Monday, January 27, 2014

Adventures in Italian Cooking

For my birthday a few weeks ago our neighbor gave me a real live Italian cookbook - like, IN Italian. I'd been staring at it for a while and trying to guess at some words that I don't know and on Friday night I finally decided to jump right in and make a whole dinner from it (with the help of Google Translate).


Since in Italy, we eat in courses, I made an appetizer before the main course. For this, I decided on Insalata con Pancetta Affumicata because "pancetta affumicata" is Ryan's favorite Italian word. It means bacon. So maybe it's his favorite English word too, come to think of it.



For the main course I made Pacchettini di Pollo e Mozzarella. What I didn't realize was that there was a red sauce that goes under the "pacchettini" that you also have to make - it doesn't come out of a can. And I really didn't want to cut corners, because this was my project. So I chopped the tomatoes one by one and I roasted the red pepper myself instead of buying a jar of pre-roasted ones, although I did skip the part of the recipe that said to take the broiling hot pepper out of the oven and cool it in a plastic bag....what?!

I made educated guesses and Google-translated my way through the recipes, learning a few new words in the process, and everything turned out deliciously (4 hours later).

My favorite part of the night was when I went to translate a sentence that I didn't understand and somehow the word for salt (sale) in it's singular form which is never used except for in this recipe (sala) turned up on the translator as "Union Hall." Hmmm....

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