Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe On my most recent trip to Italy I stayed with the Stefanis (the family in my book) and learned a new and very simple recipe ~ Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe. This recipe is one of the hundreds of classic Italian dishes were you prepare the sauce for the pasta in the …
Cookies for Santa? Maybe he’ll share~
Biscotti Natale It’s Christmas time and that means COOKIES! Have to have something to put out for Santa, right? Here is Nonna’s recipe for Biscotti Natale. I have taken the liberty of slightly altering the shape of her original by preparing this version in as round cookie. Watch the above video to see how these …
Let’s get cookin’!
Sugo…a.k.a. Pasta Sauce~ Ciao Tutti! I thought I’d post a little online cooking tutorial for you to enjoy. It is broken into two parts—the original recording was too big to load it all as one. The recipe is from my soon-to-be released book Beyond the Pasta: Recipes, Language & Life with an Italian Family, …
New old friends~
See and download the full gallery on posterous Everyone into the pool~ Going to a friend’s house for dinner is always a wonderful way to spend an evening. When that friend is someone you haven’t seen in 20 years, it can turn out to be an incredible evening. And when that long lost friend, his …
Lesson Number 2~
Nonna cooks Pollo con Limone~ Recently, I received an e-mail from Alessandra filling me in on all the happenings back in Viterbo. I mailed the Feb House Beautiful with the article on our house (http://www.mark-leslie.net/2010-starts-with-a-bang) to them back in early January and, when I hadn’t heard from them, I sent an e-mail making sure that …
Lesson Number 1:
Le presento Nonna~ The New Year has started and we are all in a deep freeze. It is time to warm up with a little video of Nonna. To bring everyone up to speed: Nonna is the grandmother of the family that I lived with in Viterbo, Italy, in 2005 through a university program in …
‘Tis the Season…
See and download the full gallery on posterous The last tree~ Since my return from our Italian vacation at the beginning of November, I have been working for friends at their quite popular flower shop in Birmingham, Alabama (http://www.flowerbudsinc.com/). We have been decorating houses for Christmas—the first house was on November 15 and today was …
Siamo a Viterbo–We are in Viterbo
Ciao ciao tutti! We arrived last night in Vitero and caught Nonna leaving the house to go to Boy Scouts (which in Italian is “masi”–I need to double check that spelling when I have more time). It is interesting to be staying in the house and writing on the same computer that I used 4 …
Pasta del giorno…
It is more than just about the food~ For me, cooking has always been about more than just the finished product on a plate. It is about the journey you take while getting to that plate. As a child, my mom got up every morning and cooked my breakfast. Sometimes, it was as simple as …