Remember I told you I had butterflied a chicken and was planning on grilling it under a brick?  Well now I’ll show you how I did it.

As I mentioned the other day, Pollo al Mattone, or Chicken Under a Brick is a Tuscan style of grilling chicken.  The chicken cooks quickly since it is flattened under the weight of the brick and you end up with crispy delicious skin and juicy, perfectly cooked meat.  What more could one want from a chicken? Continue reading →

My favorite way to grill chicken is to butterfly (a.k.a. spatchcock) a whole bird, flatten it, and place it directly on the grill with a large brick on top to weigh it down.  Pollo al Mattone, or Chicken Under a Brick is a Tuscan style of grilling chicken and the results are fantastic!  The chicken cooks quickly since it is flattened under the weight of the brick and you end up with skin so crispy and delicious, a fight might break out before it hits the table.

I have a butterflied chicken marinating in the fridge right now that I plan on grilling later this afternoon.  I’m documenting all the steps with my camera, and I’ll show you the results tomorrow.  But in the meantime, I want you to watch this great video on how to butterfly a chicken, courtesy of the folks over at The Virtual Weber Bullet.  Since this is a skill I’ve only picked up recently, I figure there are a few others out there who might benefit from the lesson as well!

So this is the second installment of our holiday recipe series, and I couldn’t be happier to share this dinner roll recipe with you!

In my family, the dinner rolls at our holiday meals are never homemade. For years, my grandmother would pick them up at a local bakery, but at some point we switched to the big bag of dinner rolls from Costco.  And I don’t think there’s anything wrong it.  My sister and I still love those rolls from Costco.  And really, even supermarket bakery rolls taste pretty good if you pop them in the oven for a few minutes. Continue reading →

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I’m back, and this time I really mean it!

I won’t bother apologizing for another extended absence. If you’ve been following my adventures at all, you know that I recently located back to the United States after four years in Sicily. If that’s not a reason to take a month off, I don’t know what is! Continue reading →

Sorry for the unannounced disappearance!

The move back to the states, living out of a small bedroom with two animals, and being without a steady means of transportation has made it difficult for me to concentrate on blogging! On top of that, all of my spare time lately has been spent house hunting and Christmas shopping.

Luckily, we did find a nice house, but for now it’s empty since our furniture is still on its way back from Sicily! But Smack and Thumbelina have moved into the new place and Justin has been sleeping there on an inflatable mattress so that his commute to work is shorter. The animals are happy to have the run of the house after being mostly confined to one room for the last month! I’ve been borrowing a car when I can and splitting my time between my sister’s place and the new house. Hopefully the furniture and my car will arrive sometime in January. Continue reading →

All the credit for these goes to my friend Ron. He’s famous throughout California’s central valley for his blue cheese burgers! I don’t have his recipe because even though I think I managed to pry it from him once, I never wrote it down. But I was craving a blue cheese burger today for lunch and since Ron and Ruby live in California and I’m still in Sicily, I had to come up with something myself! Continue reading →

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a side dish recipe and since I’ve been making a lot of rice lately, I decided to share one of my recent favorites recipes with you. Continue reading →