Italy - Foodtravel

The Italian kitchen

So for this week’s episode of our Food Travel series, we are off to an Italian inspired dinner with a smell of tomatoes, garlic fresh basil, and of course cheese.

For all of you who have missed out on our previous episodes, make sure to check out our posts with the Greek dinner, Food travel to India, and the latest one where we do 4 Italian Cocktails. I really hope you enjoy this kind of post and that you’ll stick with us as we travel through the kitchens of the world. And hey, we would love to have your input on what kitchen we should try out next?

What’s an Italian dinner without some pizza and pasta right?

The tomato sauce that we made for the pasta was super easy to make, we used both fresh tomatoes and canned once. Yellow onions, garlic, fresh basil, Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper. As I said, it’s super easy. The trick is to keep it simmering on the stove for several hours, I think ours was on for nearly four hours, then we took it off to cool down, and as we were about to serve the pasta we reheated it, poured it over the pasta and added lots and lots of grated mozzarella cheese.

The pizza was actually made on the grill. I have told you before that the husband loves to barbeque right, so whenever he gets a chance, I’ll find him in front of the grill. If you look closely on the images you’ll see that the pizza is on this round stone platter, that’s called a pizzastone, and its made keep beneath the pizza when it’s on the grill. So you just roll out your pizzadough, add some tomatosause and grated mozzarella cheese, and start cooking it on the grill. When it was almost done, we added some Bresaola ham just to heat it up. And as we served the pizza we added some arugula. Delicious!

We just had to have some small side dishes as well, so breadsticks, of course, some well-aged parmesan cheese and my personal favorite, sliced tomatoes with fresh basil and buffalo mozzarella.

Naturally, we had a bottle of red wine with our dinner, we had a wine called Zingled out. Yes, I bought it cause I thought the bottle was pretty, but its an Italian wine made from the black-skinned Zinfandel grape, which I know is a grape that I can drink without getting a headache. There are a few grapes that I just can’t even take a zip-out off, without getting throbbing pain in my head. Unfortunately, I haven’t quite figured out the particular grapes that torture me, but I do know that the zinfandel grape is one of the good guys. Have you ever had that kind of experience with red wines, or maybe wines in general?


As you can tell, this dinner was really easy to make. I am not trying to downsize the effort at all, it really was that easy to make. The hardest part was chopping the onions, and that’s always a hassle no matter what kind of dishes you are attempting to make.

Everyone who knows me knows that I am crazy for pasta, so food traveling to the Italian kitchen was a definite hit for me. Most people like their potatoes and rise and want a bigger variety when it comes to their food. No me. I can go with pasta every day, easily. Farfalle, fusilli, rigatoni, gnocchi, spaghetti, linguini, fettuccine. I just love it!

So tell me, what is your all-time favorite dish when it comes to Italian food?

//Ann

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