“Pasta primavera” is Italian for “springtime pasta”. It is a festive and colorful dish made with pasta and lightly sautéed spring time vegetables. Contrary to popular belief, pasta primavera is not Italian in origin. While there is some controversy regarding the originator of the recipe, it is generally agreed that the recipe was first developed [...]
My recipe for lasagna is vegetarian. I use spinach and mushrooms and part skim ricotta and mozzarella to make a lighter, healthier dish. With a rather lengthy list of ingredients and several components to the instructions, this is not a quick and easy recipe. Yet, no intricate techniques are required, and there is nothing inherently [...]
Since 2016 is My Year of Italy, and September is back to school month, and kids LOVE pizza, we’re going to have some fun with pizza--rolling, spreading, sprinkling, decorating and getting some veggies into the mix. I’ve provided a kid-friendly basic pizza recipe with a tomato sauce that has some chopped carrots and celery in [...]
True story: I learned how to make this scrumptious pasta dish from a Duchess! Early one morning, last October, a group of about ten of us met Duchess Nicoletta Polo Lanzo Tomasi at the Vucciria Market in Palermo, Sicily to begin a day of shopping, cooking, dining and touring a 17th century palazzo. This extraordinary [...]
Last October, during our travels in Tuscany, Italy, my husband and I boarded a train in Florence and headed 29 miles southeast to the charming medieval town, Figline Valdarno, to take a private cooking class with one of the great chefs of Tuscany--Claudio Piantini. It was just the two of us with Chef Claudio in [...]
Fall back--Daylight Savings Time! Ugh! My least favorite time of year. One thing that helps me beat the late autumn doldrums is a bowl of steaming, hearty soup. Check out my article on Broccoli Cheddar Soup in a Bread Bowl, which appeared in the October 2015 edition of the Essex Fells Magazine.
As the dog days of August morph into brisk September mornings, I am on the lookout for kid-friendly meals for our back to school issue. Also, cognizant that mom or dad does not want to be making multiple meals to cater to varied tastes and finicky eaters, I seek recipes to please the entire family. [...]
Ratatouille is a classic French vegetable stew with origins in the city of Nice located in the Provencal region of southern France. It almost always contains a savory mélange of garlic, onions, eggplant, peppers and zucchini, which are first sautéed in olive oil and then simmered together with tomatoes and an aromatic blend of Provencal [...]
Summertime and the livin’ is easy…and the corn is sweet and bountiful. As residents of New Jersey, we are blessed with some of the best corn in the country. New Jersey’s sweet corn is one of the reasons for its well-deserved “Garden State” moniker. Sweet corn is in season from May to September. While the [...]
Here is a tasty recipe for a quiche-like vegetable pie that lends credence to the saying “easy as pie.” Once you’ve prepped all the ingredients, you simply place them in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade and process until smooth. The mixture is then poured into a prepared pie plate [...]