I admit, I owe my story-telling to my Irish ancestors.

But cooking?

That's all Italian, baby.

Today it's about the Italian table as we go Back to the Cutting Board on Christina Cooks.

(theme music) ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards.

Designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

Jonathan's Spoons.

Individually handcrafted from cherry wood.

Each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: ♪ (Christina) Hi, I'm Christina Pirello and this is Christina Cooks, where each week we take fresh, seasonal ingredients and whip them into amazing dishes.

Will everything be plant-based?

Yeah.

Will it all be delicious?

You bet.

It's food the way Mother Nature intended.

Now, if you've known me for more than six seconds, you know that I love every single thing about Italy, from my heritage in Naples to the food to the culture to their, what I call, Type "Eh" personalities.

Like we seem to be all Type A.

Type A, get it done, get it done, get it done.

Type "Eh" is, "Oh, I didn't get that done?

Let's have a coffee and do it tomorrow."

Not that Italians aren't productive.

I mean, they gave us Ducati, Ferrari, and Michelangelo, so they're clearly getting something done.

But when it comes to the table, there's no rush.

They care about the soil, they care about where their food comes from.

They still cook and enjoy a meal with family and friends.

It's stunning.

When I get to Italy, I feel every bit of stress leave my body and I just relax into the joy of cooking and enjoying meals with people I love.

Now when I was a kid, my mother and father worked very hard.

We didn't have a lot of money, but we always had food.

And my mother could figure out a way to do what she called "loaves and fishes," more than we cared to admit.

And this was one of her favorite summer recipes that kept us fed when things were tighter than they should be.

So, what we're gonna do is take some extra virgin olive oil.

Actually, it's gonna seem like a generous amount because it is.

And this extra virgin olive oil has to soak up into the tomatoes and into the whole grain bread that's going into this soup.

Now, this is called Pappa Al Pomodoro, meaning a thick soup made of tomatoes.

And what they did was this was a farm-style cooking.

So what they did was they would take and make a tomato soup and then the next day they'd have to stretch it, so they would add stale bread.

So it's kind of a brilliant sort of thing.

So what we do is take a nice, fresh summer tomato.

You know your knife is sharp, by the way, when it can cut a tomato and not turn that tomato into puree.

So we're gonna take the core out.

Now I don't peel or seed tomatoes for this soup.

And somebody, I'm sure, will call my office and say, "She didn't peel the tomatoes or seed them."

I don't like to.

I think that Mother Nature gave us the peel and the seeds, and so I use them.

So you want to make a large dice of your tomato.

You're gonna need about two pounds for this soup.

And you just cut them.

You can see it didn't take any effort at all because my knife is, well, sharp.

Then I'm gonna clean my board, which I always do in between veggies.

It keeps your board and your work area nice and neat, which is very Italian, and it also allows your food to not blend flavors.

So this is gonna go into the olive oil, which is not turned on, right?

There's no sizzle.

The reason the olive oil's not turned on is because while it's a high-heat oil for cooking, the flavor changes quickly under heat.

So, I usually put my tomatoes or whatever my first ingredient is in the oil and then turn on the heat.

And we'll also stir in some garlic.

This soup has very few ingredients and loads of flavor.

And while tomatoes are tomatoes and we love them in salads and we love them in sauces, the beauty of tomatoes is that they're loaded with vitamin C because they're actually a fruit, and they're also loaded with a compound known as lycopene.

And lycopene creates reproductive wellness.

And because we cook the tomatoes with olive oil, that lycopene is 60% more absorbable by the body.

So, you're welcome.

A little bit of salt so the tomatoes start to release their juices.

Now, some people say, "Can you add onions?

Can you add hot spice?"

You can.

You can make this simple soup as complex as you'd like or use the classic recipe, which is garlic or onion, tomatoes, and bread.

The next thing to go in is a whole grain bread.

And what--I use whole grain.

Traditionally, it's a white Italian bread, but I'll use crust and everything and you just tear it.

And it's a bit of a workout.

So you tear the bread and it goes in.

And you're gonna put about half a loaf into soup for maybe four people.

You use the inside, you use the crust.

And if the bread's too much for you to handle, because it's, you know, not shredding as you'd like, you want to make sure it's stale, so it should be a little bit harder to pull apart.

You can also take a bread knife and cut it into chunks.

And then rip those slices into the soup.

Once you get the last of your bread in there, like this, I kind of don't put the really hard chunky heel in 'cause I save this to dip in while the soup's cooking.

