Pesto

This pesto is about as good as it gets – and I've eaten pesto in Liguria, the region in Italy where pesto originated.

Traditionally, pesto is made using a marble mortar and a wooden pestle. The garlic and pine nuts are crushed to a paste first, then the basil leaves and salt added, with the cheese coming next. Olive oil is mixed in last. This method does produces a more rustic version of pesto with a rougher texture. Instead, we usually use a small food processor for its ability to make smooth pesto very quickly.

To make this pesto the absolute best, use fresh, quality ingredients. Italians never even consider using olive oil that isn't extra virgin or basil that isn't fresh.

To make this pesto extra special, use trofie pasta. Trofie is the pasta that pesto is traditionally served over. This pasta can be very difficult to find outside of Liguria. However, it can be homemade – a task I would like to try someday when our dried stock runs out, using this recipe.

My mom has been using this pesto recipe for years, but I never fully appreciated it until I went to Italy. I ate their pesto, and yes, it is really good (especially in Liguria) – but this pesto is just as good, if not better than some of the pesto I tried in Italy.

Pesto
Makes: 1 1/2 cups

2 cups fresh basil leaves*
2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup pine nuts*
1 tsp lemon juice, optional
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

In a food processor, blender, or using a mortar and pestle, combine all the ingredients and blend until thoroughly combined.
Serve over fettuccine or traditional trofie pasta.
Store extra in fridge for up to a week; the pesto sauce does not need to be reheated when eaten as leftovers. Extra pesto also freezes well.

Substitute ingredients:
*Basil: can try other greens such as kale, spinach, arugula, or parsley (half basil, half spinach is wonderful)
*Pine nuts: can try walnuts, pecans, pistachios, almonds, edamame, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, or sunflower seeds
*Try adding: your favorite herbs like cilantro, mint, or parsley; or your favorite spices like cayenne, ground ginger, or paprika. Or add a dash of your favorite hot sauce.

Ideas for use:
Pesto pasta: mix pesto with noodles; optional: add chicken, cheese, tomatoes, red pepper flakes
Pesto sandwich: spread on pesto, add favorite toppings (cheese & tomatoes); grill bread in butter or olive oil.
Pesto pizza or toast: pizza dough + pesto + chicken + mozzarella or parmesan cheese + tomatoes
Pesto chicken: spoon over chicken breasts, add cheese, bake. Eat with noodles.
Pesto dip: dip crusty toasted bread in pesto

Source: This recipe is from the same lost little Italian cookbook that the bruschetta was from. If anyone knows what cookbook this is, please contact me.

Sesame Chicken

I haven't had Chinese food since London in January. And it's July now. No one should have to go 7 months without Chinese food!

So this week I picked out a recipe and we tested it. I can now see why there is such a shortage of Chinese restaurants in Moscow – Mom had to go to three different grocery stores to get all of the ingredients!

But oh boy was it worth it! I mean, yes, we did also find out why you only ever find sesame chicken in restaurants (it is a little time consuming to make) but it's not like we have a Chinese restaurant to go to.

There are, however, some advantages to making Chinese food at home. 1) There's no too-big-for-your-mouth chunks of chicken, only nice little morsels of tastiness that you can pop perfectly into your mouth. And 2) you know exactly what is in your food...those chunks of chicken really are chunks of chicken.

Part of what is time consuming is the marinade, which could be skipped but the dish wouldn't be quite as flavorful.

Cornstarch gives this chicken its crunch!

Rice cooks while the chicken fries.

Don't forget the sauce! It's nice and flavorful. If you are using the Chinese 5 spice powder, don't add it all at once without tasting along the way...it can be a little overpowering!

Drizzle that sauce on. Or keep it separate, your choice.

Garnish!

And (at long last) eat! Mix in some broccoli or peppers for added flavor.

