Tuesday, February 15, 2011

This week's menu brought to you by Mario Batali

I skimmed through a couple cookbooks and cooking magazines this morning to come up with dinner ideas for the week and found several recipes in Mario Batali's Molto Italiano that sounded tasty. Tonight, we had bean and pasta soup (pasta e fagioli) with a crusty baguette. (I thought Bean would go for the beans but he seemed to prefer the broken fettuccine noodles.) Later this week, I'm making penne with cauliflower (penne con cavolfiore) and shaved fennel with blood oranges and pecorino (finocchi e tarocchi), and by Friday we'll be feasting on a frittata with spinach and cheese (frittata de spinaci e cacio), assuming I can find the right cheese. I was just thinking how easy it was to find these recipes and that if I looked again, I could probably find another one and wouldn't you know it, there's one for the giant asparagus spears (asparagi alla gremolata) that are now hitting the stores. I guess I'll have to put that on next week's menu. Holy meat fest, Mario, here's one with skirt steak, prosciutto, and pancetta. Wowza.

Okay, I gotta stop looking at this cookbook.

2 comments:

Lori said...

Someone once told me that Mario is from Federal Way Washington and I haven't been able to take him as seriously since. :) But with that said, I have loved every MB recipe I've tried.

Christie said...

Lori - I also heard he's a jerk by someone who met him. (Maybe he was just having a bad day.) But the man does know good food. (A quick look at Wikipedia states Seattle, WA, and a quick Google search has at least one link stating he "grew up" in F.W. And that is sort of funny, since he's busy tromping around Italy as if that's his native land.)