Lesson 61: Mangia Mangia!

Today's recipes were from the Northwest region of Italy. It seemed like we had a lot more food than usual today, which can be seen in the picture above. Along with the 7 recipes that were planned for today, some students made some extra recipes with the available ingredients. So lets get to the food, shall we?

Insalata di Olive, Sedano, Aglio e Cipolla: I made this salad with thinly sliced celery hearts, green olives, red onions, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, fresh oregano, and a minced hot cherry pepper. The salad marinated until we ready to serve it at the end of class.

I also made the Costolette alla Valdostana, a breaded porkchop stuffed with fontina cheese. I pan fried the chops and finished them in the oven. They were finished with white truffle butter.

The Riso Al Gorgonzola was a risotto dish finished with gorgonzola, heavy cream, and fresh parsley:

The Calamari Ripieni di Gamberi was a classic seafood dish from Liguria consisting of squid stuffed with chopped shrimp and breadcrumbs. The stuffed squid was then braised in white wine and tomatoes for an hour.

We made a batch of fresh pasta again today to go along with the Ragu di Cinghiale, a wild boar ragu:

The Cipolline Agro Dolce was an amazing side-dish. These cipolline onions were slow roasted with sugar, red wine vinegar, fresh sage leaves, and extra virgin olive oil. Yum!Each group made this final dish a little bit differently: Sfogliata di Radicchio. This is supposed to be a puff pastry tart with radicchio, golden raisins, anchovy fillets, and black olives. Our group decided to eliminate the puff pastry and grill the radicchio to make a warm radicchio salad. The other groups incorporated the puff pastry in different ways.

The extra puff pastry was used to make pastry parmesan twists! I've made these once for a sorority pot luck in college :)

We also had some beautiful heirloom tomatoes that we roasted with some garlic and olive oil:

Another student made a "dessert risotto" by making a rice pudding with the arborio rice:

There was also another dessert served in martini glasses, but I got caught up in cleaning at the end of class and forgot to take a picture :(

Today was another great class! Italian cuisine is definitely my favorite!