Although Le Marche region is still largely undiscovered by the tourist industry, from the culinary point of view, the character of this region is quite unique. While the cuisine in neighboring Umbria is for the most part simple, the people in Marche have expensive and sophisticated tastes, though they do not indulge these to excess. Even the most magnificent stuffing for suckling pig is invariably originated in the traditions of county cooking.

Even in Gioacchino Rossini’s time, cooking and eating well were considered important. This Fillet of Beef recipe is dedicated to the composer Rossini, who lived in the first half of the 19th century. After the composer and maestro of italian opera went into voluntary retirement, he devoted time to his hobby, the buona tavola. After his death, he left several recipes which he had invented himself. Furthermore, many cooks had dedicated their own creations to him. As the result, today there are more then a hundred dishes with names bearing the tag alla Rossini.

Ingredients:
2 beef fillet steaks
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons butter
1/2 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1/4 glass Marsala
salt and pepper
2 slices Gruyere
2 slices raw ham
1/2 cup Bechamel Sauce

Method:
Heat the olive oil and butter in a heavy pan and fry the fillet steaks. When the meat starts to brown, dust with flour, sprinkle with the Marsala wine, the boil until the sauce thickens.

Season on both sides with salt and pepper. Braised the meat until it has absorbed the liquid, then remove and place in a flameproof dish.

Lay the slices of cheese and ham on top, pour over the Bechamel Sauce, and bake for a few minutes in an oven at 200C until the top is brown. Serve hot.

At this special moment I wish to share my favourite and delightful pastry recipe of both Italian and French cuisine. It’s a Almond Biscotti that perfect designed to be dipped into your best-loved cup of coffee.

Other Italian name of this biscotti is Cantucci. They are hard, high-baked lozenge-shaped biscuits. When moistened, they become deliciously soft and crumbly. In Tuscany, they are usually studded with almonds or other nuts and flavoured with vanilla or aniseed.

Cooking these biscotties I used the Bar method. Finally I got diagonally cut almond biscotti compare to round biscuit shape ones.

If you wish to make a very special salad to your festive Christmas table please see the Fruit Salsa recipe from my French Cooking Blog.

Ingredients:
150 g eggs (2 or 3 depends on weight)
275 g white sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla power
3/4 tablespoon grated orange zest
425 g plain flour
1o g baking power
150g blanched whole almonds

Method:

Mixing:
Combine the eggs, sugar and salt. Stir over hot water to warm the mixture (a sponge method). Whip until thick and light.
Fold the vanilla and orange zest.
Sift together the flour and baking power. Fold in the egg mixture.
Mix in the almonds.

Makeup:
Shape the dough into log about 6cm thick. Dust your hands and the workbench with flour. The dough will be soft, sticky, and difficult to handle, but the log do not have to be perfectly shaped.

Baking:
Bake at 160C(325F) about 30-40 minutes , until light golden.

Finishing:
Let cool slightly. Slice diagonally about 12mm thick. Place slices cut side down on sheet pans. Bake at 135C(275F) until toasted and golden brown, about 30 minutes.

Other ingredients can be added to lasagne, such as sliced cooked meatballs, sausages, zucchini, eggplant. It is best to add only one of two ingredients to lasagne. So there are three main types of lasagne -meat, seafood of vegetable lasagne.

Ingredients and Method of Lasagne:

Ricotta filling:
350g Ricotta cheese
30g Parmesan cheese, grated
1 Egg
Salt
Pepper

Lasagne :
Fresh pasta or spinach pasta for lasagne
1,5l Meat sauce
350g Mozzarella cheese, shredded
60g Parmesan cheese, grated

Mix together the ricotta, Parmesan cheese and egg. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Cook the lasagne sheets in boiling salted water, drain, rinse in cold water.

Ladle a little meat sauce into the lasagne pan. Spread it across the bottom.
Arrange a lasagne layer in the pan. Then add a layer of the ricotta mixture, a layer of lasagne, a layer or meat sauce, and a layer of mozzarella.
Continue making layers of lasagne, ricotta, sauce, and mozzarella until all ingredients are used.
Top with lasagne layer and Parmesan cheese.

Bake at 190C for about 45minutes. Cover lightly with foil at first to keep it from drying out, but remove the foil for the last 15 minutes of baking time.

Ingredients and Method of Meat Sauce for Lasagne:

500g ground beef, pork or a mixture of beef and pork
1 onion, chopped fine
1 carrot, chopped fine
1 celery, chopped fine
1 garlic clove, minced
125ml red wine
1l tomato sauce
500ml beef or pork stock
olive oil
parsley
basil
oregano

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the onion, carrot and celery and saute lightly for a few minutes. Do not let them brown. Add garlic and saute a little.

Simmer 1 hour, uncovered.

