Prosciutto Wrapped Dates - Datteri Ripeini

Lately, hors d'oeuvres are all I crave. No soups, salads, or entrees. Nope, I just want snack bites of little yummies. I make myself eat salad and stew because I feel better when I have a more balanced diet, but temptation does get the better of me and then I turn to my favorite seducer: prosciutto.

Mention the word "prosciutto" and I'm yours. Wrap it around a sweet and savory little package like dates stuffed with cheese or just herbs and I will pledge myself til the stars go cold and the sun plummets to earth.

Penne with Winter Pesto

Sometimes, in the dead of winter, you want some summer (even in Los Angeles). You want that fresh, green-ness, just picked from the garden-ness in your dinner bowl, and you want it now! That is what inspired this dinner.

Winter pesto is made with spinach and sometimes parsley, which is what I put in this version. The lovely thing about spinach, unlike basil, is that it stays vibrant green long after it is blended into a pesto. The color itself brightens my meal!

Hot Wings with Creamy Dressing

Mazzatta's, the mom and pop Italian restaurant where I had my first job, has been featured several times in this space. But I also worked at Jagger's Restaurant and Pub (as it was known 20 years ago), on the edge of Emory University's campus in Atlanta, GA. There I was a short order cook, frying corn tortillas for freshly made chips for nachos, grilling chicken breasts and burgers, and frying up lots and lots and lots of chicken wings.

Buffalo had nothing on us!

The place was open until 2 am Monday through Saturday and when the clock struck 10 pm, Jagger's famous hot and spicy wings magically became $.10 each (and Milwaukee's Best pitchers of beer were $1.99). It was mayhem. Drunken boys poured out of fraternity houses and flocked to Jaggers to consume hundreds (really, multiple orders of 50 wings each did I prepare) of spicy wings. And woe to the crazy (really drunk) person who sent the wings back to the kitchen claiming they were "Not Hot Enough"! That was when I would mix up my special fire-breathing concoctions to quiet the rabble. Occasionally, I would even cruise the dining room to ensure that tears were indeed streaming down the face of the one would wanted it hotter...They always left satisfied!

Prosciutto Wrapped Jalapenos

Sometimes you just want to eat food that some people will tell you is "bad" for you. Like cured meat, and cheese, and spicy peppers. And when you want to eat them all together at once, well, then you're really going to hell in a hand basket!

I saw these yummy morsels on Very Culinary's blog the same day that I spied Closet Cooking's Jalapeno Popper Cheese Dip and yes, dear reader, I made them both on the same night and ate cheese and jalapenos for dinner. It was a memorable feast, probably a once in a lifetime event - or perhaps just an annual one - kind of like the Superbowl, which inspired them. Decadence at its finest.

Brazilian Fish Stew (Moqueca)

Some people dream of chocolate and cake; I dream of fresh caught fish, still salty wet from the ocean. Visions of azure blue seas with houses set into steep hillsides is my idea of paradise. Anywhere in the Mediterranean would do, although I think the Balearic Islands and Menorca in particular is my ideal.

All fantasies aside, I love discovering new ways of cooking fish and this Brazilian Fish Stew was very intriguing. Bell peppers, lime juice, coconut milk, and of course cilantro make a beautiful combination, transforming "bland" fish (as too many people tell me fish is) into a party in your mouth.

Spinach Bean Patties

This is what I call good old-fashioned hippy food. Yup, you read that right, hippy food. The modern wave of vegetarian eating was kicked off by the hippies, the "back to the land" folks and the natural food movement that started the food co-ops that are sprinkled around the country. They wanted to eat what they could grow, live off the land, and withdraw from what they saw as a corrupt, consumer-driven society as much as possible. The Moosewood Collective and their numerous cookbooks are the most popular and utilized cookbooks of this tradition and they served me well. Funny, but so much of their beliefs are echoed in the locavore movement of today. History does repeat itself!

In case you haven't gathered it from my previous posts, I have a deep longing/fantasy to live the back to the land life. My first attempt was the purchase of my small farm in hopes of creating an inn. That episode of my life included a 25 foot square vegetable garden, an 8 foot square herb garden, and several fruit trees that came with the property - two apple, a mulberry and a sour cherry. Needless to say I loved every moment of life there and hope to recreate it somewhere else in the near future. If this sounds like heaven on earth to you also, you can live vicariously by reading Prodigal Summer and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the fictional and non-fictional accounts of this lifestyle as written by Barbara Kingsolver.