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Crowd Pleasing, Simple Recipes to Avoid Large Dinner Party Stress

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A lot of us have been in that large dinner party throwing situation, where we feel like being creative, trying something new or complex, only to end up being completely stressed out the night of the party and not enjoying the very company that made you want to have the dinner in the first place. I’ve done this more times than I can count…but the good news is that I’ve learned my lesson (maybe!) and how to avoid such stress…and so will you!

For the last five years, I’ve hosted a big family dinner for my Italian family each summer, now a fun annual event we all look forward to each year. The first couple times, I attempted new recipes or ideas (even this year I tried making homemade mozzarella day of…what was I thinking??) only to finally realize after some failed attempts that what I needed most for these large dinners was to rely on the simple and familiar recipes that I already knew. Not only did I reduce my stress 100x, but I also was able to enjoy my family and company by spending less time in the kitchen cooking.

Italian cooking makes this concept easy, as a lot of Italian recipes are actually very simple and fast, but fresh, and absolutely delicious. So, the answer to making crowd pleasing, simple food is this…focus on recipes that require less cooking and instead more prep, and with as few (but fresh) ingredients as possible! So many Italian recipes are just a matter of a lot of prep (washing, chopping, arranging, etc) and are much faster than slaving over a hot stove hours on end having to time each and every step.

With that said, time to introduce these crowd pleasers! One appetizer, one side, and one entree below to get you started and get your creative juices flowing…

Appetizer: Pecorino and Figs with Walnuts and Honey (serves 8-10 people)

I learned about this dish during a trip to Italy when my sister’s study abroad host parents served this before dinner. Traditionally, it only includes pecorino cheese, walnuts, and honey, but I’ve added figs which go with those flavors well, and are one of my favorite Italian appetizers.

What you’ll need: 1 container green figs, 1 block of pecorino cheese, 1/2 cup walnuts, honey for drizzling.

Start by selecting a flat, large platter. Cut each fig into quarters and spread out on the platter. Using a knife, cut off medium chunks of pecorino until the block is gone. These are not neat cuts; push the end of the knife into the end of the cheese and pull off a chunk. Messy, varying shapes gives the dish an elegant, yet rustic presentation. Spread the pecorino chunks onto the platter. Give the walnuts a rough chop if you bought them whole (or buy already chopped walnuts). Sprinkle the walnuts across the platter of figs and pecorino. Lastly, using a honey dipper or spoon, drizzle honey across all the ingredients on the platter. Add a little serving fork, some appetizer plates, and you’re ready to serve and mangia (eat)! See my point from earlier? This was just all prep and takes only minutes to prepare, but fresh ingredients and, I guarantee, delicious!

Main Entree: Chicken Cacciatore (serves 6-8 people)

This traditional Italian dish hits the spot every time. I’ve used this for a handful of events, from my annual Italian dinner of 15-20 people to an anniversary party of 75 people. Every time, it proves to be simple, delicious, and doesn’t demand a lot of my time or attention.

What you’ll need: 12-14 pieces of chicken; a mixture of both thighs and drumsticks, 1/2 cup water, 1-28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes (fine if it comes blended with herbs), 1-6 ounce can of black or green olives, 1 dozen cherry tomatoes, 2 bell peppers (1 green and 1 red), 1 medium onion (yellow, red, or cippolini), sea salt/course pepper/dried oregano for sprinkling, and extra virgin olive oil for drizzling.

Start off by browning the chicken. In a large pan on the stove top, on medium high heat, coat the pan with olive oil. Once the pan is hot, place the chicken pieces skin side down. Only add a handful of pieces, or whatever comfortably fits, at one time. You don’t want to squish the chicken in the pan, and you can repeat this as many times you need until all the chicken is done. Brown the chicken for 3-4 minutes, flip onto the other side and brown for another 3-4 minutes. This gets the skin browned so it gets crispy in the oven later instead of soft. As you finish each batch of chicken, move the chicken into either a roasting pan or a paella pan for the oven (anything big enough to hold all the chicken and has sides to hold the sauce and juices).

Once all the chicken is in the roasting or paella pan, pour the crushed tomatoes over the top and around the sides of the chicken, and pour the water into the bottom of the pan (not over the top of the chicken). Add in the whole olives and cherry tomatoes. Chop the bell peppers and onion into medium chunks and add to the pan. Sprinkle the top of the chicken and vegetables with salt, pepper, and dried oregano. Lastly, drizzle some olive oil over the whole pan of ingredients.

Heat oven to 350° and cook for 2.5 hours (uncovered). This dish is cooked low and slow, which will result in the chicken being very tender and literally falling off the bone! Great thing about this dish is it takes less than 30 mins to prep, and then you leave it alone for the next 2.5 hours, giving you time to work on your other dishes. Pull it out of the oven, transfer to a serving platter, and serve immediately. Remember to include all the juices and sauce on the serving platter and use a platter with slightly elevated sides.

Side Dish: Eggplant Caprese (makes 24 individual servings/pieces)

Caprese insalata (salad) is one of the easiest, traditional Italian recipes you can find. It’s simplicity and few ingredients make it a large dinner party go-to, and is one of my family’s favorites. Caprese salad is simply slices (rounds) of tomatoes and mozzarella topped with a basil leaf. Rather than a traditional American salad that is tossed in a bowl, these are prepped as individual servings, and look beautiful spread out on a large, flat platter. Not to mention, the ingredients are the colors of the Italian flag (red, white, and green) so it can’t get anymore traditional Italian than that. 🙂 The Eggplant Caprese I’m going to share with you is a slight twist on the traditional caprese; the same ingredients, but I’ve added rounds of grilled eggplant. First time I made this, it was a hit with all my guests!

What you’ll need: 2 large eggplants, 3 large heirloom tomatoes, 2 large balls or logs of mozzarella, a small bunch of basil, extra virgin olive oil for drizzling, and sea salt/course pepper for sprinkling.

I like to begin by slicing and prepping all the ingredients at once, because after that, you are mostly building and arranging them together on a platter. Very fast! So, start by slicing the eggplants into rounds, about 1/4in thick. Then slice the tomatoes into 1/4in thick rounds, and same with the mozzarella. Line all of these up on a cutting board.

Heat a grill pan on the stove to medium low, and lightly cover in olive oil. Drizzle olive oil on all of the eggplant rounds, on both sides (eggplant absorbs moisture very quickly so it’s okay to be generous with the olive oil). Place your cutting board with the tomatoes and mozzarella as well as your serving platter to the side of the stove as you’ll be arranging the caprese as you’re grilling batches of eggplant. As many as you can fit on the grill at once, place the eggplant on the grill and cook for approx. 3 mins on each side. There should be visible grill marks on either side. Move these to your serving platter and spread out each round side by side so they are not overlapping. Immediately add a round of mozzarella on top of each eggplant, and then a round of tomato on top of each mozzarella. Putting the mozzarella on first before the tomatoes for eggplant caprese will result is slightly warm and melted mozzarella- yum!

Repeat these steps for every batch of eggplant you make. You can arrange the mozzarella and tomatoes while you’re waiting for the next batch of eggplant to cook. When all the eggplant is done and all rounds are arranged, place a leaf or two of basil on top of each individual caprese. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil over the entire platter, and finish it off by cracking some pepper and sea salt over the top. Finito (finished)! Serve these using a flat (pie) server.

I hope you find these three recipes to be as enjoyable, delicious, and stress free as I do! Don’t let the ideas stop here though- these are just examples of recipes with few ingredients and little cook time, using all fresh ingredients. Keep these recipe concepts in mind, and try coming up with some yourself! Have one to share? I would love to hear about it- feel free to comment below!

*Cooking tip: Don’t get caught up with measurements while cooking- especially for Italian food. All three of these recipes I shared, if you slightly altered the amount of ingredients you use, it wouldn’t matter. When I selected my eggplant, tomatoes, and mozzarella for Eggplant Caprese for example, I eyeballed how much of each ingredient I would need. Just make as many servings as you can out of the ingredients you buy. Learning to be a successful cook is learning and understanding your ingredienits and how they work with one another. Adding or subtracting ingredients is a matter of reacting to your food as you’re cooking, tasting, testing, and learning how all the flavors come together. Don’t be afraid to mess up (because you rarely can)!

Our most recent, very successful Italian dinner night!

 

Italian word of the day:

cena (ch-eh-na) = dinner

 

 

 

7 Ways to Immediately Improve the Quality of Your Food

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On a regular basis, usually while scrolling through social media sites, I come across posted articles offering up tips and information about eating healthy, and more often than not when I get part way through the article, I am cringing at the “facts” and information being shared with readers, as the information is often misguided, misunderstood, and sometimes even flat out wrong.

This happens beyond internet articles though. One of the most obnoxious tv commercials I’ve seen lately is for either vegetable or canola oil (can’t remember), where a woman is pushing her grocery cart down a store aisle and pauses to grab the olive oil, but then looks over at the vegetable (or canola) oil, puts the olive oil back, and grabs the other oil instead. The commercial ends with some “facts” about why this hydrogenated oil is a better choice than olive oil. All I can say is…you have to be kidding me. It makes me laugh every time.