Then you add a whole carrot.

My mother used to put an entire carrot in.

And what this does is absorb the acid from the tomatoes.

When you take the whole carrot out, what you'll find is the carrot tastes like it's been soaked in vinegar.

So that's the way you absorb something known as solanine, which is an alkaloid that actually can create pain in arthritic joints.

Then you add water to just cover the tomatoes.

Push the bread down... ...so it all is sort of submerged.

Cover it and let it cook for 30 minutes.

And when you see how creamy this gets, it will be divine.

-Can a vegetable be a fruit?

-And fruit can be a vegetable.

-What?

It can be both?

-(distorted audio).

-(distorted audio) fruit.

-I don't get it.

(male) I am so confused.

♪ (Christina) I get so many emails through the website about confusion.

What about this, what about that?

So I thought what we would do is take a minute, here or there throughout this series, and talk about what's so confusing.

And I have aptly named the segment, "I'm So Confused."

So I'm here with my friend Heather and the lovely Rosanna.

(giggling) Who's going to eat her favorite cookie while we talk.

So you're due soon again.

And what's it like?

I'm a little bit tired.

And a three-year-old is keeping me busy.

-Yeah?

-But, you know, we're trying to get a well-balanced meal and a healthy diet, which is becoming more difficult.

As a three-year-old's palate changes, we become more picky and you can't just puree things anymore -to magically make it happen.

-No, you can't.

And as a parent, you're up against the whole, "What would you like for lunch?

Tofu and Brussels sprouts or the superhero meal with the toy?"

-Which we love the toy.

-Which we love.

So, I mean, for me, it has to be-- what usually works, I find, especially for young parents who are busy, is that when they're out they're out and when they're home the food is what it is.

And if you don't make a big deal out of it.

You know, like, I had a friend who had four kids all under the age of 10.

Seriously.

And all she did was put the healthy snack on the table and say nothing and go away.

They ate it.

If she said, "Here's your healthy snack," it was like it had the plague.

-Right?

-Correct, correct.

(Christina) So, do we like cookies, missy?

What's your favorite one?

-No?

-Why not?

(laughter) (Christina) So these, actually, as you know, -are her favorite.

-These are absolutely her number one favorite cookie.

(Christina) And there's no refined sugar.

The chocolate is stevia-sweetened, so it's kind of like there's all good news for her.

-Perfect.

-So, as everything goes forward, just be gentle, of course, try not to be the food police, and, you know, do the best you can.

-That's all we can ask.

-Perfect.

(Heather) Well, thank you for your advice.

-As always.

-So, listen, do the best you can and try not to be so confused, okay?

♪ So before we move on to the next dish, let's season our soup.

It's gotten nice and creamy, it's beautiful.

Look at this.

Just look how gorgeous that is.

The bread has melted, so now it's like sort of a homogenous soup.

So now you want to take the carrot out and get rid of it.

And now we're gonna season the soup.

So you want to take a little bit of your hot broth.

Usually they finish off this soup in Italian cooking with a little bit of parmesan cheese.

We're not gonna do that.

We're gonna take a little bit of white miso.

And white miso is good for digestion.

It's like the original probiotic.

It's soybeans, salt, and grain, aged in wooden barrels so that there's live enzymes and friendly bacteria.

This is like the greatest thing for digestion ever.

But white miso has the flavor of parmesan cheese, so it's like you win, win, win, win, and you get to digest the soup.

So, just gonna stir this in.

Take your soup down to a simmer and stir in the dissolved miso.

And we're just gonna let that sort of simmer in all its wonderfulness for a few more minutes.

Okay, now, there's no Italian table that's complete without pasta.

So if you're not a carb person, where we have bread soup and pasta and next we're doing cookies, this might be the part where you want to go get a snack, 'cause we're making pasta.

Okay.

Everybody makes pasta with huge rolling pots of water, right?

They get these big pasta pots that we buy and then you cook three penne in it.

Wrong.

What you want to do is take a smaller pot, right?

And you want to season it to be like seawater.

Settle down.

Pasta has no flavor.

You really season your water to season your pasta.

So you keep your water at a high boil, season it with salt, and now we're gonna take fingerling potatoes.

And I really like fingerlings for this because they're lower in sugar because they're not so big, they're lower in water, and they're gonna give us a nice creaminess to our pasta.

So we're just gonna keep this like this, a few potatoes, and they're gonna go right into your salted boiling water.

