marcella hazan essentials of italian cooking recipes

So, here a few minimal changes that I made and some observations:1) I used 4 chicken sausages instead of pork. The resulting cabbage was just so silky and smooth. Meanwhile, you brown the sausages and then place the sausages in the shrunken cabbage and cook (lid on) for another 20 minutes. You stir it down and cook it at medium heat for about 45 minutes. Essentially, you saute chopped red cabbage with olive oil and garlic. Either that, or the semolina to milk ratio just didn't work for my semolina. The recipe implies you should be stirring the semolina on low heat, but I think I would have to crank it back to medium, and my stove runs pretty hot.

This made it seem a little more like a rich breakfast dish than dinner. Sure enough, in the oven it turned to mush, albeit a pretty good tasting mush. Once it cooled, it was too soft to cut into rounds, so I rolled it into balls, realizing this was not a good sign. Since little had changed in the last five minutes of stirring (despite turning up the heat), I decided maybe this was it, and spread it out on the counter. However, I had gotten up to 25 minutes and still didn't have quite the consistency recommended. She also suggests that it should be ready after 15-20 minutes of stovetop stirring. Hazan suggests that if you don't cook the semolina with the milk on the stove long enough, it will fall apart in the oven.

I had some difficulty with these gnocchi. Red and yellow bell pepper sauce with sausages.The finished dish was far greater than the sum of its parts and the ham/mushroom combo was delightful in the light, creamy sauce. It also suggests onions or shallots and I opted for shallots. The recipe calls for cremini or button mushrooms and I opted for the former.

I did appreciate Ms Hazan’s specificity around cooking the mushrooms and was quite pleased to get precisely the results she described in the exact amount of time she suggested. I should also note that I didn’t make my own fettuccine and used a fresh from the Italian market version instead. 195 - I don’t have a lot of experience cooking from Marcella’s books but I do recall her recipes to be especially prescriptive so I selected this one, in part, because it wasn’t overly verbose therefore it didn’t demand much of my time in advance.

Marcella hazan essentials of italian cooking recipes