So I’m here to clear up some information for you and hopefully provide you with what I truly believe to be good  & accurate information. And I admit, a lot of the information out there is contradicting and it’s sometimes hard to decide what’s right. Honestly though, some of it is just common sense, and I like to take a logical approach to eating and living a healthy lifestyle.

With that said, here is the bottom line rule to immediately improve the quality of the food you eat, resulting in a healthier and more enjoyable food and eating experience: cut out processed foods and added sugar. 

You may have heard this before, but it’s a big project to take on, and you may be thinking it’s easier said than done. Well being someone who has actually done this, and gotten to a point where these things are very limited in my daily diet, I have some specific tips to share with you on how to get started and get to a point where you aren’t regularly eating processed foods and added sugar. It’s hard to break old habits, but after some continuous effort and conscious decision making, it’ll quickly become part of your routine and be much easier than you think. So here we go…

1. Start reading the ingredients on the back of items you purchase. The reason I didn’t mention counting calories or cutting out fat as rules to eating healthy, is because they aren’t nearly as important as the ingredients that are actually in your food. I barely use the nutritional table on the back of items, but rather I read the list of ingredients. Now, there are so many ingredients that you can read but have no idea what they are. My suggestion is to do some research and inform yourself of what they are, or use my simple rule which is, if I was making this myself, would I use these ingredients to make this food? If the answer is no, I don’t buy the item. For example, I came across jarred roasted peppers, where the ingredients listed included sugar. Why would you add sugar to roasted peppers? It’s quite unnecessary. After some looking, I found another option, where the ingredients listed were simply peppers, olive oil, garlic, sea salt. That’s the one I bought. Once you start reading labels, you will quickly realize how much unnecessary sugar is added to so many things that wouldn’t normally call for sugar.

2. Learn to cook and make food from scratch. I think a lot of people buy packaged food that they could make at home because they are intimidated by cooking or they feel like they don’t have time to cook. Cooking your own food, and making food from scratch, will always be healthier than any pre-made option in a store. Hands down. Cooking is actually quite easy (and fun!), and just takes some practice. Once you learn the basics, you can easily throw something together on any given day using the ingredients you have in your fridge. I also share a lot of fun recipes on this blog- check them out! As for making time- we are all busy, but in my opinion, my health is worth my time. Find the time and use it.

3. Limit your intake of white flour based carbs and simple carbs. White flour and simple carbs turn into sugar once eaten, and are overly processed- not a good combo. There are so many delicious alternatives for carbs out there! Try complex carbs such as quinoa, farro, barley, or harvest grains (Trader Joe’s) as alternatives for pasta and white rice. Replace sliced white bread and potato bread with sprouted whole grain bread. Now, being Italian, I don’t expect anyone to cut out pasta all together ;), but limit it, and when you can, at least buy whole wheat, whole grain, or organic pasta.

4. Completely cut out sugary drinks. Soda, energy drinks, most juices, sweetened teas, etc.- just say no! These have ridiculous amounts of added sugar, and a lack of nutrition. Stick to water, sparkling water, coffee, tea, and vegetable juices. If you want fruit juice, buy or blend up a fruit drink that only includes fruit, vegetables, and either water, soy milk, or almond milk. Of course these will still have sugar, because there’s natural sugar in fruit, but at least there’s no added sugar. Want to make your water more interesting? Throw slices of lemon, lime, or cucumber into your water…delicious and fresh!

5. Limit your intake of hydrogenated and omega-6 oils. Oils like vegetable, canola, and corn are common hydrogenated oils and are high in omega-6’s.  Our bodies actually need a lot more omega-3’s than omega-6’s, which are healthy fats, and the following oils will give you just that: olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil. There are tons of other oils, but these are my favorite. I use olive oil for almost everything. There’s a reason the mediterranean diet is found to be one of the healthiest in the world (olive oil!). Not only do you want to avoid buying bottles of hydrogenated or oils high in omega-6’s for cooking, but also limit the amount of packaged foods you buy that list hydrogenated oils in their ingredients. Note: you’ll notice some packaged foods are trying to be “healthier” and list “non-hydrogentated” oils in their ingredients, which is good because they are less processed, but they still aren’t oils high in omega-3’s and good fats, which is why I would still avoid those oils (canola, vegetable, corn) as much as possible. Plus, olive oil just has so such complex flavor and is delicious with so many things!

