I had this dish recently in the highly recommended Ristorante, a Micheline guide recommended establishment in the centre of Torino. Chestnuts have always played a huge role in Italian peasant society, a cash crop both to sell and  to provide sustenance, usually ground into flour to make a protein rich bread.  It is time consuming among and fiddly to roast and peel seasonal raw chestnuts, but the vacuum packed pre-cooked versions are readily available all year round and taste just as good.   

This week's recipe comes from the North African side of the Mediterranean. Couscous is a type of pasta made from finely ground durum wheat semolina, and is a staple across  the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia).  It is not difficult to make, using a sort of circular rubbing motion with grains of semolina and water, but for this recipe I recommend buying a good quality dried version. 

This week's recipe is another "sucrée-salée" (sweet and salty) variation of the famous caramelised apple based Tarte Tatin. The technique of caramelising the ingredients before putting a pastry cap on works especially well with chicory, its bitterness balanced by the sweetness of shallots and high quality aged balsamic vinegar. These tarts are often made with puff pastry, but I prefer to use home made all butter short crust pastry.

This week's recipe is unashamedly retro, wildly popular at dinner parties in the 1970s but deserving a comeback. The original Beef Stroganoff dates back to Russia in the late 1800s, created by a French chef who cooked this dish for his employer, Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov. According to legend, the good Count had dental problems that made chewing difficult, hence the very thin slicing of the beef.

The Arborina Relais hotel is in the heart of Barolo wine country, 14 kilometres from Alba in the Piemonte region. If you are visiting Alba during white truffle season, this hotel is a perfect blend of understated luxury, comfortable modern design, fine dining and very friendly and professional staff. The hotel has 2 restaurants, a first floor casual bistro called The Lab (which doubles up as the breakfast venue) and ground floor fine dining in the Osteria Arborino.

This week's recipe  is my version of a dish I ate recently in an excellent  restaurant called Bar des Oiseaux in Nice's old city. Until 1860 Nice was part of the Kingdom of Sardegna - Piemonte, a precursor of modern Italy,  and this dish is a classic example of the kind of Frano-Italian fusion food that is common in this area. 

This vegetable is a member of the chicory family that is very hard to find outside Italy,  and is generally only available between November and February.  Puntarelle are the new pointed shoots in the middle of the plant (photo below), before they grow into stalks and leaves with the look (and flavour) of dandelion.  I first heard of this dish a number of years ago from a taxi driver in Rome, and I was bemused that he was waxing so lyrically about a salad.

This week's recipe originates in Northern Italy, combing succulent lean veal with butter, wine and capers. It works best with French or Italian veal which is younger and more tender than veal sold in Australia. If veal is not your thing, you can substitute thinly sliced chicken breasts, which need to be cooked for an extra 2-3 minutes. Capers are the unripened green buds of the caper bush…

Although chowder is almost exclusively associated with the North Eastern United States, it is actually French in origin, and the word chowder is an anglicisation of Chaudière,  which meant cauldron, and was the name given to soup or stew with added potatoes.  A similar dish is popular in Scotland, where it enjoys the splendid name of Cullen Skink.  This chowder recipe is an approximation of a main course I recently enjoyed at the excellent Winding Stair resaurant in Dublin.  

This week's recipe is very seasonal as it can only be made with the sweetest ripe juicy figs. Orignating in Sicily, its combination of sweet and saltiness is another example of the residual culinary influence of the island's 10th century Moorish rulers from North Africa. It is often made with smoked pancetta, but guanciale (cured pork cheek) has a more delicate flavour and the crispy fat perfectly balances the rich sweetness of the figs and shallot.   

This week's recipe combines Dover Sole, one of the 3 great eating fish, with sweet mussels, white wine and butter. Variations of this dish are served in high end restaurants throughout France, and if you can't get hold of Dover Sole, John Dory or Turbot both make a very acceptable substitute. The best mussels to use are small ones which have a wonderful flavour and natural sweetness that perfectly balance the final dish. 

This week's restaurant review is of Comice, a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant near my former home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, serving product-driven contemporary French cuisine and a wine list centred on grower-producers. Owners Noam Gedalof from Montreal and Etheliya Hananova from Winnipeg, chef and sommelier, husband and wife, bring to Comice more than thirty years of combined professional experience in California, New York, Montreal and Paris.