Sesame Seed Chicken

Serves: 5

Ingredients:

Sauce:

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/3 cup chicken broth

1-2 Tbs. sesame oil (to taste)

1 tsp. ground ginger

1/2 Tbs. chopped garlic

1/2 Tbs. brown sugar

1 dash red chili pepper flakes

2 tsp. cornstarch (or more for a thicker sauce)

Marinade and chicken:

4 chicken breasts, cut into cubes

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 Tbs. brown sugar

1 Tbs. sherry wine

1/2 tsp. Chinese five spice powder (optional)*

2 drops sesame oil

cornstarch, to coat

To cook:

vegetable oil or peanut oil (for frying)

sesame seeds (to garnish)

sliced green onion (to garnish)

prepared rice, to serve

Directions:

1. Marinade and chicken: Cube chicken into bite-size pieces. In a large bowl, combine all chicken ingredients except the cornstarch. Mix the chicken into the marinade until it is completely coated. Marinate in fridge for at least 30 minutes.*

2. Heat enough oil in a wok or pan to about halfway cover the chicken. Do not completely cover the chicken.

3. While the oil heats, remove chicken from marinade and toss about 7 pieces at a time in cornstarch (sift cornstarch first if there are many lumps). Using cornstarch for frying creates tiny air pockets, resulting in a puffed up, crunchy outer layer. Many Asian restaurants also use cornstarch.

4. Fry the breaded chicken in the hot oil until cooked through. Remove from wok, place in slightly warmed oven to keep hot while more chicken and the sauce are cooking.* Repeat with the rest of the chicken.

5. Sauce: In a small saucepan, combine all sauce ingredients except cornstarch and bring to a boil over medium heat.

6. In a small bowl or cup, mix cornstarch with about 1/4 teaspoon water until dissolved (this will prevent the cornstarch from clumping). Slowly drizzle it into the sauce and stir, heating until thickened. Repeat with more cornstarch until thickened to your liking.

7. Add chicken to sauce on the stove. Remove and sprinkle with sesame seeds and green onions. Serve over rice.

*Chinese 5 spice powder is usually made up of cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise, and peppercorns. A recipe to make your own can be found here. However, I simply skipped the powder; it wasn't missed.

*If you are short on time, skip marinating the chicken. The final dish will be less flavorful but still good.

*Alternatively, skip coating the chicken with cornstarch and frying, instead simply grilling the marinated chicken.

Recipe from: http://www.food.com/recipe/family-favorite-sesame-chicken-239398

Marcela Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onions

Can something taste bright? Is that a thing? Well, if it is, that is how I would describe this tomato sauce. The tomato flavor just pops in your mouth.

Actually, when I eating the pasta, my eyes almost popped out of my head. I found a hair in my pasta – oh the horror! Luckily I knew it was one of mine and it was in my pasta. It would have been very embarrassing for someone else to find it.

But then that hair had to go and insert itself in one of the better pictures I took? Really? I guess it could have been worse...I could have found the hair after the pasta was already in my mouth. Ew. Bad thought.

This sauce is brilliantly simple – I mean, that is what Marcela is famous for. If you haven't heard of her, you should read this interesting account of her life...after all, she did change the way Americans cook Italian food! We ate this sauce over trofie pasta that we picked up in Italy while we were there, a pasta traditionally used for pesto. Use whatever pasta makes you happy, or even put it on pizza!

Marcela Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onions

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

28 oz (800 g) whole peeled tomatoes from a can (San Marzano)*

5 Tbs. (70 grams) unsalted butter

1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved

Salt to taste

Directions:

1. Put tomatoes, onion, and butter in a 3-quart saucepan over medium heat.

2. Bring sauce to a simmer, then lower heat; keep sauce at a slow but steady simmer for about 45 minutes or until the fat floats free from the tomatoes. Stir occasionally, crushing large tomato pieces against the side of the pan.

3. Remove sauce from heat and discard the onion. Add salt (and pepper, if desired) to taste.

4. Serve on pasta or pizza. Add parmesan if desired.

*San Marzano tomatoes are preferred, however they may not be available. You can also use diced or puréed tomatoes, but they will need slightly less simmering time as they are already broken down. Using puréed tomatoes will also give the sauce less texture.

