Today, I am dedicating this post and recipe to Bri, a fellow food blogger from Figs with Bri, and a woman fighting the long and difficult battle against breast cancer. This month’s CLICK event , hosted by Jugalbandi has a theme of Yellow, based on the Livestrong model. This month we, who are participating in this event, are dedicating our YELLOW posts to Bri, a strong woman with the heart and spirit of an Amazon! There is also a fundraiser going on for Bri – a way to help her seek the best medical care, in all areas, including holistic and experimental treatments some of which are not covered by her medical insurance. So please go here to check out the information and learn more about Bri’s cause – a little goes a very long way. The Foodblogger Blogosphere is a global village. we may not personally know everyone we interact with on a regular basis, but their stories and lives do touch us. I feel it is so important to support our fellow bloggers in good times and when they need us the most, during their trials.

(CLICK event photo)

Everyone here knows about my love for Moroccan foods. One of my favorite restaurants when I lived in the DC area was Marrakesh. This is how their website describes an evening there “course after course of Moroccan cuisine featuring succulent meats, vegetables, and salads served against the backdrop of Middle Eastern music and decor will both excite and lull you into one of the most special evenings of your life”. No truer words have ever been spoken.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, there was another great Moroccan restaurant where I used to live in Northampton, MA called Amanouz Cafe an unassuming place, yet serving up fresh and delicious food at very affordable prices. Both of the restaurants rate highly on my list of favorite restaurants of all time because of the education they afforded me for Moroccan food.
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So we are going to go back in time a little with this post. I hope you all don’t mind the time warp this blog sometimes is! It is hard sometimes figuring out when to post what! The life of a food blogger is all about organization…and sometimes the lack thereof.

Anyway, as you all know, the week before our wedding, Anna, Roberto’s mom came to stay with us. She is a food blogger and member of The Foodie Blogroll!

Her blog AnnaGarau.com features recipes from her native Sardinia. It is a great blog, full of wonderful anecdotes about Sardinia as well as beautiful pictures and she is quite the chef. It is in Italian, so if you want to check it out, and I recommend that you do, use one of those handy dandy translators like this translator from Google. You can even watch a video of traditional Sardinian dancing and singing – something Sardinians are known for. When she was here at our house, she was updating that post and we were having such a good time. I was really pleased to be able to have a “private” lesson with this great Italian cook in my own kitchen when she was here visiting us from Rome.

When I ask Roberto about his favorite foods that he remembers his mom making, the first thing out of his mouth is always Involtini or stuffed, rolled beef. However, he is always vague about exactly what her involtini are stuffed with. Out of desperation, once, I made these “involtini” stuffed with sun dried tomatoes, spinach and feta cheese.

They were delicious, but not involtini. So I was thrilled when Anna was here that she was delighted to show me how to make her involtini. She also made these fabulous eggplant patties that were very tasty. I am certainly making both of these again…in fact in honor of writing this post we are having leftover involtini tonight (The day I post this, may not be the day I wrote this…you know how the time warp is…)

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Recently we had my family over for an open house. We have been in our new place for a while now and not everyone had been here to see it. So we decided to do a luncheon. I had two ideas going into this party – I wanted to make something rustic and old-school hearkening back to the times that Italians stopped what they were doing to enjoy a nice lunch spread together out in the fields, on a big slab of wood turned into a table. Also along this theme, I really wanted to make something using ingredients that we already had at home.

Too many times when preparing for a party, I decide on a menu and then go and buy all the ingredients. This time, I wanted to challenge myself more and use what was around. We had been to the Farmer’s market the day before and had gotten our staples: potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, onions and beautiful bread. We also had a bag of frozen mussels in the freezer. So I decided to make a regional dish from Puglia, called Tiella di Cozze or Mussel Casserole – it is said to have descended from Spanish Paella. Since we were having a crowd, I also added some shrimp to the dish, which was topped off with a delicious bread crumb and parmesan topping! It was wonderful.

