When Erin comes home from a vacation, I always cook a romantic meal. And the only thing that comes to mind when I think romantic food is Italian. It's been awhile since I've made a risotto, so I set out to come up with an interesting risotto recipe for Erin's return. This time we dined on delicious creamy champagne risotto with pistachios,...

There was so much right here with this dish, but it just didn't pop. Sotto was the inspiration for this meal, and our trip to the grocery store marks where it started to go wrong. We set out to create a spicy octopus ragu with black kale. There was no black kale. There was no octopus. In a scramble, we switched to regular kale and squid. Neither...

Last week at Trader Joe's we sampled some of their frozen pizza burgers in-store. Dustin and I both thought they were pretty tasty, so I grabbed a box to eat for quick weekday lunches. Dustin was surprised to find out that their pizza burgers are completely vegetarian, soy patties. He said he remembered distinctly tasting sausage in them. I...

Watching Worst Cooks this season, we saw one of the contestants make ravioli with egg yolks in the middle, so that when you cut into your pasta, you get a nice runny egg oozing out over everything. Looked like our perfect pasta dish! And despite it looking difficult to make (egg yolks can break way too easily), we were convinced that if a...

A couple of weekends ago, we hosted a gnocchi party with our Rice friends. A failed attempt at making smoothly textured gnocchi at a previous Italian-themed dinner party necessitated a redo. We now own a ricer, which makes the process of smashing the potatoes much easier and makes the final product more uniform. We wanted a simple sauce, so...

After busting out the Arborio rice to make dulce de leche rice pudding a few days ago, we decided to put the rest to savory use. We decided to use a basic risotto recipe as a base like Dustin used in his cook-off and then added some flavors we thought would go nicely together. We decided on asparagus, artichoke hearts, and pancetta topped with...

I guess these are kind of like ricotta gnocchi, but they are bigger so they will be referred to as dumplings instead. Basically this is like Italian chicken and dumplings, slightly modified. We planned on making homemade tomato sauce but wimped out and opened a gourmet jar of garlic and chanterelle tomato sauce from Whole Foods to which we...

Calling these Italian enchiladas would probably be blasphemous to an Italian, but I didn't have a better name for replacing enchilada sauce with tomato sauce. These were so good and simple, I can't believe it's something we've never thought of doing before. I took leftover tortillas spread a little tomato sauce on them before stuffing them...

We've had another gnocchi success! This time around with sweet potatoes. I've found that I absolutely love sweet potatoes, but I want them as the base of savory dishes like fries and gnocchi rather than sweet ones like candied yams. Pretty counterintuitive if you know me. I saw this recipe from Running to the Kitchen for sweet potato gnocchi...

This may look like boring pasta covered in boring marinara, but trust me, this basic dish is far from boring because both the homemade, completely-from-scratch pasta and marinara sauce are made with beer— locally based Pyramid Hefeweizen! These recipes seemed like a fun way to spice up a very basic dish, and although my marinara sauce was a...