Eating Italian!

Absolute success this week! Both the local and Liz-friendly recipes were yummy. Make sure you’re really hungry if you make the local recipe!

Local Fare

I thought it would be super easy to choose a recipe for Italy…and then we went to the library and I walked past Food of the Italian South by Katie Parla. The cover was just gorgeous—as were the pictures inside—so I had to take the book home and scrap my original plan to make risotto. It was really hard to choose a recipe from this book because they all looked amazing, and there were plenty I could eat. (And some I couldn’t, though the caratti and focaccia looked amazing.)

I ended up choosing Susciello—a recipe of cured meats, tomato, and eggs. Don and I are big fans of this type of dish and I was eager to try it out. This was an easy recipe, just crisping up some pancetta, soppressata, and (chicken) Italian sausage and then adding tomato sauce and eggs. Even Don could’ve made it!

DW: Consider me skeptical on that last note.

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The results did not disappoint. It was absolutely delicious, a hearty meal that could keep you going for a long time. We actually had it for lunch and I skipped dinner.

DW: I really enjoy Italian food, and this was right up my alley. Got some sauce, three kinds of meats, got some eggs; it’s pretty much perfect. Outstanding!

Liz-friendly Fare

Next up it was time to experiment with gluten-free flours! (Which is obviously the reason I needed to make two batches of cookies and then eat half a dozen of them…) I’m actually really interested in finding the right gluten-free flours for each type of baking, as a flour that makes a fluffy muffin isn’t always good for a cookie. And a good cookie flour might make a coffee cake that is dense and rubbery (just wait for that one!).

DW: I’ll go on the record here as being strongly in favor of cookies as a general concept. If there’s a chance of finding a recipe that allows us all to partake, it’s a worthy venture!

I chose Snickerdoodles by Chocolate Covered Katie, as I absolutely love her blog. I make her chocolate blender muffins, granola bars, oatmeal cups, and no-bake cookies every week. I hadn’t made Snickerdoodles in years, and the recipe was small enough it was easy to whip up twice.

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Chocolate Covered Katie

Snickerdoodles

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The kiddo helped me again and we made one batch with Bob’s Red Mill 1-1 Gluten Free Baking Flour and one batch with King Arthur’s Gluten Free Baking Flour. (Not pictured above is us making them in our pjs at 9 AM, which is the best way to spend a Sunday morning!) We made sure to treat each batch exactly the same—the dough was refrigerated for 30 minutes to firm it up and then each batch cooked for 13 minutes, so they weren’t too doughy in the center.

The result: it was pretty much a tie! In our family, Don and I liked the King Arthur cookies best, while the kiddo likes the Bob’s Red Mill cookies. Obviously I needed more opinions, so I took them to work and forced my co-workers to try them. Again, the results were split! I really did not expect that.

DW: I think “forced” is relative. I’m pretty sure they were ready to volunteer! I know I was.

The Bob’s Red Mill cookies were a very crumbly cookie, which is what Don and I did not like, but others did. The King Arthur cookies had a really interesting flavor profile at the end, which tasted more like real flour (or what I recall real flour to taste like, again it’s been a couple years). That’s what I liked. I guess the result is: you can’t go wrong with either flour!