When my family and I were living in Houston, Texas many years ago (approx. 28 years), I was asked by several friends to teach them how to cook many of the Italian dishes that I prepared for them. Being a teacher by profession, this was right up my alley to do things I truly enjoyed, teaching and cooking. Sharing my family recipes with others was quite a thrill and they enjoyed the lessons and the dishes.
Summertime is here and time for fresh farm produce and good prices for fruits and vegetables in-season. I am always looking for a bargain and I take advantage of buying produce this time of year and doing more meal planning using fresh vegetables and herbs.
One dish I love to make and eat is a non-cooked tomato, mozzarella and basil topping for cooked pasta. It is based on a very popular appetizer called Caprese Salad. It is named for the island of Capri and is very popular all over Italy and increasingly so in the United States. This salad is a layering of sliced tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and fresh basil which is then drizzled with olive oil.
A quick and delicious side dish is my jazzed-up baked beans. It is so simple to prepare and it will taste as if you have been cooking this all day long. This is a perfect recipe to accompany any outdoor grilling you are doing, such as hamburgers, frankfurters, chicken, and my all time favorite Barbecue Beef Brisket.
Ingredients:
(See my BBQ Brisket Recipe for a video of this recipe)
Serves: 6
While living in Texas for many years, I became a devout fan of barbecue. In Texas, barbecue is an art and everyone competes for the best barbecue sauce. I loved all that I tried and now when I visit Texas, I have to make a stop at some of my favorite barbecue restaurants.
I never could duplicate the recipes to my liking, mainly because of the amount of time it takes to slow cook on the barbecue grill to get the true essence of great tender, flavorful barbecue. Eventually I found an easy and very delicious method for making barbecue beef brisket. Brisket is a tough cut of meat and needs marinating and slow cooking in order to become tender.
This is a quick and easy recipe for marinara sauce. In fact, it is so easy that it was one of the first sauces my Mother taught me at an early age, twelve to be precise. The ingredients are few and found on most pantry shelves. It works as an excellent base for other tomato sauce dishes. For example, just by adding meatballs and simmering for half an hour to an hour, you have a delicious spaghetti sauce. To make my sauce even meatier, I often add, along with the meatballs, Italian link sausage, that I brown first and then add to the sauce. Also, sliced mushrooms are another addition.
