GASTRONOMIA

Some recipes, and links to other food related pages.

Recipes

I have little expertise in cooking, but there are a few recipes I like to do when I have friends for dinner. These are simplified and imperfect versions of the true thing, but they give adequate results.

Primi
- Risotto.
- A standard pasta sauce.
- Some quick pasta recipes.
- Quick pasta with tomatoes and ricotta salata.
- Marinated peppers.
- Cognac tomato sauce (by Daniela Pastina)
- Eggplant crostini
- Baked eggplants
Dolci
Note on gluten free dolci (for those unlucky people): sweets that use yeast must be made with wheat. I have never found acceptable substitutes. But other cakes, like sponge cakes, can be made with flours that have no gluten, as their structure is not due to yeast. A pan di Spagna made of potato starch is quite good. It won't absorb as much liquids as a wheat based one, but it will be lighter. One can also use crushed or powdered nuts instead of flour. Creams can be thickened with potato starch or corn starch instead of flour. The combination of gluten free pan di Spagna and gluten free creams produces a perfectly acceptable cake, vastly superior to many nearly inedible gluten free non-cakes that try to mimick cakes that require gluten.

Italian Recipes

My favorite dessert cookbook is Nick Malgieri - Great Italian Desserts. It is one of the only books that explains carefully which ingredients have to be used, and how to substitute them if necessary. This is fundamental for preparing Italian desserts, since using American ingredients without adjustments may lead to disastrous results. I had gone through many failures before finding the right brand or type of product, and, sure enough, I then found all of this in the book.
Other cookbooks I like. Anna Tasca Lanza has various cookbooks on Sicily; I took my favorite cake recipe, the cassata, from there. About Italian cooking in general, I like Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian cooking, which describes the principles about Italian cooking, and, as Malgieri, pays attention to the exact ingredients or its possible substitutions. (Try making gnocchi with the wrong potatoes...)
Novara recipes. (Novara is my hometown). Unfortunately, the recipes are not clear. But just to know what the typical dishes are; they're quite different from the more known South Italian recipes.