Paula's Take On Italian Food

Ciao y'all

You know, just cause I can't speak Italian don't mean I can't cook it

So I'm gonna prove it to y'all today by taking y'all on a tour of Italy with just a few of

my recipes. But first we're gonna have to stop by Davis Proteus to pick up some tomatoes and onions

And then we'll head back to the kitchen where I'm gonna put together some wonderful chicken spadini

And then next up is a northern Italian favorite, stuffed shells. And this recipe comes from my friend Barbara

Last, but certainly not least, it's my tiramisu. But this time, it's Savannah style

So y'all open up a bottle of your finest Italian wine and manja, manja

Hey, y'all

You caught me looking through my drawer. I'm looking for a picture because I want to show you one of my computer friends

Oh, here it is. I'm actually making this lady's recipes today. My life is so blessed and so full

in the fact that I get to make so many friendships with so many people across the United States that

watch my show. And Barbara Platoni had noticed that I didn't make a lot of Italian dishes

So Barbara wanted to share with me some of her mother-in-law's recipes just in case I ever wanted

to do a show about Italian cooking. Well, guess what? Today is a day, Barbara, and you're a lifesaver

So we're going to make these recipes today, but before we do that, we're off to Davis Produce

Randy and Sherry down at Davis Produce carries the freshest veggies from all over the South

so I know they'll have just what I need. Hey, doll baby

Well, hey, Miss Paula. How are you today? How are you? I'm good. Good to see you

You too. I got Italian night going on at my house. Come on back

I got the best things for you. Come on back. I was trying to see if I could scope out me some boiled peanuts

We done sold them all. Or ate them all. I need some tomatoes, Randy

Well, I got a couple for you here. All right, tell me what you got today. What you got in

We got these pretty red ones right now coming in from Ruskin, Florida. And then I got these Roma tomatoes

which are doing a little Italian cooking. I love Roma tomatoes. They are the best

Some people prefer those all year because they're consistent in the taste

and it's a good, firm tomato, too. And when are the Texas sweet onions

going to be coming in? They're coming in right now. They just started up. I think Sherry's got you a basket of tomatoes ready

Oh, good, good. Thank you, darling. There they are. Well, I will see y'all later

Well, thank you, Ms. Clark. Good to see y'all. Good to see y'all. Bring us those leftovers. Bye-bye

I'm really excited to try these Roma tomatoes in some sauce. In fact, it's going to go on top of one of Barbara's recipes

And I also picked up some onions for the first dish that I'm preparing today

So what y'all say, let's get back to the kitchen and start cooking

All right, this dish I'm going to be making is called Spadinis. And I'm going to serve this as an appetizer today

I've never eaten these or fixed these before in my whole life

but Dustin Walls, a young man that's very near and dear to my family and I

loves these, and he was telling me about them one day, and I said, well, I'm going to be in the kitchen doing some Italian cooking

so I said, tell me about these little puppies. And he described them to me, and I said, well, sounds delicious

so I think I'll try my hand at that. So we're gonna see what we come up with, with these spadinis

Foreign languages get me, y'all. All right, so we're gonna start with a strip of chicken tender

and I've got some Asiago cheese. And from what I understand, you can use different cuts of meat for this

I understand that veal is real good, but as you can see, I'm using chicken today

All right, we've got those rolled up. I'm just gonna roll them in olive oil

And then I'm gonna roll them into seasoned breadcrumbs. And then put them on our baking sheet

All right, I'm gonna saute these off. Now, Dustin told me to just put them in the pan

and put them on into the oven, but I think I'm gonna brown these off just a little bit

and saute the onions a little bit and then let them just finish it in the oven

It won take them but just a minute So we got our pan going and we going to let that heat up I going to add just a little olive oil

OK, where's the phone? Hello? Hi, this is Mario Batali, Multimario from the Food Network. Mario

I just wanted to call and say not only do I love you, but I want to help you. I'm watching your show here, and I'm bleeding

Who's telling you what I'm doing? The whole world knows what you're doing, Paula, particularly us Italians

Well, what's wrong now, Mario? This dish you're cooking, you're killing me with this pronunciation