This week's recipe is one of the best ways to eat fresh crab, which many chefs regard  the most delicious member of the crustacean family.  For tastiest  results, fresh picked mud or blue swimmer crab meat is the best to use, but if steaming your own crabs and picking the meat sounds a bit daunting, feel free to use pasteurised or even canned crab meat for an alternative version.  

This week's recipe is the essence of Provence in a bowl.  It combines fennel, tomatoes and pastis with butter and has a mild chilli kick. Pastis is the iconic Provençal aperitif, and is made using anise , liquorice and herbs.  It is a 45% proof spirit served diluted with cold water and ice, and the chemical reaction of the water turns it a cloudy yellow colour.

Turbot is widely considered one of the 3 great eating fish, alongside Sea Bass and Dover Sole. It can grow to enormous sizes, and is usually sold whole up to 2 kgs in weight or in tranches for larger fish. This recipe is for a smaller fish cut sliced into 8 tranches, and cooking it on the bone extracts maximum flavour.

This week's recipe is a variation of a famous pasta dish from 3 Michelin Star restaurant Da Vittorio in Bergamo, Northern Italy. Deceptively simple, it is usually made with 3 types of tomato, yellow datterini, red cherry and San Marzano, but any good quality ripe tomatoes will give equally good results. It is also very quick to make since ripe tomatoes break down very quickly to form a thick and unctuous sauce. 

This week's recipe comes from Sicily, combining oranges, fennel and olive oil for an unlikely sounding but delicious summer salad. Sicily is famous for blood oranges, but these can be hard to get hold of and in any case normal oranges tend to be sweeter which works better for this recipe. In Sicily you quite often see additions such as black olives, but this simple version is the best. 

This week’s recipe comes from Campania in Southern Italy, marrying pistachio nuts with guanciale and parmigiano.   For such simple ingredients, the end result is a very luxurious dish that you would normally expect to find in a high end restaurant.  Guanciale is cured pork cheek, an essential ingredient for pasta dishes such as Carbonara and Amatriciana, but unsmoked pancetta makes a perfectly good substitute.  

Variations of this week's recipe can be found throughout the Mediterranean.  It requires the freshest of raw prawns, unwaxed citrus and good quality olive oil.  For the prawns, red prawns are perfect for their colour, but these can be hard to find and grey ones have the same flavour profile and make a perfect alternative.  It is usually served with fresh or dried chilli, but you can leave this out if you don't like anything spicy.  

This week's recipe comes from Sicily, where the pistachio nuts and preserved lemon peel are lingering vestiges of the islands Moorish past. It is normally made with swordfish, but sea bream makes a very good alternative, and the lemon juice partially cooks the fish so it is not raw when you combine all the ingredients. Taglierini are a type of very thin tagliatelle made from durum wheat and eggs, and it's a very versatile pasta as well as being extremely quick to cook.

Le Bistrot de Jan is chef Jan van der Westhuizen's second restaurant in Nice. It is located in rue Lascaris in Port Lympia, right next door to his amazing Michelin Stared flagship restaurant Jan. Both restaurants share the same kitchen so the bistro provides the opportunity to taste chef Jan's extraordinary food more affordably. The menu is eclectic, with influences from his native South Africa, the French Riviera and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, combined with classic French technique.

This is a spectacular dish to prepare for a large lunch or a party. It is essential to use good quality salmon, wild if you can find it and ethically farmed if you can't. In the southern hemisphere, this means buying New Zealand rather than Tasmanian. The cucumber slices are arranged as a garnish to look like fish scales, with the added benefit of being a tasty accompaniment.

This week's recipe comes from the Basque area of south western France, and is sometimes known as Basque scrambled eggs . The name Piperade comes from the Basque word for pepper, piper. Traditionally it is served with crisp fried Bayonne ham (similar to Prosciutto Crudo), but it goes better with crisp fried cooked ham. It is usually cooked with green pepper, but the red ones are sweeter.

This week's recipe is a foolproof pasta recipe that originates in Puglia in the South of Italy. It combines ripe eggplants (aubergines) and tomatoes, closely related members of the nightshade family, into a delicious and unctuous sauce. The technique includes finishing the final 2 minutes of the cooking of the pasta in the sauce, for maximum absorption of flavour as it reaches the al dente stage.

The Turbot is one of the 3 best fish in the world to eat (the other 2 being Dover Sole and Sea Bass).   It is a delicious flat fish, with firm white flesh and can be roasted, fried or poached.  The skin is very thick, and although edible if crispy, it is too easy to overcook the fish so I always discard it.