We served it with a nice green salad,Garlic-Rosemary Foccacia from Maria, the bread lady at the Farmer’s Market and finished with a

Yogurt Carrot Cake with Toasted Hazelnuts . Keep reading for the recipes.
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I love polenta – it is total comfort food and a great base for a variety of vegetables and great with tomato sauce and cheese. My favorite way to make polenta is with sundried tomatoes, olives, cheese and spinach-  put it in the fridge until it gets hard, dust it with flour and pan fry in olive oil. Served with a hearty tomato sauce it is really one of the best things to eat. This time though, I didn’t feel like frying the polenta. I wanted something lighter but still comforting and flavorful, so I decided to use the polenta rectangles as a base for lasagna. It was really good and something I will certainly make again.

This is also my contribution to Marie of Proud Italian Cook and Maryann of Finding La Dolce Vita ‘s Event: Festa Italiana. All Entries due March 22nd. Please click on either of their links for participation guidelines!
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Man, I am getting in a lot of blog posts this week! I guess there is just so much good stuff going on in the food blogoshpere that I want to support and be a part of. Sometimes, I get so backed up with other food related posts that I wait until the last minute to get my entry in for a Foodie Event. I wish I had time to do them all! I just love the creativity in this community! Food Bloggers ROCK!

Which leads me exactly to this post and this Foodie Event which is called Eat To The Beat and is the brainchild of my friend
Elly from Elly Says Opa! Elly says she was inspired to create this event because her love of music is about as big as her love for food! I completely concur. I have always believed that my life would be so much better if it had a soundtrack. So since I have started working from home, I can listen to music all day long and it just makes my life so complete. I can’t imagine cooking without music, dinner parties or meals without some kind of music playing the the background. So in a way, I have created a soundtrack for myself!

Press Play:

As you all who are regular readers of this blog know, I do bellydancing and I love it. Due to this fact, much of my music collection is what we call in this house “bellydancing music”. If the music hails from the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey or any of the places in between it is referred to as such.

And as all of you know who read this blog, I love all the foods from those regions as well…coincidence? Most likely not.

So this gets me to the meat of this post. We were having friends over for dinner last week, and I wanted to create a fun atmosphere – so we did small plates-  meze, antipasti, tapas, whatever you want to call it. I was really getting into all the dolmas or stuffed grape leaves people were making in the weeks leading up to it.  So I decided to combine Peter’s from Kalofagas and Mag’s from Hommus w/ Tabbouli to make my own version. I also made the Labneh from Mag’s blog as well, which is a soft Lebanese yogurt cheese, plus I re-created the Middle Eastern Meatballs with Orzo I had made last year. However, this time I made my own meatballs with the leftover ground meat from the gyros the week before. I just added and egg and some bread crumbs and baked the meatballs in the oven at 400 F for about 25 minutes. The meal was a huge hit and we had a great evening.

I chose this song, Desert Rose, click here to see the original video, the partnership of Sting and Cheb Mami, who is one of my most favorite artists and who is a very big star in his native Algeria and much of the “bellydancing music” world. His voice is unique and beautifully haunting. I also love Sting and give him major props for introducing Cheb’s beautiful voice to the western world through this song.

For more by Cheb Mami, click here.
To hear more of his music, click below.

Now for the recipes:
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I have been getting very inspired by blogs recently. Maybe it is because I sit down to check my daily bloggings while sipping that first cup of coffee before I eat anything – so I am half starved. But in any case, bad habits aside, I have been going crazy copying recipes from blogs that I visit through my daily interactions with The Foodie Blogroll. There is just so much good food out there and being exposed to it on a daily basis is a dream for someone as food obsessed as me.

To me there is nothing better than a Gyro – spiced meat in a warm pita slathered with garlicky Tzatziki, put an order of fries on the side and I am in a state of bliss. So the other day when I came across this, on Bitsy’s blog, A Matter of Taste, I was intrigued. I mean normally I only get Gyros out – and you watch them slice the meat off a huge cylinder of meat on a spit. For me, foodie though I may be, it never really occurred to me to think how this giant cylinder of meat might come to be. I mean there are no cuts of meat this shape and size, so what’s the deal? So when I learned I could make it at home, no spit required I decided to take up the challenge.

