A New Chapter

The blog had pretty well descended into my reviews of a single restaurant, Next.  Last night I began to cook my way through a new cookbook and on a whim I decided to take a photo and begin to document the things I cook from it.

The book is Simple Italian Food Recipes from my Two Villages by Mario Batali.  I cooked a number of things from this book many years ago when I was much less experienced and had a lot less equipment to work with.

I don't expect this to become a detailed post about each and every dish, at times like this one it'll probably just be a single picture and a few thoughts but I wanted to get some content up here so here it goes.

These are dolmas, stuffed grape leaves.  In this case they are stuffed with a goat cheese and pepper mixture and then tied and grilled and garnished with good balsamic and thyme leaves. 

I was slightly nervous about this dish because the first time I cooked this I thought it was terrible.  The grape leaves were entirely too pungent for my palate at the time.  This time I got dry leaves, I think the first time they may have been pickled.  These still were packed with a funky flavor but seemed to be more mild and were actually really good.