Recipe from: Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcela Hazan

Brown Butter Banana Bread

Sooo last week we had all these bananas on the counter that needed to be eaten up – or, actually, made into mocha chocolate chip banana muffins, as was the case. So with the brown bananas gone, my mom bought some nice yellow ones. Unfortunately these new bananas browned freakishly fast and we were again stuck with a whole bunch of brown bananas. Luckily for us, we had just finished the muffins so it was time to make another banana-baked-good.

Enter: Joy the Baker's Brown Butter Banana Bread.

Did I ever tell you that I really like Joy the Baker? All the recipes I've tried from her (like Pistachio, Orange, and Dark Chocolate Cinnamon Rolls and Brown Butter Baked Doughnuts) have turned out good. Plus her photos are amazing. And she has a cat – a definite win.

This bread was just as successful as her other recipes. It turned out nice and soft and used a lot of our bananas up (3!). Even my dad, who apparently does not like banana bread (criminal, in my opinion), complimented the nice crusty top and the flavors from the spices.

This bread made our kitchen smell amazing – and when I cut the banana bread open when it was still hot, it just got better!

I mean, can't you just see the delicious scent steaming off? No? Well, I guess it was just 'hot', not 'steaming hot', but I promise the smell was there.

A word of warning: make sure you tap out all the extra flour from your pan...I had a little too much and the edges of my bread ended up looking a little yellow.

Brown Butter Banana Bread

Makes 1 9×5-inch loaf

Recipe from: http://joythebaker.com/2014/03/brown-butter-banana-bread/

Baked Honey Barbecue Chicken Fingers

I have been wanting to see the cat circus ever since I heard about it when we first moved here. So this weekend we saw it, and all in all it was a great cultural experience.

The cat circus was in a special building just for the purpose, meaning there were lots of cat decorations (that stained glass window was worthy of a picture).

The circus room was a small, dark theater lit up by many florescent colors. Although it was a cat circus, the humans did a lot of acting and speaking (which might have been better, had I understood Russian).

Also, there were two dogs – and get this: one dog could do a hand stand on its front paws. What? I can't even do that and I have thumbs! Anyways, the cats could do some pretty awesome things too. I enjoyed the part where a cat sat in a pot and whenever the man would take it out, it would jump back in, until it got fed up and "attacked" the man. The show was good fun.

Now what does this all have to do with chicken fingers? Nothing. Except that we had our own little feline friend watching us make the chicken fingers.

These chicken fingers are quite delicious. My family is not a big barbecue sauce eater, so I was surprised when I dipped my chicken into the sauce and was like YUM. It was sweet, spicy, smoky, and barbecue-y. Mmmm.

By the way, I think these chicken fingers taste better if you actually use your fingers to eat them. 'Finger' is in the name – if they aren't finger food, I don't know what is!

Baked Honey Barbecue Chicken Fingers

Notes:

*You can use honey flavored BBQ sauce and omit the honey, but there will be slightly less honey flavor.

*use your favorite seasonings if you have no smoked paprika.

*Panko is a Japanese-style breadcrumb that tends to stay crispier longer. Use seasoned or seasoned. If you don't have panko breadcrumbs, just make your own breadcrumbs by putting bread in the food processor then baking the breadcrumbs until they are crispy, stirring occasionally.

Recipe from: http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2014/05/14/baked-honey-bbq-chicken-fingers/

Molasses Oatmeal Cookies

Goodbye fresh pasta. Goodbye Italian pizza. Goodbye yummy gelato. We will meet again delicious Italian food...

Hello, my chewy little oatmeal cookies. Because, cookies are, of course, what I made when I got back from Italy. I needed something to comfort me about the loss of gelato, didn't I?

