Tag Archives: italian

Homemade Panizza

During a recent trip to Manila, I fell in love with what is supposedly a purely Philippine phenomenon: the panizza, thin crust pizza filled with greens and sprouts and rolled into a bite-size piece of crunch perfection. Having been unsuccessful at locating a nearby source for this creation in NYC, my good spouse decided that she would make one of her own.

Enter the roll-up wrap which as available in grocery stores for use in making your more conventional wraps. On the package there is a photo of its use as pizza crust, which gave us the idea that we could create panizzas of our own. Continue reading

The Lasagna Story

I was thirteen when I started making lasagna, if only as a continued tribute to this story. Miss Samonte was the name of my Foods class teacher in high school, and junior year was all about baking. After classes that taught us how to make pinwheel cookies and pigs in a blanket, the final recipe was lasagna. We made the pasta with flour, eggs, a lot of mess, and a rolling pin. The weekend after that class, I attempted to replicate it at home.

Lasagnaaaahhhhhh

After a day’s work of rolling and boiling lasagna noodles and making the two sauces for the dish, the house smelled of flavors we all had only previously smelled in restaurants. Surely the youngest daughter of this family didn’t just make lasagna from scratch! But I did, and I pulled the rectangular dish out of the oven too eagerly. Its slipped from my mittened hands and broke into pieces on the floor! Tears welled up in my eyes as I stared at the globs of noodles, sauce and cheese, and smelled the aromas wafting in my face. The shards of thick glass protruded from the heap of ruined lasagna. I ran away from the scene and locked myself in the bathroom for hours. Continue reading

Turkey and Lamb Ragu – A Lesson In Flavor Bones

I’ll tell you a secret. Buy bones and keep them in your freezer, then use them to flavor stews and sauces. I did this for my lamb and turkey ragu, which had very little lamb meat in the sauce but all the lamb flavor – from a pound of lamb neck bones.

Beef, pork, and lamb neck bones are an excellent way to flavor soup stock and sauces because bones release gelatine from the collagen and albumen and impart an earthy, musky flavor to your stew. The meat around bones is also the most tender and flavorful, because the bones have the best blood supply in the cut.

I made a simple ragu sauce from lamb neck bones and ground turkey, and came up with a sauce that makes it really, really hard to go to a restaurant for the same thing. Enjoy! Continue reading

Oil-Free Lean Turkey Pasta Sauce

Eliminating the pork/beef and oil from an old recipe was hardly noticeable. This sauce gets its taste from the amount of time the tomatoes are allowed to stew, as well as the addition of olives and capers at the end. This pasta sauce was an eye-opener towards the use of leaner ground meats for sauces. The meat is really just for texture and I could even have done without.

Dinner tonight: Rigatoni and lean turkey meat sauce, mushrooms, capers and olives. Mangia!

Rigatoni and lean turkey meat sauce, mushrooms, capers and olives. Mangia!

 

Oil-Free Turkey Pasta Sauce Continue reading

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