6. Make your own snacks and limit pre-packaged snacks. Realistically, you won’t cut out pre-packaged snacks all together, but by following rule #1 (reading ingredients on packages) and making your own snacks whenever possible, you can make snacking a lot healthier. Here are some examples of super quick snacks you can make. 1. Chop up cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, then cover in a drizzle of olive oil, sea salt, and pepper. 2. Cut an avocado in half, drizzle with olive oil, chopped garlic, sea salt, and pepper. These are just a couple ideas and take only five minutes to make. It’s worth that five minutes! They taste 100x better than a bag of chips from a vending machine. Look out for my next post which will be a list of amazing yet healthy snacks and how to make them!

7. Pack your lunch for work instead of eating out. Eating out is convenient, but you don’t have 100% control of what’s in your food, either because options are limited or because ingredients in restaurants or fast food places aren’t listed or easily available. And plus, who’s going to stand there and ask someone for a list of ingredients in their food? Very unlikely. The better choice is to pack a lunch. It sounds time consuming at first, but it’s just about creating a routine, and once that routine is begun, it’s pretty easy. I pack a lunch every single day for work, and once you get good at it, you can do so in 30 minutes. And I’m not talking PB&J sandwiches…I’m talking healthy, delicious, nutritious food!

I hope these tips are ones that you can incorporate into your eating habits, and find helpful. Healthy eating isn’t a chore, it’s simply about eating high quality, fresh, and delicious food that isn’t overly processed or that has various unnecessary and questionable ingredients added to it. Eating in the Italian culture (and many cultures) is an important and treasured part of life, and is supposed to be an experience…so make it an amazing one!

If you like what you read, please subscribe via email so you can receive updates when I make new posts!

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Italian word of the day:

Olio d’oliva (n) = Olive oil

 

Handmade Gnocchi with my Italian Grandmother

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I didn’t make gnocchi with my Grandma until I was 22 years old, despite being surrounded by her Italian culture and traditions since I was born. It was one of those experiences we unfortunately never made time for; either school, sports, or childhood activities got in the way, filling up my sisters’ and my own schedule every weekend. There are always moments like these that are regrettable, but in the same thought though, I feel truly blessed to have finally had this cooking experience with her, even though it was much delayed.

Although my Grandma enjoyed cooking and had her share of family recipes, I wouldn’t say she was the typical Italian Grandmother in the kitchen, the cooking guru who cooked day in and day out, teaching the rest of the family these important skills. I actually learned most of what I know about cooking from my dad; a bit of a break away from the tradition of the Italian mother or grandmother being the family cook. My dad fulfilled this role instead, passing on the necessary skills to prepare Italian cuisine to my sisters and I. What my Grandma contributed though was the culture, the language, and the tradition behind the cooking. A significant aspect that could only be taught by someone from the older generation, who lived the first generation experience in America, directly learning all she knew about Italian culture from her immigrant parents.

This is what made the day my sister and I made gnocchi with my Grandma so special. Not only did we learn how to make gnocchi, we learned the tradition behind the process from the way you knead your dough with your hands, to dropping the egg into the middle of the flour, to the use of the fork and rolling the gnocchi down the fork, “giù,” to create the authentic indents in each gnocchi piece. As the four year anniversary of her death recently passed, I dedicate this July post to her and to our once in a lifetime experience of making gnocchi with our Italian grandmother.

Now, we begin! This recipe will feed a family of 5. (Gnocchi is very filling; servings are not as large as other types of pasta)

Tools you will need: Flat workspace (pastry mat works well, cloth or silicone), potato masher, knife, table fork, baking sheet, large pot

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Ingredients:

2 pounds brown russet potatoes

Pinch of salt

2 cups all purpose flour (*this is not exact; may need another 1/4-1/2 cup if dough is still sticky)

1 egg

1. You will begin the process by boiling the potatoes. To prep the potatoes for boiling, wash, peel, and cut the potatoes into halves. Place the potato halves into a bowl of cold water, and let the potatoes sit and soak for 30 mins. This is a trick I learned to ridden the potatoes of some of their starch. As you are waiting, fill up a large pot with water, a pinch of salt, and bring to a boil. Drain the potatoes out of the bowl of cold water, and add them to the pot with the boiling water. Cook potatoes until tender. Test tenderness by sticking a fork through a potato piece; the fork should easily slip into the potato. The potato should not break apart though and that would be a sign they are too soft and overcooked. Drain potatoes into a strainer and let cool for a few minutes.

