Christmas Day

On Christmas day, I learned how to make Bechamel sauce: Basic white sauce

Bechamel Sauce

5 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons flour

 4 cups milk

5 pinches of salt

A couple grates of nutmeg

You have to melt the butter in a sauce pan.Once it is melted, add the flour and mix until all is blended. Add milk and stir until smooth.

Add 5 pinches of salt and nutmeg and you are done.

My Nonna and I made white lasagna out of the Bechamel sauce. It is call white lasagna because it doesn’t have any tomato sauce on it.

My mom and I made lasagna with red sauce. We made fresh ricotta cheese. The word ricotta in Italian means cooked again. For those people who don’t know what ricotta cheese is… it is that crumbly white cheese you find in lasagna.. Sort of like cottage cheese but a little drier.

For Christmas I got lots of presents. The two foodie presents I got were my own set of pots and pans and a FOODIEJR sweat shirt.

My Chili

Once a week my mom let’s me plan a dinner for the family.  I can make anything I want. I have to write out the grocery list and check what we already have and what we need to buy.  Then we go to the grocery store and I have to find all the ingredients.  I have to check all the labels to make sure that there isn’t anything with nuts in it because of my brother’s allergies.

 This week I decided to make my chili.  My brother and sister love it!

 Here’s my recipe:

1 15 ounce can of kidney beans

1 14.5 ounce can of stewed tomatoes

1 15 ounce can of white navy beans

1 cup Morning Star crumblers (optional)

1 medium green pepper

1 medium onion

1 cup spicy V-8 juice

3 teaspoons chili powder

1/2 teaspoon hot pepper flakes

1/4 cup cheddar cheese (optional)

plain yogurt (optional)

First I drained both cans of beans. I put them in a strainer and rinsed them with cold water and then let them sit.  I cut eht bell peppers in half, removed the stems and then the seeds.  Then I chopped up the onion and green pepper into really thin small pieces.  I put about 3 tablespoons of the vegetable juice in the bottom of a large saucepan and put in the onions and green peppers over a medium flame.  I opened the can of stewed tomatoes and cut up any of the tomatoes that were still in really big pieces.   I added all the tomatoes, onions, green peppers, vegetable juice, chili powder and hot pepper flakes.  Then I let it all start to boil.  I turned down the heat and put a lid on the pan and let it simmer for around 10 minutes.   Then I added the both types of beans and the Morning star crumblers (you can add browned ground beef or ground turkey if you like instead) and let them simmer for another 10 minutes.

 Then I dished it out for everyone and then adde a bit of cheddar cheese on top.  My mom and I like it pretty cream so we both added a teaspoon of plain lowfat yogurt.

It was so delicious!!!!

I hope you guys like it as much as we did!!

Basic Pesto

Basic Pesto Recipe

Here is the Pesto recipe that my mom and her family use in so many of their recipes.

About 2 cups of fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
3 medium size cloves of garlic

first the leaves are chopped up in the food processor.. then we add the garlic and last we add the olive oil. We store it in the fridge in a glass jar.

If you are going to use it by itself you can add pine nuts or walnuts but if you are going to use it in other recipes you should probably leave the nuts out. I should add that my little brother has a really severe allergy to nuts. The kind you die from so we are pretty careful that we don’t ever store anything with nuts in it.. just in case.. so their won’t be any mistakes.

This is the pesto recipe I mentioned in the Fish Soup recipe.

Its pretty easy.

FoodieJr.

La Cassòla (Sardo)

La Cassòla (Sardo)
Zuppa di Pesce alla Sarda (Italian)
SARDINIAN FISH SOUP (English) 

5 – 6 pounds assorted fish – we had scorpion fish, white fish, and a mackrel
2/3 cup olive oil
1 large onion quartered
1 tablespoon of homemade pesto (recipe coming)
2 – 3 sprigs parsley, finely chopped
1 pound canned whole peeled tomatoes
pinch of dried hot chill pepper (peperoncino)
slices of day old or dried bread
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Large pan, stew pot.

We cleaned the fish. My uncle cut off their heads.

My aunt had me put the fish heads in a pan. Then we covered them with water and added salt, the onions, and pesto; we let it come to a boil and simmer for about 30 minutes. I used a wooden spoon to break up the fish heads and according to my aunt get the best flavor out. Then I added some hot peppers and the tomatoes.

In another large pan we heated about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. We put the bodies of the fish in the pan in order of cooking time. For us it was first the scorpion fish. After a few minutes we added the white fish and lastly the mackerel.

We strained the Fish stock and added it slowly to the pan with the fish in it until the fish was covered and added the sprigs of parsley. We let simmer until the fish was cooked.

My uncle said that if we would have had some we could have added some cuttlefish at this point or even some octopus.. but we didn’t have any. We added some salt and a bit more chili pepper.

Then we took the fish out.

We put a slice of dry or day old bread in the bottom of each of our soup bowls and then poured the fish soup over it.

The dried bread soaked up half the broth and it was fabulous.

Then we ate the fish! Wow it was fantastic!!!

I’ll post the pictures soon!