Entrees

I love pasta in all its shapes and sizes.

I'm half Italian….it's genetic.

That said, I like my pasta dishes bold, not boring.  Pasta served with just a thin red sauce, or a bland cream sauce leave me utterly depressed and feeling like dinner is some sort of carbo-loading torture. Let's face it, pasta on its own is nothing to turn cartwheels over, and the success of a dish depends almost entirely on what you toss the pasta with before serving.  Even the finest homemade pasta cannot survive a marriage with a lousy sauce.  Really, don't even bother try it, it will make you cry.

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Larb is a type of Lao minced meat salad and is widely considered to be the national dish of Laos.  It is normally made with beef, pork, chicken or fish, and we've been making the beef and pork versions of the dish around here for a while to rave reviews.  In order to satisfy the needs of our non-meat eating pescatarian, I thought we'd try a shrimp based version on for size and am so glad we did.

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Veal Saltimbocca is a classic of Italian cuisine made with thin escalopes of veal, prosciutto de parma and fresh sage leaves.  It is brilliant with braised greens and polenta, but is a dish I've hardly ever made.

Why?

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As I've stressed here more than once, and as I always tell my Cooking Matters students, when you're making a roast of any kind you should double your recipe (which hardly takes any more effort) to ensure that you have some easy leftovers to use later in the week.  So it was some time ago when I roasted two chickens for Sunday dinner figuring that at the very least I'd have some tasty morsels leftover to use for lunch over a couple of days.  As it turned out, the girls returned home late from travel and missed Sunday dinner, leaving me with lots of chicken to re-purpose later in the week.

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A few weeks back I set out to organize our freezer (AGAIN) in order to take stock of things and to set a meal plan in motion that would allow me to free up some space for the inevitable soups, braises and stews that we turn to for cold weather fare.  Much of what I found in the cold depths of the ice box were dribs and drabs of various meats that required little more than defrosting and a few minutes spent on a hot grill to move out of inventory.  A few other things, such as the wonton wrappers that we used in this dish required a little more thought and creativity in order to put them to good use.

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This is another simple yet delectable dish that I came across while trying to dig up some new recipes with Peyton (our pescatarian) in mind.  This is a dish that can be thrown together quickly from ingredients that you can easily keep on-hand.  As long as you have some canned cannellini beans and crushed tomatoes in your pantry and some frozen shrimp in your freezer, you're in business.

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The idea for these sticks came to me while shopping at BJ's Wholesale today.  I was perusing the frozen food section for some fish filets that were individually frozen so that I could have an easy and healthy non-meat alternative always on hand for Peyton.  As you may recall, she is our resident pescatarian and on nights when the rest of us are eating meat, I need to be able to offer her some other protein with her meal.  Soy based "fake meat" proteins will only get you so far, and shrimp apparently is getting a bit overdone around here as well, so individually frozen fish filets were on my shopping list today.

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This chicken dish  is the real reason I started making preserved lemons at home.  Ana Sortun, one of my favorite local chefs (she's the owner and chef at Oleana in Cambridge, MA), and also a fellow LCB alum, has had this wildly popular dish on her menu from the very start.  Like Gordon Hammersly's Herb-Roasted Chicken, and Joel Robuchon's Pomme-Puree, it has become a dish so popular with her guests that she dare not pull it from her menu.

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A couple of weeks ago, Zach and Clay, the dynamic duo behind the awesome blog "The Bitten Word" recruited a bunch of their readers to participate in a cover-to-cover cooking extravaganza.  You see, each week the guys cook and blog about a few select recipes culled from the numerous cooking magazines they receive, and wondered what it would be like to cook every recipe in each publication rather than have to choose just a handful.  Knowing that they couldn't manage that feat by themselves, they asked a bunch of their fans (and I'm a big one) to help out a bit.

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