Archive for the ‘food’ Category
What’s Cooking Wednesday: Trick or Treat Tomato Eyeballs
Happy Halloween!
Some of you have asked about what’s going on in Italy for this “holiday,” and I’m sorry to report: niente. That means nothing.
In some parts of the country, they are starting to get children involved with costumes and whatnot, but no one around here does any such thing.
This could be because I don’t have kids yet…because if you think my kids are going to miss out on trick-or-treating, well, you’ve underestimated me and my weakness for candy.
I’ll even have the good stuff shipped in from the US and distributed to the neighbors (for distribution to the children, of course, with other healthy treats encouraged too):
Added bonus is that the kids around here most likely won’t have to cover up their awesome costumes with big ole coats like we always had to do where I grew up….
Anyway, back to the business at hand, I’m keeping up the Halloween theme for this week’s What’s Cooking Wednesday and giving you a quick, fun idea for a holiday treat.
But there’s a catch–you have to go here to find the recipe for
Trick or Treat Tomato Eyeballs
Why not whip up a batch and then head over to Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun to celebrate?
Also, check out the true ghost stories over at Tui’s True Spooks Blog Carnival. Make sure you turn the light on first though! There’s some creepy stuff in there.
And, since it is the last day of October and I’ve yet to post my Monthly Musing, I’ll give you a little bit of why I love this wonderful month as we say good-bye for another year:
Sweet sweet October
Only a few words to say
How much I love you…
Sweaters, fireplace fires,
My birthday, delicious soups,
And this year, puppies!
What do you love about October?
What’s Cooking Wednesday: Pasta e Ceci
Today’s What’s Cooking Wednesday recipe is a new one around this house (but already a favorite!); it’s based on a variety of recipes around the Internet, and it’s another easy, delicious soup that will impress–just like we like ’em!
And even better, pasta e ceci or pasta and chickpeas (“ceci” is pronounced CHEH-chee by the way) is a great cold weather dish and completely adjustable according to your tastes; you can make it as thick or thin as you like and add whatever spices strike your fancy, from basil to rosemary to thyme.
Below is my basic recipe, but feel free to experiment!
Pasta e Ceci
(Pasta and Chickpeas)
(makes 2 big bowls of soup)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 large clove garlic, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped or shredded
1 peperoncino (or hot pepper flakes)
1 sprig fresh rosemary
3 cups weakly flavored chicken stock or water
1 1/2 cup canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 cup dried soup pasta (something small)
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Salt to taste
Parmigiano reggiano cheese (optional)
1. Heat olive oil in pot large enough to hold soup and add onion, garlic, carrot, peperoncino, and rosemary. Cook on low heat until translucent, between 10 and 15 minutes (don’t let this burn).
2. Take out rosemary, which I do because we like a subtle rosemary flavor in this. You’re welcome to keep it in.
3. Add chicken stock and chickpeas and simmer for a half hour.
4. Take out about half the chickpeas and crush into a paste (to thicken the soup). You can do this with a blender/food processor, but I just use the back of a big spoon–fewer dishes (which means less water used to wash them!) and less electricity too. Plus, I’m lazy and this saves me from getting out my handheld mixer, which is annoying to clean. Add this mixture to the soup.
5. At this point, test for salt; this will also let you know how much salt you should put in the water with the pasta.
6. About the pasta, I prepare it separately and then combine the two in serving dishes, but most recipes prepare the pasta right inside the soup. I prefer my way so that if there are leftovers, the pasta doesn’t soak up all the broth (I’ve mentioned this before).
7. After combining pasta and soup, stir in parsley.
8. Serve hot with grated parmigiano reggiano cheese.
Buon appetito!
Birthday Carrot Cake Recipe
Perhaps some of you thought I was off tending puppies yesterday or maybe even early birthday celebrating. Don’t I wish.
What I was really doing was nearly pulling my hair out over the inexplicable continued crap Internet connection I have. Ever since it went out about 10 days ago, it’s been on and off — and yesterday was completely off. Right now it’s touch and go (can’t access many pages), but I’m keeping positive.
And aside from causing me stress regarding work, it’s *completely* thrown off my blogging schedule. Argh.
