What?  You haven't got that ice cream maker out yet?  Seriously?  You think it's a hassle to make fresh ice cream, right?  Well, think about this - you make a mixture on the stove in the morning, chill it in the fridge all day and when you want ice cream after dinner, you simply pour it into your machine and 30 minutes later you have the freshest, creamiest, most delicious ice cream you've ever tasted.  So don't be a wimp - make some fresh ice cream and impress your family!   There's no fillers, no additives - just the best ice cream you'll ever eat.

Puff pastry is your friend.  And if you don't know that yet, let me introduce you by making this quick and easy summer appetizer.

Frozen puff pastry is one of the greatest things you can keep in your freezer.  You can make last minute appetizers with it, desserts, breakfast pastries and use it to top pot pies.  You can certainly make your own puff pastry, but it is very time consuming and the commercial version in the grocery store is very good. I like making these very easy appetizers with puff pastry.  You just lay out a sheet of the pastry, top it with cheese and a vegetable and bake.  

We sure bake a lot of bread in this house.  I used to make focaccia bread a couple of times a week, but lately this incredibly easy artisan bread has been on our dinner table most nights.  I wanted to get out of that rut and thought I'd make these easy herbed flatbreads for a change.  I hadn't made these in ages but they are easy and fun to make and can be also used as an appetizer.

This delicious bread is sort of a cross between a cracker and a bread.  It's a great excuse to break out your pasta rollers, if you have them.  The dough is divided into small pieces and passed through pasta rollers to make a nice flat bread.  If you don't have pasta rollers, just roll them out by hand but the pasta rollers make it so much easier and faster.  These little breads don't have to be a uniform size or shape - it's kind of rustic anyway if they are not.  

We all love cheesecake, right?  But it does take time and effort.  You have to make the crust and bake it, then make the filling and, if you do it right, bake the cheesecake in a water bath.  Well, I'm going to show you how to make cheesecake without any baking at all.  It's a deconstructed cheesecake and you layer it in parfait glasses. The cheesecake filling doesn't have any eggs - that's why you don't have to bake it.  These are so easy and you can even make them up ahead of time and refrigerate them.

I love puff pastry.  If you keep some in your freezer, you can make a lot of great things with very little notice. It only takes about 30-40 minutes to thaw and is so versatile.  Napoleons are usually desserts made with squares or rectangles of puff pastry and layered with pastry cream and fruit.  I'm going to show you how to make savory asparagus napoleons but you can make napoleons with any filling you like.  Get creative.  I'm using asparagus because it's in season here now.

Once you know how to make this easy Pâte à Choux dough, you can use it to make a number of different things. Pâte à Choux is cream puff pastry and is used to make cream puffs, gougeres, and even beignets.  I love it because it is simple, fast and I can make it ahead of time.  You can make these beautiful cream puffs and fill them as a dessert with ice cream or whipped cream.  You can make them and fill them for lunch with crab or chicken salad.  You can add cheese to the dough and make savory little gougeres for appetizers, which I will make for a future post.  You can make the cream puffs ahead of time and then simply fill them right before serving - I love recipes that can be made ahead of time, and this one is one of the best and most versatile.  Once you have this basic technique in your cooking arsenal, you will be ready to make all kinds of goodies.

Arancine are one of the most traditional foods in all of Sicily.  These fried rice balls resemble oranges - the Italian word for orange is arancia.  They can be stuffed with a variety of mixtures, but a meat sauce, or ragu, is the most traditional.  In Sicily, they are sold everywhere and we loved to see them sold on the street by vendors, in the airport or even gas stations.  How different from the sad hot dogs and pretzels you buy in an American gas station! They are great picnic fare and are often eaten just held in a paper napkin.  Arancine are made by forming balls of risotto, inserting some kind of stuffing, rolling them in bread crumbs and then frying. They are best served hot but can be eaten room temperature.  

This may well be our favorite appetizer.  I think a close second are these parmesan crisps, but these crostini are just amazing. The combination of the prosciutto with the luscious fig jam is so good and then the creamy goat cheese - well, you just have to make these.  And (shhhh...) they are so easy!

All you need for these little wonders are a good fresh baguette, a jar of fig jam, some salty prosciutto, plain goat cheese and some fresh basil.  The fig jam is an item which is now found in any grocery store.  You just have to know where to look for it.  Some stores carry it with the jams and some carry it with the international foods.  I know Whole Foods has this brand of jam and they always have some tucked in with all the cheeses. This stuff is incredible - if you've never had it, you'll want to eat it with a spoon.  Or put it on toast.  Or make a sandwich with it.  Or put it on scrambled eggs.  Okay, you get it.  For the prosciutto, make sure you buy a good quality prosciutto - because there are so few ingredients, this appetizer is only good as the quality of your ingredients.

