Recipes....

Well, my cooking experience has come from recipes. The only thing I learned to make from my parents was tomato sauce and breakfast. I do make a mean bacon and eggs. My fried eggs have hot bacon fat spooned over them before I flip them. It's a delicious ticket to the cath lab, I know, but I don't cook breakfast every day!

My father taught me how to make sauce, and I added a few things from another recipe I found in the Sopranos Family Cookbook. I enjoy making tomato sauce (we never called it "gravy" by the way) and I have enjoyed making pasta dishes. I started branching out after I saw Emeril cook Coq au Vin and Chicken Cacciatore on the Food Network.

I took my first cooking class in New Orleans at the New Orleans School of Cooking. This was a hands on course where we made authentic Cajun dishes. During our first class we made chicken and andouille gumbo, jambalaya, shrimp remoullade and bread pudding with a bourbon sauce. I went back twice more and learned how to make seafood gumbo, barbecue shrimp, grillades and grits and bananas foster. I have all of these recipes and continue to cook cajun food, including a real crawfish boil (in New England).

My next advance in cooking took place after discovering Julia Childs and Michael Schlow. Julia Childs is the renowned French Chef and was the first successful T.V. chef. Her dishes are classic French cuisine made approachable and intuitive. I highly recommend her book "The Way to Cook".

Michael Schlow is the executive chef of Boston's premier restaurant the Radius. It was at the Radius that I truly discovered food and learned about food and wine pairings. He also has a cookbook which explains how to make some great dishes in your own kitchen. It is an incredible accomplishment to reproduce some of the amazing dishes that we enjoy at the Radius.

Jeanine has taught me a lot about cooking. She is an intuitive cook. She doesn't use recipes. I still look at recipes, but I have started to take what I know from recipes and experiment without a net. It's great fun to create something that is a variation of a recipe or an improvement on one, or, in some cases, a major catastrophe.

We will present recipes in this blog, but hopefully some perspective. We are not chefs, but we love cooking at home. We use an old electric range and some budget pots and pans. We shop at Price Choppers, Stew Leonard's and (rarely) at Whole Foods. Hopefully you will see something you like and try it out. Let us know what happens!

-jd
 

Easy Leeky dinner!

Tonight Joe walked in the house before I had dinner done.  I was not expecting him so early.  This was a very easy and delicious pasta dish that I threw together in 20 minutes. This is my own recipe and I tweak it often, but this is it in it's most basic form.  It's summery and bright and perfect for a spring meal! I encourage you to try it.





- 3 Leeks
- 1 lemon plus zest
- 2 cloves garlic
- A few tablespoons of olive oil
- chopped walnuts
- fresh curly parsley
- fresh basil leaves
- fettucini
- shaved fresh parmesan cheese
- salt and pepper
crushed red pepper optional

Boil your salted water and get the fettucini going while you prepare the rest!
Cut leek roots at white bottoms and cut dark green parts, leaving only a small amount of light green leek. Wash thoroughly.  Slice finely.  Heat a skillet with olive oil, add the leeks and cook until transluscent and soft.  Add the garlic and cook for a couple of minutes taking care not to let it brown. Add the cooked fettucini and toss.  Add fresh parsley and basil, juice of 1 lemon, zest of one lemon, and walnuts.  Continue to toss and add salt and pepper to your liking. Top with fresh parmesan.

Enjoy this delicious pasta dish!

Love and food go together.......

Joe and I became engaged over a wonderful 7 course Chef tasting/wine pairing dinner at the "Radius" in Boston on New Year's Eve 2012. This was the perfect way for us to share the moment for a few reasons: Radius is just an incredible restaurant that we go to repeatedly for their unparalleled tasting menu ( changes frequently). Their Sommelier also pairs wonderful wines with each course and actually gives you a brief education about why it was chosen. The atmosphere is romantic, chique, contemporary.  You can feel apart from the rest of the customers in most parts of the restaurant.  The room is circular, hence the name. It allows for enough intimacy for a wedding proposal! ( with the exception of our waiter who arrived the second I opened the ring box!). I really can't think of a better way for us to have started our journey through life together.

Cooking has been a favorite pastime for us.  We enjoy being in the kitchen together. We can work on one meal and split the job.  Often I will be Joe's sous chef.  Sometimes I need him to be sous chef because he is wonderful with a knife and his cuts are even and perfect, mine are not! Consistency in the size and smoothness of food allows for even cooking, which is essential to making the finished product yummy vs. not so yummy with some cooked and uncooked parts. In this photo, Joe made a deconstructed tuna Nicoise dish. I will follow up with the details after I tell you a little bit about us.

I started cooking as a very young child, around the age of 4. My mother is  the queen of sicilian cuisine! I grew up in an old-world cooking kitchen, with a grandmother who spent the summers canning olives in the backyard and laying salted tomatoes in the sun to dry on door screens.  I knew how to cook intuitively.  I watched my mother cook everyday but seemed to understand what she was going to do next without ever formally learning.  It all made sense to me...you start with oil, garlic and onions for most things and you never let your focus down or you will burn it all. Then you add whatever else might be yummy. Most times, it was eggplant, broccoli, peppers, zucchini, fennel, olives, wine, vinegar, etc... by tasting the food, I knew what tasted good with what.

In our kitchen, we try to serve up healthy meals. Joe has two daughters ages 8 and 11.  Luckily, they get excited over our food and think it's pretty to look at too! I can't say they would try anything we give them, but the nicer it looks, the more likely they are to consider it.  We are teaching them to cook and are hoping that they will grow to appreciate the joy the cooking healthy, beautiful food.

 Over the years  I have experimented more and more with non-conventional pairings of ingredients. I have never been afraid to try weird food. I still mostly cook in an Italian/Sicilian style, but have experimented with other European cuisines and tastes from the Asian continent. I also have a tremendous Venezuelan influence from my mother who moved there from Italy when she was a young girl. The spices, the wonderful slow cooked meats, corn flour breads and beans are also integrated into my personal style of cooking. With a mix of cultural cooking styles, it is important to know how they can be mixed together to create delicious meals.  I am more conscious now of how things are paired on a plate. I take texture, color, taste, and temperature into consideration.

A good example of this is Joe's dish above. This is a fennel crusted tuna which is lightly seared. Cool in the middle, warm on the outside. It is plated on a bed of baby arugula and the tuna and greens are drizzled with a lemon/pepper vinaigrette.  Haricot Verts ( french green beans) which have been blanched, are topped with a poached egg. A refreshing cucumber sorbet accompanies the dish.  Here you have a mix of temperatures, textures ( runny egg yolk on crisp beans), flavors of the cucumber and fennel together and then the cold cucumber sorbet to refresh the palette and create contrast.