Flavia's Flavors

Frìtole Veneziane

February 28, 2017

Buon martedì grasso and welcome to the February edition of Cucina Conversations! Today is Fat Tuesday, the last day for Christians worldwide to indulge before the lean forty days of Lent. Martedì grasso is also the final day of carnevale season. This month, the bloggers of Cucina Conversations are telling you about the variety of traditional foods prepared and eaten during the three weeks of carnevale. To commemorate my recent trip to the Veneto and my northern Italian heritage, I made frìtole veneziane–known in the Venetian dialect as frìtoe venessiane– a yeasted sweet fritter laced with liquor-soaked raisins and fragrant pine nuts, and coated abundantly in granulated sugar. Frìtole are considered an institution of the carnevale […]

Pizzelle

December 20, 2016

Welcome to the December edition of Cucina Conversations! This month, we made our theme a little broader and are bringing you Italian recipes that are perfect for sharing and gift-giving during the Christmas season. I love baking year-round, but I really love baking during the holidays. The Christmas music comes on Thanksgiving Day, I spend a day or two with my nose in my cookbooks deciding which recipes to make for my annual cookie gift tins, and then my kitchen turns into a cookie-making factory for a solid two weeks (or more). Gifting homemade cookies from my kitchen to our dearest […]

Parmigiano Thyme Crackers

December 16, 2016

For those of you who know me well, you know I am an Ina Garten devotee/fan/worshipper. I own all of her cookbooks, watch repeats of her show, and triple check the DVR to make sure it’s set to record her newest episodes. I admire her cooking and entertaining style, particularly her philosophy of using best-quality ingredients to cook simple and flavorful recipes. There is nothing pretentious about any of her recipes–they are comforting, familiar, and always foolproof (seriously, I have never had one of her recipes fail). I especially admire her talent for taking every recipe she makes and presenting it beautifully […]

Parsley and Pecan Crusted Salmon Ball

December 12, 2016

You know those holiday recipes that must be made or else there will be a family-wide mutiny? This parsley and pecan crusted salmon ball is one of those recipes. When I was growing up, this was on the appetizer table at Christmas every year without fail. It had to be. I have no idea where the recipe originated–I always knew it to reside in a small black three-ring binder on a set of bookshelves in the family room of my childhood home in Maryland. Now, a copy of the recipe resides in a larger and almost bulging binder in my kitchen here in Texas. It’s […]

Almond Cantuccini

September 7, 2016

I always take a hiatus from baking sweets over the summer. I don’t shun the oven entirely, since many of our favorite meals are cooked in the oven: roast chicken, flank steak, and these tomatoes. But except for the occasional crostata, baked sweets take a back seat during the summer months in favor of bottomless bowls of fresh fruit or ice cream for dessert. A couple of weeks ago, I started to miss my regular cookie-baking routine, so I pulled out my baking sheets and cooling racks and baked a batch of Emiko Davie’s almond cantuccini. Even though the word biscotti is the correct word for referring […]

Rice-Stuffed Tomatoes

August 23, 2016

The last time Peter and I were in Rome, we rented an apartment on Via Caulonia just off of Piazza Zama in the IX Appio Latino neighborhood, a few blocks up the street from my zia Franca, who lived in an apartment on Via Centuripe. She has since moved into her late sister’s apartment in another neighborhood to be closer to her nieces and nephews, but her former neighborhood will always be one of my favorite areas of Rome. It’s home to the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano and the catacombs of San Callisto, but it’s mainly a residential neighborhood with one apartment building after another […]