More from The Two Greedy Italians: Salad, Vegs, Soup

Ah, this week I feel a bit Italian. Whatever that means!

Anyway, I'm not going to say "I should have been born Italian." as someone else used to say, but it's really nice to have a lot of Italian food. Already before I wrote you a bit of my experiences with the book Two Greedy Italians eat Italy. I'm not quite through with the book, but I am making progress. 

While browsing through the book I selected three dishes to try. The first one was Insalata della Valtellina or in other words: bresaola salad. I like bresaola. If you don't know it, it's air-dried beef. This meat is very lean and tender. The origin of bresaloa is the northern region of Italy, called Lombardy.

That is how the salad looked like. Among the bresaola there are featured some black olives, hard-boiled eggs, some bread, sliced radishes and of course a few salad leaves.
I had something similar before.
This particular one here was lovely as well. I liked the different flavours and textures - meaty, crunchy, soft and ... well, it was worth making it.
Next on the list was Bagna Cauda. It's a warm dip containing ... hm ... yes, garlic was in it, quite a lot. It was warmed cooked with milk and then followed quite some oily and fatty things: anchovies, butter, olive oil and double cream.

I had it with some sliced up vegs and bread soldiers. I wanted to try bagna cauda already way before. So now, finally I made it and ... well it didn't really work as a dip. Something must have gone wrong. It was kind of thin. The bread worked well, because it has soaking power. Everything else was just minimally coated. Nevertheless, the taste was alright, but I would have liked it a bit more ... eh ... dip-like. Maybe I add some more double cream next time, or less milk.
Finally, I made a soup again. Yes, it might not be the weather for soup. Winter might not be the time to go outside with shorts, but I did it anyway. So goes the soup. Well, I'm only lucky I didn't do it three days before, when it was really hot, so hot we really had difficulties to sleep at night. Lucy was panting half the night, or something like that. Still, we both survived and now I am even able to eat a soup.

This soup is called Eisacktaler Weinsuppe or beef and wine soup. Actually, it's the very first recipe in the book (obviously it starts with soups). The preparation is clearly the opposite from what I had to do last time I made a soup. It really takes next to no time to put it together.
You just boil white wine and beef stock for one minute. Yes, just one minute. Then you add double cream and Parmesan and heat it through ... here you go. Right, you may need a bit longer when you want to have this fried bread in it, however, still it's no big deal.
From this explanation you can gather, that much depends on the wine and the stock as to the taste, because for sure this soup has a very strong wine taste.
That's for now!
For sure I try some more nice Italian recipes of those. What is your favourite Italian dish?
Let us know?

Now I'm really finished with this post. I take some more time to fight with myself, whether I'll do a spontaneous vacation within a few days ... can't decide yet ...