Archive | eat this

Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti

September 28, 2012 at 11:30 am

Last chance to enter my giveaway for a pair of handknit fingerless gloves!

Enter here by leaving a comment. I’ll announce the winner later today!

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Here’s a little taste of Italy on your Friday morning! Biscotti–which means “twice baked” in Italian–originated in the Italian town of Prato near Florence. (I know this because I looked it up on Wikipedia.) We don’t see much biscotti in the bakeries way down south in Sicily, but that’s okay because you can always come to the States, wake up in my mother’s house, and have some with your morning coffee there instead.

Last week my mom, Aunt Leslie, and Lena made biscotti and triple-layer carrot cakes to thank the staff at the church where Julia’s memorial service was held this summer and also to thank the Vienna Fire and Rescue Squad (with whom Julia ran with as an EMT) for attending the burial and memorial service. I thought that was such a sweet way to say thank you… literally!

Here are a few photos of the process from the kitchen and then the recipe itself:

Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti

(Recipe source The Gourmet Cookbook, originally printed in Gourmet December 1994)

Printable Recipe: Double Chocolate Biscotti

Yield: About 30 biscotti

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup walnuts, chopped (or substitute white chocolate chips!)
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 tablespoon powdered sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a large baking sheet.
In a bowl whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment or in a large bowl using an electric mixer, beat together butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add eggs one at a time and beat until well combined.
Stir in flour mixture until a stiff dough.
Stir in walnuts and chocolate chips.
With floured hands form dough into two slightly flattened logs on the prepared baking sheet. Each log should be about 12 inches long and 2 inches wide. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Bake 35 minutes or until slightly firm to the touch. Cool on baking sheet 5 minutes, leaving oven on.
On a cutting board, cut logs diagonally into 3/4-inch slices to form biscotti. Arrange cut sides down on baking sheet and bake until crisp, about 10 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack.
Biscotti keep in airtight containers 1 week and frozen, 1 month.

7 :: in eat this, Italy

making cupcakes for our little boy

September 10, 2012 at 8:58 pm

I did absolutely nothing to commemorate the revealing of Lena’s gender, so I’m not sure why I decided to make it a big deal this time. Maybe it was because we really were hoping it was a boy and maybe it was because Elliott said if we end up with three girls then we’re adopting a boy. I know, I know, we only have one girl so far, but I was already feelin’ the pressure.

My friend Mary here in Sicily made cupcakes to announce the gender of her baby girl. I looked for other fun ideas (piñatas filled with blue confetti, opening a box full of blue helium balloons) and finally decided, “Who am I kidding? I love cake and frosting. Let’s make cupcakes.” Also, our beloved Arthur family was going to come over for playtime, dinner, and dessert that night, and I knew the kids would enjoy eating through sugar to find out if they will have a new boy or girl for a companion sometime next year.

Oh, and one more thing. Making cupcakes with a 1-year-old is no joke, folks. There were tantrums, time outs, and more sugar consumed by both of us than I care to mention. Don’t try this at home.

0 :: in Baby Numero Due, eat this

Chewy Lemon Cookies

August 30, 2012 at 4:00 pm

I’ve been wanting to share this delicious recipe for awhile now. As lemons appear to be in season all year round in Sicily (unlike blood oranges, much to my chagrin!), these cookies make both a light summer treat or a refreshing sweet on a cold January day. They were a big hit in our house. Enjoy!

Chewy Lemon Cookies

found via Hooray Blog

Makes 24-36 cookies.

Ingredients

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
zest of one large lemon
4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar for rolling cookies

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
In a larger bowl, beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, vanilla, lemon zest and juice.
Add in dry ingredients, beating until just combined. Roll rounded spoonfuls of dough into balls and then roll in sugar. Place on lined cookie sheets, about 1 or 2 inches apart.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. (Mine needed just 8 minutes; they were not yet golden but I wanted them still pale and tender.) Remove from oven and let stand on cookie sheet for 2 minutes before removing to cook on wire racks.

7 :: in eat this

making jam in my bread maker

August 17, 2012 at 6:26 pm

I have many fond memories of the delicious homemade bread my mom made in our bread maker during my childhood. For our first anniversary, our four parents got together and bought us a very wonderful gift: a Cuisinart bread maker. Of course during the time of our first anniversary, Elliott and I were living in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill. So, sadly, our bread maker sat in the downstairs storage room the entire time we lived there.

Soon after our boxes were unpacked here in Sicily, I pulled my beautiful bread maker into the daylight. Shortly thereafter I stopped buying sandwich bread and have been making almost all our bread since early this spring.* I even convinced a friend of mine to buy the same bread maker.

