• Cheesy Mustard Mortadella Ditalini

    A big bowl of super cheesy greens, pork, and pasta is simply go-to comfort for me, and this version with ditalini, mortadella, and a creamy mustard sauce is one of my favorites!

  • Plantain and Black Bean Tacos

    Because I work at a burrito shop that has great tacos, I don’t usually make them at home. The craving came up the other day though for plantain tacos so I whipped some up! They were much different than what we have at work so I was happy that I had made them. I highly recommend these as a filling vegetarian dinner and something new to eat next week!

  • Mortadella Fritters

    One of the best moments from my recent trip to Italy was exploring the Bacari in Venice and sampling the bar bites known as Cicchetti, Italy’s version of tapas. My family and I basically stick out as tourists and can be spotted from a mile away. As we piled into these hole in the wall spots down the side alleys of Venice in the pouring rain we would first get interesting looks from the waiter/bartender/food preparer. Once he could tell that we sort of knew what we were doing with little things like ordering wine as “ombra” instead of asking for house red, everyone relaxed a bit. In the Venice bacari, ombra means a small glass of local wine. Once we got settled with our wine and dried off a bit, it was time to get to the food. All of the small bites would be lined up behind a glass case and it was easy to point at what we wanted. Little bit of this, couple of these, maybe one or 2 of the weird looking one, and we were ready to eat! We went to 3 or 4 bacari during our time in Venice, some more traditional, and others more modern, and we sampled tons of Cicchetti, most of which I hope to recreate for posts in the coming months.

  • Mortadella

    The third and final meat at the meat slicer party this past weekend was a homemade mortadella. Making the mortadella was quite the undertaking but I had a lot of fun doing it! I used a recipe from Marco Canora that was published in Lucky Peach #4 and it came out absolutely delicious. Big thanks to Moody’s Delicatessen for selling me the sausage casings in an emergency!

  • Roast Beef With Crispy Shallots

    The second meat at my meat slicer party last weekend was roast beef. Roast beef is insanely simple to make at home, especially when you have a meat slicer to cut it paper thin. If you make this same exact recipe and try and cut it with a knife it is going to come out a little chewy unless you really are able to cut it very thin. Anyways, roast beef is roast beef right? Yea it was perfectly cooked and seasoned, and really fresh, but still just roast beef. What made these sandwiches truly memorable though, was the crispy shallots and hint of horseradish mayo, along with fresh baked onion rolls from a local bakery near my friends house who hosted the party.

  • Porchetta

    Porchetta is normally eaten as a roast for a special occasion dinner, but when I was in Italy recently, we actually had it as a thin sliced sandwich meat. We got some porchetta, salami, and cheese for a train ride from Venice to Florence, and I was completely hooked on the porchetta. I happen to have a commercial meat slicer in my possession, so I thought it would be a fun theme for a party to make some different sliced meats for sandwiches. So here we are, lunchmeat week on TFimB! This porchetta tasted EXACTLY like the one I had in Italy which is pretty lucky because I just sort of winged the recipe. It was fairly easy to make and everyone loved it so I would consider it a big success!

  • Curried Cauliflower and Chickpea Fresh Rolls

    I had some co-workers over for a quick bite on the way out to a “Team Building Event” (bar crawl). Had to stick to veggies because one is vegetarian, but I wanted to make something light anyways. I needed it to be really delicious because these people cook my recipes at Cafe Burrito every day and I wanted to show them that I was good at cooking other types of food too. I decided on making a simple cauliflower and chickpea curry and rolling it into some fresh rolls. I made a quick yogurt raita as a dipping sauce and the rolls were a big success.

  • Spicy Chile Basil Tofu Tacos

    I thought it was pretty convenient when Pepcid wanted to do a sponsored post with me. I don’t know if you guys have seen this here blog of mine, but if you have you probably can believe that I get heartburn from time to time. My plan was to make an aggressively spicy feast for my friends and see if Pepcid was strong enough to prevent everyone from getting heartburn! We started with this appetizer of Polenta Stuffed Mushrooms that I posted on Tuesday, and then we moved on to the main event, these crazy hot chile basil tofu tacos.

  • Fiery Polenta Stuffed Mushroom Roulette

    Some friends and I got together this past weekend to have a spicy feast and it was lots of fun! I was inspired to create the feast when the heartburn medicine Pepcid came to me and wanted to work with me on a sponsored blog post. THAT blog post is coming on Thursday, but this is the appetizer that we had that day. I got the idea for roulette style spicy apps from a super spicy dinner called Hell Night that is hosted a few times a year at a restaurant in Cambridge called East Coast Grill. What they do is give you one item per person at your table (I had it as meatballs) and most are mild, one is medium, and one is insanely hot. I instead made 75% of these stuffed mushrooms pretty hot, and 25% of them CRAZY HOT, and we all just started chowing down.

  • Salmon Burgers with Green Bean Slaw

    Salmon burgers usually have an asian flair to them at least when I have seen them out at restaurants, but I was more in the mood for very simple flavors that really felt like spring and showcased the fresh salmon. I grabbed some vibrant green beans and ramps at the store and put together a quick slaw with a mustard vinaigrette as a topping for these burgers. Some hard boiled eggs and nice whole grain rolls pulled everything together. Some of you are probably grilling this weekend, and I highly suggest trying out these burgers as something different for a small get together.

  • Chorizo

    Mexican chorizo is not really that common in New England, in fact, most people around here think you are talking about the much more common portuguese variety when you say the name. At my burrito shop, we used to get fresh Mexican chorizo that was delicious, but then the supplier kept sending the portuguese stuff by mistake and it was starting to annoy me. We are a burrito shop man! One day we ran out of the mexican kind so I whipped up a quick homemade version after skimming a few recipes. It came out ok, but everyone REALLY liked the stuff we were bringing in much better. This reaction made me really want to make chorizo better than the store bought one, so I tested recipe after recipe for several months until I got it right! Now we not only save money on it, but everyone loves the stuff! If you happen to live close enough to Cafe Burrito, come in and try some on a burrito or taco (it’s especially good on our breakfast burritos), But if not, here is the super easy recipe to make some on your own!

  • Sushi Arancini

    Short grain rice is used in making sushi and also risotto, and because of this, in a pinch you could use arborio rice to make sushi, or sushi rice to make risotto. With this connection in mind, I had been searching for ideas on how to combine the two dishes, but nothing made sense. Adding raw fish to risotto would either cook the fish if you stirred it in, or result in warm raw fish with hot rice which doesn’t sound appetizing at all. I finally came up with this idea to make fried arancini (normally made with leftover risotto) out of prepared sushi rice, then letting it cool, cutting in half, and popping the fish on top. These little bites came out fantastic! They had a fun texture with crunchy breading and crispy rice that gave way to the soft chewy rice inside. The flavors were familiar to any maki roll that has the crunchy bits on it.