Followed by your pasta.

And you want your pasta to be seen in the water, right?

So if you take a look at this, it's not floating around in a great big ocean of pasta water.

You don't want that.

You want your pasta to taste like, you know, pasta not water.

So it'll come back to the boil.

While it cooks, we're gonna make pesto, a nice, simple basil pesto.

So into the food processor will go some garlic.

We're just gonna tip the ends off the garlic and smash it.

And in that smashing process, please don't take out all of your aggressions of the day on your little garlic.

You just do it to loosen the skin.

I know we have all these gadgets now to take the peel off the garlic.

I'm gonna let you see that again.

This is how hard it is and why you don't need gadgets.

Skin peels right off.

So...

The garlic's gonna get smashed a little bit more so that the food processor doesn't have to work so hard.

I gotta tell you, at home I do my pesto by hand.

I chop everything.

The nuts, the garlic, the basil into a coarse paste.

I don't like a really creamy pesto.

But since people use food processors more than they chop things for a half-hour, we're doing it this way.

I'm using walnuts instead of really expensive pine nuts, but you may choose to use pine nuts.

Some white miso, again, for that nice cheesy flavor.

And now we'll get the seasonings for our pesto.

So, we have garlic, we have nuts, we have miso.

Generous amount of olive oil.

Pesto's meant to be rich, pesto means paste.

So you want this to be creamy and richly flavored.

A little bit of red wine vinegar is just gonna take that edge off the oil and also allow you to digest it with that little bit of acidity.

And this is me.

I put a tiny bit of brown rice syrup, which is a natural sweetener made from brown rice that's fermented, and it just gives everything a little sweetness.

I don't know, I like a little sweetness.

So you may opt out if you like.

Take the stems off your basil.

And then I hand-tear my leaves.

You do this just so that the food processor doesn't have to work so hard, and you don't end up with a pesto that is really, really sort of creamy.

I like mine to be a little more textured.

Now the top goes on, and now the most challenging part of using a food processor, for me, getting it to work.

And some days I'm luckier than others.

So you just want to do this until you can see all of the basil is broken up.

But don't get crazy.

I really don't like a pesto that is so soft.

Now you're gonna go back here and you're gonna taste your pasta for doneness.

Pasta takes about seven minutes.

I know packages say nine, 12, 11.

What you want to do is go in and taste your pasta.

If it still has too much tooth, then you let it cook for a minute or two more.

But you start tasting it at seven minutes.

Needs a little more.

So, now we get the greens ready while the pasta continues to cook.

When you cook your pasta al dente, which is the way Italians cook it, and what allows Italians to eat pasta all day long and look like Sophia Loren, is that they cook it undercooked, so it doesn't become an insulin trigger, so you don't go from pasta to pizza to bread to the baked potato to the macaroni and cheese to the cookie.

You eat a little serving of pasta, you have the fiber of the pasta still, and so you're easily satiated by eating a small amount.

So that's how they do it.

So what we'll do is just tip off the ends of the kale.

You may use any green you like.

Broccoli rabe, escarole.

But I like this Lacinato kale, or dinosaur kale, because it's a little hardier, and it's gonna go into the boiling water with the pasta, so it's gotta kind of hold up.

Some people use green beans in this dish as well for the green, but green beans are on what my family likes to call the master list of things that I don't truly adore to eat.

So, use green beans if you like.

So you want to cut the kale into sort of bite-sized pieces, and it's gonna go right in with our boiling pasta.

Okay?

Easy.

Now, serving bowl.

You want to use a spider or some kind of slotted spoon to take the pasta, the greens, and the potatoes out of the water.

You want some of the water.

And you want it because the pesto will naturally become a little more thinned if you serve it this way.

So as soon as your kale has wilted, maybe 30 seconds to a minute, right?

And kale is one of those, uh, we call them super foods, but it's not really that to me.

If it's a plant-based food and it's whole and unprocessed, it's pretty super, but kale has had a great PR run and it's loaded with calcium, fiber, vitamin C, anything you could possibly want.

Even protein you can get in kale.

So once you have all your pasta and potatoes out... Now you're gonna take your pesto.

You can either try to hold the blade in place with your finger under the bottom or you can be a really smart person and take the blade out.

Now we're gonna take the pesto and just dollop it right on top.

And stir it in.

And you'll create this rich pesto-covered pasta, potato, and greens main course that, in my opinion, beats just about every pasta dish I've ever had.

