It's not often I can be inspired for a recipe from the truly right place: my nose. But this one came straight from there, via our family daycare lady's new husband, who likes to cook Italian. I picked up my daughter one day and olfactory senses were sent straight to heaven. Conveniently, this recipe was online, courtesy Giada di Laurentiis.
My Italian is limited to "grazie," but I'm fairly certain "osso" means "bone." So I went against this recipe first thing, with the title ingredient no less, and used boneless turkey breasts. I know my family better than that, and anything with bones in it doubles the work for me cutting everything up.
Still, the rest of the ingredients are no-brainers: onions, carrots, wine, tomato paste...how can you go wrong? Naturally I omitted the celery, as I was born with the rare CTA (Celery Tastes Awful) gene.
This was overall easy to make, the most labor-intensive thing being chopping herbs for the gremolata (??whazzat??) and that wasn't bad at all. I sure could use a good roasting pan that can easily transfer from the stovetop to the oven though -- the cheap dented one I have kept spinning on the cooktop.
The cooking smells filled the house as promised, and the final result also looked beautiful.
My first attempt at accompanying risotto failed completely, but I just called it "fat dry rice" and no one knew the difference.
My picky husband really liked it, my somewhat-picky son liked it, and my eats-everything son loved it. My daughter, who indirectly started it all, detected the faintest speck of green and instantly rejected it, but with enough exposure to those fabulous smells at her daycare, she'll come around.
