In our quest to eat lighter and less rich meals, I made Italian white bean and spinach soup today. It's been rainy and chilly in San Francisco, so a nice bowl of warm, comforting soup was perfect for dinner.

I wanted a quick fix meal and opted for canned cannellini beans. Sometimes you just don't want to presoak beans or simmer them for an hour. And instead of using the traditional pancetta or ham, I replaced it with healthier ground turkey. It's a super simple recipe that can be made in thirty minutes or less, definitely less if you aren't snapping pictures.

The soup has great flavors from the herbs, onions, garlic and ground turkey. Add a dash of hot sauce, and it's even better. We had crusty Italian country bread with the soup. It's a simple, satisfying soup that's easy to make. What else would you want, besides a bowl right now?

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One of my favorite ingredients is hot Italian sausage. Hungry Bear loves sweet petite peas. Add some mushrooms, garlic, orecchiette, a sprinkle of Parmigiano Reggiano and you'll have a tasty pasta dish that can be prepared in 30 minutes.

Hungry Bear likes pasta dishes without tomato sauce because the individual flavors of the ingredients are not dominated by a tomato taste. Recently, we've made most of our pasta without tomato sauce. Our current favorite pasta is an orecchiette with hot Italian sausage.

This pasta dish is simple to make. We really like the spiciness from the hot Italian sausage complimented by the sweetness of the peas. The orecchiette gets coated by the juices from the sausage and mushrooms, so the pasta dish isn't completely dry. I try to make the dish a little healthier by draining off some of the fat/juices from the sausage. But if you remove too much juice, you'll lose a lot of flavor and there won't be enough juice to coat the orecchiette. It's a fine balance between flavor and fat.

To complete the meal, make a side of sautéed broccolini with garlic. You can also combine the broccolini with the pasta and have one big bowl of happiness and deliciousness!

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While in New York City last month, we upheld our Sunday Nite Dinner tradition at our friends', Jeff and Aimee's, place. After a long weekend of non-stop eating festivities and a Sunday morning bike ride to Piermont, I just wanted to curl up for a extended nap instead of dinner planning. We were cooking for several meat-and-potatoes people, so we tossed around making skirt steak or meat loaf. We settled on good old reliable spaghetti bolognese. The rest of the menu was...

Heirloom Tomato and Butter Leaf Lettuce Salad
with avocados, medium boiled eggs, bacon lardons and Dijon vinaigrette

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Vietnamese Green Papaya Salad
with basil, beef jerky and nuoc cham

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Spaghetti Bolognese
topped by basil and shaved Parmigiano Reggiano

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Lemon Pound Cake
accompanied by fresh strawberries

Why the green papaya salad? Well, Jeff invited his cycling club friend, Maggie, who volunteered to make the papaya salad if it fit into the menu. At that point, the menu was "fluid" and we neglected to tell Maggie what we were making. That's how you end up with a tasty and refreshing green papaya salad with spaghetti bolognese. The salad was made with green papaya, basil, shredded beef jerky and topped with nuoc cham (Vietnamese dipping sauce).

Recently, Hungry Bear and I have had a penchant for making salads with avocados and medium boiled eggs. I lost track of the time when boiling the eggs, and as you'll see in the slideshow, they turned into hard boiled eggs. For extra flavor and to complement the creamy avocados, we fried up some bacon lardons. Coupled with heirloom tomatoes and lightly dressed greens, this salad rocks.

Jeff made the spaghetti bolognese and used this simple bolognese sauce recipe by Giada De Laurentiis. It's an easy recipe that requires minimal prep time and ingredients. Compared to Michael Chiarello's bolognese sauce that Hungry Bear made in August, Giada's recipe uses more tomatoes and produces a meaty marina sauce, whereas, Michael's recipe makes a meat sauce with a touch of tomatoes. Both sauces are simple to make and delicious.

We ended dinner with a lemon pound cake and fresh strawberries. I used a classic pound cake recipe found in The New Best Recipe cookbook. The recipe can also be found on Kat on Thyme, a friend of a friend's blog. The cake was turned into a lemon pound cake by adding the zest of two lemons. The pound cake was light, buttery, moist and delightful.

Overall, dinner was a little eclectic and very enjoyable. It was quite a challenge for four people to prepare a meal in a small kitchen (a very nice, recently remodeled kitchen). In the end, we succeeded in making a great Sunday night meal to share with our New York City friends.

SNDsters: Craig, Nicole, Maggie, Ava, Aimee, Jeff, Hungry Bear, Chuck

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For the last few months, I've had a major craving for bolognese sauce. It all started during a trip to Geneva this past June. Hungry Bear had a conference in Geneva and I tagged along to keep her company. One evening, we walked down the street from our hotel, which was near the Pal-Expo, looking for a place to eat. We stumbled upon a nondescript Italian place that was part of small hotel. Since we were very hungry, we decided to give it a try.

Hungry Bear ordered spaghetti bolognese and I ordered penne puttanesca. I wasn't expecting much from the meal since it was a random hotel restaurant. My puttanesca was good, but Hungry Bear's bolognese was excellent. I should have known better, because I'm not a puttanesca type of person. I have a low tart/sour tolerance, so sauces with olives and capers aren't my cup of tea. Lucky for me, Hungry Bear likes dishes with tartness and we switched plates half way though dinner.

The bolognese sauce was thick and meaty without much tomato tanginess. It was fantastic! Since this meal, I've been obsessed with bolognese sauce. A couple of weeks ago, Hungry Bear made spaghetti bolognese to satisfy my craving for this meat sauce. She made it based on a recipe by Michael Chiarello -- veal, pork and porcini bolognese. It was absolutely delicious! She doubled the recipe and we had three meals of it. But, I was sad the bolognese didn't last longer.

After looking at the pictures above, my craving for the sauce has been re-ignited. I think I'll try a more classic recipe next time, perhaps this ragu bolognese recipe from Mario Batali. If you are looking for a leaner sauce, check out Chiarello's chicken bolognese recipe.

I love this simple meat sauce, and even more so, I enjoy saying... boh-loh-NYEH-zeh!

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