From: Amanda’s Cookin
Amanda says: This recipe intrigued me because it used no boil lasagna noodles instead of manicotti shells. Stuffing manicotti makes for very messy business, so using the no boil lasagna noodles seemed much easier. This is a wonderful dish, perfect for Sunday dinner or get together with friends or family…more
From: Burp, where food happens
Sometimes, when you’re nice, people send you cool stuff.
In this case, those Sweet Folks at Buitoni sent us a bit of their Riserva Wild Mushroom Agnolotti to try out. It’s been a busy week, so I was actually pretty grateful for the opportunity to take advantage of a bit of convenience food…more
From: Dinner with Julie
HIGH FIVE. Oh yeah.
I got W to eat broccoli. And not only eat it – LOVE IT. One small step for W, one giant leap for motherkind.
A few days ago I made a pot of pasta fazool (must have been for lunch) and W walked in, looked at it, and said: “what! I don’t eat vegetables!” and stomped outside. Five minutes later I could hear him out on the patio, back arched, yelling at the sky: “I need some SUGAR!!”
Great.
So I became determined to get him to eat broccoli. He’s fine with spinach, so long as it’s cooked and on pizza or mixed into meatballs or some such. Peas get snuck in if they’re mixed with rice, but mostly he tries to eat around them. It’s not the green he’s against per se – he loves pesto – it’s the vegetableness of things like asparagus and broccoli. He won’t touch raw veg like sugar snap peas or (god forbid) leafy green salads…more
From: Pithy and Cleaver
A craving hit about 4pm. There was no way around it. I needed Meyer
lemons, and nothing else would do. They’d be perfect in Amanda Hesser’s
recipe for creamy lemon pasta with arugula. Imagine my delight when the
first display in Whole Foods was a basket full of lemons and a big sign—Meyer lemons on sale! I happily snagged two…or so I thought.
In
the grocery store, I often give myself permission to alter recipes
beyond recognition. Creme fraiche is three dollars and packed with
fat—no problem, I’ll use Fage yogurt! Real parmesan and arugula beyond
my budget? (And I often feel like cooked arugula is a touch too
bitter.) No worries, we have other hard cheese and vegetables at home.
This continues until I have pretty much nothing a recipe calls for,
except those precious Meyer lemons…more
From: Elly says Opa
I decided to go with a bolognese to kick off my year with Nigel—well,
“a really good bolognese” according to him. I’ve only made bolognese
once before (I tend to stick to Greek kima,
or meatsauces with less veggies), but I love how comforting dishes like
this are. I don’t normally indulge in things like pancetta and cream
during the week (nor do I normally make things that have to simmer for
two hours on a Monday…), but what the hell. I even bought some fresh
pasta to make this even better, since I haven’t made my own pasta yet…more
From: laylita.com
Laylita says: Daube is a classic French beef stew from the south of France, it is all
about long slow cooking, you start early morning and finish for lunch
time; daube is one of Bernard’s signature dishes: he’s done it for
decades and is an expert at it. Bernard believes that the quality of
ingredients is very important: “when you have good ingredients it’s
hard to mess up the dish”. I’ve prepared this beef daube a few times
already, it is very easy to prepare, and makes such a wonderful dish
for this cold time of the year. Most daubes are made using beef but can also be made with lamb. We
went grocery shopping to Pike Place Market to the find the ingredients
for our daube, Bernard was trying to explain the exact cut of beef that
he used to make daube, which turned out to be shank – or the leg -,
while you can make daube with other types of beef cuts, Bernard likes
to use shank because it of that gelatinous consistency they have, it
helps thicken the sauce and since the meat is cooked for a long time it
gets very tender. Now, I discovered that at least in the
US, shank is not that easy to find, and even once we found a butcher
that had some in stock he had it in the back, he explained that it is
more common to grind it up and sell it ground than to sell it in pieces. The
good thing is that the meat was very inexpensive and it reminded me
that in Ecuador we use beef shank in a lot of soups, especially those
that are cooked for a long time, the combination of the bone and
collagen gives the broth a lot of flavor. Shank can be
bought either with the bone or boneless, both are good, I like it with
the bone because I really think that bones add a ton of flavor to any
dish, but my husband has this thing about bones and prefers it
boneless, so sometimes I please him and sometimes I don’t, either way
the daube turns out great…more
From: Gild the (voodoo)lily
Heather says: You love those Ikea Swedish meatballs so much, don’t you. Of course you
do, you’re not made of stone. You don’t, however, love driving through
traffic to circle the 50-acre parking lot, or swimming through the
crowds of mouth-breathers that hoved in from the suburbs to buy
exquisite plywood shelving with sleek birch veneers. What in the fuck
can you do, though? You love those meatballs.
So
make them your damn self already. Mix together some ground chuck and
ground pork (about 3:1, respectively, for about a pound total), an egg,
a half-handful of plain bread crumbs, a quarter of an onion (minced),
more nutmeg than you think you should (at least ten scratches across
your microplane zester), four or five good cracks of pepper, and a few
pinches of crunchy salt. Mix only until combined, and use a little ice
cream scoop to perfectly portion out meatballs onto a silpat. Roast
these at 400 for about 20 or 30 minutes, until they’re browned and
lovely…more
From: One tree past the fence
Kathleen said: Miss Libby says not to eat carbs with proteins so…..
I chewed the pasta on the right side of my mouth.
and the sausage on the left side…more
From: The food in my beard
I have never been the biggest fan of quiches or frittatas. They aren’t
bad, but I would much rather an omelet or just scrambled eggs any day
of the week. To me, it is easier and tastier and so why bother with the
extra effort a quiche requires? Similarly, my grandmother used to make
a baked egg and pasta dish she called pastair (sp?) pronounced
pa-stare, or past – air. I never really liked this all that much
either. It was basically baked egg and pasta cooled down and cut into
squares. I would hold it in my hand like a brownie and snack on it as a
kid with my sister. What I made yesterday for breakfast was sort of a
combo of these things that totally changed my mind about their
goodness. With components of pastair, frittata, and quiche, this
‘pasttata’ (he he he) was fantastic, simple, and fun to make! I made it
with pretty much all leftovers. I even made a quick breakfast sausage
with some leftover ground beef I had in the fridge…more
From: Once Upon a Plate
The cherry tomatoes are also from the garden. Incidentally, if you
haven’t tried pan roasting tomatoes on the vine stove top in a little
olive oil, then sprinkled with coarse salt, I recommend preparing them
that way as a side dish. This method works well with both cherry and
regular size tomatoes on the vine…more