Another dinner

The night before we left to retrieve our father from the airport, it was my turn to cook. As I flipped through the cookbooks, I was suddenly inspired. Look at that steak! It’s seasoned, then wrapped in pancetta (bacon) and marinated/cooked in a sauce and served rare. Yum! Main course, check.

 We’re also required to have a vegetable dish… what about those pomodori al forno (the cooked tomatoes) that were so successful? I also love insalata caprese, though. Anyway, it doesn’t take much time—I’ll just throw that in as an appetizer. No one was ever hurt by caprese.

I have a sweet tooth, so I almost always try out some dessert or another. Flipping through the end of the recipe book I found a cake that didn’t look too difficult. Great!

Believe it or not, I didn’t need to go to the supermarket for the ingredients. I got the tomatoes and basil from Angelo, the greengrocer; the steak, bacon, and string from the butcher’s; and everything else from Cinzia.

I started cooking at about four. The first thing to do was burying slices of garlic in the steak and rolling it in rosemary. I then wrapped it:

Then I set the steak aside and prepared the tomatoes for the oven. We didn't take any pictures, but I wrote about this recipe a while ago.

After that it was time to make the cake batter:

I pulled out the steak again and seared it in a pan.

No more pictures (sorry!) but then I added crushed tomatoes, dried mushrooms, garlic, onions, and red wine. I let that simmer for a little bit while I put the cake in the oven. 

We started dinner with caprese and the cooked tomatoes. While we were eating, the steak cooked in the oven, smothered in the sauce. When it was done... we forgot to take any photos until after we had demolished it. Quite tasty.

The cake was also delicious-- not very sweet, but somehow that didn't take away from it.

And--- the caprese earned five stars, the tomatoes six, the steak five (five very enthusiastic stars), and the cake six.

Eleanor