Looking for more recipes to use up your leftover turkey? Why not “Italianize” your turkey meat and make Turkey Tetrazzini. Just add some cooked pasta to the meat, along with a few other yummy ingrediets, and bake the dish al forno (in the oven) for a delicious and creamy main course.
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I guess I would be missing the boat, with a big picture of tomatoes at the top of this blog, if I didn’t post occasional tomato-highlight recipes. Although this is the quintessential summer dish, I offer up this little recipe as a nod to spring time and warmer days to come. Insalata Caprese is so refreshing and so simple you can make it with your eyes closed. But I wouldn’t do that because it involves a knife. So keep your eyes open and your taste buds perked. First a little background……
I love caponata but I don’t eat it much as my family considers eggplant to be one of the seven deadly vegetables. Eggplant is a well-traveled vegetable. It apparently originated in tropical Asia and headed to the Middle East via India. Arab settlers brought it to Spain and southern Italy but no one knows exactly when. There is no record that the Greeks and Romans knew eggplant (my husband considers them lucky) but it arrived in southern Italy before explorers brought the tomato, potato and pepper from the New World.
Eggplant territory begins in Naples, or so they say. That the farther south you go, the more important it becomes to local cuisine. Caponata is a classic Sicilian dish that provides an explosion of flavors once it hits your taste buds. While there are many variations of caponata (with eggplant the main event), the dish almost always includes celery, tomatoes, capers and olives. Some recipes include raisins…not mine. The distinctive taste of caponata comes from its subtle sweet-and-sour flavor the Italians call agrodolce.
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Quick! Someone eat this before it collapses altogether. This will teach me to get artsy before I have the camera properly set up. This is really insalata caprese with it’s geometry changed. It also shows one of the many dishes to which you can add pesto.
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I don’t think you’ll see this kind of pasta dish in Italy. Italians don’t generally eat cold pasta. But we love them here in the U.S. Especially in summer. They’re easy, versatile, portable and the only thing you have to cook is the pasta itself. And oh, I have an ulterior motive. My garden is completely over-run with dill. It has been a massive invasion. I expect to see it coming up through my living room carpet one morning. So this dish is a particularly delicious way to use up some of my fresh, and menacing, dill. And let’s face it, dill really wakes up a dish!
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