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.

Pasta & potatoes, peanuts, and pizza

It's been a long time since I posted anything, and I've had several wonderful cooking experiences, so I'll share some with you. Last week we had another Neopolitan cooking class. The pasta dish we made was extremely traditional, pretty easy, and really tasty! I thought I'd share it with you.

Pasta and Potatoes

Sauce:
½ onion
½ stalk of celery
1 container pancetta (about 1/5 pound bacon, chopped)
Olive oil to cover

½ kilo potatoes (peeled and chopped)

2 or 3 cherry tomatoes
Mixed pasta (or your choice)

Put all sauce ingredients in large pot, cover with oil, and sauté until cooked. Then add the potatoes. Squeeze tomatoes to get extra juice out, add to the pot. Cover with water, add salt, and cook 15-20 minutes until potatoes are soft. Add pasta and cook until pasta is done. Serve with extra liquid as sauce.

Serves 4-5. Rice can be substituted for pasta.

I finally gave up on making pizza dough from scratch and now I just use a packaged mix, but it still tastes good. I think I have finally come up with the perfect pizza:
Alfredo sauce
Red pepper flakes
Chopped onion
Chopped red bell pepper
Crumbled bacon
Cheese

That, my friends, is pizza perfection.

And finally, a recipe I found in a brand name cookbook my mom sent me. Tim loves it and it's very popular wherever we go. We do, however, use chicken instead of beef. The beef tastes gross. It's good on either spaghetti or rice.

 

Thai Peanut Beef (er, Chicken)

8 oz uncooked thin spaghetti

1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef (or chicken)

4 green onions, chopped (1/4 cup)

8 oz fresh pea pods, halved diagonally (about 3 cups)

1 red bell pepper, cut into 3x1/4x1/4-inch thin strips

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cornstarch

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/4 cup chopped salted peanuts

DIRECTIONS

1. Cook and drain spaghetti as directed on package; cover to keep warm. 2. Meanwhile, in 12-inch skillet, cook ground beef over medium-high heat 5 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until thoroughly cooked; drain. Add onions, pea pods and bell pepper. Cook and stir 3 to 4 minutes or until vegetables are crisp-tender. 3. In small bowl, mix broth, ground red pepper, salt and cornstarch. Stir into beef and vegetables. Add peanut butter. Cook 1 to 2 minutes, stirring frequently, until thick and bubbly. Serve over cooked spaghetti; top with peanuts.

 

Buon appetito!

Soup and Sicily

We love soup. Tim especially loves soup. I like soup because it's warm and I'm usually cold. Being winter, I have been experimenting with different soups lately. The first one was an Oktoberfest soup, made with chopped potatoes, celery, carrots, sliced sausage, and oktoberfest beer instead of chicken broth. Then I've experimented with a potato soup, but I haven't gotten it quite right yet. The first time, I didn't mash the potatoes enough, the second time, I didn't put in celery because it was the only vegetable the grocery store didn't have. But what I have so far is cooking chopped potatoes, celery, and carrots like I was making mashed potatoes. Then draining and mashing them, then adding butter, sour cream, milk, and cheese, and getting it hot again. Surprisingly, the celery is actually very important to this soup. It adds an incredible flavor.

Finally, the best soup of all: pumpkin with roasted apples. I've made it with both roasted and canned pumpkin, so either works. First, roast the apples by chopping them and baking them on a foil-lined baking sheet for 20 minutes or until they are soft. Cook one or two finely chopped onions in 3 tbs of butter in a soup pot until they are translucent. Add some chopped garlic (or I used garlic powder) and cook for a minute. Then add a can of pumpkin (about 4 cups) and about 4 cups of chicken broth. Season with salt, pepper, and cinnamon and put in the apples. Cook on low for about 30 minutes.

