My favorite thing to make in the dutch oven is short ribs. They’re so good! They get soft and flavorful from the braising and are easy enough to cook while busy with other things in the kitchen. The more you cook them, the more flavorful they become, so make them on Sunday and eat them on Monday. Plus, people love to eat short ribs on Monday nights. Better yet, make them tonight and eat them for Shabbat dinner!
I really like pasta, and lately I’ve been eating the homemade kind. With homemade pasta, of course I need homemade sauce! The traditional garlic and oil was getting boring, and I don’t really love tomatoes, so unless they’re cooked for a really long time, I don’t like making sauce with them (sometimes I do, anyway). I do, however, like red sauces. And I really like pink sauces, and I used to only have them in restaurants. But now I’ve found a way to replicate the restaurant flavor at home…and it didn’t even take THAT long. True, the sauce had to simmer in the oven for an hour and a half, but if you have laundry to fold, a paper to write, or some TV to watch, then do it when the sauce is in the oven. Oh yeah, and you’ll definitely have to do some dishes, too.
Believe it or not, we eat well during Passover. We don’t even miss bread. It’s only a week! If you can’t go eight days without eating a bagel, there’s probably something wrong with you (not that we don’t love bagels, clearly).
Our secret to delicious Passover dining is using matzah only for what it is intended (read: forgoing desserts that replace flour with matzah meal) and experimenting with sweets that can be enjoyed all year long, but just happen to be kosher for Passover. Continue reading
Jessica bought a pasta roller attachment for her KitchenAid! So obviously we both wanted to use it right away. It was great to have two people to feed the dough into the machine and catch it as it came out (and take pictures of the process!) but you can do it alone, too! The machine is doing most of the work.
We used Tyler Florence’s recipe for pasta dough. He uses it to make ravioli, but works just as well for spaghetti and fettuccine. The recipe makes a pound of pasta, so if you want less, half it. Or learn how to dry and preserve it by making a nest. I’m still working on that skill.
I had to use up the leftover cauliflower from the Italian Style Cauliflower last week, but I wanted a recipe that was completely different. Too much of that white vegetable is boring! The first step? Make it in the oven instead of the stove. Oh, and I just got a steamer basket, so I wanted to use that too. If you like creamy foods, you’ll love this! It’s pretty much mac and cheese with cauliflower instead of pasta. It would probably be delicious with an assortment of vegetables, or with purple cauliflower and pasta together (again, too much white bores me).
Every year we make the same hamentaschen recipe. Not because it’s the only one we know, but because it’s really the best. I can’t say I know where this recipe came from, all I know is that it has been photocopied many times, and the instructions are cut off on the side of the page. We’ve been able to figure out what to do. Oh, and the original recipe calls for margarine – yuck! We use butter instead. Continue reading
I have never cooked cauliflower before. I didn’t even know if I liked it when it wasn’t breaded and fried. Turns out I do.
When I got the Williams-Sonoma Bride and Groom Cookbook and flipped through the pages, I knew I had to try their recipe for cauliflower. It seemed really easy and I already had most of the ingredients in my kitchen. I picked up a head of cauliflower on my way home from work and in a half hour, this dish was ready. Continue reading
If you grew up in the Blanco household and it was a Monday night, you would know what you were having for dinner: spaghetti & meatballs, of course! Now, I don’t actually remember the last time all six of us actually sat down on a Monday night and ate spaghetti & meatballs, but I know we all remember that’s what we’re supposed to eat.
Well, mom’s recipe for meatballs is exactly what a meatball sounds like; ground beef shaped into balls. I wanted to make mine a bit more sophisticated, so I took the advice of my Food Network friends (okay, maybe they don’t know who I am, but I feel like I know them so well!) and used two kinds of meat and some seasonings before cooking them slowly and for a looong time in garlic-y and wine-y tomato sauce.
I used to think I didn’t like mushrooms, but here I am posting yet another mushroom recipe. I’ll admit it, I hate raw mushrooms. But when cooked, they have an amazing flavor that goes really well with pasta.
On my birthday I went for dinner and ordered a pasta with portobello mushroom sauce. It was delicious, but way too creamy and rich. I decided to recreate the intense mushroom flavor in my own pasta dish, without adding loads of cream. Here’s what I came up with.
You didn’t think I was going to throw away all those biscotti crumbs, did you?
I know cookies and cream ice cream is typically made with oreo-like cookies, but this cookies and cream is much better than any you’ll find in a store. With creamy gelato and crunchy biscotti, you can’t get any better.
Gelato is Italian ice cream and is pretty similar to the ice cream we eat around here. It is typically slow churned and therefore less airy than ice cream and has less fat (cream) compared to the amount of milk. It’s really very good. This recipe yields a very rich egg-y custard. If you’re not into that, choose another vanilla ice cream recipe. I happen to think this is awesome. Continue reading
