The March 2009 Daring Bakers challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

There are many kinds of lasagna and even in Italy every cook has his own recipe. But this is the real, traditional lasagna that is made in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, the birthplace of fresh egg pasta. It is made with homemade fresh spinach pasta, bechamel sauce and bolognese sauce. That's it. Each of these three components can be made at separate times, so there isn't so much to do all at once. You can certainly make the bolognese sauce a day before and the bechamel can even be made in the morning and allowed to cool.

My Italian blogger friends, Marie over at Proud Italian Cook and Maryann at Finding La Dolce Vita, are hosting their second annual Festa Italiana, a virtual potluck of Italian dishes. I wanted to make something really special for this, so I did a Pasta Roll, stuffed with spinach and dressed with tomato sauce.

My mom, Angela, passed away in 1985. She was from Sicily and I was just really beginning to get into cooking when she died. A short time ago, I was flipping through an old Italian cookbook of hers and saw this recipe, written by her, in the back of the book:

We had to go to Chicago this weekend for a wedding and we got to have dinner one night with our oldest son, Barry, who goes to school there. I've always wanted to try "Quince", the restaurant which occupies the space where the famous five star "Trio" and Grant Achatz used to be. We had a great dinner there. The menu had me stumped because I wanted to try almost every single thing on it. And I was so disappointed in myself because I did not have the guts to take decent photos of the food - just these lousy low light ones. But I was way too conscientious to use my flash in such a nice place. Just what they need - another food blogger taking pictures of the food. But that food really deserved serious photos. If you want to see real photos of how the food was presented, go to their website. The dishes are real works of art.

It's gotten cold outside and so it's time to make gnocchi. I hardly ever make this in the summer, but in the winter, this is such great comfort food. Gnocchi is a lot of fun to make - it's like playing with Playdough. I've included a video in this post to show you how easy they are to roll out and cut. You can make them when you don't have anything else around for dinner because the ingredients are all things you have on hand anyway - flour, potatoes and eggs. And now it takes me even less time to make them. Most cooks think you have to run the finished gnocchi over a fork or grater to get those ridges that will catch the sauce. That's how my mom and I used to make it.  However, when I have gone to Italy and ordered gnocchi, it is very often made without those ridges.  They are just nice fluffy little pillows.   I know that Todd English makes them this way, also.    And I have come to actually prefer the texture of the gnocchi without the ridges.

For those of you who are tired of the same old lasagna, try making this "white" lasagna. It has no meat and you can really use whatever vegetables you like. The vegetables are roasted, giving them a deeper flavor and the lasagna is assembled with a simple, rich bechamel sauce. Learning how to make a bechamel sauce is easy - you just whisk and cook!

This is a recipe from the Babbo cookbook, which I absolutely love, by Mario Batali. The combination of pancetta and parsnips is just about perfect. I love to make homemade pasta and this black pepper fettuccine has a lot of zip to it. You can add as little or as much pepper as you like. If it's freshly ground, of course, it's going to be zippier. My farmer's market closed up shop this week and these were the last parsnips of the year. There were a few that were really bizarre looking, like something out of Lord of the Rings. That's part of the charm of buying local organic vegetables!

Let's talk ravioli. If you haven't made it, you probably think it's hard, right? It's actually easy and fun and if you make the filling ahead of time, it really doesn't take that long to make them.

There are many ways to make ravioli and I think I've tried them all. You can roll out the sheets of pasta with something as basic as a rolling pin  (a lot of work).  But a little equipment makes the job much easier.  For years I used the trusty Atlas pasta machine to roll out the dough into sheets. This required hand cranking and certainly wasn't hard.