Preview in new tab Pasta with swordfish, or Pasta con Pesce Spada, is a quickly made pasta dish popular throughout southern Italy.  It takes about 30 minutes to prepare.  Pasta con Pesce Spada is typically a one skillet dish in which the swordfish is cooked along with the sauce.  I prefer to cook the fish […]

Sicilian cuisine makes use of locally sourced ingredients such as its famous pistachios, which are grown in the town of Bronte.  This simple recipe incorporates pistachios into a breading mixture that can be used as a coating for fish (such as cod, halibut, salmon, and tuna), and boneless steaks.    Pistachios have a high fat […]

It’s customary in my family to prepare seafood for Christmas Eve dinner. Not quite the traditional seven courses but I make around three or four dishes because not everyone in the family is fond of seafood. The first course is always a pasta dish. Pasta with red clam sauce is quick and easy to prepare […]

Pizzaiola sauce is basically a marinara sauce seasoned with dried oregano.  The Italian term “a la pizzaiola” refers to any dish that is made with this sauce.  However, the term is seldomly used here in the States.  Eggplant Parmesan and Chicken Parmesan are popular Italian dishes using pizzaiola sauce.    This recipe was originally given […]

Most of the time when I grill swordfish, I simply coat it with olive oil and sprinkle it with some salt and pepper.  Sometimes I like to kick it up a notch and make swordfish Palermo style (alla Palermitana).  This is a very simple, tasty, and quick swordfish recipe.  The swordfish is first coated with […]

Our family celebrates Christmas with a traditional seafood dinner on Christmas Eve, as most Italians do.  This year I decided to make baked scallops instead of the usual stuffed clams my kids love.  Here’s the reason why.  As I was cleaning out my kitchen drawers the other day, I found some natural baking scallop shells […]

Sarde alla Beccafico, a very old dish in Sicilian cuisine, is still popular today.  The dish is made with fresh sardines that are stuffed with toasted bread crumbs, currants, pignoli, cheese, and parsley.  The fish roll-ups are then baked in a casserole snuggled between bay leaves, orange, and lemon slices. The beccafico, a species of […]

While visiting my daughters in the Washington, D.C. area, I made a trip to the local seafood market.  Really fresh seafood is hard to come by in the mountains of North Carolina, where my husband and I spend our summers.  I was instantly intoxicated by the variety of fish and crustaceans exhibited, including the octopus.  […]

There was some outstanding tuna at the market this week so I decided to make Tuna alla Ghiotta.  Making this dish brought back memories of living in Sicily.  I remember the local fishmonger would have a huge fresh-caught swordfish or tuna sitting on a butcher block from which he would hack off a piece of […]

Calamari salad makes a great antipasto dish or side salad, served either chilled or at room temperature.  It is similar in flavor to octopus salad but much quicker to make.  Squid takes about one minute to cook, whereas octopus takes about one hour.  Chilling the squid for several hours helps to intensify the flavors.  I usually […]