The fastest weekend in the West

So let me tell you about cooking. I decided to start prepping my children for the Italy trip (T-Minus 26 days and counting) by cooking some items from the Rome and Florence cookbooks I have received as gifts. My sister had sent along a goodie box full of Italian items from . Polenta, pasta, fregole (Sardinia cous cous) tomatoes, yummy stuff!

So the first night I found a recipe for Fregole with pancetta and pecorino. I also used the Roasted chicken with lemon from the Williams Sonoma cookbook. It called for roasting the chicken stuffed with lemons and then using the roasted chicken drippings and juice of the roasted lemons to make a sauce.

I think my daughter put it best. It was a huge flavor explosion. The meal was rich so we ate slowly and took small amounts. That was Saturday.

Sunday we ended up with no dinner plans and I had a hankering to make a marinara sauce I'd seen on America's Test Kitchen. So I did. Let me tell you that was the best sauce I have ever made. Think, rich and fast by comparison to others I've made. Those guys (America's Test Kitchen)do all the anal retentive stuff for me that I don't have time to do. The pasta from Italy is so different and cooks up so rich and plump and succulent. It's hard to describe.

So the weekend was a rousing success for cooking. No knitting to speak of, I worked on my Italian a little more. Restful, but not nearly restful enough. Sweetie Man flies home tomorrow and I'm going to make the best of the next few weekends to get my diet and exercise in order and spend more time sleeping. Sometimes it's a hard adjustment for fall and winter weather. My winter body is stubborn about working. Kind of like the old cranked cars. You have to try several times to get them started.