A Creamy Team Favorite

Hi everyone!  Here is a favorite of many of my friends here overseas... every time I've made this dish, it's been a hit!  If you like cream sauces, cheese, bacon, and pasta, you're gonna love this dish!  And who doesn't love artery cloggers?  Enjoy this delicious recipe!

Carbonara Pasta

Hooray for Guacamole!

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Virginia Woolf

Occasionally I like to subscribe to informational Podcasts: President-Elect Obama's Weekly Video Address, CD Baby DIY Musician Podcast, Make-It-Green-Girl, WhoWhatWhereDaily, etc. Things that catch my fancy. One podcast that I subscribe to that has remote connections to food, is Nutrition Diva's Quick and Dirty Tips. An excerpt from a former episode on the health benefits of adding some kind of fat while eating rabbit food:

"But you'll actually get more nutrition out of those vegetables if you eat them with a little fat. That's because many of the most valuable nutrients in vegetables are what we call fat-soluble (or lipid-soluble) vitamins. These include vitamin A, which protects your eyesight, vitamin K, which builds healthy bones and keeps your heart healthy, as well as beta carotene, lycopene, and all the carotenoids, which fight free radicals and ward off cancer.

These nutrients don't contain any fat themselves. But in order to be absorbed into your cells, where they can do you some good, they need to hitch a ride on a fat molecule.

Isn't this the greatest news you've gotten all day? Eating your spinach sauteed in a bit of olive oil and garlic or dipping your carrot sticks in peanut butter is actually much better for you than eating them plain. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition reported that when researchers added avocado to a salad, the subjects absorbed up to 15 times more fat-soluble nutrients than those who ate the plain salad. (Now that's the sort of medical research I want to do: the kind that involves guacamole!)"

Quite interesting, no? All the more reason to eat some cut up veggies with pinzimonio :)

Pinzimonio

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Assorted cut-up vegetables (such as carrots, celery, fennel bulb, radishes, red and orange bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes)

Stir the oil, salt, and pepper in a small bowl to blend. Arrange the vegetables on a platter. Serve the vegetables with the dip.

Christmas Feast!

I had a Christmas party with some of my friends, and cooked lunch for them!
Homemade Meatballs

Mixed Salad with Homemade Balsamic Vinaigrette

Spaghetti, naturally

Merry Christmas!