| Who doesn’t love good Italian cooking? Whether it’s a pasta dish or a homemade pizza topped with fresh mozzarella and tomatoes, Italian cuisine is almost everyone’s favorite. The main characteristic of Italian cooking is its healthy balance, the excellent basic ingredients being simply cooked and retaining their original goodness and freshness. Italian food is simple, yet with such a variety of flavors and rich inventiveness in preparation, that even the most demanding gourmet is delighted.
Main ingredients in Italian cuisine include olive oil, garlic, pasta, onions, red peppers, beans, greens, artichokes and tomatoes.
Authentic Italian recipes include pasta, polenta, risotto all of which can be combined with meats or vegetables depending on your palate. A classical authentic Italian beef recipe is pasta bolognase which also includes lamb, veal and a variety of vegetables including carrots, celery and onions.
Italian food expert, Giada de Laurentiis as seen on The Food Network, has a wonderful cookbook entitled everyday italian, which has her favorite Italian recipes easy enough for even a beginner cook to tackle. One of the tips she offers is to make sure you use ample water when you cook pasta. This guarantees that the pasta will cook evenly and not stick together. Make sure to add plenty of salt to flavor the pasta; she prefers sea salt. Spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and red pepper flakes is one of the easiest pasta dishes you can possibly make. In Italy this dish is called aglio, olio e pepperoncino. The secret to the dish is to reserve some of the water you use to boil the pasta to make the sauce. The ingredients are just salt, spaghetti, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, crushed red pepper flakes, chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, fresh basil and fresh mint. Tiramisu is easier than you would think. It just has mascarpone cheese, whipping cream, sugar, espresso and lady fingers.
Considering a "cooking in Italy" course? There are many available from some of the top culinary schools in the nation. Italy's climate, soil and very old traditions of viticulture make Italy a natural wine growing nation. The wines are as personal as a name, as different as the colors of the rainbow and as much a part of Italian life as almost 3,000 years of tradition can make them. The Etruscans of North-Central Italy, who created one of the peninsula's earliest civilizations, left evidence of how to make wine. The Greeks who soon after established themselves in the South gave Italy the name Enotria (the land of wine).
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