Wow Chow Cooking

I saw this recipe on Living the Gourmet, a wonderful cooking blog run by my pal Catherine Pappas. That woman knows HOW TO COOK. I was recently in a bind for dinner time (had no meat thawed and no vegetables around!) and I remembered her wonderful recipe. As isusual, I amended it a little bit [...]

I recently wrote an article about tips for making the perfect spaghetti sauce with ground beef. I used to make this kind of sauce all the time (I cook mostly Italian dishes) and my sauce is sooooo good. While this kind of sauce is pretty easy to make, there are a few tips that will [...]

I’m not exactly a pizza connoisseur, but I love me a good pizza. I’m terribly spoiled, because I live in Upstate New York, where there are more pizza parlors than people (so it seems). I have tried my hand at making a good homemade pizza, but have failed miserably. My daughter, however, makes GREAT homemade [...]

I don’t know what the difference is, exactly, between calzones and pepperoni rolls. They are shaped differently, but that’s only slightly. They are made with the same kinds of ingredients and bakes the same way… ?? When I worked in radio, there was a pizzeria across the street. They made the most FABULOUS pepperoni rolls. [...]

Central New York is renowned for incredible Italian dishes, due to the influx of immigrants in the late 1800s. I am not Italian, since I was raised in an Italian region by Italians, I cook a lot of Italian foods. (I also talk with my hands :-p ). One such Italian dish in the Utica, [...]

Well, as is customary about this time of year, billions of recipes involving zucchini are blasted through the Internet cookbooks, mine included. For some reason, we had a weird occurrence with excessive zucchini this year. No no, I know everyone gets excessive zucchini EVERY year- but the weird thing is that I had the kids [...]

This recipe is sooo good. And it’s pretty easy to make, if a bit messy. (Italian dishes are always so messy to make and eat). This particular recipe I got from Italian Food at About.com, and it’s called Don’s Steak Pizzaiola. I altered it a little to my liking. It’s a really good dish. Steak [...]

These are perhaps the most succulent meatballs you will ever eat. All the meatball recipes that I have seen bake the balls in the oven. This pretty much destroys the savory goodness of the meatball. Plus, you may as well hand out the nutcrackers when serving the meatballs, they get so hard. My meatballs are [...]

We LOVE lasagna. But it is so time-consuming to make. And you have to pre-cook the lasagna noodles just right, or they turn out too chewy or too mushy. I’ve tried those “oven-ready” lasagna noodles, too, and I can’t stand them. I want to eat my lasagna, not chew it like cud! Plus, lasagna just [...]