Calamari are mostly known as deep fried rings. They are especially delicious when you make them from fresh calamari. Calamari do not only consist of a body (that is cut into rings) but they also have tentacles. You could deep … Continue reading Linguine with Calamari Tentacles (Linguine ai Tentacoli di Calamari)
Cooking a delicious weekday meal can be as quick as it takes to cook the pasta. Thanks to my blogging friend Simona and her wonderful blog Grembiule da cucina, here’s another one. The combination of tomatoes and sundried tomatoes works … Continue reading Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes and Olives (Orecchiette con Pomodori Secchi e Olive)
Calamarata is a pasta shape from southern Italy that looks like rings of calamari, and it is most often served with a seafood sauce. This fish ragù is very simple and can be prepared while the pasta cooks (provided that … Continue reading Calamarata al Ragù di Pesce (Pasta with Fish Ragù)
This pasta dish is quick and easy enough to serve for a weekday meal, and special and delicious enough for a dinner party. It takes less than half an hour to prepare, and only a few ingredients are required. The … Continue reading Fusilli with Smoked Eel and Celeriac
Although crab and fennel are perhaps not ingredients you use on an every day basis, this is one of those pasta dishes that can be prepared in half an hour and is thus perfectly suited for a weekday meal. That … Continue reading Fusilli with Crab and Fennel
Last Saturday I hosted another wine dinner: 6 courses with 2 wines accompanying each dish for a group of 15 friends. If you’d like to see some photos of the event and read about what I served, visit my page … Continue reading Pasta with Romanesco and Sausage (Pasta con broccolo romano e salsiccia)
One of my favorite dishes is spaghetti alle vongole, and I realised I had never done a post on it yet. This pasta with clams has great depth of flavor because of the juices that the clams will release when … Continue reading Spaghetti alle Vongole
Different types of pasta can be found all over Italy. Especially the shapes are different everywhere, but there are also differences in the pasta dough. Generally speaking, fresh pasta is made with eggs and 00 flour in the North, and … Continue reading ‘Water’ Gnocchi with Sage Pesto (Gnocchi all’Acqua al Pesto di Salvia)
The secret to a great linguine ai frutti di mare is to use fresh seafood and to use the juices of the vongole and a stock made from the shrimp heads and shells for the sauce. It is a bit of … Continue reading Linguine ai Frutti di Mare
When we visited the Adriatic beach town of Roseto degli Abruzzi to eat at Vecchia Marina, Lucia, the charming hostess of the B&B we stayed at, pointed out to me that Roseto degli Abruzzi was also the home town of Antico … Continue reading The Quality of Pasta and Gold versus Bronze Drawn Spaghetti
One of the goodies I brought from my trip to Italy was a new pasta shape: soqquadri or a square version of mezzi rigatoni. (If you can’t find the square version, you can also make this recipe with the usual … Continue reading Soqquadri Pasta with ‘deconstructed’ Eggplant Parmigiana
After all the decadent restaurant meals, it is time for something very simple. This plate of pasta takes less than 15 minutes from start to finish. The list of ingredients is very short: pasta, zucchini, parmigiano, salt, pepper, olive oil. … Continue reading Quick Pasta with Zucchini
I got the idea for this fast delicious summery pasta dish from Marina of Le Recette di Baccos. It only takes as long as it takes to cook the pasta and the variations are endless. Raw vegetables, in this version … Continue reading Pasta with Raw Vegetables (Penne con Verdure Crude)
I had picked up a cauliflower because it was on sale, without knowing what I was going to do with it. Then when it was time to cook I wanted to try something new, and as ravioli is one of … Continue reading Cauliflower Ravioli (Ravioli al Cavolfiore)
