Italian cuisine, thoughts and recipes.

The previous week due to some personal reason I had lunch out of my house 2 days in a row. Since I was near the north suburbs of Athens I decided to visit 2 wine restaurants I always wanted to try nearby. I am not going to go for a full review since I tried only 1 dish out each restaurant but you will get the point.

First one was Whispers of wine in which I had a nice Orange sauce Salmon filet with a fairly priced glass of Chilean Sauvignon blanc. It was a really small nicely decorated wine restaurant in which I will certainly return one day to taste more dishes. The main reason for my post is Dal professore, from which I was totally disappointed. First of all when you have such a small wine list you can’t be missing my first 3 choices! The waiter was keep coming back telling me that they run out of this wine while the list had only one rose and even this was sold out! On the other hand someone needs to explain me why the prices are so ridiculous for the daily food of Italians in Greece. For some strange reason Italian cuisine is considered luxury. You can’t set the price for an average pizza over 15 euros!!!

 Salmon Fillet at Whispers of wine

pizza at "Dal Professore"

That being said I decided to prepare an Italian dinner on my own this Saturday and give you the recipes because restaurants need to understand that they should offer something better then what you can cook at home in these days. The menu was

Linguini with Hazelnut Pesto wine: Tenuta Cocci Grifoni 100% Passerina

And

Pizza Margherita wine: Villa di Monte Chianti

Both dishes ended up good and if you follow the recipes you will see yourself it is very easy to prepare something really tasty at home. The wines in the dinner was a white from 100% Passerina which is mainly planted in Piceno and matched nicely the pasta. The "Pizza" wine was a chianti from Villa di monte which was simply amazing! Sagniovese at its best!

Linguini with Hazelnut Pesto

400 gr Linguini De Cecco

80 gr Grated parmigiano Reggiano

100 gr Hazelnuts

100 gr extra virgin olive oil

Few fresh estragon leaves

2 toast breads soaked in milk

Few flakes of smoked salt

Lime pepper

Boil the Linguini for 8 minutes in salted water. In the meantime put in the blender 70 gr of hazelnut plus all the other ingredients and blend until you get a creamy sauce.

Keep a spoon from the water that you boiled the pasta, put it in the pot together with the sauce and the linguini and mix it. Serve with some extra grated parmesan, the remaining hazelnuts and a couple leaves of estragon for décor.

Pizza Margherita (2 pieces)

Pizza dough:

4 cups of flour

½ cup of extra virgin olive oil

2 yeast sachets

1 ½ cup of lukewarm water

2 t.s sugar

1 t.s salt

Topping:

1 Barilla napoletana sauce

250 gr mozzarella di bufalla

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt

We mix the yeast sachets with the sugar in a bowl, add ½ cup of lukewarm water and leave it for 5 minutes. We add the flour, salt, remaining water, ¼ cup of Olive and kneed well until the dough doesn’t stick in our hands (we add flour if needed).

We put the remaining olive oil, cover the bowl with a towel and leave it for one hour in a warm place. We kneed well again separate the dough in 2 pieces and cover the bowl again with the towel for 30 more minutes.