For a simple spring place setting at your next dinner, look to the farmers’ market and a bunch of hot pink radishes! Tie two radishes — leaves intact! — with twine and place on top of a cloth napkin. I particularly like them paired with a pea green napkin; so lovely and fresh!
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You know what automatically makes a sit-down dinner a little more fancy and fun? A printed menu of all the food to come! But you don’t have to be a graphic design whiz to have a personalized menu at your next dinner party — we found five pretty, customizable templates you can download for free.
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Polpo is the Italian word for octopus, and it’s also the name of a restaurant located in London’s Soho district that serves rustic, simple Venetian bar food. I have never been (to POLPO or to Venice), but after looking through this cookbook from POLPO’s owner Russell Norman, I want to hop a plane right now and visit both. Given that we’re still under the shadow of tax season here in my household, I will have to content myself with cooking from this gorgeous book, which believe me, will be no hardship.
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by Real_Food_Freak on Tuesday, April 23, 2013
4 / 5 Stars | 8 Reviews
by LaDonna
“This hearty soup recipe using a slow cooker combines mixed dried beans with tomato sauce, chopped carrots, celery and low fat smoked sausage seasoned with onion powder and minced garlic.”
It probably goes without saying — but I will say it anyway; this is an internet weblog, after all — that a whole lot of the food I cook at home doesn’t make it onto this site. I like to use this space to talk about aspirational cooking — things that have fascinated me because they were different or better or even easier than I’d expected to make. At the very least, I hope they’ll have a good story to tell or get someone else as excited to cook as I was. The work-a-day cooking (pizza, lazy meatballs, oatmeal) that fills out our weeks is hardly noteworthy stuff.
I also prefer to avoid gushing about ingredients most people don’t have access to. No, I don’t mean truffles or anything so fancy — I’m not secretly flavoring my pasta water with fistfuls of the Himalayan pink salt I eschew elsewhere — I just mean something that especially short-seasoned and regional and it feels little will be gained by crowing about a dish that 95% of people can’t make.
… Read the rest of ramp pizza on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to ramp pizza | 97 comments to date | see more: Photo, Pizza, Ramps, Spring, Vegetarian
Fans of food and science, rejoice! Mary Roach’s new book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal explores the fascinating, at times bizarre, science behind the process of eating. Embracing the topic with infectious curiosity and her signature sense of humor, Roach enters the world of pet food tasters, plunges her arm into the rumen of a living cow, visits a prison to talk to a man with a talent for smuggling contraband in his — well, let’s just call it the end of his alimentary canal — and looks into how Elvis really died.
After spending a week regaling my friends and loved ones with my favorite surprising facts from the book, I sat down with the author to ask her a little more about her adventures.
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To capture the entire sense of a place between the covers of one cookbook is no small task. Yet, here is a photo of bobbing fishing boats that feels so close that I can practically smell the salt water. And a woman making fresh couscous that I want to scoop with my hands, and a basket of silvery fresh-caught anchovies for dinner, and spirals of yellow pasta, and…and…and. Sicily is one of those cookbooks that transports and inspires. If Sicily holds a special place in your traveler’s heart, this is a book you will cherish. If visiting Sicily is dream of yours, this book might just transform your “some day” into “right now.”
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4.63 / 5 Stars | 4 Reviews
by rubybegonia
“Passed down from my grandparents, this recipe is a great way to use the extra tomato and peppers from the garden! Quick, easy and also very healthy! A nice warm lunch for the veggie lover! Makes its own sauce and can be canned for the winter months. Serve over sliced fresh buttered bread and a few shakes of salt and pepper.”
Every once in a while, you’ve gotta pull out all the stops. You’ve got to roll your own pasta and spend an afternoon carefully folding it around spoonfuls of creamy cheese while gazing out the window and listening to This American Life. Then you have to serve this handmade tortellini as its very own course at an extra-special dinner party. And serve it simply — not buried in a rich ragu, but with a few ladles of good Parmesan-infused broth so everyone can taste how amazing these little pasta dumplings truly are. Trust me on this one. It’s worth it.
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