Bistecche all'Aceto Balsamico - Steak in Balsamic Vinegar

Some day soon, I hope to break away from the easy obvious meat choices in The Silver Spoon. I mean, with over a hundred pages of recipes in the "Meats - Variety Meats" section, all I've made is one lamb recipe, a meatball and a steak. I mean, come on! For a die-hard variety meat fan, that's playing it pretty boring.

Sadly though, today isn't that day. I made this steak recipe several months ago, to go with the zucchini-tomato accordion. And while later tonight, I'll look into a more interesting recipe to make, I have to admit that this recipe was absolutely delicious. And simple, too!

As Big E pointed out, you've got to love a recipe for steak that begins with melting butter and mixing it with olive oil. Just how can that go wrong? I cooked the steaks on high on each side till they were nice and browned - about two minutes each side. Then i removed them to a serving platter and salted them.

In the remaining juices, I sautéed a chopped shallot for about five minutes, and added a little dab of butter, melted it then added a couple of teaspoons of Balsamic vinegar. I poured the sauce over the steaks, sprinkled them with chopped vinegar and we ate them.

They were delicious. I've been trying to master the poke test for determining whether the steak is done, but I think it was just luck that the steaks were done exactly the way we like them: deliciously rare. I used a hot skillet and watched the steaks like a hawk till they were perfectly browned and took them off right away. I loved the flavour of the Balsamic on the steak and the butter and shallots didn't hurt. All around yum.

And now to plan my next meat dish from SS: perhaps the sweetbreads with Madeira?

Tasty Factor: A+ Ease of Preparation: A Modifications: None.

Pomodori Alle Zucchine - Tomatoes with Zucchini

I turn to cookbooks for a variety of different reasons: for ideas for what to cook for dinner, for instructions on how to prepare a specific dish I've tasted elsewhere, but more often than not for inspiration. And to be honest, for the most part, The Silver Spoon is not one of those cookbooks that inspires me.

It definitely gives me ideas for dinner and specific instructions for Italian dishes, but it just doesn't inspire me. For one thing, I tend to be a mostly visual person (makes sense for a film editor, I guess) and while the drawings in SS are charming, they aren't really mouth-watering.

Though I have to admit that sometimes they're downright hilarious. Like this soup drawing that astutely points out that the soup is inside the tureen.

I also enjoy reading my cookbooks like a good novel, so any book with good chapter introductions and recipe descriptions definitely draws me in and inspires me. SS doesn't do that so much either.

Lately, I've been craving inspiration but have kept on browsing and searching through SS, mostly out of obligation. Last night, I finally killed that sense of obligation with a disappointing seafood crostini. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This post isn't about a failed recipe, it's about rediscovering inspiration and in this particular instance, it is about the last recipe found within the covers of The Silver Spoon which succeeded in inspiring me.

This came a few weeks ago, when our box was brimming with summer vegetables: three types of tomatoes (cherry, roma and heirloom) and week after week of zucchini.

We'd been getting zucchini and tomatoes in our box for several weeks at this point and while I love both of those vegetables very much, I hadn't been varying what I did with them so much. The zucchini were all sliced and oven roasted - I do so love the caramelized taste of roast zucchini. The tomatoes were almost always sliced and eaten raw.

When I searched through SS this time for a recipe using my box ingredients, I stumbled upon this one, which didn't sound new and different, and well, inspiring, at first blush but it certainly used what I had in the house. It was upon reading the instructions for the recipe that I became intrigued.

The preparation was rather satisfying, a bit like a kindergarten project: I sliced a lovely heirloom tomato, but not all the way through, so that it opened like an accordion. I slipped thin slices of zucchini in between the tomato slices. After that, I sprinkled the tomato-zucchini accordion with chopped parsley and garlic, drizzled it with olive oil and baked it for about thirty minutes.

Then I added thin slices of fresh mozzarella in between the slices and sprinkled some dried oregano and returned the dish to the oven for another ten minutes. I served this dish alongside steak in Balsamic vinegar and some delicious potatoes with onions.

The zucchini-tomato flower looked beautiful on the plate and tasted delicious. I did not often prepare recipes that involved such construction and this opened my mind to other potential baked vegetable creations. I will definitely make this dish (or some variation thereof) again: it would be great dish to serve to company and a different way to use up the zillions of gorgeous tomatoes in our box.

Tasty Factor: A+ Ease of Preparation: B- Modifications: None. This dish didn't need any help.

And now that that's out of the way, time to turn to my gathered pile of inspiration:

• The Tra Vigne Cookbook because it is a recommendation from my friend and erstwhile cookbook co-author (hopefully we'll get back to this project sometime soon)
• The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen by Paula Wolfert because I'm dying to use the tajine we got as a wedding gift
• The Naked Chef Cookbook by Jamie Oliver because I loved his Happy Days Cookbook
  
• The Babbo Cookbook by Mario Batali because we also got this as a wedding gift and it's GORGEOUS!
  

Petti Farciti al Mascarpone - Chicken Stuffed with Mascarpone

You may have noticed that I've been missing for a while (or maybe you didn't, in which case, feel free to skip on to the next paragraph... Don't worry, my feelings won't be too hurt). Well, it's been a bit of a whirlwind summer - mainly leading up to our wedding and the wedding aftermath.

But in case you think I wasn't cooking all this time, I was. I just didn't have time to write about it all. So I'm back now, as ready as ever to cook, but also ready to write about the backlog of recipes that I made these past two months. I'm also really excited to make use of the awesome new cookware and appliances our friends and family have been so sweetly sending us.

Stuffed chicken has always been a favourite dinner party dish: usually easy to make, elaborate enough that its not just your average weeknight meal and absolutely delicious.

The version I usually make is a bit simpler than the one I found here: goat cheese and pesto at its simplest, sometimes with fresh herbs or a sliced vegetable.

The Silver Spoon recipe for this is excellent: a tad bit more involved but well worth it. The extra step is to chop and sauté mushrooms in butter with a few garlic cloves and some chopped parsley. SS says to remove the garlic once browned, as it so often does, but I chose to ignore that and used chopped garlic instead, as I so often do.


I sliced the chicken breasts horizontally in half and pounded them as flat as I could. I then lined each piece with a slice of prosciutto (the recipe called for cooked, cured ham. I don't tend to like ham all that much, but I love prosciutto... and it is dry-cured ham, which isn't that far off, right?). I then spoon in some mascarpone, the cooked mushrooms and close the chicken breast. I top each breast with some halved cherry tomatoes and bake the whole thing in the oven (at 400º) for about 25 minutes (15 minutes with foil, then till browned). The recipe actually just called for one slice of tomato on each piece, but since I had cherry tomatoes in my box, that's what I used. I would probably do that again though, because I think it looked more elegant.

The chicken was incredibly tender and the flavours very rich and earthy. Absolutely delicious with a lovely glass of red wine (we had a Chalone Pinot Noir). One of our dinner guests was a fungiphobe - sadly, I seem to know many of them - so I made hers without the mushrooms but it still seemed quite tasty. I would highly recommend this dish for small dinner parties when you're out to impress.

Tasty Factor: A+ Ease of Preparation: B- Modifications: Sorta, prosciutto instead of "ham"... does that even count as a modification? I'm counting it as a yes, because I wouldn't make this recipe any other way. I love prosciutto.