I'm cooking spadinis, yeah. Isn't that what I said? No, Paula, it's spadini

I call it spandinas. Spadini. It's Italian. It's a beautiful word. Spadino

Spadini. Spadino. Spirini. Is that right? Uh. Ciao, baby

We'll see you soon. Bye. I think you just ought to come down here

and let me cook and him pronounce the words for me. He's on my case

I bet if I brought him here in the south, he couldn't say some of our words

the way we say them either, could he? I just wanted to brown those off. Now I'm going to put them on our baking sheet

and we're going to stick these in the oven. and let them finish cooking off

because they're not done on the inside, but they're nice and brown and pretty on the outside

And before I do that, I'm gonna toss in our onions and just roll them around in that olive oil

and those little breadcrumbs that's fallen off. That looks like that'd make some good gravy to me

Gonna just kind of pour those right over the spandini

Hope that was close. All right, just distribute those onions and drop on the bay leaves

And in they go. Looks pretty good, doesn't it? And when we come back, we're gonna taste this and we're gonna taste northern attack

stuffed shells. Okay, we've got our spadini in the oven

and I'm going back to a recipe that belonged to Barbara's mother-in-law

and it's Northern Italian stuffed shells. And we're gonna start by browning our hamburger meat

our ground beef. We're gonna kind of just crumble that up. And I'm gonna go ahead and season this

with a little salt and a little pepper. I think I'll drizzle just a little bit of olive oil over it

just to make sure it doesn't stick too bad. All right, now I'm gonna toss in some chopped onions

And I'm just gonna let that brown away while I'm putting together our other ingredients over here

I've got three boxes of frozen spinach. Now you'll wanna make sure

that you drain this really, really good because you want this to be nice and thick

Here's a tip for dishes like these. The frozen spinach works so much better

because in order to yield this much spinach, I would have had to have cooked

probably a sack of spinach that big, and it's still got that real strong spinach flavor

Okay, I'm gonna take our meat and just add it to this bowl

For this particular recipe, I've used a leaner grade of beef because I'm actually putting more fat in this

All right, now I'm gonna just take our softened cream cheese, kind of just work that in there

I love do ahead things. You can do this actually the night before or the morning of and stick it in the refrigerator

so you can have all of this part done. All right, I'm probably gonna have to wash my hands a couple of times on this dish, but

we're almost there. Gonna throw in a couple of eggs. Just break those up a little bit, and I'm gonna add the Parmesan cheese

You can put as much of that cheese as you want. All right, that's ready, and all we're going to do

is take our shells and stuff them. I bet you could even freeze these just like this I bet that they would freeze well to this point and then just pull them out let them thaw and bake them off All right now I think that get it

One more hand wash. All right, now I put my tomato sauce in one of my canning jars

and I'm going to just pour it all over those shells. Alright, I'm just gonna finish up a little cheese

because I love a lot, a lot of cheese. Sprinkle this with a little extra Asiago

Then we're gonna cover it with tinfoil and bake it for about an hour

Okay, I think our spadini is probably ready, so let's check on it

I think this spadini is ready. So let's see what we've got here

Can't wait. This is the first time, y'all, for Spadini to hit these southern lips

Oh, it looks really, really good. Mmm, mmm, mmm

It's really, really good. I love the flavor of the breadcrumbs and that delicious cheese

I've got to take a quick break. I'm going to put our pasta shells in the oven

and I'm going to give this one more taste. And when we come back, we're going to taste this

and we're going to taste Savannah tiramisu. And that one's mine, Mario

We're back and I'm ready to take these stuffed shells out of the oven

And I can smell them and they smell heavenly. All right, let's take a peek and see what we've got

Oh gosh, they look delicious. And I can see that that's way too hot to put in my mouth

I won't have any lining left in my mouth. So I'm going to let that cool

And while it's cooling, I'm going to be showing y'all my recipe for Savannah Terramassu

And it's very simple and very delicious. Now I'm starting today with some store-bought macaroons that have been dipped in chocolate

And I've crumbled those up, and I'm going to take my bourbon

and let that sit while I'm putting the rest of our dish together

And over here, I've got two sticks of softened butter, and we're going to throw those in our mixer along with some sugar

And we're just going to cream those two things together. Now, to the creamed butter and sugar, I'm going to add six egg yolks

Now, if you're wondering where the egg whites went, I beat them up earlier into the state

of a meringue, and I've got them in the refrigerator. When we get through, we're going to be folding the beaten egg whites into our yolk mixture

I'm going to add about a teaspoon of vanilla and a half a cup of nuts

I'm going to beat in our chocolate macaroons that have been soaked in that bourbon

All right, now to this, we're going to add our melted chocolate

And the chocolate that I'm using is unsweetened. Okay, now I'm going to go to the refrigerator and get our egg whites

and I'm going to fold them into our chocolate mixture. I'm going to just fold this in. And look how good that looks

Now we're going to come over here and we're going to be using a springform

pan for our dessert. And I'm going to need to spray our pan because when we take the side off

we want to make sure that nothing sticks. All right, we're using a plain store-bought ladyfinger

So I'm gonna take them apart and just cover the bottom. Now we're gonna come in here and layer it

with our chocolate mixture, and I'm gonna spread that around evenly over those ladyfingers

And then we're gonna come back in here in here with another layer of Lady Fingers. Now we're going to come in here with another

layer of the chocolate. Just keeps getting better, doesn't it? We're going to spread

that out Now we going to put our last layer of Lady Fingers on it and put them up close enough to almost make the size of a serving of pie Now I going to cover this and I going to put it in the refrigerator and we going to let it set overnight

But I have another one that's ready. So we'll go in with this one because I really do want to show you all how I finish it off

And you can see that this is set up nicely

I'm going to gently remove our springform pan. Looks good. Alright, I think I'm going to move it to our pedestal and finish it up

I'm just gonna take our whipped cream, gonna come in between each of those lady fingers

And you can do this any way you want it. There's really no right or wrong way

And now for the center, I'm just gonna come in here and build it up with stars

And then I'm gonna take one of my little leftover chocolate macaroons

and drop right in the center. And she looks beautiful, doesn't she

And now all I'm gonna do to finish her off is just dust her with a little cocoa powder

Look how pretty. Well, she's done. I think it's time to taste these stuffed shells

I'm gonna come in here in the middle and get me a piece with a lot of cheese

It's still steaming hot. Not bad for a first timer. Mmm

Can't hardly think about leaving these stuffed shells. But I just got to try the tiramisu

It just looks sinful. So very good. I know y'all are going to love it

I'm only going to leave for a couple of minutes, and when we come back, I want to take y'all outside

and show y'all the neatest trick about how to plant your tomatoes

tomatoes. Y'all not gonna believe it. I learned this from a country boy from Mississippi

I can't wait to share this little tip with y'all. From what I hear, all Italian families

or most all Italian families grow their own tomatoes because they take them very, very seriously

Well, I want to show you a trick that Brandon Branch taught me, a little country boy from Mississippi

This is a great way to grow your own tomatoes if you have a very limited amount of space

All you have to do is go find you a couple of bales of hay

and you can get this from your agway, possibly even a hardware store

And you can see how it's bundled up with twine. Now you want to leave that twine on your hay

And all you're going to do is take you a sharp knife and just cut through that hay

And that serrated knife works real good. It'll kind of just cut right through your hay

And then we're just going to dig it out. Then we're going to put some dirt in there

Just going to pour a little real good soil. You want to make sure that you use a soil that's good for growing vegetables in

And I'm going to take our tomato plant and gently pull it out of the container

I'm gonna just break up some of that dirt, and then just tuck it down in that hole that

I made in the hay. And these are going on the patio

And I'm just gonna water this, and I'm gonna wait about a week before I fertilize it

And before you know it, we're gonna be eating tomatoes. And to give my precious little tomato plant a little extra added protection, I'm gonna

Just stick a few marigolds around in it cause the smell will keep the bugs off

I've had so much fun in the kitchen today with this meal. It was really fun kind of getting outside my box

and fixing other people's recipes. Barbara's stuffed shells is so good. And Dustin's Spadino is delicious

And I really liked the tiramisu cause it was my recipe. And I hope that y'all will try some of these and love them as much as I did

And so until next time, America, I send you love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours

Ciao, baby