Preparing Lasagna

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Maria D'Amico

Every Sunday my family and I make dinner together. During this time, we get the chance to bond over things that have happened over the week. Instead of ordering take-out food or only having one person make a meal, we cook together to create new memories and learn better ways to make new meals. A meal that my mom taught us to make this Sunday is lasagna. The lasagna recipe in my family is incredibly tasty. It includes all fresh ingredients which make it more unique than a store-bought dinner.

In the morning, we prepared the sauce. The sauce included onions, celery, carrots, garlic and tomatoes. It also contained other ingredients that are a secret to the family recipe. Once the sauce sat and cooked for a few hours, we placed lasagna noodles on the sauce in a thirteen by nine pan. After this, we mixed the eggs, parmesan cheese and cottage cheese together in a large bowl. One third of this is spread over the noodles in a pan. My mom likes to shred her own fresh mozzarella so we took the block of cheese and sprinkled one layer over the pan. This was repeated two more times to complete the three layers. We then placed the pan in the oven set at three hundred seventy-five degrees for about forty-five minutes. Once the top layer was light brown and had a bubbly-looking texture, we took it out of the oven and prepared to eat the meal as a family. This Sunday not only taught me how to make a delicious, simple, home-cooked meal, but also that making dinner with your family can be a very fun tradition to continue on with my own family someday.

Homemade Raviolis

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Ariana Gargano

My grandma came from Italy when she was only 12 yeas old in 1959. She came with her mom, dad, five sisters and two brothers. In Italy, they made almost everything they ate homemade nothing was store bought except 11892358_1071945729483444_744013092827412635_o for some ingredients. My grandma also grew up on a farm that had nearly every fruit and vegetable her and her family would need. When my grandma came to America, her and her family brought a lot of their traditions of cooking with them. The one thing that she loves to make all the time is raviolis.

It takes a lot of work and time to prepare and make raviolis. The first thing is to make the filling, my grandma makes her ricotta most of the time or she does something different like she did this time, and she made what she calls basket cheese that is pretty much ricotta just cooked and settled a little differently. She makes the cheese by boiling water and adding junket tablets to the boiling whole milk with lemon juice and little pieces of cheese start to float to the top and are spooned out and put into the basket mold to settle. The next thing she does is make the dough; she uses special dough flour that you can only buy in certain stores. She mixes the flour with eggs, water, and baking soda. She then rolls the dough into flat pieces and uses a ravioli mold to shape the dough into raviolis. First one pieces of dough is put 1920031_764282193583134_537343406_n on one side of the mold, then the holes that are made are filled with the basket cheese that was made then another flat piece of dough is put on top of it and pressed down by another side of the ravioli press. The press then cuts and seals all the raviolis into individual pieces.

My Food Voice

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Allison Krauza

A tradition that is upheld in my family is Sunday sauce. This is a time in which all of my family members set aside their busy schedules, as well as their phones, to talk with one 20150531_142919 another about their week, recount old memories and create new ones. This tradition originated in Calabria, Italy with my great-grandmother and her extended family. Early Sunday morning, she would start to make the sauce from scratch, preforming the tedious process of removing the seeds from tomatoes and peeling them. While I have never tried to actually make sauce from fresh tomatoes, my mom and grandma have groomed me to make the sauce just as my great-grandmother did.

Although some substitutions have been made to the recipe, including the replacement of fresh garden tomatoes with canned crushed tomatoes and fresh 20150531_163516 herbs with dried ones, Sunday sauce remains quite familiar. To keep with the tradition of Sunday sauce, I let the meatballs and sausage soak in the sauce to give it the same robust flavor as my great-grandmother did. The tradition of this dish continues to keep the memory of my great-grandmother alive.

Bread baking past and present

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Alison Smith

I spent the weekend trying to bake bread. This isn’t by any means the first time I’ve baked bread, and the bread I bake usually pleases the people I bake it for– so one might ask why I’m bothering to experiment with other recipes and techniques. The short answer is that we’ve built a wood-fired oven in our backyard and have plenty of wood. But the real answer is that I’m seduced by the magic of bread– kneading it, letting it rise, shaping the loaves and finally taking it out of the hot oven and tapping it to see if it’s done. There are lots of people out there on the internet who feel the way I do and who have painstakingly described their techniques for people like me to follow. Not surprisingly, the bread–baking community is a generous, opinionated and friendly bunch. They want to create more of us, and so have taken the time to write down the methods they use in meticulous detail. These bakers use special scales to weigh their flour, salt and water, even their yeast. They report on the exact temperature of the dough at each stage of the fermentation process–which they time carefully. I’ve spent months reading and experimenting with these recipes. And finally this weekend I decided that I just can’t make myself follow these precise directions. Despite my determination to learn how to bake a loaf of bread I can really be proud of, and my recognition that bread baking is all about chemistry, and that I should pay close attention to weights and temperatures, I just can’t do it. This is partly because I think like a humanist and not a scientist, which is a disciplinary contrast that we will be exploring in this Learning Community.

I like to remember that bread baking is an ancient human skill (or art), and only recently have bakers had access to scales and thermometers. I’d love to have find a master teacher I could bake with so that I could “learn by doing” –and tell when I’ve added enough flour to the dough. And feel when I’ve kneaded it enough. And know whether I need to slow down the fermentation or shape the loaves. I’m trying to learn this by practicing it on my own, just as millions of men and women have done in the past. That’s the romantic version of the story.

But it’s not that simple and that’s what really makes me want to keep on trying, endlessly interested in what the next batch will be like. Because even in this standardized/mechanized day and age, there are too many variables (at least for me) to control to achieve a completely repeatable result. For example, the flour is never really the same,the barometric pressure outside fluctuates, the interaction of yeast and water changes, the moisture in the oven varies, etc. And think of bread-baking before the availability of commercial yeast, when the natural “levain” varied from day to day! What we’re also discovering is that the process becomes even less predictable when you use a wood-burning oven. First of all, it’s hard to know exactly how much heat an individual log will produce. Then regulating the heat of the oven and being able to predict when it will cool off enough to receive the loaves for baking is proving to be very complicated (and we even have a nifty infrared thermometer to guide us.). Baking bread, it seems to me, defies science. And it approaches art.

Here are a few photos of my experiments this weekend: