Viva gli italiani!

I have another new hobby. It suddenly dawned on me that there could be blogs written by Italians, about anything Italian, in Italian! I was right--there are! It took me a few minutes to figure out that in order to find them I needed to do my searches in Italian, but then I hit the "mother load." Just like in the English-speaking blogosphere, there are many hundreds (maybe thousands) of blogs in Italian!

I first tapped into the world of cooking blogs. My, oh my, there are so many! I started browsing the other night and added a bunch of blogs to my list to follow. One in particular which I loved immediately is written by a mature woman who is apparently a fantastic cook! The first night, I found her family recipie for Cappalletti in Broth. She credits her grandmother and aunt for the recipe, so I'm thinking it must be quite an old, traditional recipe.

Finding this recipie was quite a thrill since I have for years been searching for a traditional recipe for Cappelletti in Broth because I remember it so fondly from my childhood. My grandmother (nee Moretti) and her two sisters would get together on a fairly regular basis and make what seemed like massive quantities of Cappelletti together. I wish I could have been there just once. Cappelletti is a filled pasta which resembles tortellini, and theirs was filled with a mixture of meats with maybe some cheese inside as well. The filling always had a hint of spiciness, along the lines of cloves or nutmeg--so unique with the meat filling. I suspect there never was a written recipe for this wonderful dish, it was just a family tradition probably learned from their mamma and nonna.

We ate the meaty filled pasta in chicken broth, and there were always sweet brown raisins in the broth. It was like nothing else I ever ate during my childhood, all warm and brothy and sweet, with grandma back and forth from the kitchen, fussing over us. Now that I found a traditional recipe, for some reason, I just starting having the desire to make my own pasta....strange, is it?

But I digress. The new Italian blogosphere promises much--more opportunities to practice reading Italian, some links to my heritage, and a window into today's Italy too!