ceramic plate from Fifty One and Half

This green leafy vegetable is a staple in the Italian kitchen.  It is called Rapini but it is better known in the U.S. as Broccoli Rabe.  Italians love their bitter greens and this vegetable fits right in.  It's in the mustard family and is like a turnip green with little broccoli florets.  It's absolutely delicious.  It goes well with a nice grilled steak. There are a number of ways to cook it, but I'm going to show you how to roast it til it's crispy. 

When you buy broccoli rabe, it will be in a nice sized bunch and it will look like a lot, but it does cook down. I like to roast it on sheet pans but you can't crowd it - one large bunch should be divided up between two sheet pans so it crisps up well and doesn't just steam. 

It still feels like winter here in Michigan!  I'm doing a lot of sewing and cooking wintry dishes like this one, until some nice weather arrives.  We do get to sneak out to Seattle, where one of our sons lives, where the weather is much nicer than here. And the food is so, so good! 

There is a wildly popular tiny Italian restaurant in Seattle's Pioneer Square area that has a line out the door every day.  It serves lunch only, Monday through Friday. It's Mike Easton's Il Corvo and it serves some of the best pasta in the city.  

ceramic plate from Fifty One and a Half

This soup hits the spot at this time of year.  This is such a delicious soup that makes a perfect marriage of meat and greens (hence the name Italian Wedding Soup).  There are so many versions of this soup it makes your head spin.  Some use rice, some add beans, some use pasta, most have beef meatballs, etc. etc.  Here is how I like to make it. 

First, I use pork for the meatballs. You can use whatever you like - turkey (which I've done), beef, a mixture of beef and pork, whatever.   And I grind it myself as some of you know.  It makes a nice fluffy mixture to work with and I know exactly what is in my meat mixture that way. I used pork shoulder for this - in the grocery store often they slice up this cut of pork into large strips and call it "Country Style Ribs".  It's a nice fatty flavorful cut of pork.  If you want something leaner, by all means use ground pork loin.  

I was saddened last week to hear about the death of Gina DePalma at the age of 49.  She was the highly acclaimed pastry chef at Babbo and the recipient of numerous awards for her work.  I had written about her before in this post about making her Mosaic Biscotti (which includes a video of her).  Mario Batali called her "the mother soul of the entire kitchen" at Babbo.  

I would like to share with you Gina's recipe for Lemon Goat Cheese Cake that was served at Babbo.  Goat cheese has such a delicious tang and it's great in this cake. The cake is light and airy, unlike a cheesecake.  It has such a light texture because you separate the eggs and whip the whites into a meringue, which you then fold into the egg yolk batter.  The results are almost souffle-like. 

After the cake has cooled, a delicious lemon syrup is poured over the top and sinks down into the cake and adds even more lemony goodness.

A little holiday cocktail for you!  This involves bubbly Prosecco, frozen cranberries and a little hint of orange. It's easy and festive and pretty.

Enjoy!
Elaine 

I'm finally putting this recipe up on the blog.  This delicious breakfast casserole is something I've been making on Christmas morning for years and years.  I do it because my mother-in-law gave me the original recipe and I make it for my husband.  So it's become a tradition and I serve it every Christmas morning. We give a big neighborhood Christmas Eve open house every year, so when I am preparing dishes for that on the 24th, I go ahead and make this dish and stick it in the fridge. Then, on Christmas morning, I get up and pop it in the oven while we open gifts and it takes about an hour to heat up.  It's perfect timing! Serve it with a bowl of fresh fruit and you're all set. 

See the quilt in the opening photograph?  I made that.  A lot of you probably know that I like to make things.  I cook, of course, but I like to knit and sew. I've started writing about what I'm sewing (mostly quilts) for fun and if you are into that sort of thing, I hope you will jump on over to Beech Tree Lane Handmade and follow me there!

I just finished giving a Fall pizza making class and it seems like I get a lot of e-mails from readers who cannot attend the class because they don't live locally and want to know more about what we make in the class.  So I'm going to talk a little bit today about what we discuss during class about the finer points of homemade pizza. We make six pizzas during class and this is one of them and one of my favorites.  If you think bacon, onions and mushrooms go together just about perfectly, you will love this pizza.  I'm also going to give you some parts of the handout that I give my students during class so you can see what we cover.

Have you ever made a crostata?  You might have been scared off because it requires making dough, but if you have a food processor, you can use my 60-second pie dough recipe, and that makes this a super quick and easy dessert to make.  You can use whatever fruit you like, but the blueberries are so great right now that I used those. 

One of the nice things about crostata is that it is free form - there is no crust to crimp or pan to line perfectly. You just roll out the dough, place the filling in the middle and fold the dough up around the filling.  Also, you can make this dessert earlier in the day and let it sit in the fridge until you're ready to bake it.  Love that!

