Cooking from Scratch
We always like trying new shapes for our pasta. Sure, we know that the pasta will taste basically the same, but the whole idea of different pasta shapes, we think, is to have fun. We’ve made dozens of different shapes over the years. Don’t believe it? Well, just click on shaping pasta to see, and maybe select a new shape to try. Next time, of course; this time, you’ll be making fagottini!
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On Sundays, we like to have rather more special dinners than those we eat on other days. Perhaps something like risotto or homemade pizza, two of our favorite dishes. The dinners don’t have to be fancy, just something that we think is nice. This past Sunday, as we were thinking about what to have for dinner, and what we have in the house, we wondered, can you make polenta from fresh corn?
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When we first tried this bread, we made it using commercial yeast, and we said that we’d show you how to make the same bread using a sourdough starter. Today, we will. And, if you’re one of those people who bake with sourdough starters, you know that you need to feed and split your starter regularly, including those times when you don’t feel like baking a full batch of bread. Well, it turns out that this bread is perfect for just those occasions, as you can use the starter that you’d normally discard.
Continue reading “Sourdough Pizza Bianca alla Romana”
We got a big bunch of parsley in our CSA share, and we generally don’t use a huge amount each week, so we were afraid that it might just go bad and we’d have to toss it. We didn’t want that, so we searched our memory banks and remembered that some sort of sauce or paste is made mainly from parsley. What is it? Oh yeah, gremolata. Naturally, we looked it up just to be sure, and, yes, it’s basically parsley, lemon zest, and garlic. Well, we can do that.
Continue reading “Gemelli and Peas with Hazelnut Gremolata”
This post comes, somewhat, from a baking disaster. Well, not really a disaster; no one was hurt, nothing was damaged, it was just that a particular recipe we were trying had problems in the ingredients list. Instead of something nice to bring down to the fellow volunteers on Monday, we were left with a mess spread across a couple of baking sheets. As luck would have it, we’d happened to see Jim Lahey present the baking of his no-knead breads at the Tucson Festival of Books the day previously, so we switched gears completely and quickly made his Pizza Bianca alla Romana.
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Eggplant puzzles us. When we pick up one (or two) as part of our CSA share, we just place it in the crisper bin, and spend several days trying to figure out what to make. We always think of something; depending on the season, it might be Ratatouille, or perhaps, Eggplant Gnocchi, or even Crispy Eggplant Strips. It seems to grow well enough that there’s always more eggplant to use, someway, somehow.
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We had a few of those Pumpkin and Walnut Gnudi left in the freezer, and, while we ate some with a red pasta sauce, it’s also quite common to use gnudi in a light broth. The best part of making Gnudi in Brodo is that it makes for a light, quick meal, provided, of course, you have some leftover gnudi that you need to use.
Continue reading “Gnudi in Brodo (Italian Dumplings in Broth)”