From Micol and Dino

Hello from our kitchen to yours! It’s been a blustery few weeks here in New Jersey, which gave us the opportunity to cook some amazing comfort winter food. We now have 103 videos on the site for you to enjoy!

Newly added: 7 videos devoted to making fresh pasta. To get the most out of the new material, we suggest you start by watching the video on making fresh egg pasta dough, followed by the video on using a pasta machine to roll out dough. After that, you have the choice of four different pasta shapes (trenette, reginette, farfalle, and maccheroni alla chitarra) using our basic egg pasta dough, plus cavatelli, which are made with an entirely different (eggless) semolina flour and water dough.  

New Video Recipes

Inspired by the snow, we filmed two of our all-time favorite cold weather dishes: braised oxtail in the style of Rome, and Tuscany’s chunky vegetable and cornmeal soup. Both of these recipes embody the very best of regional Italian cooking and will transport you to Italy upon first bite.

A little more about each of these recipes.

You may be wary of eating oxtail if you’ve never tried it, but we assure you, it tastes like the very best slow-cooked beef: not gamy at all, rich and unctuous in texture, and with a deep, deep flavor that will have you coming back for just one more bite. We love oxtail sauce on pasta (shred leftover oxtail, warm it in its own juices with a bit of starchy pasta water, and toss with freshly boiled pasta) so we always plan on extra when making it. We suggest you do the same. You can also freeze batches for later enjoyment.

As for the soup, adding polenta to soup probably sounds odd if you’ve never had it, but it is SO good: it thickens the soup up beautifully, lending just a hint of corn goodness without coming across like cornmeal on the spoon. Partly this is because the soup features strongly flavored vegetables (Tuscan kale, cabbage) that benefit from the gentle sweetness of corn, and partly it’s because the Tuscans are really good at combining seemingly disparate ingredients into a cohesive whole. We first tasted this dish at our favorite trattoria in Lucca, Da Giulio in Pelleria. We were confused at first because the soup was listed on the menu as farinata, which we knew to be a chickpea flour pancake in Liguria. That’s part of what makes Italian cooking so interesting: there are so many regional variations, different dishes with the same name in different regions, the same dish with different names in different regions… It is quite an education, and such a tasty one, to eat your way across Italy!

Regional Specialties

And that brings us to two other classic Italian regional dishes we filmed for the site this month. The first is amatriciana sauce, a heavenly combination of guanciale (cured pork jowl, akin to pancetta and easily substituted by the latter), onion, and tomatoes that graces bucatini or whatever pasta one fancies in Rome’s eateries and homes. The other is baccala’ mantecato, salted cod cooked until tender in milk, whipped with olive oil, garlic, and parsley, a classic accompaniment to polenta on the Veneto’s tables.

Also new this month: spaetzle pasta with Swiss chard from Trentino-Alto Adige, three polenta dishes, grilled flatbread, an easy pasta and greens gratin, and much more.

We hope you’ll try these regional offerings in your kitchen and let us know how you liked them. The point of this video site is as much to teach you new culinary techniques as it is to inspire you to experience new flavors and combinations. We hope these new dishes fulfill these goals and bring something new to your kitchen and your dining table.

Classes $24 for Members

And a friendly reminder to those of you who haven’t yet taken advantage of your free virtual cooking class (this was a bonus with your membership package): check out our class calendar here and email us to let us know which class you want to take.

If you’ve already joined us in a virtual class and want to participate in others, you can now buy virtual classes for just $24 each (half price). And if you want to invite a friend to join from another kitchen, we’ll extend them the same heavy discount! Check the Special Offers section of the site for details on buying cooking classes at a discount.

Buon appetito and happy cooking!

Micol and Dino

P.S. A Few Tips for Navigating the Site

Be sure to visit the Introduction to your Membership section where you will find information on navigating the site, how to bookmark video lessons, writing notes on recipes, and much more.

This is also where you will find technical help on watching videos in full screen mode, skipping ahead or going back to key steps in recipes, messaging us, using the discussion forum, and much more.