Scamorza is a cheese from southern Italy that is often smoked, and it is this smoked variety that is the star of this recipe. You can think of it as smoked mozzarella. I had picked up this scamorza without deciding … Continue reading Penne with Scamorza, Eggplant and Cherry Tomatoes
This is more a serving suggestion than an actual recipe, but since I liked it so much I’m sharing it with you anyway. You see, the place where I found imported burrata before, had it again (after a few botched … Continue reading Fusilli with Bolognese Ragù and Burrata
Yet another simple and delicious seafood pasta dish from Biba Caggiano that only takes as long as it takes to cook the pasta: pasta shells with calamari, tomatoes, anchovies, and chile pepper flakes. This is best with fresh squid, but … Continue reading Pasta with Squid (Conchiglie alla Pappagano)
Acqua Pazza (which literally means “crazy water”) is a dish from Campania, the region of Naples. It can be either a primo piatto or a secondo piatto. As a secondo, it is fish cooked with cherry tomatoes. As a primo, it is … Continue reading Spaghetti all’Acqua Pazza (Spaghetti with Fish and Tomatoes)
Burrata is a fresh cheese from the Italian region of Puglia that is like a creamy version of mozzarella. I had never seen it imported before, so when I did see it in Amsterdam I jumped at the chance to … Continue reading Pasta with Burrata, Spinach, and Lemon (Orecchiette Burrata, Spinaci, Limone)
Viaggiando con Bea is one of the Italian blogs that I follow to get inspiration and feedback on my Italian recipes directly from the source. A while ago she published a recipe for a Sicilian side dish with cauliflower called … Continue reading Sicilian Pasta and Cauliflower Gratin (Gratin di Mezze Maniche al Cavolfiore)
Each region in Italy has its own pasta shapes and pasta recipes. For the southern part of the island of Sardinia the shape is called malloreddus or gnocchetti sardi, and the traditional dish using them is called Malloreddus alla Campidanese. … Continue reading Malloreddus alla Campidanese (Sardinian Pasta with Tomato and Sausage)
My favorite food blog in Italian is Le Recette di Baccos. Marina has done a lot of research to identify traditional regional recipes, handed down from mother to daughter, and every day she shares one of them with us. About … Continue reading Penne with Leeks and Pancetta (Penne con Porro e Pancetta)
Many Italian dishes have an amazing return on ‘investment’: a low number of ingredients and a simple and quick preparation yields a lot of flavor. This is certainly also true for linguine with scallops, although it is fair to say … Continue reading Linguine with Scallops (Linguine alle Capesante)
The Italian region of Lazio (which is the region around Rome) has some of the best simple pasta dishes: Spaghetti alla Carbonara, Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe, Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, and Spaghetti alla Gricia. The ingredients that all of them have in common are spaghetti, pecorino romano cheese, and freshly ground black pepper. Three of them have guanciale, two of them use the pasta cooking water, one has eggs, and one has tomatoes.
I had not blogged about alla Gricia yet, which is also known as Amatriciana ‘in Bianco’ because it is the same as Amatriciana but without the tomatoes. The recipe for alla Gricia is very simple: spaghetti, guanciale, pecorino romano, salt, and black pepper. It is not only very simple but also very tasty! Continue reading “Spaghetti alla Gricia”
When I started this blog I intended to share all my interesting experiences with cooking, and I’ve hold up to that intention. On some weekends I do so much cooking that I gather material for 5 to 10 posts in a single weekend. I’ve been cooking so much lately that I have about 20 posts worth of photos sitting on my hard drive, waiting to be published. So even on days like today when I didn’t cook anything interesting because I came home late from work, I browse through the photos to choose what to blog about.
