Lentils like other beans are legumes but compared to other types of dried beans, lentils are relatively quick and easy to prepare. Lentils are great in salads as they readily absorb a variety of wonderful flavors from other foods and seasonings, are high in nutritional value, inexpensive, and are available throughout the year. I recently came across black lentils, often called beluga lentils as they resemble caviar and thought they would be delicious as well as pretty in a lentil salad. We...
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I recently made a lovely batch of creamy smooth ricotta cheese that I wanted to use in a baked pasta dish. I make lasagna and cannelloni all the time so I thought I’d try something a little different and picked up a package of manicotti noodles at my local grocery store. Manicotti are similar to cannelloni in that they are both stuffed tubes of pasta enclosing some type of filling that you top with a sauce and bake. Manicotti are a dried pasta tube however, while cannelloni are fresh...
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I love my KitchenAid stand mixer and use it often throughout the week for basic mixing, and even kneading my dough at times when baking bread. I also use the pasta roller attachment every time I make my homemade pasta, and the cutting attachments make it very simple to make fettuccine or linguine. There are many other attachments and extras available for the KitchenAid stand mixers and it is difficult at times to decide if these extras are easy to use, worth the cost, or even if they...
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Ricotta cheese is widely used in Italian cooking in everything from appetizers to desserts. It is a very soft, low-fat cheese that is actually a by-product of cheese making because it is made from the whey that has been separated from the curd in the process of actually making cheese. It is in fact, technically a dairy product rather than an actual cheese because of this. Ricotta translates as “recooked” and was originally made in Rome when it was discovered that the whey could be...
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I love the variety of artisan sandwich breads we have available in the US which all make amazing sandwiches. One of my favorite breads is an onion and cheese flavored bread which is great used for grilled sandwiches in particular. The flavor of the onions and cheese really pop out when the bread is grilled to a golden brown.
Unfortunately, although we have wonderful bread available in Umbria, these types of breads just are not sold so I decided to make my own at home. This bread turned out... Read the whole entry »
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