And comfort me is just what they did. Before they had even finished baking them, I had already eaten a couple cookies' worth of cookie dough! That was good stuff. Don't worry though, we still had plenty of dough left to make cookies for our new neighbors and to snack on later!

It was fun to make these cookies. Not only did I get to sneak cookie dough, but when I was dumping all kinds of add-ins into the batter, no one noticed when a few chocolate chips disappeared!

This batter is nice and thick with a molasses and cinnamon flavor that is especially prominent in the dough (I should know!).

Chilling makes the dough easier to handle and hold its shape better.

They're too soft to move onto racks immediately – but if you break a cookie trying, then you have an excuse to eat it immediately.

And they finish cooling, ready to put in a box.

Add-in ideas:

M&Ms

Chocolate chips/white chocolate chips/butterscotch chips/cinnamon chips/peanut butter chips

Reese's Pieces

Raisins/dried cherries/dried cranberries

Pecans/walnuts

Pretzel pieces

Molasses Oatmeal Cookies

Makes: 24

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (115g) softened, unsalted butter

3/4 cup (150g) dark or light brown sugar

1/4 cup  (50g) granulated sugar

1 large egg, room temperature

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 Tbs. (20g) dark molasses

1 2/3 cups (140g) old-fashioned rolled oats

1 cup (125g) all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cups add-ins

Directions:

1. In a large bowl using a hand mixer or a stand mixer cream softened butter and sugars together until smooth.

2. Add egg. Mix about 1 minute on high until combined.

3. Scrape down sides of bowl. Add vanilla and molasses, mixing on high until combined. Set aside.

4. In a medium bowl stir together the oats, flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.

5. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix on low until combined.

6. Stir in add-ins using a spatula; dough will be thick.

7. Chill dough in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

8. Preheat oven to 325F.

9. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

10. Roll cookie dough into balls containing about 1.5 tablespoons each and place 2 inches apart on cookie sheets.

11. Bake until very lightly browned on the edges, about 10-11 minutes. The centers should look soft.

12. Remove from oven and allow to cool on cookie sheets for 5 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to finish cooling.

13. Store cookies covered for up to 1 week at room temperature. Freeze baked cookies and rolled cookie dough for up to 3 months.

Recipe from: http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2014/02/11/loaded-oatmeal-cookies/

Food Tour in Rome

My family and I are in Italy...land of the delicious food! With that in mind, we decided to take a food tour in Rome to find out more from a local.

We started out with our guide, Francesca, taking us to a grocery store. Not the normal supermarket kind, though. This was an old family owned grocery store. Inside was a big counter with various cheeses and meats. There were also some shelves of wine along with some normal grocery store products. Francesca first told us about buffalo mozzarella cheese. It is made of buffalo milk (surprise!) from domestic water buffaloes in Italy. It does not last for more than a week and cannot be stored at temperatures too warm or too cold. It is often referred to as "white gold" for a reason – when I bit into it, it was juicy, a little bit chewy, and absolutely bursting with flavor. I have never tasted buffalo mozzarella so good. We also found out that there are two other kinds of mozzarella: burrata (made from mozzarella and cream) and fior di latte (made from cow's milk). What is not true mozzarella cheese is the pre-grated stuff in a grocery store bag!

Next she gave us another type of Italian cheese: pecorino. Pecorino is a hard cheese made from sheep's milk, and it has a very salty flavor. Because of the saltiness, we ate a bite of salami afterwards. The flavors worked well together.

After the grocery store we went to an old bakery. The window was filled with sweet baked goods, which turns out is what Italians eat for breakfast. But we were here for dinner, so we ate the fast food of Rome: pizza! Roman pizza is thin and has no more than three toppings on any piece (cheese is considered an ingredient, not a topping). The pizza sits on the counter and when someone wants some, it is chopped up, weighed, and sold by the slice. Roman pizza is very thin crusted, and there are two kinds: pizza roja and pizza bianca. Pizza roja only has a thin layer of sauce on its thin base. Pizza bianca has no sauce, only cheese and other toppings. Because of the thinness and small amount of toppings, the pizza has much less calories than American pizza. Both were surprisingly delicious for the lack of toppings! I must say...I never was much of a fan of thin crust pizza before Italy.

