A Couple Nights of Italian Cooking

I just love Claudia Roden's "The Food of Italy." Spend some time in a "general" cookbook and then switch over to something like "The Food of Italy" and you'll see that it's like cooking without a net. The recipes are so spare; it really comes down to ingredients, combinations, and cooking techniques. I find the simplicity a little unnerving at times. Anyway, between Claudia Roden and Marcella Hazan I pulled together a few Italian meals indoors as the cold weather has returned.
From Claudia Roden's recipes I did stuffed peppers. Her recipe calls for arborio rice, chopped tomatoes, she makes a suggestion of spicing it up with chopped green olives and capers which I added. They came out great; there is a nice mint flavor (I used dried) that made itself known every time I ate one the next few days. If I could do it over I would cook the rice a bit longer in the skillet. We served it with scalloped potatoes...can't get enough of those.
Later in the week I went for a two course dinner starting with Marcella Hazan's Minestrina Tricolore which is a potato soup with onion, carrots and celery. After the potatoes were cooked I used an immersion blender and blended it with the cooking liquid. The additional vegetables were added after a bit of time in a pan with butter and oil. While that was cooking I made Polpettine Fritte and Cipolle al Forno from "The Food of Italy." Breaded fried meatballs (turkey, in this case) they were fantastic, I served this with baked sweet onions. When the onions were done I loosely chopped them and mixed them with a little bit of vinaigrette.