Add ground beef, cook for a few minutes. Then add red wine and later tomato sauce, beef stock, parsley, oregano and basil. Season to taste with salt.

Haricot beans (Haricot is the french word for ‘bean’) are another staple of Italian cooking. The most popular varities include the pretty red-and cream speckled borlotti, the small one cannellini and black-eyed beans. All these are used in stews, with pasta and in soups, and borlotti and cannellini are often served as a side dish simply flavoured with extra virgin olive oil.

Ingredients and Method:
Borlotti beans, cooked or canned, drained
Asparagus
Shallots, chopped fine
Garlic, chopped fine
Olive oil
Fresh parsley, chopped fine
Fresh basil, chopped fine
Red wine vinegar
Grated Parmesan cheese
Salt

Cook the asparagus in boiling, salted water until just tender. Drain, cool in cold water, and drain again. Cut the asparagus into pieces about 4cm long.

Heat the olive oil in a saute pan over a moderate heat. Add the finely chopped shallots and garlic. Cook until tender and lightly browned.
Add the drained beans to the pan. Toss over heat until the beans are hot.
Then add the asparagus and herbs. Heat another minute until the asparagus is hot.
Add salt to taste.

Just before serving, stir in the vinegar and add the Parmesan cheese. Serve hot.

Coming back to My-Italian-Cooking, I ‘m posting today a recipe of making flavoured sauce - Shallots with Rosemary Oil, that I used recently as a BBQ sauce for lamb. It’s a simple version of Italian sauces which can be used widely in Italian and French cuisine.

Flavoured oils make an interesting alternative to vinaigrette and other sauces when used to dress a wide variety of dishes. They can be suitable for steamed, sauteed and grilled dishes, but they can be used with cold foods as well. The simplest way to flavour an oil is putting some of the flavouring ingredients in the oil and let it stand until the oil has taken enough the flavour.

Ingredients and Method of Flavoured Shallots with Rosemary Oil:
Shallots, chopped
Flavourless oil such as canola, corn, grapeseed or other
Fresh rosemary, chopped

Combine the chopped shallots, rosemary and the oil in a jar, shake well. Let stand for 30 minutes in a warm place then refrigerate.
The oil is ready to use as soon as it has taken of the desired flavour, which may be in 1-2 hours.

I served shallots and rosemary flavoured lamb chops with a green salad dressed with the Italian Dressing.

Ingredients and Method of Italian Dressing:
Wine vinegar
Salt
White pepper
Salad oil or Olive oil
Minced garlic
Dried oregano
Chopped parsley

Mix together the vinegar, salt and white pepper until the salts is dissolved. Add the remaining ingredients. Mix well in the oil.

Original Ilalian name: Tiella Alla Barese
Place of origin: Puglia, Sourthern Italy

Coming back to the Italian blog,  I wish to share today one of the recently cooked main dishes. I would estimate this dish to the First course dishes category or Primi like said in Italy. However, this meal is slightly unusual for this group. Firstly, because it doesn’t include pasta as one of the main ingredients. Instead of pasta, here are rice and potatoes and even mussels. To be honest, I am not a fan of rice, and can’t eat it every day like pasta, but the result of my first experiment was a good-looking and good-tasting meal.

Tiella alla Barese recipe was born in Apulia, where the oven is essential to the rustic cuisine. Italian people used stone ovens to cook sweet to savory dishes in a tiella, an earthenware pot with a tin lid, and to bake a wide variety of breads. But the good, old, wood-fired oven is also essential for preparation of Apulian meat specialties until today.

Ingredients:
1 cup/200 g rice
800g mussels
300-400 g potatoes
1 onion, finely sliced onto rings
1 clove or garlic
1/2 cup Pecorino cheese
extra virgin olive oil
chopped parsley
Salt and freshly milled pepper

Method:

Cook the rice in water until almost cooked.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Prepare the mussels. Cook them in a pan with the clove or garlic for a few minutes. When the shells are open, strain the juice through a fine sieve or cloth and reserve. Remove the mussels flesh from the shells and set aside.

Peel and finely slice the potatoes.

Grease a ovenproof dish with a olive oil, then add a layer of potatoes. After that add layers of cooked rice, onion rings, Pecorino cheese, parsley and mussels. Repeat the process until all the ingredients have been used. The final layer should be potato.

Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil, pour over the mussel juice, and bake in a preheated oven at 180C for about 45 minutes.

Original Italian name: Tonno Alla Palermitana
Place of origin: Sicily, Southern Italy

In Sicily, Southern part of Italy, The Mattanza is the traditional method of tuna fishing.  This event provides an occasion for the whole village to celebrate a folklore festival. This major tradition gets underway with an morning mass to bless the fishing boats before they sail out with nets. Singing old folk songs as they work, the fishermen start setting up the various corrals of netting in which the tuna will be trapped.