I really love the idea of these individual little lasagnas - I think they're fun to serve and you can easily individualize them - for example, leaving out meat in one of them for someone who is a vegetarian.  As I was assembling these, Brian snuck in some pepperoncini and sun-dried tomatoes in one for himself.  You can use any kind of filling - I've made these before with sausage and marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese, for a more traditional lasagna taste.  The filling in these, however, is a simple saute of pancetta, leeks and garlic.  And oh, does it smell heavenly as you're cooking it.

It's artichoke season and I know a lot of people don't know what to do with them. These thorny little devils contain succulent insides and it's just a matter of trimming away all the inedible parts.  Once you get the hang of it, trimming an artichoke goes very quickly.  Don't believe me?  Observe from a master in Campo di Fiori in Rome:

If you look for recipes for the traditional Italian Easter Pie, you will find many variations.  Some people call it a pie and some call it a cake.  Some have meat inside and some do not.  There are so many different ways to make it, but they are all savory.  This recipe is one that I have had for twenty-five years.  It comes from a very authentic source - Anna Teresa Callen, who is now in her eighties. She is a very well known cooking teacher and author who lives in New York City. She is from the Abruzzo region of Italy.  She says this pie is traditionally made with 33 layers of dough, one for each of the years that Christ lived.  But she makes this with twelve - for each of the apostles (and a whole lot easier!)

It's about time for another cocktail around this blog, I think.  I want to introduce you to a drink that is wildly popular in Italy, especially in the Veneto where it originates, but is hardly known in the United States.  It is made with Aperol, which began to be imported into this country only about three years ago.  It is the Aperol Spritz and you can get a little of the general spirit of the drink with this Italian TV ad:

I know what you're thinking - what a carb load potato pizza must be!  Well . . . yes.  You certainly wouldn't want to eat it if you were doing Atkins, but if you're vegetarian or even vegan, it's the perfect pizza.  No meat and no cheese (the cheese is optional, but I think the pizza doesn't need it).  If you go to Italy, you will see potato pizza in most of the pizza shops.  The combination of potatoes, rosemary and onion is absolutely delicious and set on top of great pizza dough, it's so good.  Add a green salad and it's a nice dinner.  Cut it into small squares and it's a delicious, unusual appetizer.  

When Brian and I were on our great food and wine adventure to Oregon last summer, we saw lots of orchards that we could not identify.  As it turns out they were hazelnut trees.  I love hazelnuts.  Some people call them filberts.  They are the nutty goodness in Nutella.  Turns out Oregon is the major producer of hazelnuts here in the United States.  It was nice to see them used on so many of the restaurant menus in that area, especially in their wine country.  I wanted to cook more with them when I got home.

What if I told you that instead of buying bakery bread for four or five dollars a loaf, you could make delicious handmade bread whenever you wanted, at a fraction of the cost and it is so easy a kid could do it?  Well, read on because this method of making artisan bread at home will change your life.  

You can make incredible bread without having to do all the usual time consuming tasks of breadmaking :

• no need to make a new batch of dough every time you want bread
• no need to proof yeast
• no need to make starters or prefermented dough
• no kneading! 

This is absolutely one of my favorite pasta sauces.  I make a traditional bolognese or ragu sauce frequently from ground beef and pork, but this sauce is very different.  I make it from chicken thighs, which I braise, remove from the pot and then shred, removing the meat from the bone.  The meat is then placed back into the sauce to cook further. It has a very full, rich flavor from the vegetables, broth, wine and the addition of tomato paste (I used my homemade estratto from this fall).  You can serve this over any pasta.  I like orecchiette ("little ears" in Italian) because it holds the sauce so well.  This is also great over homemade gnocchi.

When The Daring Kitchen asked me to review “The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken” by Laura Schenone, I was excited because I had seen the book before and I have quite an interest in making ravioli.  This particular ravioli is made with a special rolling pin that has a checkerboard pattern which makes ravioli very quickly.  It's a fun method to try and I think if you are a beginner to ravioli, it is an especially easy method. 

It's World Nutella Day.  I'll bet some of you didn't even know that! It's a day created for Nutella lovers by Sara from Ms. Adventures in Italy and Michelle from Bleeding Espresso.  Bloggers from all around the world post recipes made with Nutella and Sara and Michelle will both have a roundup of all the recipes on February 8th.  if you head on over to World Nutella Day and click on "Nutella Recipes" you can see recipes from years past.

I love to make hand crafted pasta and corzetti are such fun to make.   They are pasta discs that are stamped with a design, which helps to hold a sauce.  They are a regional pasta to Liguria in Italy.   In medieval times, they were stamped with the Genovese family crests. To make them by hand, you must have a corzetti stamp.