If you have plans in the future to visit San Francisco and wonder where to eat, let me recommend a couple of restaurants to you that are really exceptional - A16 and SPQR.  They are sister restaurants, with the same owner, Shelly Lindgren, at the helm.  They are both Italian restaurants and serve outstanding food and wine.  I guarantee you will not have a bad meal at either place.  A16 focuses on the food and wine of the Campania (Naples) region of Italy.  A16 is the name of the road that runs through that part of Italy.  SPQR, if you have ever been to Rome, are the initials that are stamped into everything in the city - from manhole covers to coins. It means "The Senate and People of Rome".  Tip: if you go to SPQR, sit at the Cook's Counter and watch them prepare the food. 

In all the years of writing this blog, the most popular post ever has been the one I wrote about No-Knead Artisan Bread.  This method, popularized by Zoe Francois and Jeffrey Hertzberg, revolutionized homemade bread baking.  Instead of making up a batch of dough every time you want to bake bread, you make up a large batch of very wet dough and let it do a long, cold fermentation in the refrigerator - no kneading, no fuss. You can store the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks, tear a hunk of dough off and make bread whenever you feel like it. A variation of this method was also developed by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was making homemade bread with these methods.  In the five years since I wrote that post, I've learned a few things and tweaked the recipe a little.  I thought it was time to do an update.  

Zoe and Jeffrey's approach is to make a very wet dough, let it rise and then let it sit overnight in the fridge. You then shape a piece of the dough, let it rise and then bake it on a pizza stone in the oven.  They liked to place a cup of water into a pan beneath the rack with the bread, creating a little steam for the crust.  In Jim Lahey's version, a smaller batch of wet dough is worked up and allowed to rise about 18 hours then wrapped in a towel to rise again and baked in a heavy cast iron or ceramic pot.  Both methods are terrific.  I like making up a larger batch of dough so I can keep it in the fridge and just make bread or rolls whenever I want.  I was baking my bread on a pizza stone but then tried Lahey's version of baking it in my Le Creuset pot. I really liked doing it this way and that's how I've been doing it for a while.

We were recently in Seattle, visiting one of our sons, and had dinner at Spinasse. Spinasse is known around Seattle as one of the best places to go for homemade pasta and it did not disappoint. There were a lot of moans and groans coming from our table. The meal was delicious, from the amuse that they brought out (a heavenly little bite of crostini with butter and anchovy) to an oustanding dessert of coconut gelato with dark chocolate flakes.  But the real star of the show was, indeed, the pastas.

I discovered this recipe last year and made it for my youngest son who loves both challah bread and chocolate. This is a cross between a chocolate babka and challah bread and it's so good.  I love the combination of the chocolate and cinnamon together.  

Whole Foods is celebrating their Parmigiano Reggiano cheese again this year and they want to give a lucky reader a $50 gift card to use in their stores!  All you have to do is leave a comment at the end of this post and you will be entered for the giveaway.  To celebrate this cheese, I'm posting a recipe that I actually made for Valentine's Day dinner this year - a cheesy saffron risotto with poached shrimp on top.  It's out of this world. I made it as a first course for the dinner. 

If you're like me, most of the time for Valentine's I prefer to stay home and prepare a nice dinner myself. And it's not just because Valentine's Day is notorious for being a bad night to go out, but it's nice to make something a little more luxurious than normal and break out some of the great wine we have at home. So if you are one of those people who are going to make a Valentine's dinner yourself, maybe the dinner is work enough for you and you don't want to labor over a complicated dessert. These easy stuffed strawberries are quick and simple to fix and go great with a glass of champagne.

Happy Valentine's Day!

What do you do when you miss a dish that you can get in Italy but doesn't exist here? If you're Chef Sara Jenkins, you open your own storefront and start making and selling that dish. That's how Porchetta was born, a tiny storefront in the East Village in New York City that sells heavenly servings of porchetta, a pork dish that is found all over central Italy.  In Rome, it's sold frequently on the street in food carts.  It's pork that is stuffed with herbs, slow roasted and piled high on a bun.  And it's outrageously delicious.

Have you ever wanted to fix a Caprese Salad during the winter months but didn't, because you knew it just wasn't going to be any good with bland, anemic winter tomatoes?  Well, if you use this method you can have a tasty Winter Caprese Salad.  The secret is to slow roast the tomatoes, removing the moisture from them and concentrating the flavor.  You get a very intense tasting tomato out of a mediocre winter tomato.

This homemade candy not only looks so pretty but it's absolutely delicious, and I'm not even a big peppermint fan. Making it yourself is quite a fun project and you can make it quite a bit ahead as it keeps well in the fridge or the freezer. I remember the first time I ever made it and tasted it and could not believe how addictive it was - so it makes great gifts at the holidays! 

I love making these kinds of breakfast breads, leaving them on the kitchen counter and letting everyone nibble on them for a couple of days.  These breads really are not hard to make - this kind of sweet dough is very easy to work with and you can make the fillings with lots of different things to suit your own taste. This version is with dried cranberries, walnuts and some orange zest.