I smell like bleach.

We did the laundry last night and Mom told me to put in too much bleach. Clearly that is why everything smells like bleach. Thankfully the office is half empty today because if not everyone would probably have to stand 10 feet away from me in order to not be annoyed by the smell. I don’t know how I am surviving right now. I just want to rip this damn tank top off! Blah.

Chad ordered me the KitchenAid Pasta Maker attachment for Christmas and it arrived last week. I took a swing at making ravioli again. Same recipe, but with much thinner dough. I also made some pan fried Chicken cutlets and a Caesar Salad as Dario and Gina were coming over for dinner. Small and simple, unlike my usual dinner parties. Everything tasted excellent and I feel much more comfortable in the ravioli making department now which is good. This has caused Chad to become obsessed with freshly made pasta and he now wants me to make it when every possible. I might try Fettucine with his Moms famous meat sauce this Saturday.

Sunday the four of us helped out at the Befana event that our Italian group puts on every year. It was Ginas first time being introduced to the ‘Italian Witch’. The lady you ‘plays’ the Befana is like the cutest Italian Nonna of all time. She reminds me of my Nonna on my Dads side. ADORABLE. We get free pasta and sausages out of the deal, and really, that is reason enough to volunteer. We ended up watching the last 10 minutes of the Broncos vs. Stealers game on Darios android phone, including the insane over time finish. Where were you when Tebow threw a pass to beat the Stealers? Oh, we were in a Gym with a bunch of Italians eating pasta and watching the game on a cell phone. Random but true.

Claudia is in Chile for another week, which makes the office very lonely.

Tonight we order sushi for dinner. This makes me very happy. What makes me even happier is that on Friday we are all getting together for sushi again, but this time we are going to use light saber chop sticks. Oh you just wait for those photos!

I’m half Japanese and half Italian, didn’t you know?

Since we haven’t been doing a lot of our own home cooked meals while living at the parentals, we decided that on NYE we would cook them out most favorite dinner, Ciavarro style. This dinner is somewhat similar to the dinner Colin made us last year. I guess you could say we were inspired by the best.

Our dinner included…

Garlic & Cream Cheese Mashed Potatoes
Roasted Carrots
Steak House Salad
BBQ’d Beef Tenderloin

I don’t actually have a recipe for my mashed potatoes because they are so easy to make, you really can go by feel and taste, however, I use this basic standard of measurement when making them..

Ingredients

1 Russet Potato per person
1 Clove of Garlic per person
1 Green Onion per person (sliced)
2 Strips Cooked Bacon per person (chopped)
1 tbsp Milk per person
Butter, Cream Cheese, Salt, & Pepper to taste

Steps

Peal your potatoes, cut them in half and add to a large pot of water. Peal your garlic, leave them whole, and add them along with the potatoes. Bring the water to a boil and boil for 5 minutes. Turn down the heat to a simmer and test the potatoes after 15 minutes for doneness. Your fork should be easily slide through the potato. If the potatoes are not quite done, let them cook for a couple more minutes and check again. The timing really depends on the size of the potatoes. Drain in a colander and let them steam for 5 minutes.

Using a potato ricer, mash the potatoes and garlic back into the pot. Place back on the stove and turn on the heat to low. Add the milk and mix with a Wisk. Next add the butter, salt & pepper and mix. You want to make sure that the base of the mashed potatoes tastes right before adding anything else. Next add the cream cheese. I would start by adding a tablespoon at a time, depending on how creamy you want it. Wisk it until the cheese is melted and taste. For 5 potatoes I used about half a stick of cream cheese. What can I say, I love cream cheese!

Once your potatoes have the right creaminess and texture add in the green onions and bacon and mix. These potatoes are quite rich, but once you have tried them you will never want to go back to regular mashed potatoes again! If you like the creaminess and flavor that the cream cheese adds, try using an apple wood smoked cheddar next!

It took me a while to find a great carrot recipe. I love carrots that are sweet and caramelized and Chad likes carrots that are crunchy and buttery. This recipe is really the best of both worlds.

