Hello world

In this blog I will try to teach you how to cook italian meals. I am not a particularly good cook, so I will not tell you the ingredients to make the ultimate top-level chef dish, add some suggestions and then pretend I've actually taught you something. What I will do is I will try to teach you how to cook simple everyday italian dishes step by step.

I've had a hard time learning new recipes form books, the only thing that really helps me is learning from someone who is cooking right in front of me.
This is why I will provide photographs to show each and every step you'll have to take before you can taste your creation.

This blog is for those who want to taste real everyday cuisine from Italy (and therefore pretty unexpensive meals that you can cook everyday without spending endless hours in the kitchen) and prefer to take it slow and just watch as the dish comes to life, before trying to cook it themselves.

Let's start right away..

First thing we'll discuss is pasta, as probably 99% of the dishes we are going to discuss will have pasta as their main ingredient. I guess you already know pasta. If you don't, do your research but don't trust wikipedia. The english article on pasta is not very precise.

First things first: pasta is not an ingredient you put on something else. If you live outside Italy (which probably is the case if you're reading this blog, since most italians can cook good pasta and wuold not find this blog very useful) you may have seen some crazy things like.. pasta on a pizza, pasta with ketchup, sliced bread with butter and pasta.. well, forget about that. This blog is about doing it the simple way, but it is also about doing it the Italian way. The orthodox way. No heretics allowed!

No but seriously, you won't see any "Pepperoni Pizza", "Spaghetti Bologna", or Spaghetti with meatballs posted here. These.. things are basically the simplified and internationalized version of italian dishes. If you come to Italy and ask for "Spaghetti Bologna" people will laugh at you. The city of Bologna is not famous for spaghetti, but for Tagliatelle (and many other things), which are usually eaten with either tomato sauce or ragù, which is a meat-based sauce. I know at first the difference between spaghetti and tagliatelle doens't seem huge, but it really is. The type of pasta you use (I'm talking about shape, quality, cooking time in boiling water) radically changes your dish. Some kinds of pasta are more suited to a particular kind of sauce or condiment. In Italy pasta is not considered a single dish, but more of a food category. You don't just decide you're gonna cook pasta and take the kind of pasta you've got on hand and cook it the way you like. You think about what kind of pasta-based dish you want and then you think about which way you can cook it. What I'm trying to say is that there are so many different dishes you can make with this fantastic ingredient that you would really be ruining a good meal if you just took a random type of pasta (let's say penne or fusilli) and cooked it in the same way as you would cook your average spaghetti. Penne alla carbonara? Doesn't really sound good: tortiglioni or spaghetti are better for carbonara. Fusilli al tonno (fusilli with tuna)? Not a wise choice: better use spaghetti.

In my next post I'll try to show you different types of pasta so you will be able to tell the difference between them very soon. Don't overlook this one as it really is important.

I hope you will excuse my poor English. If you want to learn, you'll have to endure the sufferings coming from me butchering this language, which I love by the way.