stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
Lasagna - there is so much to love about it. It's cheesy, it's gooey, it's a meal in itself, it's comfort food. It's easy to make to boot. This was something I could make in my dorm kitchen, following the recipe on the back of the Barilla box. What that recipe lacked in finesse it made up for in cheese. Not that we minded - we were college students starved for a homemade meal, and so we always had fun popping this into the ovens in the dorm kitchens, opening a bottle of wine, and making a meal such that we were the envy of most dorm residents.
Now that I'm out of college though, that cheese-laden flavor-lacking thoroughly Americanized version isn't going to cut it anymore. And that Souffer stuff? Forgetaboutit. Why oh why would you buy something like that when lasagna is like the easiest thing to make ever??? Anyway, I'd been looking for a good recipe for a several years until this winter when we had a dinner party at my swim coach's house and my friend Ginger brought a tray of the most fantastic lasagna. It had just the right amount of cheese and wasn't greasy and had some substantial herbs to it, which is really something that most recipes lack. So what did I do? I asked her for the recipe, of course.
"Oooh, I don't know, I'll have to ask my mom about it!" Apparently the lasagna recipe is akin to a state secret - Ginger's mom worked really hard to develop the recipe (it shows!) and only gave it to her daughters under the condition that they would keep it as proprietary information. Lucky for me though, Carol agreed that it was ok for Ginger to give me the recipe because I had shared my family's pumpkin cookie with her. Totally a great swap, if you ask me. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have permission to share this recipe on this blog! I've modified it only a little bit, because the core premise of the recipe is so solid. It uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, which I think is a really great idea because it's really tough to find good ricottas in the States. I absolutely love the sauce that you make for the recipe, and it's fantastic with both either and turkey Italian sausages. I did substitute dried Italian herbs for dried basil because basil's flavor is so volatile in the presence of heat and the dried version retains so little of the fresh's flavor - but I just added in the fresh basil later in the recipe. The overall effect of the recipe is a way-less heavy version of the typical lasagna, but still retains all of the flavor that you want.
Thank you so much, Carol, for sharing this recipe with me! You did an awesome job creating this lasagna and I really appreciate being let in on the secret!
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Every cook needs a good marinara recipe in her or his repertoire. Why not? It's simple to prepare, goes with tons of things, and is easily modified into a multitude of other sauces. It's infinitely superior to what attempts to pass for jarred spaghetti sauces, and again, it's so easily made and even more easily customized that it's really not worth buying it off the shelf.
I recently made a batch from a recipe recommended by raving reviews from my Mom and I fell in love. It's sweet but not overly so with plenty of warm garlic flavor without any of the raw garlic punishment. I used it for three separate applications: saucing ravioli served with fresh mozzarella and torn basil (pictured below), pizza Margherita, take due, and spaghetti with calimari (utterly divine, but so modified on the fly due to utterly poor recipe testing that I wasn't keeping track of things like quantities and time, so I'll have to re-make it in order to post the recipe). Needless to say, the sauce is all gone. Well, that is, until I make another batch...
Espresso. Brandy. Ladyfingers. Chocolate. Marscapone.
When you look at that list you may find yourself wondering, "What possibly could go wrong?"
And if you answered an enthusiastic "Nothing!" you would be so, so wrong. I sure as hell hope you didn't bet the farm on that one.
Tiramisu, at its best, is light yet rich, warm-tasting with brandy notes, with espresso to offset the sweetness, and because everything is better with chocolate, a liberal dusting of some Scharffen Berger. However, when executed improperly, it's flat tasting, bitter, and soggy. Trust me, you don't want soggy tiramisu.
It's one of those dishes where everything has to go right. Because of that, I won't order it in restaurants anymore, not even the one that Cory took me to for dessert on my birthday, because they screw it up and frankly, mine is a hell of a lot better (sorry Cory, I know you meant well!).
Luckily, if you have a good recipe, like the one I'm about to share with you, you can't go wrong. Too many recipes for tiramisu are too vague and include verbiage like "stir a couple of times" or "heat until lukewarm" and that sort of imprecision, while maybe appearing a little less intimidating to the novice cook, is a recipe for disaster. For soggy, flaccid, bitter disaster. And you know I would never do that to you.
I've been waiting to post this recipe for quite some time.
You see, you might call this dish Highly Significant.
It's so significant that I often find myself asking if Cory and I would have gotten married if it were not for this recipe.
It's one of the first things we ever cooked together, and from the point that we starting smooshing up those tomatoes with our hands, it was painfully apparent that we were meant to be.