2. Move to your work surface: place about half of your flour (1 cup) on the surface. Then directly on top of the flour, take your potato masher, place one potato half at a time in the masher, and squeeze out over the flour. Repeat this until all the potatoes have been mashed. Add the rest of the flour (1 more cup) on top of the mashed potatoes, and mix the heap of flour and potatoes with your hands. Mix just until ingredients are combined. (In the photo below, the potatoes are being mashed into a bowl first, and then transferred to the flat mat. This is not necessary; they can be mashed right onto the flour.)

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3. Make an indent or small hole in the middle of the mixture with your hand. Drop the egg into the indent, and slowly mix egg into flour and potato mixture. It is crucial you make an indent to add the egg. Otherwise it just slips off the top of the mixture and runs all over your work space. This part can be a bit messy! Knead with hands until dough is no longer sticky. Test by poking with your finger- the dough should not stick to your finger. This is where you can add a little extra flour if the dough just won’t loose it’s stickiness. Be careful to not over knead; stop as soon as the dough is not sticky. I find it helpful to wash my hands at this point as there’s usually dough all in-between your fingers. This will make it easier to handle the dough in the next step.

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4. Clean or wipe your workspace, or move to a new one if you have the option. Lightly flour the workspace. Divide the dough evenly into four parts. Working with one part at a time, roll out a part with your hands into a log about 3/4in-1in in diameter. Apply pressure evenly with your hands, and roll by moving hands from center towards the roll’s ends. Repeat this until the log has lengthened and about the diameter mentioned above. Log should be even from one end to the other.

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5. Take a knife and cut the log into approx. 3/4in long pieces.

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6. Now it’s time for “giù!” As my Grandma and her mother did, the traditional way to shape each piece of gnocchi is to push each piece down the ridges of a table fork. As my Grandma taught us this motion she would say “giù, down the fork!” as giù in Italian means down or downwards. This is a tricky motion that takes some practice; I squished enough gnocchi pieces in my experience by applying too much pressure. Be light with your hands and find a consistent pressure and motion. Here we go-

Hold your fork in one hand and lean the bottom of the prongs against your work surface. Take one of the 3/4in pieces of dough and place at the top of the fork’s prongs, holding it with your thumb. Then with your thumb, press lightly and roll the piece of dough downwards to the bottom of the fork’s prongs. The piece of dough should roll as it’s moving and when finished is covering your thumb. And that is how gnocchi pieces have lines on one side and an indent (from your thumb) on the other side! Cool huh? There are lots of tools and makers available these days to assist you, but I think it’s much more rewarding to do all this by hand, knowing your hands created the design and shape of each individual gnocchi piece.

  

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Repeat the motion of rolling the dough pieces down the fork until you finish the roll you cut up. When finished repeat steps 5 and 6 for each dough part, until all dough has been made into gnocchi pieces. After 100 or so giù motions down the fork, you will be an expert! 😉

7. Line up the gnocchi pieces as you work on a baking sheet; there will be many pieces and you may need more than one sheet. Do not stack the pieces as they will stick and their forms will be ruined. If you want to freeze the gnocchi and save for later cooking, place gnocchi is large, flat container with lid, keeping the gnocchi in flat layers, dividing each layer with wax paper. This has worked very well for me in keeping the gnocchi separated.

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8. If you want to cook immediately, boil a pot of water with a pinch of salt. Add gnocchi pieces to the boiling water. They only take a few minutes to cook so don’t walk away! As soon as the gnocchi rises to the top of the water and floats on the surface, they are done. Using a slotted spoon, remove the gnocchi from the water and place into a large bowl. Do not drain water as it will take many batches to finish boiling the gnocchi; you do not want to boil them all at once and crowd the pot. As you are working on the batches, add a little olive oil or butter to the already cooked gnocchi in the bowl to keep them from sticking.

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Cover with your favorite sauce, and your gnocchi is ready to eat! Sauces for gnocchi can range from simple, like butter and sage, or olive oil and herbs, to more complex, such as a red tomato sauce or Italian cheese sauce (usually a mix of Italian cheeses and referred to as “quattro formaggio.”) I will cover some sauce recipes for pasta in a future post.

You will never look at store bought gnocchi the same way again! Homemade pasta is a truly authentic experience, and I am grateful I have experienced this tradition to be able to pass this on to my own kids one day. Molto grazie Grandma————————♥

If this post has inspired you to try making gnocchi, please post a picture of your own gnocchi making experience below- I would love to hear about it!

Enjoy & mangia!

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Italian word of the day:

Cucinare (v) = to cook  *(pronunciation: coo-chee-nar-ay)