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.
