Italian
Italian recipes
Crouton’s Bucatini alla Amatriciana
A traditional dish from Rome and the Lazio region, usually served as the primo or pasta course of a full Italian dinner.
Crouton’s Pasta alla Puttanesca
This is my interpretation of spaghetti alla puttanesca (whore’s spaghetti), a simple yet robust pasta dish that’s easy to make with around-the-house ingredients (well, our house anyway). Don’t be squeamish about the anchovies … they add flavor to the dish,…
Crouton’s Pasta with Italian Sausage
Here’s another easy pasta dish anyone can make. It tastes as good as it looks. Notes I’ve tried this with both kalamata olives and canned black olives. The strong flavor of the kalamatas overpower the bell pepper and broccoli, so…
Photoblog: an Italian Family Dinner
Yesterday Ditalini and her Aunt Radicchio made three pounds of gnocchi and a big pot of sauce. When it comes to rolling and shaping gnocchi, there’s some twist of the wrist thing I never quite mastered, but Aunt Radicchio, now…
A Birthday Dinner Photoblog
It’s been an annual tradition for several years now: Osso Bucco, our friend from Las Vegas, comes down to visit during my birthday week (his birthday is a week from now, so we celebrate together) and we all go over…
Second Rule of Cooking Club
If it looks wrong, go with your gut. Our second cooking club dinner was last night. The theme was Italian, using recipes from the cookbooks of celebrity chef Mario Batali. Ditalini and I were in charge of the antipasto; Magret…
Sausage & Spinach with Fettuccini Alfredo
We went to one of our favorite Italian restaurants a few weeks ago. We were with a crowd, so we ordered appetizers. On the appetizer menu was a dish labeled Sausage & Spinach. Sounded good, so we tried it, and…
Ditalini’s Family Gnocchi Recipe
Ditalini’s Aunt Joyce, a first-generation Italian-American and today the matriarch of the della Fagiolis, taught us this authentic gnocchi recipe, brought to the USA from Vittorio Veneto when the family emigrated.
Polenta
I learned about polenta when I married Ditalini. It was what you ate when you were poor, or when you were tired of pasta and wanted something different. Sometime during the 1980s polenta became trendy and today you can find…
Ditalini’s Family Meat Sauce Recipe
This is the real stuff, a family meat sauce recipe from the Veneto region of Italy, handed down to my wife Ditalini from her family, the della Fagiolis. I’m sure the recipe changed as it adapted to life in the…