Neopolitan Pizza

Having lived in Naples for 3 years, the birthplace of pizza, you'd think we'd had it all.

According to the pizza tower, we have.

I'm not sure if it's sad or awesome that it's hit the ceiling. What was truly sad is that we had to take it all to the recycling before moving out. We pretty much filled a bin, not to mention the back of the truck.

 

 And no, we did not match on purpose.

But I digress (and am getting kind of sad we don't live in Italy anymore), so on to the pizzas.

This spring, we ate the pizza known as "Re Umberto", or King Umberto (Humphry?).  Tell me, who is this genius who came up with a double-decker pizza?

The bottom layer was ricotta and salame, the top layer was the 4 Stagione (4 seasons). Sausage and friarelli, ham and mushroom, eggplant, and artichoke.

Fabulous. Totally worth the 16 euro.

On the Italian bucket list was to eat the hot-dog-and-French-fry pizza. It was pretty much disgusting. I mean, who puts hot dogs and French fries on a pizza?

 



I went to lunch at a famous pizzeria called Da Michele with a friend. It's the one in the book/movie Eat, Pray, Love. They only serve 2 kinds of pizza: Marinara (just tomato sauce and garlic, no cheese) and Margherita (with cheese). The restaurant is pretty small and the line is crazy long, so you take a number and wait. An hour and a half later... But the price (and the excellent quality of the pizza) made it worth it: two pizzas and two beers, 13 euro.

 

I mean, come on! It's literally hanging off the plate.

 

And finally, it was time to leave. But not before hitting Gennaro 2 twice our last weekend. After great discussions sounding like "What should our LAST pizza be? The D.O.C.? The frittatura? Marinara?", we settled for the frittatura, or the fried calzone. Delicious!

 

 

Sigh, I miss Italy. Though being American, I'm still happy to eat at Papa John's.

White chocolate no-bake cookies

In my crazy, thematic teacher mind, I've been plotting to make white chocolate no-bake cookies for some time now. I was going to make them for St. Patrick's Day and dye them green, but I bought mint oreos instead.

But what better time is there than Easter? With some pastel m&m's, they're perfect. The white chocolate ones even look kind of like bird nests with colorful eggs. The white chocolate ones aren't so overpoweringly sweet, so you can eat more of them at once. Score.

I made regular chocolate ones, too, just in case the white ones didn't, you know... turn out right.

I was on a quest to make something different. Usually, Italian/European kids will do anything for a cake-mix cupcake, but this class is weird. Only about half of the kids will eat cupcakes, so I needed to try something else.

After a poll of students from 5 countries, the white chocolate cookies are the best. There was serious gushing going on. From 5th graders. And drooling. Win.

White Chocolate Peanut Butter No-Bake Cookies

1 1/2 C sugar
1 C white chocolate chips
1/2 C butter
1/2 C milk
1/2 C peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
3 C minute oats

Melt sugar, chocolate chips, and butter in a saucepan, adding the milk when everything is almost melted. Cook and stir until boiling, boil 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter and vanilla. Stir in oats until combined. Drop by spoonfuls on a cookie sheet covered with waxed paper and allow to harden.

Buon appetito!

Some 2012 food adventures

The year 2012 had some interesting food moments, some in my kitchen, some from other places. For Valentine’s Day, I made peanut butter- chocolate brownie trifles. Layers of peanut buttery and chocolaty goodness.

 In Turkey, we ate Turkish Delight and drank copious amounts of tea. And our favorite, burek, a flaky pastry stuffed with cheese and sometimes meat and onions.

The was a Neapolitan cooking class where we made some extremely cheesy Pasta alla Siciliana.

In the summer, I really went nuts with trying to make pasta as pretty as possible with as many colorful vegetables as possible. There was also grilled pizza and apple crisp and cold tomato soup.

But the crowning food moment(s) of our summer was Eastern Europe. Burek made several reappearances, much to our delight (the Slavic countries love it, too!). Other delicacies included grape-flavored aloe vera juice, (Lake) Bled cake, Austrian Wiener schnitzel, and Chinese food (sometime you just get tired of Italian). We came home with 5 jars of Ajvar sauce, which is roasted red pepper and eggplant sauce. It doesn’t get much better than that. Oh wait, it does. That would be the 20 or so bottles of wine we had been collecting and had crammed between suitcases in the trunk.

