Pasta alla Siciliana

In Italy, pasta is a main food group. It is cooked differently based on what region you are in. This pasta is called Pasta alla Siciliana, or pasta from Sicily. We refer to it that way, but I've heard that in Sicily, it is called Pasta Norma, or Normal Pasta. Anyway, here is the recipe that got written down on the back of an old gas coupon booklet at the last Italian cooking class. It didn't get baked (you normally would), just because it took so long for the water to boil and people were REALLY hungry.

Pasta alla Siciliana

Ingredients:
Eggplant
1 large jar tomato sauce
Oil (enough to cover eggplant spears)
¼ onion, cut in small slices
Basil
Water (about ½ C per jar of sauce)
Provolone cheese, chopped (make sure it is soft provolone)
Penne pasta

Process:

Slice the eggplant into spears and fry it in a pan in oil.

For sauce, fry onion slices in oil until soft, then add tomato sauce, water, and basil. Cook for 20 minutes.

Boil water, cook pasta until it is al dente. Mix sauce, pasta, and cheese; bake for 10 minutes. Serve topped with eggplant and extra sauce.

Note: Remember that Italian cooks rarely use measures, they just go by how much looks right. This makes about 4 servings, so put in about that much pasta. One eggplant is enough, and you can fry up any leftovers with some garlic and oil and serve it as a side dish.

Buon appetito!

Adventures with peanut butter

I have been having some interesting and tasty encounters with peanut butter lately. I made Tim chocolate/ peanut butter brownies for Valentine's Day. I used just a basic brownie recipe, but added peanut butter to the melted chocolate and mixed in peanut butter chips. I cooked them in a muffin pan for easy serving sizes. Once they were baked, I used a couple to make chocolate peanut butter trifles. These were decadent!

I had been reading in a magazine about making trifles, and I thought I'd try it. They are all about different colors and textures, and the layers should be interesting to look at. I made them in juice glasses so I could see the layers.

So here is my trifle, starting from the bottom:

1. crumbled brownies

2. chocolate pudding

3. peanut butter (melted in the microwave for 30 seconds, so it spreads nicely)

4. mini marshmallows

5. chocolate pudding

6. more brownies

Then I made peanut butter cup cheesecakes. I have been looking at the mini cheesecake crusts at the grocery store and wishing I had a reason to use them. A coworker's birthday was an excellent excuse!

I started out with my basic no-bake cheesecake recipe:

1 can sweetened condensed milk

8 oz cream cheese (room temp.)

1/3 C lemon juice

1 tsp vanilla

Mix until well blended. (It fit in exactly 12 of these little crusts.)

Then I melted some baking chocolate and spread it on the bottom and sides of the little crusts. When the chocolate had set, I melted some peanut butter and mixed it with some of the cheesecake mixture and spread it in the pans. It is topped with chocolate chips and chocolate syrup. The white ones are s'mores: chocolate chips on the bottom and cheesecake topped with marshmallows and chocolate sauce.



Turkish delights

Over President's Day weekend, Tim and I took a trip to Istanbul, Turkey, which was a culinary delight. Let's just say we spent a lot of time eating. Everything just looked so interesting! Some things were a little odd, like the super-sticky ice cream made from goat milk that you had to bite and chew. Lunches consisted of kebaps, shaved meat wrapped in a tortilla with french fries and veggies, and we stopped frequently for pomogranite/orange juice.

The first evening I had ravioli, which was stuffed with veal and and topped with a yogurt sauce and oregano. Tim had the daily special, which wasn't worth taking a picture of.

Being February, Turkey was very cold, so we stopped frequently for hot Turkish tea. They had apple tea, lemon tea, and just regular tea, all of which were served in little glasses. It took skill to pick up your cup so you didn't burn your fingers. These teas were instant, but at the spice market, we bought dried apple-chunk tea, which is excellent.

For all you Narnia fans, we did eat Turkish delight. There were lots of different flavors, many had pistachios and they came with little plastic swords for more fun spearing. 

Our mid-afternoon snack consisted of borek, which is the general word for pastries. These particular ones had cheese in them. The one on the left was basically just rolls with cheese melted in them, while the one on the right was more like phyllo dough with cheese baked in layers.

We took a ferry trip down the Bosphorus Strait, and stopped on the Asia side for lunch and a hike up to a castle with views of the Black Sea. Lunch wasn't anything spectacular, but we stopped for the local specialty called lokum. It is little dough balls that are deep fat fried and then rolled in maple syrup.

The Turkish people have an interesting way of making coffee. They keep adding a little to the cup and then cooking it some more until it can float a horseshoe and the bottom half of what is in your cup is made up of grounds. I had it with LOTS of sugar, Tim had no sugar (because that's how the locals take it). At the particular coffee shop we went to, they served it with chocolate to cut the bitterness. They also put chocolate covered coffee beans on the table. We were a little hyper afterwards.

Finally, the last evening in Istanbul, we found a restaurant on Trip Advisor that was out of the touristy section of town and we decided to give it a try. Besides the fact that it was in a slightly creepy part of town and though I was the only female in the restaurant (weird?), the food was outstanding. Appetizers of tomato and cucumber salad and a baked rice thing with chicken and raisins. The main course was thick pita bread with lamb. After we finally finished, having struggled with cutting the bread, we happened to look at the next table and see how those men were eating them. They were tearing the bread and using it to pick up the meat. Ohhhh, that's how you do it! Sheesh, we are such tourists.