So here we go…

Here is your music of the day:

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If you have never had fried cauliflower, you are missing out. My Nana used to make it, just dusted in flower and pan fried. I used to eat it with ketchup when I was a kid! It was delicious. Years later, as an adult, I had fried cauliflower, known as Zahra Mekleyah, again, at a Lebanese friend’s house, then again at a Lebanese restaurant. They traditionally serve it with a delicious Tahini sauce and it is out of this world. Blows ketchup right out of the water!

I have always tried to take fried things I have enjoyed in a restaurant and see if I can make them healthier at home. I still enjoy all the fried stuff when I go out sometimes, but I hate the mess of all the oil splatters in MY kitchen. Yes, I am a neat freak,that is established. My favorite way to get a similar crunchy texture in the oven to frying is either to bake it at
450F, maybe 475F or broil it. These cauliflower, I did the former.

Instead of creating a Tahini dipping sauce, I decided to toss the cauliflower in it after broiling. It was phenomenal. Roberto and I kept saying, the few words that we spoke because we were too busy gobbling this down, through the whole meal that we need to eat this eat least once per week. Oh and did I mention that the cauliflower was from the Farmer’s Market?
Oh, yes, but of course!

Along with this wonderful cauliflower we made bruschetta with delicious farm fresh tomatoes, also from the market. The Bruschetta is Roberto’s recipe and made the Roman way -with crispy bread and warm tomatoes. It was really really good. I would not recommend making this unless you have really good tomatoes, as they are the star of the show.

Here is a little music with your dinner:

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The reason we are all gathered here today- at least in my corner of the universe, is because February 5th is
World Nutella Day 2008. This is the day that my buddies, American expats in Italy, Sara, Michelle and Shelley decided we should all sit back, relax and enjoy the Nutella.
This is a day to celebrate this delicious chocolate-hazelnut spread that puts smiles on faces young and old all across the world.

My first encounter with Nutella was when I lived in Norway, in 1994. Bread is a big thing in Norwegian cuisine. You eat it for breakfast and lunch with a wide variety of meats cheeses and spreads. My favorite was always Brunost (Brown Cheese) – I had it for breakfast and lunch, every single day. Of course, I was a foodie back then, too, I just didn’t know it yet, so I was addicted to going to the grocery stores there and seeing what kinds of products I could find that were unique to Norway. When I came across Nutella and realized you could eat it on toast for breakfast, I thought it was pure genius. I mean who doesn’t love the combination of Chocolate and Hazelnut? But for breakfast!? I thought this was a Norwegian invention and I was forever indebted, until I found out it was an Italian creation! Gotta love Italy. Anyway, I fell in love with the stuff. I discovered how good it went with waffles, another big treat in Norway. Well by that point I was hooked. When a Dutch friend of mine told me they eat chocolate sprinkles on their toast for breakfast, I began thinking we Americans are totally depraved.

Anyway, I digress. You are wondering about these wonderful pudding cakes I made. Well there is a story behind them too- I will try to be quick about it. Remember the Dolce Italiano Event back in November, where I, along with the geniuses behind World Nutella Day made recipes from Gina DePalma’s newest cookbook: Dolce Italiano: Desserts From the Babbo Kitchen? I made this and this.Well we were only allowed to make 2 desserts for that event (as if I was in any capacity with the impending holidays to make MORE than 2), but there was a third I was really wanting to try, her Chocolate and Date Pudding Cakes. I love dates and chocolate and pudding, so for me it was another match made in heaven. When I was thinking of a recipe to make for World Nutella Day, I immediately went to Gina’s cookbook to look for inspiration. I rediscovered these pudding cakes and decided to alter them to fit the bill for this fabulous celebration that I am sure Ms. DePalma would certainly sanction.

So what I did was instead of using the bittersweet chocolate and butter mixture, I decided to use Nutella. And in place of walnuts, I went for Hazelnuts, much more my liking and a much better match for the Nutella.

The verdict? These cakes are succulent. Yes, that is the word.

As Gina puts it : “The Medjool dates…contribute a deep caramel flavor that holds hands with the chocolate like a smitten teenager.”

Oh boy, does it. That with the warm taste of the hazelnuts underneath they are just pure heaven. I baked mine for 20 minutes and not minute longer. This made the centers perfectly moist and delicious. Bet you can’t have just one!
Happy World Nutella Day to everyone – get out there and get your Nutella on!

World Nutella Day: How you can participate.

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