Mascarpone...and pizza

So, in reading "Under a Tuscan Sun" the author is a bit of a chef, and she describes a lot of the food she cooks.    The traditional cooking in this part of the world is "la cucina povera", the poor kitchen, and a lot of the time only a few ingredients are used.

A very popular ingredient is Mascarpone, so we figured we'd buy some and try it out.

The first dish is just three things:  1) Mascarpone, which turns out upon purchase and subsequent tasting to be a very thick creamy-type cheese, actually more like English clotted cream....cream so thick you can stand a spoon up in it, 2) pasta, for which we use our favourite gnocci 56 shells, and 3) a jar of palpa di pomodoro, which is just crushed tomatoes, although this particular one also has basil and garlic in it.

Now, I appreciate it does not look fabulous, but it does taste fabulous...and it was all of 15 minutes to make. We put parmigiano on it (the good stuff...freshly grated), but it was way better just on its own.

Given the fact that Marscapone tasted just like English clotted cream, Mary figured that she would make scones so we could have English scones with "clotted cream" and jam.  The scones turned out perfectly...even Mary was impressed and she has a very high bar when it comes to these things.

These tasted absolutely fantastic!!

Finally, we thought we'd try our hand at making pizza.  You can buy the pre-made dough at the supermarket, so we unrolled that and put on palpa di pomodoro with freshly sliced mozerella.

After rubbing the edges with olive oil (which Mary is doing here) we put on a little garlic and salt.   A quick 20 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees celsius and it was done.  We garnished with fresh basil, and we had crazy good margherita pizza.

Seriously, this Italian cooking thing is not that hard.

Cheers,

David