This wonderful pasta dish is a great weeknight find.  A hack makes it even better.                       I like to make pasta at least once a week. It is our go-to comfort food. This week, I…

The Bolognese Revelation from Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy – An Authentic Twist You Need to Know When it comes to Bolognese, we’ve all been in the habit of letting it simmer for hours, haven’t we? That slow-cooked, rich, meaty flavor developing bit by bit,…

Stanley Tucci’s 6-part series for CNN is an Italophile’s dream. For one hour a week, its viewers are immersed in the food of a single region of Italy.  For lovers of the Italian language, there’s a surprising amount of it spoken here. Subtitles are provided…

Turn Store-Bought Tortellini into a rich Creamy Soup in no time. As easy as it is, Creamy Tortellini Soup delivers a wonderfully creamy-rich soup packed with cheese tortellini and fresh spinach and carrots. I’d be tempted to call it a stew.  The secret to its…

This bowl of cold-weather comfort revealed quite a secret. This hearty Tuscan bean soup is a perfect combination of smooth, silky soup topped with crispy, crunchy croutons.  It also fulfills our promise to put more plant-based meals together this year. And we’re not alone.  Americans…

MonteRosola is an Award-Winning Winery in the middle of the Tuscan wine-growing regions of Chianti and Bolgheri. 50 km from the coastal wine region of Bolgheri and 20 km from Chianti in the Tuscan hills, sits MonteRosola.  This relatively new vineyard has established its organic…

We could ‘fancy-up’ the name of this dish by calling it Pasta al Forno. It still wouldn’t alter the fact that this might well be called Cheeseburger Pasta. Ooey gooey, cheesy, meaty.  This is Andrew and my idea of comfort food times three. Baked Ziti…

Rome’s favorite and most famous pasta dish gets a major makeover. When I lived in Rome, I can’t count how often I would order this dish. At least once a week, I would sit down to a bowl of this pasta.  Just four ingredients made…

Ina Garten’s Winter Minestrone is remarkably simple to make.  Trust Ina Garten to give us a recipe so dead easy, that you could decide to make it an hour before dinner.  It’s from Ina’s 2012 cookbook “Foolproof” (Clarkson-Potter). I looked at the ingredient list and…

This Lamb Ragu is a colorful and flavorful introduction to Fall. Chef Micheal Mina’s recipe for Lamb Ragu is a keeper. It starts with a bouquet garni of fennel and cumin seeds, Aleppo pepper, and whole black peppercorns.  This gives the dish a hint of…

Call it a Flatbread but this is a Fig, Gorgonzola, and Arugula Pizza. And who doesn’t love pizza? Covered with a thin layer of fig jam, it was then sprinkled abundantly with Gorgonzola, the crumbly Italian Blue Cheese. Gorgonzola packs quite a punch of flavor,…

I am a sucker for “What to Cook This Week” from the New York Times. Here’s one reason why. Very often this email from the NYTimes is the work of Sam Sifton. Sifton is billed as the founding editor of NYT Cooking. And Sam is…

“Dinner in French”, Melissa Clark’s latest Cookbook is filled with great, easy recipes. Confession time. For some reason, I associate French food with cooler temperatures. Give me Oxtail Bourguignon in October, my first bowl of Onion Soup at first frost.  But I’ve been raring to…

This meal is a sum of its parts: A sublime Fried Chicken, my take on Sicily’s Caponata and great Pesto topping a crispy toasted Baguette. When I was looking around for something special to serve as a supper for guests, I came across this extraordinary…