Guess you’ll have to wait another year for today’s originally planned post. Or I’ll just save it for NaBloPoMo . . . with which I sincerely hope Telecom Italia cooperates.
So here is What’s Cooking Wednesday: the Birthday Edition — a day late for Wednesday, but just in time for my birthday! Woohoo!
For anyone who’s curious, I’m 31 today. So send any e-cards in large font please. Hah!
Now, back to the originally scheduled post:
For my birthday, I always have this chocolate cake. It’s my absolute favorite cake in the whole world — especially when my mom makes it.
But I’ve been feeling a little daring lately, in the mood for something different. And that, for me, means carrot cake.
I love carrot cake, haven’t had it in at least four years, and besides, isn’t it just a great autumn cake, spicy and orange and brown and cream cheese icing and yum?
I have never made a carrot cake before, and I’m not entirely sure why not. Probably because my mom isn’t particularly fond of it, so she never passed on a recipe, and goodness knows I stick to the recipes of experts around these parts.
So I turned to these Internets and went for the first recipe that came up. I know. Really selective right? Well you see, I had been going over what I thought would go into a carrot cake in my head, and this recipe fit that, especially with the adjustments listed in the comments. So I made my own tweaks, and below is what I came up with.
This cake is delicious. It’s a subtle carrot cake, and by that I mean it’s not at all like some store- or restaurant-produced cakes that make me feel like I’m eating a scented candle. I like my spices subtle, so if you like them stronger, you might want to adjust. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you think you don’t like carrot cake, you should give this one a go.
Also, the original recipe had pecans. Some people in the comment section switched to walnuts, but I didn’t add any nuts at all; I’m not a fan of nuts in my cakes in general. But this would’ve been *fabulous* with raisins so I’ll make an effort to find them before I make this again.
My Birthday Carrot Cake
4 eggs
1 c white sugar
1 c brown sugar
1 ¼ c vegetable oil
3 tsp vanilla 2 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp nutmeg
3 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
3 c grated carrots
1. Preheat oven to 350° F (175° C). Grease and flour 9 x 13 inch pan (or, as I did a 6 muffin/cupcake pan and a small loaf pan).
2. Blend together eggs, sugars, oil, and vanilla in a large mixing bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices, and salt and add to mixing bowl a little at a time. At this point, the mixture will be really thick, almost pasty. Now you’re ready to stir in the carrots.
4. Pour into pan(s), and put in the oven. The original recipe says 40-50 minutes for a full-sized cake. My muffins took about 20 minutes, and the loaf pan about 40. Just make sure to always test with a toothpick in the center—if it comes out with no batter, you’re good.
For amateur bakers, the other trick is the “spring back to the touch test,” which says, not surprisingly, that the cake should spring back to your touch. I find this one a big dangerous though as you can sink the top of your cakes and muffins/cupcakes pretty easily, so I always use a toothpick.
5. Remove from oven and let cool before icing.
Cream Cheese Icing
The measurements in the original recipe looked really off to me so I used a tried and true cream cheese icing recipe that I’ve made before. You might want to play with this too according to your tastes and how much icing you like (I don’t use much). In fact, on the cake, I just sprinkled some confectioner’s sugar on top. Look it’s snowing in October in southern Italy!
8 oz softened cream cheese
4 tbl butter
1 ½ c powdered sugar
½ tsp vanilla
Beat everything together until smooth and to your desired consistency.
Grating the carrots makes this one a little labor intensive, but it’s worth it, especially if you’re making it for someone special — like for yourself. Come on, show yourself a little love this Love Thursday!
Happy Love Thursday and buon appetito!
Edited to add a request:
If you leave birthday wishes for me,
please leave the date of your birthday too (no year required!)
so I can return the wish.
What’s Cooking Wednesday: Easy, Delicious Minestrone
Lest you think we’re always making everything from scratch around here, I’m going to clue you in on one of our colder weather staples–minestrone.
Whether you say it with or without that final “eh” (never an “ee” sound please), its etymological origin is the Italian word for soup, minestra, with the augmentative suffix “one” denoting larger or grander, and it’s povera cucina (peasant or poor people’s cuisine) at its finest.
Minestrone, basically vegetable soup with pasta, is eaten all throughout Italy and there are an uncountable number of recipes for it–some with meat, some without, some with more tomatoes, etc. The idea is to use whatever vegetables are in season and the stock of your choice.
