Bolognese Sauce, pasta, baked zucchini, focaccia, Nutella pie!
Mmmmmmmm! I told you Italian Summer was my favorite of all our seasonal recipe times! Saturday kicked off Italian Summer, but I’m just now getting around to posting this. We broke all the rules Saturday. Our dear friend Tammy and her beau Zach were driving back to Arizona from West Virginia, and came to see us as their overnight pit stop! So, of course we fed them! (Social distancing be damned, when you only get to see one of your very best friends once a year if you’re lucky, you do it.)
I tried a different Bolognese recipe than the one I made last summer, this time I went with Lidia. To critique, this one was more time consuming (cooking time was 3 hours!) but had some interesting elements. You make a “pestata” or paste out of bacon and garlic in the food processor, then saute that to start off. A very good way to get all that flavor going at the start! You also add liquid as you go, versus adding it all at the start and letting it cook down like in Giada’s recipe. Overall though, I like Giada’s recipe better, it adds a little more heat with some Calabrian chili paste and the flavor was a little deeper. The pasta was packaged linguini from Hemisphares, they make some really great pasta, I find it at Kroger.
For the zucchini, I cut it into sticks, gave it a little hit of salt, pepper, bread crumbs, and Parmesean, didn’t measure a darn thing. Onto a baking sheet and into the oven for about 20-25 minutes at 400 degrees until they were cooked up. Easy peasy!
Jarrod contributed greatly to this one! First, he made homemade focaccia bread, and holy moly was it delicious! He used Samin Nosrat’s recipe from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (you can look that one up, and we HIGHLY recommend watching her Netflix series of the same title). It was so good, and it makes a ton of bread, so we’ve had some leftover for sandwiches and just to snack on! Making your own bread is SO worth the time and effort!
Dessert was Nutella pie, also a Jarrod production. The recipe is from the First Prize Pies cookbook (recipe below). The pie filling is so easy, Nutella, salt, and mascarpone cheese whipped together and some toasted hazelnuts. The harder part is the crust. We’ve tried using a store-bought cookie crust, and it just isn’t the same. Baking the cookies and then turning them into the crust has so much more flavor! Plus you get cookies!
I’m so so happy we got to spend time with our friends and enjoy a great meal to boot, that’s what makes it great! It’s so much more fun to cook for people you love and get to share that time together! Our world is hugely messy right now, we need all the love we can get and give! Go be nice!
Cheers! ~ Jen
