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I'd like to second the Moro offerings. I find that their recipes always works very well. Another book that I highly recommend is A Mediterranean Feast bu Clifford Wright. In addition to a lot of good recipes, this book provides an excellent read on the historical development of the cuisines around the Mediterranean sea and also contains a lot of good recipes.

Thanks Johnny! BTW, how do you sauce these veg based agnolotti? A simple herbed butter (like in Piemonte) or something else?

Haha. Let me know which one you would like. Or all of them if you want. -Chef Johnny ← Celery root, please. I like this root vegetable a lot, so its always interesting with new ways to use it. .

Serve it with potato gnocchi. Or maybe that's too similar to pasta?

I'd recommend the following english language books: Since you're going to Catalonia, there is of course "Catalan Cuisine: Europe's Last Great Culinary Secret" by Colman Andrews, which I haven't got myself, but I've heard good things about. Based on what I've read in Saveur that was written by him (e.g an article about Barcelona), it should be good. For a broad overview of Spanish Regional Cooking, I would recommend "The Food of Spain and Portugal: A Regional Celebration" by Elisabeth Luard. For each region there is a short introduction about the distinguishing characteristics of the region and how this has been influenced by history, climate and geography. Then follows a couple of dishes from the region (usually a couple each of starters, entrees and dessert).

There is a recipe in 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. It's been a long time since I made it, but as far as I can recall, the result was great.

I googled a bit and found several sites (e.g. this one) that explained that arbanelle is the cylindrical glass jars that is used for preserving the anchovies in slat. The jars are then sealed with a thin slate stone.

Flat pancetta goes under the name of pancetta tesa . My impression is that it's prevalent in at least Tuscany and Umbria.

Not pretty? I think it looks excellent, as does your whole menu. We traditionally have lamb at least once during easter and this year it will of course have a Rome/Lazio theme. I am currently trying to decide on either of the above ones from Molto Italiano and I leaned towards the Abbachio all Romano until I saw this. Did you find any suckling lamb and did you use the leg or the shoulder? I guess I will have a hard time to find suckling lamb myself, so I will have to settle for ordinary lamb. I did a Pollo alla romano the other day, no pictures this time. I used a recipe from Mario Batali, this time taken from the Food Network site. Although it was a quite good, nurturing dish it wasn't that spectacular. It might have had something to do with the heavy cold I had at the time but it wasn't as good as other chicken/bell pepper combos I've made in the past.

I had planned to get this book for this month. It turned out that Amazon UK couldn't deliver it so I ended up ordering Mario Batali's Molto Italiano instead. After all praise he's received in this forum, I was very curious on how a book by him would be. The book really lived up to my expectations and appropriately enough it contains a lot of the Roman "classics". I started out exploring this book with a meal consisting of saltimbocca alla romana, broccoli slowly braised in white way (apparently a roman way of doing things). To have some starch to go with this a made a torta alla patate from the book which may not be a really Roman thing but it was very good anyway. Mario's recipe for saltimbocca were different from other ones I've seen earlier on a couple of points. Firstly, the way he uses butter instead of oil and secondly the way the flattened cutlets are folded. The results: Unfortunately the saltimbocca sauce split in the last moment as my son had dragged his chair dangerously near the stove.

For those living in europe (not including Italy of course ) there is Savoria in UK. If I remember it correctly, it is run by the people who ran the UK part of Esperya. The products are shipped from Italy. I've not tried it myself yet, though.

Last month I didn't come to around to cook anything from Friuli Venezia-Giulia but I'll hope to contribute a little bit more this month. Lets start this month with a real classic: Pasta Carbonara. Pasta Carbonara have previously been discussed here. This is a dish that I often make for a quick lunch or after work dinner. This is really good simple comfort food. Guanciale is unfortunately impossible to find here and it is also rather hard to find any good pancetta that's good for cooking. I usually substitute with bacon but this time I used a brined pork belly. Of course I don't include any cream in my carbonara. To lighten up the egg yolks I add 1 egg white to every 2 egg yolks. Simple real comfort food as always.

Yes, it's caraway that's in aquavit. Cumin is called "spiskummin" in swedish. The most common use for caraway in Sweden (apart from aquavit) is for breads.

I also made riso alla pilota this weekend, I didn't go fot the col puntel version though. I based my version on this recipe together with Alberto's description upthread. I substituted the salamelle mantovese with some fresh italian sausages from my a Italian deli. These are made in-store and is as close as you get to homemade ones. Unforunately, I didn't read Alberto's advice to add some cinnamon or nutmeg until after I made this dinner. Nevertheless, I think it was an excellent great tasting dish and really simple to make. I'll agree with Alberto that this is comfort food. I'll definitely will make this more times. The next time I'll probably make my own salamelle forcemeat as well. For dessert I made a Semifreddo al torrone which is basically a parfait. This recipe is from Cremona where torrone supposedly features a lot. It consists of broken up torrone, egg custard, beaten egg whites and beaten double cream. All this is folded together and put in the freezer for three hours. I haven't got any picture of this, since all my photos were strangely out of focus.

Thanks for the info, Alberto. This makes it close enough to my substitute of choice: A really good fresh italian sausage made in-house by one of the italian delis here in Gothenburg. The main difference is that is made with white wine instead of red.