We still cook up a batch of chicken cacciatore every time we're together. I thought it was criminal that he didn't have a copy of the recipe or The Joy of Cooking, so when he moved into his current apartment I bought him a copy the newly released 75th anniversary edition as a housewarming gift. Before I bought it for him I made sure that the recipe hadn't gotten the axe and was included in that version, but when we brought it home and we inspected it more closely we found that it calls for diced canned tomatoes, not whole tomatoes that you crush with your hands. On that alone, I've basically panned the whole edition. It's not worth buying! Find the 1997 edition! That older recipe helped Cory and I find love, and I who am I to deny anyone else that opportunity by recommending an inferior tome?
I'm going to admit upfront: my version of the classic Italian chicken is so not traditional. Every recipe I've ever seen and everyone else who's ever served it to me - including places in Italy - call for chicken parts, not chicken breasts, but when I was first learning to cook I had no clue what the heck a chicken part was. Even if I had been savvy enough, I simply didn't have the equipment to cut up a chicken and then cook it. So maybe it's for the best that I've bastardized it. I still think it's delicious, and it has the health benefits of being all-white meat.
Not everything about this recipe is 100% positive though. There is something about chicken cacciatore that makes living alone an especially bitter pill to swallow. This dish is so obviously meant to be cooked with people and then shared with people. That alone explains two of my behaviors: I always call Cory when I'm starting to crush up those tomatoes with my hands and tell him that I wish he was there with me, and whenever I'm cooking for a group people for the first time, this is the recipe I pull out. It's just too good to not share with others. It's not just the end result that's important, it's the whole process - from the first time you throw the onions and herbs in the pan and the fragrance makes everyone exclaim with delight to the times when the pan is in a long simmer and you can just sit around and enjoy the company of your companions to the first bite of that warm, earthy, wine-herbs-and-tomato chickeny goodness. Nothing says "I care" like chicken cacciatore.
When Cory and I arrived in Florence, one of the first things I noticed on menus at local restaurants was tomato and bread soup. I had never heard of it and honestly was thinking, well, something close to "ew."
But then there was Il Latini, the renowned restaurant that hasn't lost its local charm despite its fame (which I have already described in my Panna Cotta entry). Since it was our last night in Tuscany and we had finally found the Florence restaurant of our dreams -- the restaurant that we had literally stumbled across, having gotten lost in the streets in our quest for food -- I decided to branch out and try some of the truly local cuisine. Even though we were offered many, many delicious options for our primi, I ordered the pappa al pomodoro.
As soon as the waiter set the bowl down in front of me all of my previous expectations evaporated. I had been imagining something much like American tomato soup, thin and watery with an assertive salt flavor. Instead I was served a hearty, thick, delicious soup with deep tomato and bright basil flavor. Its texture on the tongue is like no other soup I've ever had. Cory, with his singularly amazing gnocchi, was something akin to jealous.
So, unsurprisingly, Cory and I started looking for a way to duplicate this soup experience when we got back to the States. The William-Sonoma Florence cookbook had disappointing results (which is a cautionary tale to American cooks that what we consider to be aromatics like celery and carrots will never ever stand a chance against plenty of fresh basil), and I was almost beginning to despair until I remembered that in the front window of Il Latini a TV was playing a tape of the international media coverage the restaurant had gotten -- and they had played a clip of Rachel Ray's $40 a Day. Feeling slightly dirty (to put it delicately, I'm not the world's biggest fan of Ms. Ray), I hunted down the episode online, and lo and behold, she had their recipe!!! Cory and I cooked it together, and it was everything we remembered and brought back wonderful memories of that night in Florence.
So if you can't make it to Florence yourself, at least do yourself this favor and make this soup. It's so representative of how Italians can take something most Americans would throw away (stale bread), add it to a couple of fresh, simple ingredients, and create something warm, delicious, and satisfying.
Click here for the recipe for "Pappa al Pomodoro - Tuscan tomato and bread soup" »
My love affair with pizza margherita can be traced back to my absolute smittenness with caprese salad. It's really not all that surprising -- you start with basic, fresh, delicious ingredients, then you put it on a pizza. What could go wrong????
I had made this pizza before about two years ago. The first time, Cory was my dining companion and instead of a tomato sauce base we used freshly made pesto and topped the pizza with tomato slices. Delicious, but I would recommend custom-making the sauce for the pizza and using a lighter hand with the oil, as it will mix with the fat in the mozzarella. While I loved it, it certainly wasn't truly authentic.
So, of course, when Cory and I went to Italy, one of the things I had to eat over there was the pizza margherita. We wasted no time on that count -- our first lunch in Florence was in a trattoria outside of the city's famous Mercato Centrale. Cory had a pizza topped with prosciutto and I, of course, indulged my tricolore tastebuds.
The pizza was unlike any I had ever had before. The crust was very, very thin but not cracker-crunchy and the sauce was, for lack of a better description, true tomato red. I thought it was pure, simple, and delicious, and Cory was known to say "the sauce is so fresh it still had seeds in it!" The pizzas we were served were probably a good 12 inches, but they were nowhere near as heavy as their American counterparts. Since we had had a typically light Italian breakfast and had been walking all day and climbed to the very very top of the duomo (the Santa Maria del Fiore) Cory polished his off easily. I packed my leftovers out and devoured them later that day.
