kaye16's Profile

Joined: December 21st, 2009

Pasta e Fagioli from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

An easy and delicious soup. I used lardons for the meat. We were thinking that chicken sausages would be good, saucisse de volaille or merguez de volaille, cut in quarters lenghtwise, then into little... read more >

recipe reviews (1461)
book reviews (64)
useful review votes (310)

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kaye16's Reviews

18 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 18Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

Marcella Cucina

By Marcella Hazan
William Morrow Cookbooks - 1997

Rich and yummy. Serves 6? Maybe as a light meal or lunch.

useful (1)  

A very good soup, and easy to assemble, although it does use a lot of pots. I forgot to save the barley-cooking water, which would only have improved this yummy soup. Serves 3 as a dinner soup, as least at our house.

useful (1)  

Peeling the bell peppers is a bit tedious, but otherwise this is an easy recipe. Good even for non-aficionados of bell peppers.

Yellow bps are pretty on green pasta; red ones should be on white pasta.

Note-to-self suggests forgoing the butter at the end, using a bit of the pasta-cooking water instead.

useful (1)  

A nice vegetable-based pasta sauce.

- I made a halfish recipe, which made an ample one-dish dinner for two.
- I skipped the salting/draining of the eggplants.
- I found the instructions for how to cut up the eggplants a bit confusing and ended by making fat-finger kind of strips.
- There's a long simmer/stew time for the sauce near the end, which I somehow overlooked. I shortened it a bit, which was fine.

Hazan reports that the sauce could be made ahead of time, which would be nice since the cooking is a bit long.
But worth the time and effort.

useful (1)  

This was the second time I've cooked rabbit, and this was much more successful than my previous attempt. This isn't a hard recipe, but quite a lot of clock time is involved, marinating and long cooking.

Because of the long marinade in vinegar, I was afraid the sauce would not be very pleasant, but it was quite nice in fact. The remaining sour and the sweet of the bell peppers balanced each other out.

Also I was worried because only 1/2 cup of wine is added as liquid, to deglaze the pan, and most of that had evaporated by the time I covered the pan to cook for a long while. In the end, quite a lot of liquid "appeared" and I boiled some off before serving.

Might consider buying just some hind quarters to do this again, rather than dealing with a whole rabbit (head and innards were included with this one).

This kept well. Reheated leftovers were very good.

useful (0)  

This is so simple and one of our favorite really quick dinners. You can prepare the sauce and a salad while the water boils for the pasta. Scrumptious.

useful (4)  

The was was good enough, but contained a huge amount of juniper berries. Usually recipes call for one or two berries. This one asked 1/4cup of them. The sauce was marked by little black dots. They are a bit bitter, but I didn't mind this so much; my husband pulled out many of his.
Glad I tried it. Won't make it again.

useful (0)  

With raw tomatoes, this is kind of like a tomato salad served on pasta. Peeling the tomatoes is a bit tedious, but what a delicious result!
- The sauce is supposed to sit for 1hr. Mine sat only for the time required to boil water and cook the spaghetti. Hard to imagine it getting better.
- The instructions say to assemble the sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Since you're going to toss the spaghetti in the same bowl, small will definitely not do. The middle-sized bowl of the 3-bowl pyrex set held the sauce (for a half recipe); the smaller bowl would have been too small. I put the pasta back in the pasta pot and did the tossing there.

useful (1)  

Not my favorite from this book. Good, but nothing special. Made a half recipe with home-made fettucine.

useful (1)  

A nice, simple sauce.
The instructions are a bit hard to decipher—the option to use fresh or frozen peas is confusingly presented.
The photo seems to show another kind of ham, finely cut, rather than boiled ham in 1/4" wide strips.

useful (0)  

I made a half recipe of this with plain old canned-in-olive-oil anchovies, plus 1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper. The anchovies dissolve into the sauce, making this palatable for non-anchovy people. We're not big bell pepper fans either, but enjoyed this.

useful (0)  

"Scrumptious!" was my comment on first making this, and dittoed subsequent times.

I use about a pound of mixed 'shrooms, sometimes including some dried ones if no interesting fresh ones are available, to make the whole recipe of sauce; serve this for two with a regular recipe of pasta (1 cup flour + 1 egg).

Nice to make fresh pasta for this recipe, but not required.

useful (1)  

A really simple and delicious risotto.

useful (0)  

Very tasty and fairly quick.

I had a skillet with bacon fat left from breakfast and used that instead of olive oil and pancetta. Really tasty.

A half recipe was fine for pasta for two. I used casareccia; not an especially good choice. Spaghettini or spaghetti, as Hazan suggests would be good. We also thought orecchiette might be good.

useful (0)  

A really nice, somewhat unusual pasta sauce. I made a halfish recipe as dinner for two.
- If you boiled the cabbage leaves ahead of time, this would be quite quick to prepare. Don't think they would mind a sit in the fridge.
- I needed a bit more than half the cream, I expect because my skillet was large enough to evaporate it too quickly.

useful (1)  

A good soup, easy. Whole recipe served 2 as dinner. The "leek dissolving" step (2) takes quite some time, but not much attention is required.

useful (0)  

A nice pasta sauce, best made when the garden overflows with zucchini and tomatoes are at their best.
A bit of prep work required (slicing the zukes, peeling/seeding/chopping the toms), but it comes together easily after that.

useful (0)  

A nice, quick pasta dish. I used up what are probably the last zucchini from the garden this year and one of the last tomatoes.

Think the first cooking of the zukes is a bit on the long side. I would start checking at under 10min. Maybe mine were too thinly cut? By the time they spent another 10min with the tomatoes they were a bit soggier than I prefer.

Tasty. Wanted a good dose of salt at the table and lots of freshly ground black pepper.

useful (3)