And I can't be done without a quick note about our trip to Sicily. We ate dinner the first night at our agriturismo and the meal was bigger than the Thanksgiving meal the day before! The appetizers were mostly fried: fried dough, fried veggies. They were excellent! There was also something that was a Sicilian specialty that had eggplant (and maybe something else) cooked in olive oil and totmatoes. I think that was our favorite. The pasta was pasta with pumpkin (I can tell you how to make that, just ask), and we just really didn't have room for the meat course. For dessert, cannolis, of course. We had to get up and walk around the room for a few minutes because that could not be passed up. They are stuffed with sweetened ricotta cheese, but they aren't too sweet, and oh, so good! We also tried Sicilian pizza, and shocking as it may be, I think I like their crust more than the Neopolitans'. It's a little thicker and less burned. But then again, maybe it was just a fluke. Pistachio gelato first came from Sicily, so that was definitely the thing to eat. All in all, Sicily was a culinary delight.

Apple pies

Maybe this is a little late because I made these in August, but it's still worth sharing. We were putting on a baby shower for a friend and looking for new and intersting finger foods. I found a recipe for mini apple pies. Basically, they're the same as all other apple pies, you just divide the crust into muffin tins and dice the apples. I used both red and green apples and left the skins on. They were wonderful!



Also for that baby shower were prosciutto and egg cups, a great appitizer. Lay prosciutto (thinly sliced deli ham) in muffin cups, break an egg into each one, and season with basil and pepper. Bake about 20 minutes or until the egg is solid.

And as a nod to my last post about pasta and using pretty vegetables, here is such a dinner in the making:

Perfect Pasta

If there is one food that is quintessentially Italian, it's pasta. They eat it at lunch and dinner, usually every day, and with a variety of pasta shapes, sauces, and toppings. So you are probably saying, "You live in Italy, so why haven't you talked about pasta yet?"

Making good, interesting pasta is actually rather easy. For seasonings, I pretty much use garlic salt, peppercinis (the red pepper flakes that you find at Pizza Hut), onion powder, and basil (both fresh and dried). Start with an appropriate pasta base: penne or rigatoni for a meat sauce, spaghetti for chicken and/or vegetables. Then decide what kind of sauce you want. Tomato sauce is the heartiest, and with hamburger it makes a good meal in itself. An alfredo sauce is a little lighter and gives pasta a nice coating if you're topping it with chicken or vegetables. Another excellent option is olive oil with garlic salt, basil, peppercinis, onion powder, and pepper. I like flavoring my sauces: putting peppercinis and garlic salt in the tomato sauce and pesto or sauteed onions in the alfredo sauce.

Now for what to put on top. There's always the very traditional meat sauce with hamburger and onions in tomato sauce. Chicken also makes a good topper. Here are some chicken options: coated with bbq sauce and grilled, then sliced; breaded in flour and seasonings and cooked on the stove; and cooked in seasonings. Vegetables can be cooked or not, sliced big or small. Usually I use onions, green or red peppers, green beans, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, and mushrooms. Use what you have and be creative with the colors and sizes. That way, your food can be pretty, as well as tasty.  Pasta is always better with cheese on top, no matter what else is on it. Parmesan, shredded cheese, or (if you want to be really Italian) mozzerella cut into chunks. Try different combinations, seasonings, and sauces; you never know what you might come up with!

Here is a pasta that we made at our Neopolitan cooking class:
Pasta of the 7 P's
Penne - 1 lb
Pomodoro (tomatoes) - 1 15 oz can diced tomatoes
Pancetta (bacon) - 4 oz
Pepperoncino (red pepper flakes) - to taste
Panna (cream) - 1 cup
Prezzemelo (parsley) - a handful
Parmigiano (paremsan cheese)
Olive oil
Salt

In a pan, saute the bacon and pepper flakes in the olive oil until the bacon is cooked. Add the tomatoes and salt and cook for 15 min. Add the cream and parsley. Cook the pasta, drain, and add to the sauce. Serve with parmesan on top.

Buon appetito!