Artichokes are one of those ingredients that make you look like a culinary genius just for knowing how to cook them. These aren’t the sad steamed ones from 1990s dinner parties either. We’re talking tender, garlicky, herby chokes simmered in olive oil and wine, with a little chili heat for that Roman attitude. In Italy,…
You know when you’re at a restaurant and they bring out a basket of bread and you’re like, “I could just eat this and leave happy”? That bread is usually focaccia—and it’s rude how good it is. This recipe is all about that pillowy interior, crispy bottom, and a top layer that’s basically garlic-herb heaven….
So, you’ve had meat sauce before. You probably dumped some ground beef and jarred tomato sauce on spaghetti once and thought, “Close enough.” Yeah… nope. Real Bolognese—Ragù alla Bolognese—is a whole other level. It’s thick, rich, meaty, and slowly simmered to perfection. Add pancetta to the mix? Now we’re talking full-on umami explosion. It’s not…
So you’re trying to eat more vegetables, but not in a sad salad-for-dinner kind of way? Enter: stuffed bell peppers—AKA nature’s way of saying, “Hey, what if we turned this crunchy, colorful thing into an edible pasta bowl?” Peperoni Ripieni are an Italian classic, stuffed with a mix of meat, rice, herbs, and cheese, then…
Alright, let’s set the scene. You want pasta. You want heat. You want something that feels fancy AF but only takes like 20 minutes and one pan. You want… ’Nduja. Never heard of it? Imagine if salami and chili paste had a delicious, spicy baby—that’s ‘nduja (pronounced en-doo-ya, BTW). It’s a spreadable, fiery Calabrian sausage…
Alright, real talk—eggplant gets a bad rap. It’s that vegetable everyone pretends to like until it shows up soggy and sad on a plate. But when Sicilians get their hands on it? Total game-changer. Enter Caponata: a wild, wonderful mix of fried eggplant, tomatoes, capers, olives, and vinegar, all cooked down into this sweet, tangy,…