Domenica Marchetti is a food writer, recipe developer and cooking teacher who specializes in seasonal Italian home cooking and the author of The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy. Visit her website at www.domenicacooks.com. You can find more of her recipes here.

I have only been to Morocco by way of the movie Casablanca and through the words of my former cleaning woman, Fatima.

Like me, Fatima is an avid home cook and every other Tuesday when she would arrive, we would spend a good amount of time talking about food we had cooked for our families. She described in vivid detail delicious-sounding tagines of lamb or chicken, the proper way to make couscous, and soups featuring lentils and other legumes, assorted fresh vegetables, and spices.

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I am always looking for ways to make use of what some may consider scraps. So when the blue-eyed boy at the farmers market asks if I want the greens cut off my leeks or spring onions, I always wince at the thought that those flavorful green bits will come to naught.

A pang of self-congratulation always washes over me when I find uses for parmesan rinds, parsley stems and other overlooked culinary real estate. But it never even occurred to me to wonder if those lovely wasted radish leaves were edible until I stumbled on Clotilde’s recipe for radish leaf pesto the other day.

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If you’re so broke or apprehensive about the economy that even Friday night Happy Hour feels like a forbidden indulgence, why not bring it home? You’ve been good all week. Tonight, treat yourself or invite some friends over for these inexpensive, junky, indulgent and crowd-pleasing finger-food treats.

1. We’re making this weekend’s Sunday Dinner — Andy’s sweet and spicy take on Buffalo Wings with bacon in the blue cheese dressing and honey in the wing sauce — tonight.

2. Deep-fried tortilla chips are worth the indulgence if made in your own kitchen and eaten while still warm with some homemade guacamole or salsa.

3. Quesadillas with black beans and cheddar are budget-friendly and filling.

4. Karina’s gluten-free Nachos Fabuloso are made even more so thanks to a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.

5. To wash it all down, make a pitcher of sparkling margaritas, Micheladas or classic limeade for the teetotalers and the kids.

Why do we use the phrase that something is “as American as apple pie” when apple pie itself was invented before America was even founded? (This 1361 English recipe reads like a Twitter micro-recipe — “Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis,” it begins, and ends with instructions to “bake wel.”)

Back in 1989, Russell Baker ran a New York Times contest “to discover a new cliche for the outmoded expression ‘as American as apple pie,’” offering a frozen apple pie as a reward. He was disappointed with the results.

And 20 years later, the increasingly quaint-sounding but still widely used idiom is defined by the Cambridge University dictionary as meaning to be typically American, although what that means is as diverse as the recipe for apple pie.

The once-nostalgic phrase is just as often used to make a political point about who we have become, “as American as apple pie” used to describe torture, bank nationalization and socialism, to name a few.

In a country as diverse as ours, is it even possible to use a single dish as a metaphor to capture the essence of the nation? From a purely food point of view, which dishes seem most American to you?

Domenica Marchetti is a food writer, recipe developer and cooking teacher who specializes in seasonal Italian home cooking and the author of The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy. Visit her website at www.domenicacooks.com. You can find more of her recipes here.

It strikes me as funny now, but for years when my kids were younger, while I spent my days testing recipes and writing about food, I still struggled to put dinner on the table just about every night.

Part of it, I guess, had to do with my husband’s work schedule. Daily newspaper deadlines meant he usually did not get home before 8:30 or 9 p.m., often later. If what I was making was not “kid-friendly” food, I would set it aside for my husband and me and search for something simpler to throw together for the kids. This helped us to get through “arsenic hour,” as a friend described dinnertime in a household with young children.

Once I tried to get them to eat more adventurously, more often than not, only one of them would like the offering, while the other turned up his or her nose or grimaced while trying to choke down a few bites.

It was peas that finally saved the day.

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The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.

Cooked eggplant isn’t pretty. Cursed with the color of putty, its pulp is bland, at best. But cube it or slice it and goose it up with a bit of garlic or wrap it in a robe of tomato sauce, and this perennial wallflower blossoms.

Ironically, the culinary allure of eggplant comes from its dullness. Its innocuous color and mild flavor make it a perfect vehicle for any number of seasonings. Its meaty texture gives vegetarian dishes substance and its natural creamy consistency can thicken a sauce or a stew, without a speck of added cholesterol, less than half a gram of fat and barely an added calorie per serving.

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Photo: Smoked Salmon And Fennel With Green Sauce On Toast (Cookthink)

A tartine (tar-TEEN) is a fun-to-say French word that means bread that is spread with something — whether it’s a baguette smeared with butter and dipped in morning coffee, a round of goat cheese melted on a slice of country bread and served on a bed of greens or what English-speakers would call an open-faced sandwich (or, to borrow a word from our Italian friends, a crostini). Dressed sparingly with a few harmonious and well-chosen ingredients, a tartine sliced into one or two-inch strips also makes an easy, inexpensive and informal hors d’oeuvre to serve with drinks.

The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.

Food snobs have been known to come to blows over whether a bouillabaisse deserves the label without rascasse, the bony fish of the Mediterranean that’s more skeleton than meat. There are heated debates slugging out the origins of pasta, and brawls determining whether an authentic cassoulet is the one from Castelnaudary, Carcassone or Toulouse.

But cooking is at heart a folk art, and we do it a disservice whenever we take its products too seriously. For the quality of a dish does not lie in the purity of its recipe or the authenticity of its ingredients, but in the way that it fits the taste, lifestyle and dining habits of those who choose to cook it and eat it.

I therefore advocate fiddling with classic recipes, or any recipes for that matter, that seem overly complex, expensive or time-consuming — which leads me to the subject of this week’s Sunday dinner.

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It’s looking like cool, damp weather in Louisville for tomorrow’s 135th running of the Kentucky Derby. Having a few friends over to watch the action? If you’re still figuring out what to serve, consider the classics, then consider varying them a little.

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For longer than any of us have been alive, cooks have been finding uses for leftover bread. If you find yourself in this predicament, here are 10 delicious ways to salvage bread before it goes to waste.

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