Salad

This is like a steak dinner with onion rings, steak fries, and salad with blue cheese dressing, all chopped up in a bowl together. If you skipped lunch, this is your payoff.

This is the at-home version of another perfect meal from France. To make this more of a meal, serve with sliced French sausages and ham.

My mom created the pancetta-wrapped shrimp years ago. I love her SOOOOO much!

That’s what Mom and I called it, this light, delicious midday meal in Saint-Émilion, France. It’s a wonderful light supper in warm months and a good lunch in any season. To make this salad into a movable feast, serve with French ham, sausage, or pâté, cheese, and a baguette. Oh, and plenty of Saint-Émilion wine.

I imagine eating this meal on a farm table, outside, in Tuscany—maybe it’s early fall. I have a glass of Rosso di Montalcino. Where will you be for your first bite?

This dish is fast and healthy and incorporates a favorite Sicilian combo: oranges, red onions, and oregano.

This simple feast brings together all my favorite flavors from a short, sweet stay in Bordeaux.

This one is especially good at summer’s end.

The “greens of the first of May” are a spring treat I enjoy if I happen to be lucky enough to be wandering around Italy on the first of May. The mixture of spinach, anchovies, capers, and olives is stuffed and cooked inside a dough pocket, like an empanada. Here, I pile it atop a favorite of mine, creamy polenta.

Eat well, eat more! Chew this one until you bust!

If you don’t groove on the shrimp, use 1 1/2 pounds of chicken tenders, 20 large sea scallops, or even 8 pieces of calamari, 2 per person, and grill in the shrimps’ place.