What are you cooking the week of February 4, 2018?

[RiversideLen]

Today I made meatballs with beef, pork and veal. Added a bunch of chopped parsley and some fresh grated parm. Some of the meatballs are for tonight and the next 2 days and the rest are in the freezer for some easy meals later. I think I saw on ATK where they said to take the rind from the parm and toss it in the pot when making the tomato sauce, so I did that. It gave the sauce a mild parm flavor.

[Italiancook]

I made Cauliflower-Pasta Soup for the freezer and a couple of upcoming meals.

[Joan Simpson]

Today it my husbands birthday #67 so it's his favorite Taco Salad.

[chocomouse]

I made a huge pot of chili for my husband to take tomorrow to share with the guys running an ice fishing derby on a nearby lake. It will go well with the bacon-cheddar scones and maple cookies I also made for them.

Joan, please tell your husband I send best wishes for a wonderful day and many more to come. I love Taco Salad too!

Italiancook, would you please share your recipe for cauliflower pasta soup? I froze 6 heads of cauliflower last fall, so am always eager to find new ways to use it up. Thanks.

[BakerAunt]

Chocomouse--When I saw your comment about having a lot of cauliflower, I remembered a cauliflower soup, which is one of my favorites. (I can't wait to find the top of the blender, once we get this place remodeled.) I have posted it in the recipe section.

[Italiancook]

chocomouse, the Cauliflower and Pasta Soup recipe I make comes from "Italian Family Recipes from The Romagnoli's Table." I hesitate to post the recipe because of copyright. Sorry. I spent a long time looking online for the recipe for you. I didn't find the exact one, but the link below is almost like it with the following exception:

Romagnoli's used water, not chicken broth, but chicken broth would work fine.

https://www.cookiesfromitaly.com/recipes/pasta_cauliflower_soup.htm

"Italian Family Recipes from The Romagnoli's Table" is my best Italian cookbook. Amazon has some used copies of it for reasonable prices. Other booksellers might also carry it -- I don't know.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Italiancook.

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks for being sensitive to copyright issues. Lists of ingredients are often considered 'facts' and are not copyrightable, though the instructions on how to assemble the dish are clearly copyrightable. I generally stay away from even posting lists of ingredients from another source, though the usual rule of thumb is that if you change two or more ingredients, it's considered a different recipe.

I'm curious about the Romagnoli book, how many of the recipes use garlic? (As I understand it, northern Italian cooking doesn't use much garlic, though southern Italian recipes do.)

[Italiancook]

Mike, most of the recipes I've tried from the book use garlic. Some of them pull the garlic out after a short time, but it's still garlic. Regrettably, the cookbook wouldn't work for your wife.

[skeptic7]

Mike;
Do you avoid all members of the garlic-onion family when cooking? Can you still cook Italian by relying heavily on basil and parsley and various peppers?

[Mike Nolan]

She's concerned that her garlic allergy could spread to other alliums, but at this point she can still handle onions and leeks. She's not fond of chives, though we have them in the garden, mainly for color.

As for spices and herbs, I tend to use basil, parsley, oregano, thyme and marjoram a lot, and I've been experimenting with winter savory. You have to know when to add them, basil gets really bitter if cooked a long time, so it goes in towards the end.

I've started using rosemary more frequently too--now if I could just get a rosemary plant to survive over a winter. My wife's sister has a huge rosemary plant in her living room, she's had it for decades. But that room has good sunlight, I need to find a better place to put a rosemary plant, if we put it in the guest bedroom (southern exposure) it gets forgotten about.

A beef stew just isn't complete without some bay leaf in the pot. I've been using dill weed more frequently lately with fish. (The other day I made salmon poached in butter with dill weed and powdered mustard.)

I tend to stick to ripe (not green) bell peppers and I don't use the hot ones much, as we're not really into spicy hot foods.

[BakerAunt]

I also would like to try a rosemary plant again. I used to keep them going fairly well before I got married, in part because the kitchen got excellent southern light. The house I moved into was just plain dark. Now that we are in Indiana, we have great sunny windows, so it's time to see about a rosemary that can winter inside.

[Mike Nolan]

Our dining room might work, though my wife would have to give up some of the space for her Christmas cactus plants.

[skeptic7]

I killed off three small Rosemary plants this winter by forgetting to water them. Another Rosemary branch which just started growing roots might not make it either. The ones outside were doing well until the very hard freeze, I just hope they will make it.
Over wintering rosemary is tricky lots of light, not too much water and not too little water.

[Mike Nolan]

We've probably drowned more rosemary than we've dried out. We used to try putting them in the kitchen window, but it is north-facing and definitely doesn't get enough light for rosemary, though it seems to be working for orchids.

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