Cooking from Scratch
Dishes that we think of as the main portion of the meal. You might be able to use some as sides, too.
We had a dish similar to this eating out while in St. Louis (specifically at Small Batch, a great little restaurant on Locust Street), and we knew that we could make something like it. Of course, if you know that primavera refers to spring vegetables, and know how to make risotto, you can guess how to make this dish. If not, you might want to try scratchin’ this out for dinner some evening.
Continue reading “Primavera Risotto with Fennel Oil”
No, this isn’t for dessert. It’s a savory pie made from a few simple ingredients and it’s perfect for a home-style dinner. We’re not sure this is really a Russian dish, but, when we came up with the idea of making a cabbage pie — we envisioned a pie made similarly to a Leek and Cheese Pie, except with cabbage in place of leeks — we hit the search engines. That’s when we found a recipe for a Russian Cabbage Pie at Global Table Adventure. We modified ours a bit, eliminating the hard-boiled eggs, mainly, but the idea is pretty much the same.
Continue reading “Russian Cabbage Pie”
What? What’s Spinatknödel? We’ll get to it, just wait.
This is a recipe based on our trip to Chicago late last year. One of the things we like to do when we travel is to walk around the downtown areas, and, we make it a point to find self-guided walking tours. These can cover history, architecture, food, parks, nearly anything; we just love waking around seeing some of the sights. Well, we’d found some on Frommer’s that we printed out and took with us. And, one tour happened to suggest stopping in the Berghoff Restaurant partway through. We did and loved it. By now, you can guess that one of us had the Spinatknödel for lunch.
Continue reading “Spinatknödel”
We had these several weeks ago for a quick meal — everything can be made ahead and reheated for dinner, which is what we did — that we decided that we’d make them again, and turn the recipe into a post, so others can try Cauliflower tacos, too. The real key here is seasoning and roasting the cauliflower, which brings out a lot of nutty flavor, turning a somewhat bland vegetable into an outstanding vegetable.
Continue reading “Roasted Cauliflower Tacos”
This is the last post about the beet ravioli that morphed into beet greens-filled agnolotti. Let’s bring everything together for the week and make a delicious dinner. To recap, we made up Beet Pasta Dough (Monday’s post), and some Beet Green and Goat Cheese Filling (Tuesday’s post), which we used to make up a batch of Agnolotti (Thursday’s post), and, today we’ll show you how to make a brown butter-beet sauce to tie it all together.
Continue reading “Beet Agnolotti in a Brown Butter Sauce with Walnuts”
This is a dish we had when we dined at Mercato, in New York. We enjoyed it so much that we had to make it at home, and thought that you, fellow scratcher, would like to try it, too. Apparently, it’s from Trapani, Sicily; hence, the name. As with many Italian dishes, this one is easy, yet tastes delicious. And, it has an upside for us: trying a new technique, that of blanching and peeling almonds. It’s not difficult, so, let’s give it a try together, shall we?
Continue reading “Trenette Al Pesto Trapanese”
Everyone likes macaroni and cheese, right? It seems to be the very definition of comfort food, always perfect for those days when you just want to relax and enjoy eating without a care in the world. To us, we just can’t imagine that macaroni and cheese could be improved. But, that lack of imagination shows why we aren’t world famous chefs like Thomas Keller. He’s taken macaroni and cheese to the next level.
Continue reading “Thomas Keller’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese”