Announcing the launch of a new website gallery dedicated to Burgers.

Modular Food™ by Joia is has been an exercise in creating imagery that illustrates just how simple, cool and fun it can be to evolve multiple dishes from a few base products.  Joia™ is a new Hudson Valley-based company with a mission to bring locally-sourced and produced, hand-cut, slow cooked foods back to the table again. This 1+2=3 project was designed using loads of graphic food imagery to illustrate just how easy it is to work with Joia™ through its website and collateral materials. Whether heated and eaten as they are or used to innovate new dishes, Joia Modular Meals™ save hours of sourcing, preparing and cooking whole ingredients into healthy and delicious meals.

To learn more about Modular Food™ by Joia™, visit: www.joiafoods.com

Weekends call for delicious, home cooking, sometimes with the involvement of even the smallest hands in the Tonelli household.

The kitchen resembles an elementary school arts and crafts class, even though real-time cooking with Dad is a lot more fun. Tiny fingers pinch flour and eggs in an enormous well, then knead and roll the dough for Agnolotti – an art not unlike mastering Play-Doh when you are 7- or 9-years old.  Pliable and brilliant in color the dough and filling are fun, just like art class, but much tastier to eat. Next, picture perfect pasta sheets get layered into handmade lasagnas or spotted with seasoned braised meat and spinach filling before folding, cooking and finishing to enjoy around the table together – the way a perfect Sunday dinner should be.

Francesco cooked, styled and shot over 100 recipes for Italian Cooking, a book released in March by Wiley publishers as part of the Culinary Institute of America’s atHome series. The book, which gives readers a taste of authentic cuisine from Italy’s diverse culinary regions, is co-authored by two Italian chefs, Gianni Scappin and Alberto Vanoli, and features wine pairings by Steven Kolpan.

While Gianni and Alberto prepared the majority of the food, Francesco brought visual life to the inspiration behind their recipes and finished each dish to be cooked, assembled and styled for the shoot. With the exception of a few photographs taken at the CIA campus, most of the book was shot in Francesco’s studio, where he was assisted by his wife, Lynn, who was also in charge of all the prop styling.

The production spanned a period of several months, during which Francesco not only photographed every recipe for the book, but also tasted virtually every dish along the way — leaving him especially attune to conveying the realness of the tastes through his images.

If you want to learn more about Italian Cooking at Home you may check its page on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Tripe, trippa in Italian, is the stomach of an animal, in this case beef. It’s texture is unique and very different from other offals or meat cuts. Very rubbery and tough when raw, becomes gentle and gelatinous when cooked slowly with a liquid.

This is one of many ways of cooking tripe. Various regions in Italy cook it in slightly different ways, changing the type of tomato product and its quantity, adding more or less liquid, various type of beans, herbs, spices and other ingredients. It is a humble, inexpensive dish and a true delicacy to be enjoyed in the cold months.

Buonappetito!

Recipe below… Read the rest of this entry »