In Slovenia, our host served us fresh trout. I now know how to debone a fish.

In Austria, we found a Vietnamese restaurant that was really good. However, we discovered that neither of us can use chopsticks. I’m pretty sure the waiters were taking pictures of us trying.

Slovakia had egg dumplings that are similar to Italian gnocchi. Very filling and very good.

I’m pretty sure the national seasoning of Hungary is paprika. It was on everything from our eggs at breakfast to the meat at dinner. And it was fabulous. At the Great Market Hall, we had the traditional Langos, kind of like a savory elephant ear with veggies, sour cream, and cheese on top.

The food in Croatia was terrible. So terrible that it wasn’t worth taking a picture of it.

The food in Bosnia and Herzegovina was much better. Whew. During the Iron Curtain era, items from Western culture were not allowed. These included Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, movies, music, etc. The Bosnians really wanted their Coke, so they made a substitute called Cockta. It was actually pretty good and it tasted like vanilla Coke.

Later in the summer, we finally got around to buying an Italian mokapot. How have we lived without it?

When Thanksgiving came around, we decided to start a new tradition and make Pasta Zucca or pasta with pumpkin. It’s the perfect Thanksgiving food! Chicken with honey-cranberry sauce and garlic green beans finished it off. It’s fairly Thanksgiving-y, right?

Stay tuned, 2013 should be just as exciting!

The Lindsays' Illustrated 2012

 What a year 2012 was for the Lindsays!

January
In January we went to visit Hadrian's Villa and the gardens of Villa d'Este outside Rome. We also witnessed some of the most amazing sunsets you've ever seen from our balcony!

February
Welcome to Istanbul, Turkey!

 



March
Tim took sailing lessons and took me along once. The lesson got cancelled, but we walked along the beach and found lots of beautiful shells.

April
In April everything was waking up again and calling us to go hiking. So we did Walk of the Gods along the Amalfi Coast one day and the rim of Carney Park (an extinct volcano) the next.

May
In May I went to Puglia again with the 5th graders, and Ron and Betsy Sears stopped by on their cruise and we took them to the Amalfi Coast.

 

June

The weather was so beautiful that we decided to take a ride on the motorcycle to Sant'Agata dei Goti, a small hill town. We happened upon the Festival del Bacio or the Festival of the Kiss.

July
In July Tim's grandma and brother came and we took them on an epic journey through Tuscany, Cinque Terre, and Rome. We also visited the Solfatara, our local sulfur vocano.

 

 

 

July and August
Then at the end of July, the epic Eastern Europe road trip began. 8 countries, 17 days, a Danube cruise, a bike ride, and a ferry across the Adriatic Sea.

 

 

 

September

Tim went out on the USS Mount Whitney, which is stationed in Gaeta, Italy, about an hour away. I went with some other wives to visit and have dinner.

 

 

October
In October, we did the Walk of the Gods again. It never gets old, though I am... my knee hurts every time!

November
One weekend we went to Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, a town in the mountains, for the Sagra delle Sagre, or the festival of festivals. Artisians from the region brought their wares, mostly food, and set up around the town. Honorable mentions included apples, olive oil, and torrone, but first prize went to the "hanged cheese", cheese melted over a bbq and spread on bread.

December
We just can't get enough of the Walk of the Gods! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

Let's hope 2013 is as exciting!

Peach Apple Cobbler

The neighbors are remodeling. Right on the other side of my wall. Using jackhammers. After listening to the noise all day, I decided I needed a treat. "Mmm, peach crisp would be good. Wait, I have apples, too!" It's also been cooler the last couple days, so turning on the oven didn't sound so terrible. So google and I set to work to find the perfect recipe, one that doesn't have too many ingredients, or use too much sugar.

