Roba Generale

Feeling sufficiently fatigued after rolling out enough sheets of spinach lasagna to feed twenty people. I briefly considered just staying up until the Italy v. Slovakia game comes on, but then realized that five hours of sleep would be an absolutely terrible idea. Allora, nap, then Italy match. –StellaCadente*

I recently wrote about purchasing the Experimental Texturas Kit from For the Gourmet (via Amazon.com). I decided to break it out this afternoon for an experiment. My brother and I are catering a 90th birthday party next weekend, and I want to come up with a special drink for the guest of honor, so I thought I’d use that as a starting point. The kit came with a few recipes, including one for White Sangria in Suspension. Instead of white sangria I decided to concoct a modified bellini with peach puree, white wine, and rosemary simple syrup (which I fell in love with last weekend). Before I even got started I noticed a flaw in the recipe (and by flaw I mean the lack of professional kitchen equipment available to me in my home kitchen). The recipe recommends vacuum packing the beverage, once it’s blended with Xatnana (which I am assuming is the Adria‘s brand name for xanthan gum) in order to eliminate bubbles from the cocktail. Well, I don’t have enough in my piggy bank yet for a professional vacuum packer, so I channelled my inner Sarah Palin and went  rogue. This was the result: The texture was both frothy and…

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I am thrilled to welcome you to my new stand-alone Pomodorista blog. If you are an Al Dente blog reader than you already know a little bit about me. If you are a new reader, allow me to give you a little background. What is a Pomodorista? When you add an “-ista” ending to an italian noun it signifies one of the following: 1) a person of that profession i.e. a dentist would be dentista 2) someone who participates in activity i.e. collezionista would be a collector, or 3) a person who follows a doctrine or movement i.e. anarchista would be an anarchist. Pomodorista falls under the umbrella of all three. During the summer of 2009 I found myself doing a stage, or kitchen apprenticeship on the island of Capri just off the coast of Naples, Italy. I was assigned to the pasta chef, and consequently every morning after setting up my station, it was my job to cut up thousands of cherry-sized pomodori (tomatoes), and make the sauce for the day. I cut so many tomatoes, that I came to appreciate the uniqueness of each one. As I sliced hundreds upon hundreds of tomatoes (always with a serrated knife…

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