Ingredients

5 large Carrots
3 Clove of Garlic smashed
1 tbsp Thyme
1 knob of Butter
Drizzle of Olive Oil and Red Wine Vinegar
Salt & Pepper

Steps

Pre heat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel the carrots and cut in half. If the carrot is very thick, cut it down the middle so that all the pieces are relatively the same size. Place the carrots in a roasting pan with the garlic, butter, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and thyme. Mix so that everything is coated well. Cover the pan with tin-foil and cook for 30 minutes. Remove the tin foil and place back in the oven for another 10 minutes so that the carrots have a chance to caramelize.

You can play around with the timing depending on how you like your carrots. Chad likes them crunchy and I like them a soft, so I try to aim for something in between. Also, if you want more sweetness, try using balsamic vinegar instead of red wine. This recipe is super easy and has such great flavor!

We essentially stole this recipe from Milestone, but made it our own of course. We use to eat this salad all the time, which probably isn’t the healthiest thing ever, but oh well! Here are the ingredients for the dressing.

Ingredients

1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/2 cup Lemon Juice
1 small Shallot diced
1 dollop Dijon Mustard
1 tsp Dried Oregano
Salt & Pepper

Steps

I use an immersion blender, but you can use a regular blender. Place all the ingredients in a bowl and whip it up! It’s as easy as that.

The salad itself is also really easy.

Ingredients

Diced Red Onion (about 1/4 cup)
Iceburg Lettuce cut into strips
Crumbled Blue Cheese

Steps

Mix ingredients to taste. Red onions and blue cheese can be quite strong flavors but the dressing tones them down quite a bit. When first making this salad, I would go a little easy on the onion and cheese until you get the flavor profile you like.

Dress the salad with a light coating of the dressing. You do not want to add to much, and you will have leftovers. Toss and taste adjusting the flavors as needed!

Chad is the magic man when it comes to grilling steak. We buy the Beef Tenderloin steaks from Costco. They are the best ones we’ve found and they turn out perfect every time.

Ingredients

Sea Salt
Pepper
Garlic Plus Seasoning
Italian Steak Spice – You can get this at your local Italian deli. We get ours from Bosa.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Steps

Here are the grilling instructions as per Mr. Ciavarro.

Preheat BBQ to high. Take thawed steaks and rub both sides with olive oil. Generously cover both sides of steak with Italian steak spice. Let sit for at least 20-30 minutes.

Grill steaks for two minutes then rotate 90 degrees (for grill marks). Grill for another 2 minutes then generously add sea salt to each steak. Flip steaks and generously add sea salt and garlic spice to the now exposed grilled marks. Grill for another 4 minutes for medium rare. 5 minutes for medium.

Serve with freshly ground black pepper

These steaks rival the Keg. I can’t tell you how excited I get when I know it’s steak night!

The goodness that was NYE dinner.

We eat rich foods, what can I say. The flavor profile of this meal is out of this world. Everyone really enjoyed it and I was glad we could share our Classic Ciavarro dinner with the parentals!

There is that rare magical day where the that one kitchen gadget that you have finally decided to buy for yourself actually gets sent to you for free.

There were a lot of big kitchen gadgets that I never bothered to register for when we got married. I knew we didn’t have the space for a lot of stuff in our apartment and having little to no cooking experience I didn’t really know one thing from the other. So I decided that I would get some experience under my belt and when it was time for us to move into our big shiny new house I would buy all the things I was missing.

I never really thought a food processor was all that necessary. My mom didn’t have one and she made amazing meals, so was it really something I needed? After watching several thousand hours of the Food Network and attempting to make certain meals myself, I realized that it was a tool that I definitely needed to add to my kitchen. So off I went to do research.

If there is one thing you need to know about me it is that I go big or I go home. It doesn’t matter what I am buying I want the biggest and the best of what you have, especially when it comes to my kitchen. Sometime it is over kill and sometimes it is just right.

I started to see commercials on the Food Network for the new KitchenAid 13 cup Food Processor. I watched almost possessed as they demonstrated all the different features that it could do. I compared it to other food processors on the market and was sold that this was the one I needed.

I harassed Chad about it for two days straight until I woke up one morning to an email offering me the opportunity to test out the features of the new KitchenAid 13 cup Food Processor. Umm, what? Did this just happen!? Stuff like this NEVER happens to me.

A couple of weeks ago it arrives, in all it’s glorious beauty.

This puppy can puree, chop, knead, shred, and slice with its 3 blades and 2 discs. It has an externally adjustable, stainless steel slicing disc that lets you adjust the slicing styles for all types of food. It has a large 13 cup bowl as well as a smaller one that fits inside of it for smaller jobs. It is the most gorgeous piece of kitchen equipment I now own, next to my KitchenAid Stand Mixer, of course.

I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but this weekend I took the opportunity to try my hand at making fresh pasta dough and ravioli. Yes, I know, kinda weird that I chose to make dough with something that is so good at slicing and dicing, but this is the way that Lidia does it and she is my Italian Food Muse.

I used the dough blade and mixed up my flour, egg, oil, and water. The dough was a bit wet so I pulled it out and kneaded in some flour my hand.

Now, I didn’t really think this whole process through. Nonna has a pasta maker, but we don’t, and while I should have gone over and borrowed hers, I figured we could just do it by hand. I mean that is the way Lidia perfers to do it. Yea, that didn’t work out so well. The dough looks pretty thin in this picture but as soon as I cut out the shapes it was like the dough scrunched up and doubled in size.

Yea, they look like hockey pucks haha!

I stuffed them with Brie cheese and a couple with roasted tomatoes for my brother who doesn’t eat cheese. I know, don’t ask.

As for the sauce I made a brown butter and sage sauce. It was so amazing I will have to post the recipe on here.

The ravioli took forever to cook. The thickness of the pasta really kind of screwed me over, but you live and learn!

Over all the flavors were amazing. Melty yummy brie inside with a butter and sage sauce on the outside, all wrapped together with home made pasta dough. The flavors were a huge success, the dough, not so much.

Mom and I did a bunch of research and we agreed that I need to get the pasta making attachment for my KitchenAid Stand Mixer. I plan on making a lot of fresh dough, and with out a pasta maker we are just going to by eating huge clumps of it!

Now I have to plan my next dinner using my KitchenAid Food Processor!

I saw a posting on Facebook that the Italian Cultural Center was doing their first ever Hands On Cooking Class. As soon as I read that the theme of the class was pasta making, I knew I had to go.

I have been watching Lidia, my favorite Italian, make pasta on her show for months now, but still have not attempted it. This was my chance to finally get going on it.

I was very curious as to who this was all going to go down. A hands on class where 20 people were going to make different types of pasta dough, different types of pasta shapes, and different sauce. How was there going to be room for everyone? How were we all going to be able to make this stuff? Well, I soon found out.

We were divided into four tables of five. From there we watched as Chef Rebecca added ingredients to a  Tomato Sauce and Cream Sauce which she had gotten ready ahead of time. She gave us tips on fresh tomatoes versus canned tomatoes and let us in on her secret of using potatoes in a cream sauce instead of flour. Crazy, right!?

After showing us those two sauces she made a Sundried Tomato Pesto and Basil Pesto. The Sundried Tomato Pesto we tasted with some bread. Holy, that was amazing! I am definitely going to make it and post in on here.

As the sauces simmered away she then demonstrated how to make gnocchi, both potato and yam, as well as gluten free pasta and regular pasta.

I would have loved to get my hands in there and make the pasta from scratch as well, but it was super helpful watching the way she made it and being able to ask questions as she went along.

From there our four groups moved onto the actual forming of the pasta shapes. Our group started out with the gluten free pasta which was very hard to work with. Gluten is what keeps the dough together so every time we rolled it out and tried to make shapes it would tear. Now you know why gluten free pasta is so expensive! It was quite the contrast from the regular pasta that we were about to work with.

Next we moved onto the Gnocchi station where we rolled out long strips of the dough, cut them into smaller logs and rolled them out on special tools that added ridges. Oddly enough the best tool we used was a piece of cardboard!

It was neat making them this way. My Mom always makes them into smooth balls, so this was quite the contrast for me. The point of the ridges is to pick up more of the sauce and thats exactly what they did.

The yam dough smelled so good! It was more loose than the potato dough, which made it a little more difficult to work with, but if you were gentle it worked out great.

The third station was making short noodles out of the regular pasta dough. This was much easier to work with!

My strozzapreti noodle got me compliments from the Chef! Oh la la!

Jeremy trying his hand at the Strozzapreti.

 Finally we worked on the long noodles! I was in charge of running the pasta dough through the electric pasta maker.

Thankfully I have years of experience using these machine!

Jeremy showing off his work!

After we were done we sat down to a nice feast. They served us Farfalle in both the Cream Sauce and Pesto Sauce the Chef made earlier as well as some of the Gnocchi in the Tomato Sauce. I could had sat there all night long and eaten up every last bit of pasta, it was just soo good.

It was such a great experience being able to work with the different doughs, getting a feel for them and working them into different noodles. I’m going to have to book a Saturday and just sit in the kitchen all day and try my hand at the yam gnocchi and maybe try doing some ravioli out of the basic pasta dough.

It was also awesome to be able to talk with Chef Rebecca and ask questions and get tips on how to make things, using different types of flour, and where she goes to shop (which, by the way is Bosa, because Bosa is the most amazing store ever).

And yes, I know it seems kind of silly that my Nonna lives three houses away and makes fresh pasta all the time, and here I go and pay for a pasta making class, but I have seen what my Nonna makes and wanted to experience something a little different. I am very glad I signed up for this class and would recommend it to any foodie who wants to try their hand at pasta making!

I love being Italian.

The other night we made pizza from scratch, like really from scratch. Our favourite go to is to buy pizza bread from Bosa, throw on our toppings and then in the oven it goes, but I remembered seeing a recipe in the Weber grill book for pizza on the BBQ and I really wanted to try it out.

I haven’t been very successful with making dough that has yeast in it, so I was a little weary of this recipe, but to my delight it turned out awesome!

For the dough you will need…

1 1/2 cup warm water
1 package rapid-rise active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar
4 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons salt

In the bottom of an electric mixer combine the water, yeast, and sugar. Stir briefly and let stand for 5 minutes. Add the flour, oil, & salt. Fit the mixer with a dough hook and mix on low speed for about 2 minute or until the dough begins to come together. Increase the speed to medium and continue to mix until the dough is slightly sticky, smooth, and elastic (about 10 minutes). Form the dough into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl. Turn it over to coat all sides and tightly cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Allow the dough to rise in a warm place until it has double in size, about 1 1/2 – 2 hours.

The dough it supposed to yield 8 small pizzas (about 6 inches across) but we made 2 larger sized pizzas and saved a smaller ball to do some pizza bread later on.

The best part about preparing the dough was the fact that I didn’t have a rolling pin and so I had to use a bottle of Pam to roll it out. Oh yea, classy all the way!

To prepare the dough for the BBQ lightly brush it with oil (top and bottom) and allow it to sit at room temperature for 10 minutes. Place the dough on parchment paper, as this will allow the dough to keep its shape while on the BBQ. Once you’ve done that, place the rounds on the BBQ over direct medium heat with the paper size up. With the lid closed, cook the dough for about 2 – 5 minutes. You want to make sure the dough is well marked and firm before you flip it over. Peal off the parchment paper and cook the other side.

The essence of an Italian pizza is simplicity. Clearly I did not get that message.

Chad made a classic Diavola with marinara sauce, Calabrese salami, mozzarella, and basil.

I used roasted tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, garlic, mozzarella, and basil, with a tiny drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Not very simple at all!

Back on the BBQ they go. Cook once again over medium direct heat for 2 – 5 minutes until the cheese is melted and everything is warmed and yummy!

NOM NOM NOM

The pizza turned out really good. The only thing we realized is that the dough becomes quite thick when it cooks, so the thinner you can roll it out the better (unless you like a thicker crust pizza).

My toppings were a good choice but I had way to many of them. Probably could have cooked half the veggies that I did.

Chad and I bought finished off our pizzas by drizzling flavoured Olive Oil over the top. We have a spicy one we bought in Seattle and it went so well with the pizzas. Flavour Olive Oils are my favourite ‘condiment’ ever, if you can consider it a condiment.

I was pretty proud of myself for not screwing up yet another yeast dough, so this has definitely given me the confidence boost I needed to try more yeast doughs.

Pizza on the BBQ. You should try it!