros, has a very nice flavor and texture.

SALAT TIS LESVOV Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of the Greek Islands. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. From the first October rains up until the end of April, the greengrocers of Mytilini, the capital of Lesbos, sell each head of romaine lettuce tied together with two or three sprigs of borage (often with its little blue flowers), two or three scallions, several sprigs of peppery arugula, four or five sprigs of dill or fennel fronds, a few sprigs of peppery wild cress and either fresh mint or a little wild celery. Once home, these essential ingredients for the local green winter salad are thinly sliced and tossed with a simple vinaigrette. It's important to cut the greens at the last moment and to slice them very thin. If they are coarsely cut, the salad will taste different.

Utensils needed: Heavy-bottomed saucepan; four 8-ounce containers with lids, sterilized
Cooking time: Approximately 20 minutes
Storage: Refrigerate in an airtight container up to 3 weeks.
Serving suggestions: Use as a condiment for meat, poultry, or fish; as a dip for crudités; or as a topping for croutons, baguette slices, or sliced cooked potatoes.

KITRINA KOULOURIA ASTYPALITIKA Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of Greece. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. I first saw these biscuits on Holy Thursday in Astypalaia (an island of the Dodecanese). In a bakery there I saw pan after pan full of yellow biscuits about to be baked for the second time. I thought they were the baker's specialty and asked if I could buy some. To my astonishment I learned that they belonged to the women of the village, who had brought them there to be baked. I was offered one to taste, and tried to figure out what was giving them their strange flavor. I had never seen or tasted anything like those biscuits anywhere in Greece. The week before Easter it is customary throughout Greece to bake Easter biscuits, but the ones I was familiar with were sweet and contained many eggs. These were savory — I could taste pepper in them — but I could not figure out the rest of the flavors. When I asked, I was told their main flavoring was saffron. In the fall, after the first rains, the women of the island climb the rocky hills of Astypalaia in search of the crocus flowers from which they collect about 1/3 ounce of saffron threads — enough to color and flavor the dough made from 28 pounds of flour that they usually bake. Astypalaian women don't like commercial saffron, believing that the saffron gathered from their own hills is best. And, of course, they are right. As I learned later, these saffron biscuits are found only on this tiny island. In Athenaeus, bread with saffron is described as one of the foods served during ancient symposia, but in modern Greece — although we now cultivate and export a lot of the precious spice — we use hardly any saffron in our cooking. I believe that this recipe must be a very old one, and that is the reason it contains no sugar. The women of the island keep the tradition and bake a lot of these yellow biscuits every Easter. They send some to their relatives in Athens and keep the rest in large tin boxes to eat with fresh farmer's cheese or with their coffee for the rest of the year. Adjusting the recipe given to me by Virginia Manolaki for 8 cups of flour was quite an ordeal. Commercial saffron seems to be weaker than the Astypalaian variety, so I had to use more. Finally, I came up with the version that follows, which is very near the real thing. Serve the biscuits with fresh cheese or with coffee.

I am delighted to see broccoli di rape in the supermarket almost year-round and of excellent quality: fresh, bright-green stems and leaves, with tight heads of pale-green florets (don't buy any with yellowed, open flowers). I hope you are familiar with this versatile vegetable — related to both turnips and broccoli — and love its unique bitter-almond taste as much as I do. This warm salad is a particularly easy way to prepare broccoli di rape, and its mild flavor and comforting texture will please even those family members who are wary of new vegetables!

ARNI GEMISTO ME HORTA KE FETA Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of the Greek Islands. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. This recipe comes from Andros, and it is one of the most delicious ways to cook a whole Easter spring lamb or kid. The various spring wild greens on the island, seasoned with fennel, mint and other aromatic herbs, together with the local slightly sour fresh cheese, are used to make the stuffing. In my version, instead of a whole tiny lamb, I use a shortened leg of lamb (shank half) partly boned, to make room for the stuffing. The result is quite different but equally enticing. Serve with Roasted Potatoes with Garlic, Lemon, and Oregano.

If you have a nice sharp chef's knife, this is a breeze. (Or if you don't, you should buy a sharpening stone, and you'll never have blunt knives again.) The idea for this recipe came about when we were catering a HUGE job on a TINY budget. They wanted tuna tartare, but I knew it would be expensive, and it's best eaten soon after it's made or it starts to get all gummy. Gravlax, on the other hand, needs at least a couple of days to cure, so I decided to use diced salmon instead of tuna, for economy, and to marinate it with our gravlax spice mix a day before the event, freeing up the chefs for other last-minute things. In my test run, I added orange zest, thinking, isn't orange good with salmon? Normally you would put something like this on a cucumber slice and that would be fine, but the juniper in the marinade suggested potato, so we served it on a slice of crisp potato, and it was ravishing in the extreme. The potatoes can be made ahead of time too, as long as they're cooked until they're completely crisp and stored in an airtight container until you need them. Any potato not cooked all the way through will soften the others; if that happens, pop them all in a 350°F oven for five minutes, or until they've crisped up again. The salmon can be sticky, so use two teaspoons to put it on the potato. I could never remember of which there was more in the gravlax cure, sugar or salt (since in the basic gravlax recipe one is three tablespoons and one is four). So after years of irritably looking up such a short recipe, I decided to THINK for a second and realized salt has four letters so salt is the four tablespoons. Welcome to my world.

This is a ridiculously easy soup to make. It's tasty and durable, and it gets even better overnight.

(Kavalierspitz) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from David Bouley, Mario Lohninger, and Melissa Clark's book East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube. Lohninger also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Lohninger and Austrian cooking, click here.

A panachée is a mixture of two or more ingredients with different colors, flavors, or shapes. For this one, I mix fruits and fruit puree with cookies and cream. It takes only a few minutes to prepare and almost any berries will work. I like to serve these desserts in shallow glass bowls or goblets. Although any cookies will do, I prefer to use Scottish shortbread cookies in this dessert.

Mango Chutney is the one we think of as the "original" and most traditional of all chutneys. It goes well with curries, chicken, pork, lamb, and game.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from David Bouley, Mario Lohninger, and Melissa Clark's book East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube. Lohninger also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Lohninger and Austrian cooking, click here. David Bouley: Mario and I wanted to put fresh herring on the menu, but we couldn't find a consistent source for the best product from the North Sea. So we came up with this dish using mackerel, an underused fish in this country. When you marinate the raw mackerel, it becomes very mellow in flavor. It's a clean-tasting fish, not a bit "fishy" or strong. We marinate the mackerel in Bibb lettuce and cucumber juices, then mix it with beet and apple for sweetness and a little crunch. It's both light and refreshing.

(Vanillesauce) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Rick Rodgers's book Kaffeehaus: The Best Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. To read more about Austrian cooking, click here. This recipe originally accompanied Farmer's Cheese and Raisin Filo Strudel. A cousin to the French crème anglaise, this pale yellow dessert sauce is called Kanarienmilch, or "canary milk," in some old cookbooks. The Viennese version is boiled, as the egg yolks are protected from curdling by the cornstarch. This makes it a slightly thicker, less egg-rich sauce that beautifully offsets Austro-Hungarian desserts. Because it takes less watching, I now use Vanillesauce whenever I need a vanilla dessert sauce.