Super rainy here today, so time to bake. Here’s a great recipe to bring the wonderful smell of spices into the house. These cookies are addictive and really do make the house smell wonderful.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a large collection of modern, vintage, and antique cookbooks. One of the things I enjoy most is comparing how recipes have evolved over the decades and seeing how cooks adapted authentic dishes to the ingredients available at the time.
I got this marinara recipe from a friend’s grandmother. She had emigrated from Sicily in the early 1920’s and settled in the North End of Boston. She wrote the recipe down in a piece of scrap paper with a stubby little pencil. I had that piece of paper for years and then it disappeared. I admit I was pretty upset. I was planning on framing it.
She always had a batch of this sauce going on her stove, and always served it with rigatoni or mezze rigatoni.
This is such a typical Moroccan dish, that the number of recipes are endless. After experimenting a bit, I felt that the balance of this dish was superior to other recipes I had tried.
I liked using the Le Cruset to maintain the heat in the oven and allow the juices to drip back on the tagine while cooking.
On my many trips to Thailand, this was always my absolute favorite dish to have, and there were many days that I ate it every single day. It was such a simple dish, but the flavor was pure Thailand.
I first tasted Vietnamese Ginger Chicken while visiting Da Nang. It was one of those simple, home-style dishes that doesn’t look particularly impressive at first glance, yet after a single bite you understand why it has remained a favorite in Vietnamese kitchens for generations.
Not sure when I thought up Chicken Lasagna, but I think it was after I saw the bags of rotisserie chicken that have been taken off the bone from the roasted chickens at Costco and I thought I could do something with that. The meat has a lot of flavor and its white meat only and very moist.
Greens are a very Southern thing. There are some that love them and some that aren’t so fond. After making and eating a lot of greens, I understand why. When they are bad, they can be really unpleasant.
My friend was visiting from the UK and made this for dinner and it was off the charts. He is originally from Singapore and while this is not an authentic Singaporean dish, it is very good.