We walked over to the Jewish Ghetto, which is now only a ghetto by name – in fact, to buy a house there, it would cost around 25,000 euros per square meter, effectively keeping the population mainly Jewish. Instead of buying property, the Jews that live there pass down their property through their family. We ate at a restaurant serving Jewish-Roman food. Jewish-Roman food is not necessarily Kosher, but does differ from Roman food. Many years ago when the Jewish Ghetto was still a ghetto, the Jews' main food was the scraps and leftovers from others. Because of this, they fried much of their food to make it safe to eat. Out of the leftovers, they created foods such as fried zucchini flowers stuffed with anchovies, and a fried ball of rice mixed with tomato sauce, with a pocket of mozzarella in the center (both of which we tried). This zucchini flower is called fiori di zucca fritti. The zucchini flower had a very light flavor, which is why it was stuffed with anchovies. For me, I did not like the anchovies part of that equation – too salty and fishy tasting! Not to mention I could see tiny bones. The rice mixture is called supplí. I liked the supplí...it tasted a little like pizza!

Next we went to a restaurant and learned about pasta. One of the traditional types in Rome is the bucatini all'amatriciana. The pasta, bucatini, is a bit thicker than spaghetti (which no Italian in Italy actually eats!) and has a tiny hole down the center. The pasta was perfectly al dente – if the noodles are not overcooked, it turns out that you get only a third of the calories as when they are overcooked! The sauce is called amatriciana. It is based on tomatoes, pecorino cheese, and guanciale. Guanciale is pig's cheek. To make the sauce more creamy but not change the flavor, some of the water that the pasta was cooked in is added to the sauce. We discovered that the Italians do not cut their pasta up when eating it as it defeats the point of long noodles. Might as well just make the noodles short in the first place if they're going to be cut up! Francesca also told us that Italians do not eat bread if they have pasta or potatoes. This solved a debate in our house about when to eat bread! Also, we learned about olive oil. Italians do not consider anything but extra virgin olive oil when buying theirs. When they buy olive oil, it is usually once a year from a farmer, when it is made. Italians buy enough for the whole year – about 50 liters at 8 euros a liter. That's a lot of olive oil! Of course, they taste it before buying such a large amount as the flavors may vary year to year.

Lastly we had gelato. We have gelato almost every night in Italy, but this particular night we learned the true meaning of real Italian gelato. 'Gelato' means frozen, and thus many gelaterias feel justified in selling frozen mixtures that they call 'gelato'. It may be ice cream, which isn't bad but it's not gelato, or it may be something truly gross which may have flour mixed in to make it creamy or start from a powdered mix that the gelateria makes 'gelato' from "fresh every morning". We discovered that it is difficult to tell what is real gelato and that there is a small amount of real gelaterias in Italy compared to fake gelaterias. One good sign of real gelato is if the top of the gelato is not piled up (even though it looks pretty); the top should be more or less flat because gelato has less air in it than ice cream so whipping it into piles just creates more unnecessary work. Another sign is trying it – after a few licks you should still be able to taste it...it shouldn't leave a nasty coating in your mouth. Also, you shouldn't feel like you need a drink afterwards; it should leave you feeling refreshed (well, you might need a drink if it is so rich and delicious!). Gelato is usually fruit, nut or chocolate flavored. If gelato is made from fruit, no sugar or cream is added. The gelateria we went to was so good they didn't even offer cones, everything came in a cup. No cardboard cone was going to distract from this gelato! First we tasted the flavors to find out our favorites. I tried many delicious flavors but ended up with almond and chocolate. The almond was so intense it tasted like almond paste (but better!) and the chocolate was insanely rich. They were a great pair and the best gelato I've ever had!