Violet Sky

New Recipes

Ligurian braised rabbit – Okay, I’ll admit, I made this with chicken, both because I didn’t want to try to source rabbit and also because coming back from vacation and making my pickier youngest child eat rabbit seemed like a bad idea. This is a dish we ate in Genoa, at a restaurant that specialized in Ligurian cuisine, and it was delicious – simple ingredients, but really well done. I used chicken broth instead of making rabbit broth. I will say that I salted the chicken, thinking perhaps the recipe had left off that step, only to find that the salt from the olives was all the sauce needed, so it was a bit oversalty.

Pasta bianca – At the same restaurant, we had trofie with basil pesto. This pasta is made without eggs, so I immediately set out to recreate it. My shaping needs a lot of work to take it from “maybe a worm?” to the delicate curls we were served, but this recipe was easy enough to follow.

Revisited Recipes

Pasta with sausage and arugula – My husband makes pasta and sausage with red sauce fairly frequently, but I’m pretty burnt out on red sauce as a pasta base, at this point in my life, so sometimes I like to throw this one in for a nice change. The roasted fennel and red onions are so nice.

Bolognese pizza – Since our bolognese recipe is a 3 hour labor of love on my husband’s part, we tend to have this only occasionally. It’s also honestly kind of a pain to make into pizza, since I’m a very junior pizza chef and the bolognese sauce is much heavier than most pizza sauces. Still, everyone in the house loves it as a special treat – I use the 24-48 hour pizza dough recipe from Ken Forkish’s book, The Elements of Pizza.

Salmon couscous bowls – My daughter loves this recipe in particular, so to celebrate her return from her own international trip, I made this for her. Skinning the salmon is the hardest part – the rest is just letting the sauce cook down around the salmon. I’m not sure the carrots add a whole ton to the dish, but I put them in anyway, this time.