A Home Cooked Meal

Making the layers of eggplant parmesan.

A storm blew in a couple of days ago.  We watched it coming up the valley.  It was dry where we stood but you could see sheets of rain falling into the sea.  In a few minutes it moved onto shore and was such a wall of water you couldn't see anything behind it.  The sea disappeared, next the town, and soon the rain was slapping against the tiles of our balcony.  Since this was supposed to keep up for a couple of days we thought it might be a good time to stay indoors and start making some home cooked meals.  With the rain, also came our first credit card bill with all those fine dinners accounted for.  We added up the monthly cost of our restaurant frenzy and it was a bad figure.   Another reason to find our way around the kitchen.

Steve and I had taken a cooking class together at one of the local restaurants when his sister was out visiting.  The restaurant was Max and the instructor's name was Pasquale.  I loved listening to him describe how to make the dishes.  That is how the class went.  He talked about what needed to be done, while one of the chefs did the cooking, and we watched and took notes.  It was something about the way he spoke English and the melody of it that I think could make anything sound good.  He could be describing boiling brussel sprouts and I would have thought "Mmm..those brussel sprouts are going to be delicious!".   The fact is though, the food tasted as good as he made it sound.  It did not include brussel sprouts.

We learned a few dishes, one being eggplant parmesan.  We tried that on our first rainy night.  It only required five ingredients; eggplant, mozzarella, parmigiana, tomato sauce, and basil.  A key was first coating the eggplant in salt and sugar to remove the bitter juices from it.  Ella and Samantha had a good time putting the layers together.  Amazingly, it turned out really well, maybe not to the Max standard but not bad.  The second rainy night was gnocchi.  Steve made the dough with potatoes, flour, salt, and an egg.  He made long rolls of it and chopped them up into bite size pieces.  The final part involved using your thumb to press down on the bite size piece and roll it across a fork, to make the notches in the pasta.  It got another thumbs up from the girls.  With a little bit of confidence we are on to fried zucchini blossoms next! 

Rolling out the dough for the gnocchi.

Our big helper

Our little helper

My gnocchi was relegated to a second bowl until I
got the fork rolling technique down.  

Gnocchi and zucchini

Stuffed zucchini blossoms

Frying the blossoms

The finished dish.  Yum!

Unrelated to our cooking, a picture of what I think is the town
cemetery up on the hill before the storm hit.