A Bachelor's Weblog to Urban Cooking where speed and simplicity comes before taste!

I have been experimenting with Italian food for the past two weeks. I bought the “The Sopranos Family Cookbook” from borders last week. (ISDN: 0446530573). So I am planning to have a “Sopranos Family Dinner Party” soon.

 

Here are some of the dishes I made.

• Rossted Peppers with Anchovies
• Fettuccine with Three Cheeses
• Penne with Spicy Tomato Sause
• Penne with Swordfish, Tomatoes, Olives, and Capers
• Linguine alla Carbonara
• Linguine Alla Vongole ( Linguine with White Clam Sause )
• Baby Octopus in Tomato Sauce
• Rigatoni with Broccoli
• Baked Chicken with Potatoes, Lemon, and Oregano

Since this is the first time I made Italian food, I did figure out how to reduce the complexity of each recipe yet. However I did notice that those dishes are very easy to pipe line. For example, after you start cooking some pasta, you can let the water boil for a while and don’t have to attend it very often. It does not matter if the past is cooked for 12 minutes or 15 minutes. The same idea applies with the sauce. So it is easy to make food for a lot of people in a short time if you can get the timing right.

 

• Highway Cooking - How to cook on your car engine.

It has been a while since I had a post. Now I am back with more fast cooking methods, recipes and dinner parties. Just this past weekend I hosted a 18 people Chinese New Year party. It took me 2 hours to prepare and cook, 1 hour to cook during the party, and 30 mins to clean up. I had a chance to show off a couple of new recipes that I learned since the last dinner party. But before I talk about recipes, I want to thank all for coming and for the fine wines, drinks, chips, salads and deserts. I had a great time. I also want to thank my mom for making us fried noodles and fried rice. The dinner party started with an experimental wine tasting. The feature wines were hand selected by Rich Ricci, the wine manager for the Gordon’s Fine Wine & Liquors in Watertown. They were: