Roccbox Pizza Oven
My latest cooking toy is the Roccbox portable pizza oven, which can get to 500 degrees C. At that temperature, a pizza takes about 90 seconds to cook.
Category: Italian Cuisine
One-Pan Pasta and Meatballs
I am always looking for recipes which I think would work on Boy Scout camping trips. Such recipes should be simple, use a minimum of pans or techniques which would be hard to use while camping, and should be boy-friendly. This concept of cooking pasta and meatballs in one pan was on the cover of Read More …
Boundary Waters Bolognese
Carol was advocating something new for the menu in the Boundary Waters, including use of spaghetti versus small pasta, our daughter just finished a year studying in Bologna, and those two factors lead to the successful proof of concept that spaghetti Bolognese could be served as a one-pot dinner on a backpacking or canoe trip. Read More …
Quick Fresh Egg Pasta
I saw on the internet an article from bravotv.com stating that fresh pasta could be made in just 3 minutes in a food processor. Since I had some leftover Ragu Bolognese and since tagliatelle (a wide egg noodle) is the standard pasta in Bologna for the ragu, I decided to give it a go. Read More …
Ragu Bolognese
As a souvenir of her year in grad school in Bologna, our daughter Amanda gave me a local cookbook, Luigi Lepri’s Recipes from Bologna: The traditional food from the Capital of Italian cuisine. This is an adaptation of the recipe in that book, adjusted for the ingredients which I could easily find at my local Read More …
Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce
During the past year this has become my standard Italian red sauce. The key step is to hand crush a lot of canned tomatoes, and then to slowly roast and caramelize most of them, while reserving a smaller amount to add just at the end to add brightness to the final sauce. It takes a Read More …
Pane Francese v2
On Friday night, I mixed the pre-ferment for a batch of Pane Francese without fully reading my recipe. When I did read it, I realized that the original recipe took at least 48 hours, and I did not have that long since the bread was intended to accompany Chicken Vesuvio for a family dinner on Read More …
Chicken Marsala with Mushrooms and Shallots
This made an excellent Friday night dinner for company, with chicken breasts providing an economical alternative to the traditional veal. (Turkey cutlets would also work well here.) This recipe, which is an adaptation from Serious Eats, includes the trick of adding gelatin to the liquids to give the sauce a better mouthfeel. 1-1/4 Read More …
Focaccia
Focaccias are lightly topped Italian flatbreads which I generally make with the same dough I usually use for pizza. It should be very light and airy with the flavor of the bread shining through, and with the topping just as an accent. This posting is about the focaccia I made last night to go with Read More …
Garlic Scape Pesto
My son Nick brought me a pile of garlic scapes, which are the tough stalks of the garlic plant. He suggested we make a pesto out of it, which we have done and enjoyed with pasta and pizza. This is an example of the general principle that tasty pesto-like mixtures can be made with Read More …