Browsing Tag

holidays

Focaccia Veneta

April 14, 2017
focaccia veneta

Welcome to the April edition of Cucina Conversations! We’re sharing our recipes a little early this month so you can see what we have cooked and baked for our upcoming Easter celebrations. Like Christmas, Easter is one of my favorite holidays of the year for both its religious significance and the food traditions. I am thoroughly enjoying researching and learning the recipes of my northern Italian heritage, so for this month’s post I’m sharing a recipe for focaccia veneta, a yeasted sweet bread typical to the region of the Veneto. In the Venetian dialect, this bread is known as fugassa or fugassin. This is a […]

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Frìtole Veneziane

February 28, 2017
frìtole veneziane

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 […]

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Occhi di Bue

February 14, 2017
occhi di bue

Happy Valentine’s Day! To celebrate, I made occhi di bue, one of my favorite Italian cookies. They are a simple sandwich-style cookie made of pasta frolla typically cut into a circle with a thin slip of fruit preserves, fruit curd, or Nutella spread in between. The top half of every cookie has a smaller circle cut out so the filling is visible. Every Italian pasticceria (pastry shop) or biscottificio (cookie shop) will almost always have occhi di bue behind their impeccably clean glass counters, lined with tray after tray of beautifully presented cookies, crostate, cakes, and pastries. We spent the last day of our […]

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Pizzelle

December 20, 2016
pizzelle

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 […]

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Parmigiano Thyme Crackers

December 16, 2016
parmigiano thyme crackers

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 […]

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