Category: Spadellandia (Italia)

Chicken slices with porcini mushrooms and onions – Meat

Chicken slices with porcini mushrooms and onions

 

Chicken slices with porcini mushrooms and onions – Meat

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Vegetable turrets with caper sauce – Vegetable dishes

In the meanwhile, I have a few extra recipes to blog in today.

(Capers can be bought online of course. Amazon, or Walmart or Target, for instance, but also, supermarketitaly.com, which is one of my favorite Italian groceries online.)

They are also in most Italian grocery stores wherever you find an Italian grocery store and probably also available in every ordinary grocery store that sells ethnic foods.

Vegetable turrets with caper sauce – Vegetable dishes

Roast beef with herb sauce – Meat

One of my earliest kitchen culture memories of the United States and that I was living here and not in Italy although my home seemed like I was living in the place that was the City of Rome for some reason — to me alone I think this may have been my impression — I remember it did take me a while trying to understand the United States wasn’t the country of Italy and everyone thought that was funny to learn. Now I also think it is funny and it’s making me laugh again, but as a child, I couldn’t understand how places were separated for whatever purpose it served. The land was great and large and the Italian nation was obviously a bilingual or historic choice! I believed that Italians were calling the nation the United States for the government (and also, since the Italian government is half run by antiquities and patronages), that the rest of the nation was in its historical hideaway somewhere. You know? I mean that everyone living in North America was Italian and that this is Italy and that Italy — I knew we lived overseas, was just a satellite of itself. I have always wondered if other Italians that are spirited at birth to this foreign place and kept in the best ancient traditions all the same have wondered the same. But I have never found out.

The way I began to have to accept the truth of the place, because I didn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise for many years, was by the difference in the make of some typical dishes. So I believed that a regular staple of everyone’s diet was roast beef. It took me about 10 years to figure out whatever everyone’s mistake to me was about — including my own family for misunderstanding me. There’s roast beef that you get at the deli, there’s pot roast that you make at home from the raw pot roast meat you get ready to go at the butcher shop in the grocery and then there’s just sliced roast beef that you make at home. No one knows this and even at home they don’t seem to understand that roast beef is something different. What IS everyone’s problem?

But roast beef at home is a dinner staple in Italy and I understand it passes by to nothing ever made in North America. So I found this here today as the example of examples and decided to post it. Someone will say it’s some kind of pot roast. Of course there’s pot roast — that you can make a million different ways and different by culture as well. This is roast beef!

Well I am going to go back to being an anonymous Italian now. I wish I had had a better story to tell about roast beef home made. But I don’t.

 

Roast beef with herb sauce – Meat

Baked pasta with mushrooms and fontina – Pasta

A honey mushroom is a can-be edible wild mushroom that grows in Italy. So since it might not be sold outside of the immediate area of cultivation — though I’m totally unsure. (The encyclopedia says that it grows in North America, however, as a dangerous parasitical fungus that can destroys trees and other plant life unattended, uncultivated and undefined, it more than probably isn’t first on the wild-plant agricultural cultivations list of things for sale.) In which case, pardon my earlier fragment and this one. In which case, I would suggest just using gourmet wild mushrooms in a glass for the pasta or wild mushrooms made for pasta; the safe kind of course.

Not that Italians are known for selling deadly fungi, but they are known for cultivating foods from deadly wild specimens and this is really a very big business in that nation for so many centuries, it dates back to the ancient times of Egypt, which is where I think we got it from. This was so much of a childhood rearing thing at one time for me, I remember being surprised that while other children got to forget their nightmares of poison invasive species in the wild after they learned them (I grew up in the US for the most part), I couldn’t rid myself of the concern, ever, because it kept coming up as scholastic topic in the gourmet kitchen where my life centered. (Isn’t it absolutely strange that I love food and despise cooking. Well it is to me.) For that matter, I really wasn’t that good of a student and I don’t have a great set of lines to share besides these few thoughts.

I like to make sure when I am sharing Italian indigenies recipes, you know national recipes that need google translate to read, I have covered the trans-national tackle on the make of the dish. I’m almost sure there is a sure equivalent for these mushroom and a gourmet group somewhere probably imports and sells them, since they’re ordinary to us, but otherwise, more probably it means wild mushrooms.

 

Baked pasta with mushrooms and fontina – Pasta

Sardinian gnocchi with ricotta and walnuts – Pasta

Sardinian Gnocchi, also known as Little Sardinian Gnocchi, are also known as, Malloreddus, by the name of their make as a pasta shape when you are looking to purchase them. There are different ways of making them at home — I mean the look is different. The most popular is as spirals.

I suggest also that if the Malloreddus shaped pasta is difficult to get, the larger Orecchetti (orecchette) or else, the very large (and stuffed) Orecchioni (sometimes called “mumps”), would also make an excellent pasta for this dish.

In any case, whatever, I have included some recipe above this for the malloreddus and the orecchhioni and the orecchetti.

(I was home sick for Sardinia. Not really, I’m actually from all over Italy, but also, I like not to omit our small islands and that they are culturally and historically important.)

 

Sardinian gnocchi with ricotta and walnuts – Pasta