Cannellini Bean

This light summery riff on an Italian classic, pasta e fagioli, is as basic as it is tasty. I love the temperature contrast of hot pasta and beans with cool tomato salad, though you can also serve this peasant dish cold as a pasta salad.

Beans and mushrooms are a great combo and quintessentially Italian. Experiment with different varieties and colors of beans.

This is a beautiful dish, which I discovered on vacation with my family in Capri. Every year, we visit the same hotel—Hotel Quisisana—on this beautiful island in southern Italy. The region is rich in seafood, which they use for everything from antipasti to entrées. Some of the seafood can be a bit exotic for most American palates, especially squid. But don’t be afraid of it: You can buy squid that’s already cleaned from your fishmonger, and all you need to do is rinse, grill, and slice. Just like chicken. (Okay, not really just like chicken, but the steps are the same.)

Throw these pantry ingredients together and you’ve got a terrific salad. You could add other ingredients to jazz it up, like 1/2 cup capers, 1 cup cherry tomatoes, and some fresh basil leaves, and you could even serve it over 2 cups fresh arugula.

This dip is the Italian version of hummus, and in my opinion it’s smoother and tastier. This is a staple antipasto when I’m entertaining. The pita chips aren’t Italian, but they work really well with this dip.

Orecchiete are like little spoons that cup the ingredients and ensure you get a little bit of all the flavors in every bite. This is a particularly fast dish to put together.

In Venice you’ll find this soup in nearly every restaurant, and every version is a little bit different. I use two kinds of beans because I like the different textures each contributes: the cannellini are creamy while the garbanzos (chickpeas) have a slightly firmer bite. The final herb sauce brightens and freshens the long-cooked flavors. You can substitute any mild white fish for the snapper, but try to keep the fillets whole as the soup cooks. I always feel if I’ve spent the money for a beautiful piece of fish, I want people to see it, not just find tiny flakes throughout the soup.

I love the versatility of cannellini beans. I’ve puréed them to make a dip and have used them as a thickener for soups. They’ve made many appearances in salads and even pasta dishes. This time, though, the cannellini bean is the star, offering a creamy, buttery texture for the base of the soup, which perfectly absorbs the flavors of the aromatics.

I made this for an après-ski menu on Everyday Italian. It is quite hearty and the beans give it nice body without making it too thick. The whipped cream garnish is beautiful and becomes even more fragrant as it slowly melts into the soup.

Flavors of the Mediterranean are blended in this simple, easy-to-love salad. Serve it as is or on lettuce.

Soup’s on! This colorful and creamy soup is a delicious way to eat your veggies.

I love dips because I think they “force” people to eat more veggies. Now that’s great if the dip isn’t doing more damage than the veggies are adding in health benefits, which is not the case with many dips. But fortunately, this is one that helps people eat more veggies and adds extra nutrients.

Pat: Creamy, smoky white beans, simmered with some kind of pork fat, are a Southern staple, especially when served with a wedge of warm cornbread. This white-bean soup is finished with kale, a nourishing green that’s packed with vitamins A and C (the leaves are so pretty that Gina uses the green and purple varieties to decorate her party trays). Smoked sausage makes a great addition to this soup, and what we do then is leave out the bacon and add 1/2 pound of sliced smoked sausage instead. (You’ve heard the expression “an eye for an eye” in Memphis we say “a pig for a pig.”)