I just wanted peaches and apples and something yummy on top. Of course, that is impossible to find. Everything called for copious amounts of butter (I only have 1/4 cup left, oops) or cups and cups of sugar (Tim objects to this). Nothing was right.

How hard could it be, anyway? Apparently not very.

I started slicing and sprinkling and it came out absolutely delicious. Grease the pan you want to use and slice peaches. How many you use depends on how big the pan is. Cover the bottom of the pan with peaches, sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar. Then slice apples thinly and cover the peaches. Sprinkle with maybe a tablespoon of brown sugar. Repeat with peaches. Repeat with apples. Repeat until your pan is almost full.

For the topping, I used bisquick. Yeah, yeah, I'm lazy like that. You could make real biscuit dough if you'd like. I added a couple good shakes of cinnamon to the biscuit dough and then spread it on top of the last layer of apples.

Because I was using my tiny Italian oven for dinner, my cobbler had to wait its turn to be baked, but I think it just made it juicier and let the sugars (what little there was) soak into the fruit more. Once it finally went in the oven, it took about 30 minutes at 350.

Warm with ice cream on top, it was just what I needed. I needed seconds, too.

Good thing there's leftovers, they're jackhammering again.

Stay tuned for the great Eastern European Adventure, commencing Friday. I see schnitzel and goulash in the near future and my mouth is already watering in preparation for it.

Oh, what to make for dinner?

Every summer I have the same problem: it's too hot to cook, but we still have to eat. Currently, my kitchen is already so hot, that if I were to turn the oven on, it very possibly would cook me as well as my food. So here's my question, what do I make for dinner when I'm tempted to simply put an assortment of cereal on the table and say "have at it!"?

Sure, we could always go get pizza...

... but obviously, we do that a lot.

As I grumbled and sighed and tried to come up with a non-life threatening menu, I realized I'm probably not the only person who is having this dilemma. Then I thought, maybe those people might take comfort, not only in my similar struggle, but in using my ideas. So here you go, here's what I've come up with so far.

Day 1: Bacon-onion grilled cheese and cold tomato soup.

Grilled cheese: Cook bacon until crisp, drain; fry thinly sliced onions in leftover bacon grease. To put sandwiches together, layer cheese (I used pepper jack, yummy and spicy), bacon, and onions, butter outside of the bread and cook in a frying pan. The recipe I based this off told me to use mustard inside the sandwiches, but Tim didn't like it. So sauce, no sauce, it's your choice, I'm sure it's good without, too.

Soup: I was short on time, so I made just a can of tomato soup, but once it was hot, I stirred in a couple spoonfuls of sour cream, some milk, and a couple ice cubes to make it cold.

Day 2: BBQed pizzas and Tuscan Bread Salad

Pizza: I'll admit, I finally gave up trying to use the Italian ladies' pizza dough recipe and I've been using a mix. But this time I thought I'd try my mom's recipe because my VERY warm kitchen is a perfect environment for rising dough. It worked! Then I divided the dough into 8 parts, brushed then with olive oil and put them on pieces of foil on the grill until they baked enough so they wouldn't fall through the cracks. After the dough was cooked (about 10 minutes or so), I put on seasoned tomato sauce, assorted veggies, salame, and cheese, and put them back on the grill for about another 10 minutes until the cheese melted. They had a nice charcoal-y flavor.

Salad: I found this in a magazine: Chop leftover, slightly stale French bread into chunks. Then chop tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives and add all of it to a large bowl. (It said to use cheese, too, but I didn't have any and it was good without it.) Then sprinkle with salt and pepper and give it a good drizzle of olive oil, mix and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Day 3: Pasta with vegetables and sausage

I had some leftover pasta fresca (fresh pasta) in the fridge that needed to be eaten. Darn it. While it cooked, I cut up sweet red onions from my "garden", zucchini, red bell pepper, and mushrooms and cooked them in some olive oil and spices (it was a mix, but basil, parsley, oregano, and red pepper flakes would do). I chopped the sausage and added that. Once everything was all cooked, the veggies went on top of the pasta with some fresh tomatoes and basil.



Hope this helps! Also, other ideas are welcome.

Buon appetito!

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!