After some posts about Tex-Mex and fancy stuff like sous-vide rose fish, it is time to go back to my culinary roots and post a recipe for a homey Italian pasta dish. Comfort food that is simple to prepare, cheap, loaded with flavor, and perfect for a cold autumn or winter day. This is one of those recipes that I had not tried before from my first cookery book by Biba Caggiano that got me started on Italian cooking. I probably never tried this before because beans are not really my favorite food. According to Biba this is a very old country dish. It sure has a lot of flavor, and although it still doesn’t make me fond of beans it was pretty good 🙂 Continue reading “Pasta with Stewed Beans (Pasta con i Fagioli Stufati)”
Cavolo nero is my favorite type of cabbage. You could substitute with kale if you can’t find cavolo nero, but cavolo nero has a sweeter taste. You can think of it as the elegant Italian cousin of kale. This pasta dish is quick, easy, and delicious. The cavolo nero is parboiled and then stir fried while the pasta is cooking. To complete the dish, the cavolo and pasta are tossed with parmigiano and a bit of the pasta cooking water. The ‘sauce’ that is thus created of the cooking water and parmigiano is very creamy and works very well with the flavor and crunchiness of the cavolo nero.
Continue reading “Penne with Cavolo Nero and Parmigiano”
Did you know October 25 is World Pasta Day? I didn’t until today. For us, almost every day is pasta day. There are countless varieties and even more sauces, and we like them all. I’ve written before on this blog that my love for Italian cooking initiated from the books of Biba Caggiano. I have almost all of her books, and I have cooked many of the recipes in them. But not all, and today’s pasta is a dish that I had never tried yet, even though it’s in the first of Biba’s books I have owned for 15 years now. I wish now I had tried it sooner, because it is really good!
Gramigna is a special kind of homemade local pasta from Bologna. Gramigna are often served wit sausage and cream, and Biba was inspired by that for the sauce in this recipe. As you need a special tool to make gramigna, we prepared fresh fettuccine instead. Continue reading “Fettuccine with Porcini, Sausage, and Cream”
The second time I cooked in someone else’s kitchen because I couldn’t use mine, I went to my parents. (In the meantime the floor has been finished and I can use my kitchen again, and I have been so busy cooking to celebrate that I didn’t have time left to post — the posts from that cooking frenzy will follow soon.) As I was surprised how good mussels with roquefort turned out to be, I thought it’d be nice to share this with my parents as I know they love seafood. To turn it into a whole dish of Italian-French fusion, I made a combination of pasta with mussels and broccoli with the roquefort sauce. It was no surprise that it turned out nicely. If you like mussels and blue cheese, you have got to try the combination. It really works!
Continue reading “Pasta with Mussels, Roquefort and Broccoli”
We are back home from our travels through Australia. Since this is a food blog rather than a travel blog, let me suffice by showing you a map of the route we have traveled (6000 km or almost 4000 miles altogether) in a camper van from coast to coast.
In the other posts I wrote about cooking in the Outback, I told you about how we would on most days kept the cooking to a bare minimum and simply put meat like beef, lamb or kangaroo on our small BBQ. But on one day during a long drive from the West MacDonnells to Kings Canyon I had plenty of time to think and decided to make something that would require more actual ‘cooking’ with the ingredients I had in the camper and of course taking into account the very limited equipment at my disposal. We did not have time to do any shopping, so I used only the ingredients I had bought without a clear idea of how I would use them.
I thought it would be nice not to use the BBQ for a change, and so I decided to simmer pork chops in tomato sauce and then serve the tomato sauce over pasta with additional mushrooms as a primo piatto, followed by the pork chops with the remaining tomato sauce as a secondo (click here if you’d like to know more about the Italian menu structure). I would have liked to use a better marbled shoulder chop for this, but I only had a loin chop so that is what I used. The result was quite nice and I will probably repeat this at home with a shoulder chop or perhaps even sous-vide. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Pork Chop in Tomato Sauce (Primo + Secondo)”
I had fennel left over after making fennel polpette using only the greens. I decided to use the fennel to make a Sicily-inspired pasta dish with raisins, pine nuts, and saffron. When I made this for the first time, I thought it was a bit bland. Now I added sugar and parmigiano and the result is very tasty. The flavors of the raisins, saffron, and fennel work together very well and are supported by the pine nuts and parmigiano. This is a nice vegetarian pasta dish that I will make again. I am not sure if it resembles any traditional Sicilian pasta dish. Continue reading “Fennel Pasta”
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