What I'm making tonight:

AN ITALIAN FEAST!

Pasta al Pomodoro (pictured above)

Burrata Cheese With Shaved Vegetable Salad

Negroni

Dinner, Italian Style

Last week, a few of my girlfriends and I had a fancy four-course Italian dinner, each of us in charge of one of the courses... It was amazing. Here's what we had:

Antipasto:
Alexa made an amazing spread of grilled vegetables, delicious meats, roasted garlic, olives, goat cheese, and artichokes. She also made focaccia bread from SCRATCH! Ugh, it was perfect.

Primo Piatto:
Traditionally Italians make pasta or risotto for the first course of the night. This was my responsibility! I wanted to do something authentic and different, and I found the perfect recipe in the Italy issue of Bon Appetit Magazine... Tagliatelle with orange and prosciutto. It sounds kind of weird, yes. I've never used orange in any Italian dish before. But I figured if it was in Bon Appetit, it ought to be good. Boy, was it. It wasn't super sweet from the orange, and cooking with fresh pasta totally made a difference.

Secondo Piatto:
Erin, who hosted the dinner in her lovely Queen Anne apartment, made chicken breasts stuffed with fontina cheese, prosciutto, and sage for the main course. Woo! The girl knows how to cook. And she uses amazingly fresh ingredients.

Dolce:
I'm so glad that Jessica chose to prepare something simple and refreshing for dessert: She made limoncello floats! You can buy limoncello at the liquor store, and I believe she used a lemon flavored gelato for the "float" part.

Italy

"Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own sense, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why ... Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists, and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real."

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Bone Marrow Butter?

Happy February 2! My little supper club, consisting of her and her, celebrated the new month by going out to Cantinetta, a charming little Italian ristorante tucked into the Wallingford neighborhood.


I think the dish pictured above is what I ordered: Tagliatelle with porcini, duck confit, and raisins. Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment. Too dry or something. But as luck would have it, Danielle wasn't too happy with her order of agnolotti stuffed with sunchokes (it reminded her of beef stroganoff for some reason), so we traded. I liked it much better. Sunchokes are a revelation. Leslie got the Teres Major, which is a specific cut of beef, I think on the shoulder, and it was served with purple potatoes and bone marrow butter or something odd like that. Anyway, I had a bite and it was goooood. Oh, and for starters we had pancetta-wrapped dates (ahmazing), and a cheese plate with taleggio, a hard goat's milk, and a gorgonzola. Not too shabby!

Jumps in the Mouth

Chicken saltimbocca literally translated is "jumps in the mouth." Kind of cute. More like "shoves in the mouth," because it's so yummy. It's chicken with a sage leaf pressed onto it, wrapped in prosciutto, sauteed, and then drenched with a white wine-sage sauce.

Here's the recipe, from Everyday Food.


(And that photo is from a Vogue Hansel and Gretel spread, and I love it. That's Andrew Garfield, Lady Gaga, and Lily Cole).

Ka-ching!

Eating at Assaggio tonight in honor of Spidatter's birthday.

Italian food + long lost friend = party mode ACTIVATED.

Girlie Show Dinner

Here's what I'm making tonight:

...Creamy Orzo With Porcini...


Here's who I'm making it for:

And here's what I'm doing in my head:

Ratatouille Soup

Thank you to my dear friend Tita for sending me this recipe AGES ago. Because on Sunday I had the craving to make soup--the kind that simmers for an hour, with the savory scent wafting through your whole house. Ratatouille soup is healthy and delicious... the best combo in my opinion! And perfect for Fall. Note: I altered it a bit, using fresh rosemary instead of a bay leaf, and mushrooms instead of green peppers. And it tasted great.

Ingredients:
1 tbsp and 1 tsp olive or vegetable oil
1 cup chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, chopped
3 cups eggplant cut into 1/4 inch cubes
2 cups canned tomatoes, coarsely chopped
2 cups zucchini, sliced length-wise and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1/2 cup green bell pepper, chopped
4 cups Water
1 tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 bay leaf
2/3 cup orzo

Method:

Heat the oil over medium in a large saucepan. Gently saute the onion and garlic until the onion is beginning to soften, about three minutes. Toss in the eggplant, zucchini, and pepper and sauté, stirring from time to time, for five minutes. Add the water, tomato, and herbs, bring to a boil. Turn down heat to low and simmer for 45 minutes. Add the orzo and continue to simmer until orzo is fully cooked, about 10-15 minutes. Season to your liking (I used a bit of black truffle sea salt, because I'm cool like that).

Pasta Bella

On Sunday night, Joe and I cracked open his Mario Batali cookbook and made bucatini all'amatriciana, pasta with pancetta, red pepper flakes, and tomato sauce.

It can be pretty comical cooking with him; I'm a control freak, and he thinks he has a "natural gift" for cooking so he doesn't need to follow directions. Hi-larious. But the end result, was AMAZING. We were pretty darn proud of ourselves.

Highly recommend making bucatini all'amatriciana.

I'm loving...

Pasta Ponza.
It involves such tasty things as
cherry tomatoes, bread crumbs, and capers.
The recipe is easy-as-pie.
Bon appetit!

Weekend Cooking Project: Pizza

Punching out the dough...

Ingredients...

Coming out of the oven...

Kiss me, pizza. Kiss me.

Joe is having a pizza party for his birthday in a couple weeks, so he wanted to practice the art of making a perfect pizza pie. At one point I asked, "Do you know what you're doing?" and he replied, "Yah, I've done this many times!" Turns out he was a big fat liar. This was his first attempt at making homemade pizza. Thankfully, it came out of the oven crisp and cooked and bubbly. The only problem was that it stuck to the pan a little. Does anyone out there know how to solve that?

Gift Idea: The Silver Spoon

Do you know someone who likes to cook?

Do you know someone who likes Italian food?

Then, consider this doozy as a Christmas present:

The Silver Spoon (or Il cucchiaio d' argento). It's like the Bible of Italian cookbooks. It was first published in 1950 and has just recently been translated into English from Italiano.

And you'll find that what makes Italian cuisine so good is the simple (and fresh) ingredients and the simple steps.

Buon appetito!