Good Eats Club

Pastosa Pizza

Yum…. After a rainy afternoon touring Staten Island pizza spots, Frank introduced me to his favorite specialty Italian food store, Pastosa’s Ravioli—a third generation owned family business. Starting out 40 years ago in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Anthony G. Ajello saw the gap in the market for ravioli made with high quality cheeses and other ingredients. Now the family has 11 stores across the tri-state area selling olives, sauces, smoked meats, cheeses as well as other Italian imports.

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Walnut Pesto Pasta

A few weeks ago, I had a craving for pesto. We went over to Fairway and the basil looked great but when we went down the nut isle- pine nuts were $13 for a 1/2 cup!!  There was no way I was about to pay that, so I thought to myself what to do next. Next to the pine nuts were the walnuts – $4 for a 2 cup bag – much better. » Continue Reading…

Cheryl's Eggplant Parmasan

There are actually few things I consider myself to cook well – Eggplant Parmesan is one of the things. Most of the time I act as an excellent Sui Chef for Frank as he takes the lead. This eggplant recipe is one I made up from years of trying other peoples eggplant and taking note of what I liked about it and what I didn’t.

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Shrimp Frittata

Frittata. It’s just fun to say, really. It’s also an extremely quick and easy dish to make if you’re looking for a quick dinner. We’ve been working with the Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Italy which was a gift to us from our good friend Aimee. For a brit, he actually does a very good job taking the reader around several kinds of Italian food and offers some new twists on old Italian favorites and some recipes that I never really considered Italian at all, like this frittata.
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Home Made Whole Wheat Pasta

Usually Sunday dinner for Italians consists of so much food you can’t leave the table and escape your family. While it’s not as intense in our kitchen, we do share the need to eat tons of pasta. Looking to finally put Cheryl’s pasta maker to good use, we decided to make some whole wheat pasta and some marinara sauce for dinner.
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Lentil Walnut Veggie Burger

Apparently, we had no idea that veggie burgers with bacon was a trend, but people keep telling us that it’s true. Regardless, some of you will scoff at the idea of making a veggie burger, let alone eating one, but they’re much better than the frozen Boca kind and you can’t eat hamburgers every day, can you?
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Eggplant and Polenta

Being that I’m a vegetarian, I’m always looking for hearty dishes for the winter and eggplant is a good meat substitute. This dish uses similar techniques found in my eggplant parmesan recipe (more on that later).

For this recipe you will need:
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Octopus and Potatoes

There’s something about Mark Bittman’s recipes for The New York Times that has me excited to cook.  Perhaps it’s the simplicity of his recipes, how easy it is to make great looking dishes or just that they taste amazing.  Here’s a recipe that I had been meaning to cook for a long time that is all of these things – octopus, Galician style.

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