Simkin: Italian food for amateurs

When my roommate told me she’d like to invite eight friends over for a multicourse dinner… When my roommate told me she’d like to invite eight friends over for a multicourse dinner featuring recipes she’d learned studying abroad in Florence, I knew it was going to be epic. If a person buys baking ingredients in amounts that threaten to warp floorboards — i.e., 50 pounds of flour in a single outing — you take her seriously when she says she’s going to bake something.

The only possible flaw in her plan? She was going to do all this in our tiny galley kitchen, on a student’s budget. Was such a feat possible?

A sane person would have retreated to the safety of her bedroom and returned when the flurry of kitchen activity was finished, but I’ve never claimed to be one of those. So I volunteered my assistance, comforted by the thought that if I managed to make it out alive, the story might make for a decent food column.

To my shock and awe, the dinner wasn’t nearly as difficult to prepare as its bafflingly named Italian ingredients led me to believe. I managed to do it, and you absolutely can too. All of the lush and foreign-sounding foods required were purchased at Giant Eagle.

The Appetizer

The trickiest part of the appetizer, Pera e Pecorino con Miele — pears and cheese with honey — is finding the right cheese: pecorino romano. And even that really isn’t that difficult. Around 1/2 a pound of cheese and three pears served eight people comfortably, so you can scale down from there.

Cut the pears and cheese into wedges and drizzle them with honey. It’s that simple. Arrange individual portions on plates or serve them as a sticky finger food. Elegance, sophistication and scrumptiousness are yours.

Gnocchi

For the main course, my roommate served gnocchi — pronounced no-key — a potato-based pasta with gorgonzola cream sauce. Prepare the gnocchi as you would regular pasta, by boiling, but beware of its tendency to stick together and mush. A pound comfortably serves four people. When the pasta rises to the surface — which should take three or four minutes — it’s finished.

For the sauce, heat four cups of heavy cream to a boil. Reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for 45 minutes or until it halves itself in volume — a bizarre thing that cream does. Remove the pan from heat and add four ounces of crumbled gorgonzola cheese, a dash of nutmeg and a little bit of kosher salt and black pepper. Stir until the cheese dissolves smoothly and pour over the gnocchi.

Garlic Knots

No Italian meal would be complete without garlic bread. Fortunately, garlic knots can be prepared ahead of time, hence their moniker, icebox knots.

Dissolve 1/2 an ounce of active dry yeast in 1 1/2 cups of warm water. Add two teaspoons of sugar and let the mixture stand for five minutes. Add 1 1/2 cups of warm milk, 1/4 a cup of vegetable oil, three more teaspoons of sugar and two cups of flour. Beat until smooth, then stir in enough flour — this could be as much as five or six more cups — to form a stiff dough.

The next step is the only slightly difficult part. Knead the dough until it’s smooth — about six to eight minutes — on a floured surface. Then place the dough in a greased bowl, cover it and allow it to rise until its volume is about doubled. This should take about an hour and a half.

Now comes possibly the most enjoyable moment of the entire dinner-preparation process: Punch the dough down like it’s a belonging-stealing sibling. Then, if you’re doing this ahead of time, pop the dough into a Ziploc bag and stick it in the freezer. If it’s the day of, roll a chunk of dough into a cylinder, then tie it into some semblance of a knot. Your craftsmanship doesn’t have to be perfect since the bread fluffs out as it bakes anyway.

Place the rolls on a greased baking sheet and brush with butter and garlic powder before baking for 15 minutes at 375 degrees. Serve with even more butter for absolute hedonism.

If the baking-from-scratch process doesn’t appeal to you, store-bought rolls will be sufficient. We served our dinner with sparkling apple juice and raspberry iced tea. If you’re of legal age and know of a more fitting wine pairing, by all means, try that.

And there you have it: two courses of a relatively easy-to-make Italian dinner. As for the chocolate-honey mousse bomb my roommate finished the evening with … you’re on your own.