Of course, upon returning to the States, I wanted to make it, but the whole-grain fiend in me wanted a whole wheat crust. I finally found a recipe for it, and of course wasted no time making it. Next time I make it I will probably try to lengthen the rising time (true Stacey fashion) and I will make my crust much much thinner, even if I have to discard some dough. And I will buy a pizza peel. Save yourself the anguish -- buy one too!
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita with a Whole Wheat Crust" »
Until I made this dessert at home, I had never had panna cotta in the United States.
I hadn't even heard of this indulgent dish until a couple of months ago, when I met someone in Korea who had actually taught at the Culinary Institute of America. I haven't met many people who are bigger foodies than me, but he definitely qualified. A few of us were looking for a restaurant in Seoul for dinner and we decided to pop into an Italian place, and my chef comrade ordered it for dessert, served with a perfect raspberry sauce on top. "Not too shabby," I thought, but didn't think too much of it again until Cory and I's honeymoon.
After our day trip into Siena, we returned to Florence intent on finding a classic Tuscan dinner. We looked through our guidebooks and found a place or two that looked promising on paper but were totally uninspiring when viewed in person. So we started to wander the streets, looking for those wonderful Italian hole-in-the-walls that you hear about from all your friends who were lucky enough to go to Italy when they were still in college.
All of a sudden we passed by a Il Latini, a restaurant that looked very cozy and the menu was actually entirely in Italian, which I took to be a good sign that this place was authentic. It was about 7:05 and the place didn't open until 7:30, so we decided to wait, queuing up like, well, normal civilized people would. About ten minutes later a man walked up and asked if anyone there spoke English, and almost all of us answered that we did. "This is the third time this week that my wife and I have been here, and trust me, the wait is worth it." Cory and I grinned at each other at this, and the man continued, "I know you all think that you're lined up like rational, courteous people, but trust me, when it gets closer to opening all the locals are going to start massing around the door. Lines will mean nothing!"
Well, you know what they say, when in Rome....
So we gaggle up, and before long the man is proven correct when these people start amassing around us, trying to get in ahead of us even though we've been waiting twenty-five minutes. 'Oh hell no!' I thought to myself. "If anyone tries to get around you, throw 'em an elbow!" was Cory's husbandly advice. And throw an elbow I did!
We managed to get in at the first seating and were seated at a table with another couple. The huge bottle of house wine was already on the table, and the food starting coming almost immediately. We never saw a menu, but everything they brought was superb: insalata caprese, pate on crostini, and tabbouleh made with barley for antipasti, Tuscan tomato and bread soup for me and gnocchi with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes for Cory for primi, roast beef for me and roasted lamb for him for secondi, and then a delicious dessert wine, biscotti, espresso, (something delicious that I can't remember), and, of course, panna cotta with a velvety chocolate sauce for dolci. It was an amazing meal (quoth Cory: "my brain pretty much shut down so that the only thing working was the taste buds") and an unforgettable dining experience in my favorite city.
It was also, of course, a wonderful reminder of a dessert that is fast becoming a favorite.
The first time I had gnocchi, I was pretty doubtful. Cory and I were living in San Angleo and he happened to find a package of gnocchi on the grocery store shelf. He used to make it with his family and he loved the stuff, so he bought it and cooked it for me one night. I was not impressed -- they seemed like heavy, tastless lumps in the no-man's-land between pasta and tortellini.
But then, we went to Italy.
We had gnocchi there.
And I have seen the light!
Yes, light is what they are, light and flavorful! Those potato dumplings have won a place in my heart.
I came back from Italy all culinarily inspired, even more firmly convinced than ever that when it comes to food, Americans just don't get it. To help shed some light in those dark corners, I resolved to serve a proper Italian meal to some friends -- with complete with antipasti, primi and secondi piatti, and dolci. I wanted to try something new, something delicious that I had never made before and that my guests would probably have never eaten before, so after a bit of searching, it came to me: gnocchi was the obvious choice for primi.
When I found the recipes, I realized I had a new dilemma: I don't have a potato ricer, and I have this thing about taking up limited storage space with single-use gadgets. So the stubborn, yet forsightful, bit of me decided to instead buy the Pasta Maker with Food Grinder attachment for my stand mixer, figuring that I could also use it for tomato sauces, apple sauce, sausages, and, of course, pasta.
Last week I made a test batch of gnocchi for the dinner I'll be having at the end of the month. Let me tell you, even though I'm not really sure what the authentic shape is for these dumplings, they are delicious -- especially when tossed with a pesto sauce you've just ground up yourself.
