Tag: italian cuisine

When it comes to cooking, I almost always overestimate how much I need to cook. I think it comes from watching my mom cook – she is the youngest of six kids so there were always lots of people to feed in her household. We are both the same in that we would rather have too much left over than not enough, and that is especially true of family gatherings.

A coworker noted this week that all my food columns lately have been healthy recipes. He’s right that for the last month I have been trying to incorporate healthy meals for dinner and lunch most days of the week.

Pasta e fagioli is a great Italian dish that is kind of a mix between a soup, a stew and a hearty pasta dish. As with a lot of Italian dishes, it can be made with a variety of different additions, from various herbs to vegetables to meats. The main two ingredients remain the same – pasta and beans. I enjoy making the dish with ditalini, the type of macaroni that my family uses when we make macaroni salad. It’s a small pasta that leaves room for all the other ingredients in the pot. I also like cannellini beans, which are like a white kidney bean; but any beans can be substituted in. The recipe below calls for pancetta, but bacon can be used instead. Or it could be left out all together to lower the fat content of the dish. The fresh herbs and vegetables are really what makes the dish taste great. They add a lot of flavor to the sauce/broth that elevate the recipe beyond a typical pasta dish.

One of my favorite kind of cuisines and a type that I find especially easy to make at home is Italian food. I like the versatility of pasta, which can go with a variety of different meats, sauces and vegetables. For the most part, pasta is a vessel to soak up the flavors that are mix into it.

For those who are not into football - or whose favorite team just missed the big game by three points as happened for so many 49er fans recently - the only reason to watch the Super Bowl might be for the snacks.

After a week of eating holiday leftovers and eating out quite a few times over the busy holiday season, New Year's Day seemed like the perfect opportunity to start out a resolution of getting back to cooking some tasty meals at home. Since I had a lot of free time on a lazy Sunday after staying up until midnight to ring in the New Year, I opted to try out a new risotto recipe. Though the recipe says it takes only 30 minutes to prepare, it's been my experience that it takes a little bit longer for me to get Arborio rice to just the right consistency. So I knew to be prepared to cook it a little bit longer. The recipe took me a little closer to 45 minutes, but it was worth the wait.