These corrals are anchored by heavy stones to the sea bed. Now, all they have to do is wait. Later the most experienced fisherman has the honour of signaling the actual start of the Mattanza. When the first shoals are sighted , the fishermen sail out early in the morning to start reducing the size of the corrals in which the tuna are now confined. To this day, food festivals are still celebrated in early summer in honour of this fish.

Tuna is a big fish of the sea and can grow up to 14 feet that is around 4 m long and weight several tonnes. Tuna fish can be cooked fresh or else the raw fish fillet can be eaten as carpaccio cut into small slices and sprinkle with a lemon marinade. Old traditional method is  preserved tuna fish in salt, mature for a month and then it can be used as an ingredient in certain salads. However, the most popular method is preserved tuna fish in oil and later used as ingredients for various salads.

For today dinner my choice was broiled tuna fish covered by sardines fillet to serving. This method of cooking tuna fish named in Italy Palermo style tuna fish.

Ingredients:

2 fresh tuna fillets (around 150g each) or 300-400 g tuna fish
1/2 glass of dry white wine
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 spring of rosemary
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 sardine fillets
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method:

To make a  marinade, combine the wine, lemon juice with the rosemary, garlic, a little salt and pepper. Slice the tuna fish into steaks, wash thoroughly, then leave into marinade mixer for several hours.

Remove the fish from the marinade, drain off excess liguid and broil on both sides, basting with the marinade from time to time.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in the skillet, add the sardines and mash into the paste. Spread this over the tuna fish and serve.

Original Italian name: Caponata
Place of origin: Sicily, Southern Italy

Caponata is a typical Sicilian name of one of vegetable dishes with a long and colourful past. Originally, this dish started life as a fish, served in the caupone in taverns around Sicily’s ports. It consisted of squid, celery and eggplants and served with a sweet-and-sour-cream. But nowdays, the Caponata is made exclusively from vegetables -eggplants, onions, celery and tomatoes. Some other vegetables as green olives and carpers should be added to this dish in order to enrich the flavour.

In fact, the most unusual variation of Italian dish is Caponata San Bernardo. It is eggplants combined with a sauce made from plain dark chocolate, almonds,  sugar, vinegar and toasted breadcrumbs.

I felt the chocolate version could be a bit extreme for the first time I cooked this dish so decided to keep up with the classical set of ingredients this time.

Ingredients:

300g eggplants, diced
300g onions, finely chopped
3 celery stalks
100g green olives
350g tomatoes
2 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1,5 tablespoon sugar
4 tablespoon vine vinegar
1,5 tablespoon capers
salt and freshly milled black pepper

Method:

Slice eggplants, sprinkle with salt and place in a sieve to allow the bitter juice to drain off.

Finely dice onions, blanch the celery and cut into small pieces. Cut the olives in half and remove the stones. (I would prefer to buy olives with stones everytime and pitted them on my own if necessary. I found the unpitted olives way more tasteful comparing to pitted ones). Blanch the tomatoes and pass them through a sieve. Rinse the eggplants in cold running water, drain them and pat dry.

Heat the vegetable olive oil in a skillet and saute the eggplants on both sides until golden brown. Place on paper towels to remove any excess oil.

Put the extra virgin olive oil in a saucepan and gently saute the onions. Add the celery, pitted olives and sieved tomatoes and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the sugar, vinegar and simmer for a further 10 minutes until the vinegar fumes have evaropated. Leave the vegetables to cool before serving.

I kept quiet for awhile in my blog but keen to get back to my Italian cooking adventures. I just returned from Fiji holidays where experienced broad variety of different seafood based dishes. Inspired by that and searching through similar Fijian style recipes for dinner I decided to prepare an absolutely simple and gorgeous ad-hoc green salad with prawns for lunch.

The salad recipe is quite simple. Salas leaves, cooked prawns, cherry tomatoes, avocado and sauce that is mix of extra virgin olive oil with red vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste. That ’s it!

Original Italian name: Pasta Alfredo

Pasta with Cream & Parmesan is one of the popular classic Italian recipes originated from Rome. This pasta recipe is incredibly simple and quick to make that gives attractiveness of cooking it for an ordinary midweek lunch or dinner.

Ingredients (serves 4)

for pasta:
400g fettuccine
for sauce:
2 tablespoon butter
300ml double cream
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra to serve
2 tablespoon freshly chopped fresh flat leaf parsley, plus extra to garnish
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Cook the fettuccine until al dente.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large casserole and add cream and Parmesan, season with salt and pepper to taste. Stir over a medium heat until the cheese has melted and sauce has thickened.

Drain the cooked fettuccine thoroughly and add it to the sauce with the chopped parsley. Fold the pasta and sauce together over a medium heat until the strands of pasta are generously coated. Grind more black pepper over and garnish with the extra chopped parsley. Serve at once, with a bowl of grated Parmesan.