Pasta Bolognese

With the first cold raindrops falling outside and the first tree leaves turning their color into yellow I’ve started thinking about something nourishing and warm. Sauce Bolognese. This typical Italian sauce, known throughout the world, has become a kind of generic name for minced meat and tomato sauce, but most of the families, especially outside Italy, prepare it according to their taste without being aware of the ingredients in the original recipe. The taste of the original Bolognese sauce should be kind of creamy and this is because of the milk, which mellows the acidity of the tomatoes and is a staple ingredient of the authentic recipe. The sauce requires simmering for some hours in order to develop its rich and hearty taste. The combination of sautéed onion, celery and carrots, called in Italian soffritto is also important. According to people from Bologna, this sauce tastes best served with fresh pasta like tagliatelle or fettucine.

Eggplant Involtini with Ricotta and Goat cheese

The first time I tasted involtini was some months ago in one of the small restaurants in Little Italy in New York. We were thirsty and hungry and tired from all the strolling through the streets and the smell in the air around this restaurant made us stop, sit and wait impatiently for all the tasty homey food we ordered. I do not remember the name of the restaurant, but I remember very well the taste of the eggplant involtini - the  thin slices of eggplants wrapped arond a ricotta and goat cheese stuffing. Here is my interpretation of the recipe:

Eggplant Parmesan (Melanzane alla Parmigiana)

Melanzane alla Parmigiana is a rich dish from Northern Italy, composed of alternating layers of fried eggplant, tomato sauce, Parmesan and mozzarella.  

Mussels marinara

Marinara is one of my favorite sauces for mussels. Marinara means 'sailors' style' in Italian, so probably the sailors preferred to have mussels that way. Because of the wine as an ingredient. Or because mussels get hot and full of flavors. Mussels marinara are usually served over boiled linguine, but I love them so much, that I skip the pasta and sip the sauce of the mussels right from the shells. Or enjoy to wipe up the spicy sauce with a slice of crusty bread. 

Panzanella - Italian bread salad

Do you know what cucina povera means? It is an Italian term for the poor man's food. 
But nothing offensive. Peasant cooking means take the best from the ingredients you have on hand. Fresh ripe vegetables. Cheap cuts of meat and offals. Stale bread. The meaning is  cheap ingredients or ingredients you anyway have at home, simple recipe, rich taste.
In fact, bread and olive oil are two of the fundamental ingredients of Tuscan cookery and stale bread should not be wasted. So, Panzanella is a way to use a day-old bread. Roast or pan-fry the bread. Chop some ripe, but firm tomatoes. Add dressing and some more ingredients and you've got the summer taste in your plate, even if it is late spring outside. Bread soaks up all the juices from the vegetables and dressing and melts in mouth. Most of the recipes call for fresh basil as an ingredient, but I prefer to skip it in my version. I also substitute hot green peppers for the sweet ones used in the original. 

Zuppa Toscana

I don't have much time to prepare all the winter dishes I like- spring has nearly come, so I have to hurry. Nearly twenty days until the end of March, nearly twenty dishes to savour. 

One of them deffinitely Zuppa Toscana. Zuppa Toscana is a winter soup. Based on rich and nutritious ingredients like bacon, sausage, potatoes and heavy cream it is best enjoyed when the weather outside is cold. 

Trippa alla Fiorentina (Florence-style tripe)

Can you put in one sentence sophisticated words like Renaissance, paintings and architecture and a humble ingredient like tripe? Yes, if you describe the landmarks of Florence. There are lots of stalls and stands around this city, where tripe is prepared accordoing to various recipes and you will miss part of the Florence experience if you don't taste it.
Trippa alla Fiorentina is a specialty of preparing tripe with vegetables and tomato sauce. As most of the Tuscan dishes, it is simple and tasty, nutritios and unexpensive and could be easily prepared at home. Little pretence, deep and satisfying taste.

Patiency is the key word when talking about tripe - the more you cook it on medium heat, the more tenderness you will get at the final dish. The spongy honeycomb part of the tripe is the most tender and so my favourite. It is a good idea to buy a pre-cooked tripe,  this will save you 3 hours of preliminary boiling. 

Sausage meatballs with tomato sauce

As I told you, this weekend was a soup weekend. Soups were created fast and disappeared fast and everybody was busy with eating and/or cooking.
This dish is my son's absolute favourite and I always know, he will devour it minutes after I make it. I watched a chef preparing it on a German TV show some months before and it was described as an Italian specialty fast and easy to make. But as far as I saw on the net, Jamie Oliver has something very close to it. So do many other prominent or not so promiment housewifes around the world. Some people serve it as a pasta sauce, other with a thick slice of bread. My son Peter didn't want to wait the cooking time of the spaghetti (which is 10 minutes according to the instructions), so decision was taken.
I added some dried chilies to my plate. Do we like this "soup"? Well, yes, and as you can see, there was not much to put in the plate for my blog's needs. Peter was fast enough to win the competition. And not only he.

Italian Wedding Soup

It was a soup weekend.
I felt slightly under the weather on Saturday and the best medicine for the flu is a bowl of hot, steaming soup. Its smell is really appealing (imagine the little meatballs with the melting parmesan browning slowly in the oven, who can continue sleeping with such a tasty alarm). Children came to the kitchen still wearing their pijamas, asking: Mmmm, what are you cooking today, Mum? So I knew, I would have to share it with them. D. also didn't need an invitation to take his spoon, so the below mentioned amounts of ingredients were enough only for one meal for four hungry "Italians". We all liked it very much and I do not know whether the Italians really eat it on their weddings, but it is tasty and nourishing, herby from the spices and fresh from the spinach. 
Why exactly this soup? While watching Desperate housewives some weeks ago I heard for a first time about it (of course, Bree Van De Kamp prepared it and did I tell you, that I deeply admire her cooking success?). The net is full of recipes for this dish and the main ingredients according to them are meatballs (most often from ground chicken or turkey or from chicken sausage), small pasta and spinach. We prefer pork meat, so I used minced pork. 
I suppose, you can use whatever meat you like most of all.
This will not make somebody run from the wedding, you must be sure. 

Tiramisu

The name of the famous layered Italian dessert "Tiramisu" means "pull me up" in Italian and this effect is probably because of the two ingredients - strong espresso and cocoa powder. It does not have a very long history - according to different sources it was invented in the second half of the twentieth century.  In spite of being so "young", it has become a classics and could be ordered in many restaurants outside Italy. 

The original recipe includes raw egg yolks and whites, but there are some variations  concerning the amount of eggs or substituting the eggs with Zabaion or cream.

The type of added alcohol also varies - it could be the Sicilian Marsala wine, different types of brandy of liquor. I use Cointreau because I love its sweet orange flavor.