Pasta a la Norma:
- Take an eggplant and slice it lengthwise in slices of about 2 cm thick.
- Slice up a few cloves of garlic.
- Rub both sides of each slice of eggplant with the garlic, some seasalt and then cover both sides with olive oil.
- Grill the eggplant slices.
- Meanwhile prepare the pasta and a generic tomato based pasta sauce. I prefer to use penne as pasta.
- When everything is done just mix the sauce with the pasta, put on a plate, put two or three slices of eggplant on top of the pasta and grate ricotta salata on top of it.
Basic risotto recipe:
- Chop up some garlic and onion and fry gently in some olive oil.
- Once these are ready, add the risotto rice. Remember that you need to add raw rice, not cooked rice.
- Mix and heat until the rice gets a bit glazy.
- Add white wine and stir until all the wine is absorbed by the rice.
- Add a ladle of stock. This can be chicken, vegetable, fish, even beef stock. Whatever works best in the dish. Again stir until absorbed.
- Repeat the last step until you've added all the stock. Remember that you should only add more stock once the previous ladle full has been absorbed. Be patient here, this takes time but the end result is amazing.
- When its done, add grated parmesan cheese.
- Typically you will want about 100 mL of wine, 1 liter of stock and 100 grams of cheese per 400 grams of rice, but feel free to experiment a bit.
- Meanwhile in a separate pan you prepare the ingredients. You can add pretty much anything to risotto, but I personally like things like chicken, salami, mushroom, sun-dried tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini and/or pumpkin.
Ovenbaked sweet potato:
- A side dish, but works excellently with many things. Can replace potato for pretty much anything, while being much healthier.
- Skin the sweet potatoes and dice them.
- Put them in a tray, sprinkle in olive oil, cinnamon, sea salt and rosemary, then toss until all potato dices are properly covered.
- Preheat an oven to ~200 degrees C and heat the potatoes for about 40 minutes.
Portobellos filled with goat cheese:
- An appetizer that will certainly impress your friends.
- Take a soft goat cheese and crumble it up.
- Mix the cheese with honey and roasted pine nuts.
- Remove the stem from the portobellos and clean them with a damp paper towel.
- Fill the caps with the goat cheese mix.
- Heat in a 200 degree oven until the cheese starts to turn brown.
- Serve on a bed of whatever you call this type of lettuce:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Ackersalat02.jpg/220px-Ackersalat02.jpg
- You can also use crushed walnuts instead of the pine nuts.
Pasta quattro formaggi (aka Mac&Cheese for professionals):
- Two of the cheeses should be an old, hard cheese like Parmasan and a blue cheese like Gorgonzola. The other two cheeses are more flexible, but I recommend using soft, but firm cheeses with lots of flavor. I typically use Gruyere and whatever red-crust cheese I can find. Whatever you do, don't use mozzarella. It doesn't add anything to the taste and ruins the texture. Even cheddar is better than mozzarella for this dish, and cheddar is terrible in anything.
- Melt the cheeses in some cream. Keep stirring so the sauce doesn't burn.
- Mix with boiled pasta. I think farfalle works best, but anything that is not spaghetti will work here.
- Mushrooms mix really well with this sauce, as do stir fried spinach and chickpeas.