These dishes are perfect for a New England autumn, when the tomatoes are still abundant, but evenings are cool. Not every recipe is foolproof, but there's enough buried treasure here to keep Mediterranean-minded cooks digging happily for months.
Bean soup with escarole, in particular, was simplicity raised to an art. It was nothing more than white beans and slightly bitter greens, but the aromatics - garlic, celery, chili, parsley - infused the beans with earthy virtue, and naturally sweetened the escarole. Orecchiette with broccoli rabe had a salty, insolent quality (if somewhat one-dimensional) reminiscent of a good puttanesca sauce, thanks to a hefty dose of garlic and anchovies. Jenkins's instructions yielded a thick but not overly doughy homemade pasta.
The frittata-like ciambutella started with a deeply fragrant, thick, and savory sauce of tomatoes and sausages, and evolved into a hearty egg dish generous with basil and oregano. Our favorite by far was the humble braised squid and potatoes. Cooked in a little wine and baked in the oven, the squid were coaxed right past their rubbery stage. The result was a mass of flavorfully tender rings and tentacles crusted with Parmesan- and parsley-flavored bread crumbs. By the end, even the 6-year-old at our table was fighting over the brown bits in the bottom of the pan.
Not every dish met with such success: Lemon and garlic chicken, baked with rosemary and a pile of lemons and garlic, somehow failed to develop into more than the sum of its parts. What I thought of as braised cauliflower with the usual suspects (red onion, chili, cherry tomatoes, olives, pecorino) was underwhelming in the same way, not an inspired experience I couldn't have discovered on my own.
