Italian food intimidates me.  I’ve heard the stories about Italian women spending entire days making sauce and unspoken recipes with no actual measurements. This scares me.  I didn’t grow up eating a lot of pasta and as a result never developed much of a taste for it.  But I’m well aware that the rest of the world is rather fond of it.  I’ve heard all the campaigns: It’s so easy! It’s so versatile! It’s so delicious!

These social pressures have, in fact, led me to obsessively keep a box of dry pasta in my pantry out of the fear that I will have an unexpected guest show up who wants pasta for dinner.  Now, this same box has moved with me to at least three different apartments.  As it turns out, people don’t frequently show up at my house demanding pasta.  Nonetheless, I’ve always been terrified that someone will ask for pasta and I won’t know how to cook it! Oh the embarrassment! Can you imagine? You can’t cook pasta!?!?! For shame!

They always say “But it’s so easy!  Just boil water and throw in the pasta!”  I didn’t believe them.  I was certain there was something they weren’t telling me.  Then they would toss around words like al dente and I’d be done for!!  But I had a revelation.  Thanks to Giada.

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!

We are major mushroom fans.  Sauteed mushrooms, stuffed mushrooms, sliced mushrooms all make frequent appearances in the kitchen.  It’s been so cold lately that I’ve been looking for more soup recipes and when I saw Kalyn’s Double Mushroom Soup I knew it would only be a matter weeks before I was making it myself.

The trickiest part was locating the dried mushrooms. Not a single employee at our decent-sized grocery store could say whether they carried dried mushrooms and if they did where they would be located. Luckily, I have an extremely patient boyfriend who searched high and low until finding a box of dried porcini mushrooms.  I had never worked with dried mushrooms before but was pleasantly surprised to find that the rehydration process was painless and they added a nice extra mushroom-y dimension to the soup.

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!