(*I do recommend keeping an emergency loaf of sandwich bread in the freezer for that time that you run out of flour or milk or–gasp–just forget… and your husband has no sandwich the next morning for his lunch!)

Anyway, to get to the point, my nifty bread maker also has a jam setting. I started using it with strawberries this spring and have been jamming every fruit in season ever since (so far, cherries, peaches, and apricots). The entire process takes about 20 minutes to set up, then the bread maker works for 1.5 hours, and then you slide your jam into a jar and… you’re done! No sweating over the stove, no fiddling to get your canning jars to work, no huge messes or sticky pots. Here is what I do:

First of all, assemble your ingredients. It’s a short list: a few apricots, a box of pectin, one lemon, and some sugar. Cut up 2 cups of apricots into chunks and slide them into the bread maker pan.

Squeeze a tablespoon of lemon over the apricots.

Dust half of a box of pectin over the fruit. Let it sit for 10 minutes.

In the meantime, enjoy your beautiful daughter. She has assumed her usual position for whenever I am cooking or baking anything: right in the middle of my kitchen counter.

The recipe calls for 1.25 cups of sugar “or to taste.” I prefer my jam on the tart side, so I put in only 3/4 of a cup of sugar.

Then snap the pan into the bread maker and program it for the jam cycle. The bread maker uses the paddle in the middle of the pan to mix the jam and uses extra high heat to bring the fruit up to the proper temperature. After 1.5 hours, you have fresh jam! I put mine in recycled jars since I will just keep it in the fridge or freezer until we eat it; I would need brand new canning jars if I wanted to keep it for any length of time at room temperature. It will keep in the fridge for up to 6 weeks or in the freezer for… well, I assume a really long time.

Come on over and I’ll put some homemade jam on some homemade toasted bread for your breakfast!

2 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, eat this

Agriturismo San Fantino

August 14, 2012 at 5:16 pm

the Italian form of “Magdalena”

We had run out of cereal and milk, so for our last morning in Amalfi we decided to have an Italian breakfast. This might have also been because I had been craving a cappuccino all week. You just can’t walk by all these darling cafes and not want to sit down for awhile! And a Nutella-filled croissant doesn’t hurt either…

As I mentioned before, the town of Amalfi is known for its old paper mills, and many local artisans still make beautiful paper by hand. We visited several of these shops, and at one of them I purchased some thick, creamy paper with the letter “B” embossed in the top corner. I’ll need an especially good pen for that paper.

Later we hiked above the town into the hills to see some of the old paper mills. If we did see them, they were really old. Like… just a few stone walls in the valley. But the hike itself was totally worth it, particularly because it passed through so many magnificent lemon groves.

Finally it was time to move on and leave the Amalfi Coast behind. We drove down the winding highway along the coastline, soaking up last glimpses and final memories. After several hours on the highway (including, of course, a stop along the way at another beach) we reached Agriturismo San Fantino, a rustic Italian villa with an attached ranch. Since the 1980s, a huge tourism movement in Italy has been to convert old farms into hotels where families can come stay, meet the animals, and then enjoy a [usually organic] meal made almost entirely from food grown or raised on the property. I’ve mentioned visiting another agriturismo here, and we have also visited a couple more in Sicily that I haven’t photographed for this the blog. Visiting an agriturismo is definitely one of our favorite ways to enjoy the Italian countryside: good food and farm animals all in one place.

Before dinner, we explored the ranch, ate wild blackberries, and showed Lena animals in real life (instead of in The Big Red Barn).

Around 8pm we put Lena to bed and then enjoyed a quiet dinner on the patio. The chef–a cheerful man named Pierluigi–served a dozen appetizers, all of which he had made from produce and meat from the ranch (sheep’s cheese, pork sausage, proscuitto, pickled artichokes, fresh green salad, eggplant bruschetta, etc.). Elliott and Jess sipped wine from a nearby vineyard. Later Pierluigi served us steaks from a cow that had been… umm… well, alive just a few days earlier. Fresh and tasty. Sorry if you’re vegetarian, but it was delicious! Pierluigi popped the top off a Heineken and sat down with us to talk as the meal wound down.

And then home again, home again (jiggity jog) the next morning. We were so ready to settle into regular life again, as always. I think we all agree, though, that this whole trip has been one of our favorites in Italy thus far, haphazard and last-minute though it was!

2 :: in agriturismo, Amalfi Coast, eat this, Italy, travel

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