Let me end the mystery now and tell you that I use a frozen minestrone vegetable mix and bouillon cubes. Sure I (and you) could make this from scratch, but it’s just so darn good this way–and so easy too–that I often just make it like this, and I thought you might enjoy a truly simple recipe as well.
Now let me caution you by saying that I’m not sure frozen vegetable mixes are created equal everywhere. The one that I buy is seasoned–there’s parsley, garlic, and basil listed in the ingredients–so you may need to add more seasoning than what I list here. Feel free to experiment.
Also, I like my minestronea bit more tomato-ey than the recipe here, but since P doesn’t, I’m giving you the way I make it most of the time. If I make this soup just for me (and sometimes I’ll make two small pots, one for each of us), I add some tomato sauce (just crushed tomatoes) after the broth. You could add fresh tomatoes, but around here in the winter, the best flavor would come from sauce.
Minestrone
3 1/2 cups water
2 bouillon cubes (adjust for your taste)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium red onion, chopped finely
2 small cloves garlic, minced
1 bag of frozen vegetables
Small soup pasta
Heat pot of water on high, and when boiling or near boiling, add bouillon cubes to dissolve, making what we’ll now call broth.
Meanwhile, in large soup pot, heat olive oil on medium and then add onion and garlic and let cook until tender, nearly brown. At this point, your broth should be ready, so pour that into the larger pot with the garlic and onions.
Add vegetables (still frozen and in proportion to the water you’re using) and let cook for about 20 minutes to a half hour, testing vegetables to make sure they’re done before serving.
For the pasta, the only rule is to use something small; we use lumachine, pictured above, which are like little elbow macaroni. Boil pasta separately in salted water and then put a small amount of pasta in each serving bowl and add soup. This method ensures that you can then store leftover soup without mushy pasta soaking up the broth.
Serve immediately with some crusty Italian bread. Note that P (and probably many Italians) would never eat bread with this as there’s already pasta in it. Duh. I, on the other hand, always ate soup with bread growing up and continue to do so.
No excuses on not trying this one. It really couldn’t get much easier–or tastier.
Buon appetito!
Well I Love a Rainy Night, Such a Beautiful Sight
Ciao! I hope everyone had a nice weekend full of Internet connections!
Yes, we lost contact with the outside world (via computer) again on Sunday morning, and it lasted until yesterday evening–and this morning it has been so frustratingly slow to do anything. I’m not even sure if this is going to post when I’m done, but it’s worth a shot.
To be clear, I’m not complaining because when I called the Internet provider, they told me it’d be fixed by giovedì mattina–Thursday morning. Look at Telecom coming through early! Miracles do happen!
So what caused the outage? Well, they can blame this:
But in reality, we lost the phone and internet before the *big* storms came–and they were big. Huge. Scary in fact, and they lasted most of the day Sunday and yesterday.
No complaints on the rain either as it’s been so very long since we’ve had a good soaking, although I could do without the lightning and thunder. I think the pooches, though trembling, secretly enjoyed it all because it meant plenty of Mommy Lap time–Luna on the upper half, Stella on the lower as we stared off into the fog, clouds, and rain (no television allowed when there’s lightning!).
So, forced to stay inside, we did a little of this:
Which eventually led to this:
Those are pieces of one of our chickens marinated in olive oil, red wine vinegar, and Stubb’s Rosemary-Ginger Spice Rub (sent by my mom) and then basted by P using a brush made of his mother’s dried oregano. Yum!
Great family and food time aside, I also got *a lot* of other things done–finished all the translations that were piled up, completed another couple writing assignments, wrote a handful of blog posts, and ran a bunch of errands (in between the raindrops of course). I haven’t felt so accomplished in weeks!
I love the rain! Especially when it’s followed by this:
And, in case you’re wondering, now we’re back to this:
And how was your weekend?
P.S. Thanks so much for turning the last post into a wonderful discussion! You have no idea how happy it makes me when that happens.
Michelle Kaminsky is an American attorney-turned-freelance writer who lived in her family's ancestral village in Calabria, Italy for 15 years. This blog is now archived.
Calabria Guidebook
Recipes