♪ And there it is.

Pasta perfection.

♪ ♪ So how do you know your knife is sharp?

If you can slide it through a tomato like hot butter, just like that, that's how you know your knife is sharp.

If you can't do that and you make tomato puree on the board, probably not sharp, better hit the steel.

But if you're using a ceramic knife, maybe don't hit the steel.

These are guaranteed sharp for five years.

You have to send them back to the company when you need to put a new edge on them.

♪ So before we move on to dessert, which you're gonna love, let's bowl up our soup.

So it's all finished, it's nice and creamy.

Just make a nice hardy bowl.

You got nice creamy chunks of bread and tomato.

Make a nice serving.

Some fresh basil leaves for garnish.

♪ Just like a whole gigantic sprig on top.

And it looks really beautiful.

It's the perfect summer soup.

♪ Now, it's all about dessert.

Italians love their desserts, but like any European culture, they're really smart in that they don't eat huge desserts.

They don't have desserts brought to the table by four waiters and it looks like the size of the Great Wall of China.

What they do instead is eat little tiny desserts, three bites, because they know that after three bites your body doesn't taste sugar anymore.

So they savor those three bites, these little delicate desserts, and that's how they can enjoy dessert and not have it land heavily on their hips.

So we're gonna make something called Baci di Dama, which means Lady's Kisses.

And you'll see why they're called kisses in a minute, but let's start making 'em first.

We're gonna take five tablespoons of vegan butter.

You may use whatever brand you like.

And don't get crazy with measuring.

I mean, measure, but don't, you know, you don't have to, like, give yourself a stress attack.

So... And this cookie is so easy.

Everything goes in one bowl.

You don't have to measure the wet, then the dry.

It all goes together.

So we're gonna put a teaspoon of vanilla, just about.

Make sure you use really good vanilla when you're making dessert.

You want to be able to smell it, that it's so lovely you want to dab it behind your ears and walk around smelling like a bakery.

We're gonna use a half-teaspoon of baking soda.

Two tablespoons of arrowroot.

Arrowroot is gonna behave like the egg in this, so you need about two tablespoons.

Four tablespoons of coconut sugar.

That gets measured in.

A pinch of salt, just a tiny bit to make the cookie sweeter, I know.

And then it's a cup of almond flour.

Some people call it almond meal, but it's almond flour or almond meal goes in.

And then we're gonna take either whole wheat pastry or a whole wheat sprouted flour.

I love sprouted flour because it's light and it also will help us to digest it as a vegetable not as a carbohydrate.

Then everything's in one bowl, so now you just take your mixer on low or slow, otherwise your kitchen's covered with flour, and you're gonna mix this together until it forms a homogenous soft ball of dough.

It takes about two minutes, not even.

It starts to come together looking like wet sand, and then it comes together as a dough.

And as soon as it really starts to gather, you can also do this in a stand mixer, which I love, but there's something about your hand mixer that just, I don't know, it always will have my heart.

So, then you pull the dough together.

And now you make the first part of the kiss.

You're gonna turn your oven to 350, and then you'll take little pieces of dough.

There are about, I wanna say, a quarter to a half-teaspoon, like a little tiny, right?

It's as big as one of your fingernails.

And it goes onto parchment paper.

Now, when I make these at home normally, I line them up perfectly.

Perfectly.

But when I watch other people make them, they just kind of make them and throw them onto the tray and--right?

They don't really line them up.

And I'm a little, um, you know, OCD about it.

So--but you want to fill your tray with your dough.

You'll get about 70 of these little balls of dough onto your tray, and then this is gonna go into the oven at 350 for 10 to 11 minutes and be done.

Okay, now what we have to do is make the filling that actually allows the cookies to kiss.

So we'll take some rice syrup and water and we boil them together, this is sort of like making a ganache.

And then we'll take some non-dairy, stevia-sweetened chocolate chips into a bowl, grab a whisk, and pour this boiled mixture over the chocolate.

And you want to just almost cover the chocolate but not quite, because we want the filling to be a little on the thicker side.

You don't want it to be runny like a glaze.

And then you get in here and you fight with the chocolate just a little bit.

And suddenly under your whisk it turns creamy and smooth and shiny and thick and gorgeous, and you know you've done it.

So once you have that the way you like it, that texture, it's nice and shiny and smooth, set your whisk aside and take cooled cookies.

The cookies have to be perfectly cooled, perfectly cooled.

And now they kiss.

You take a cookie... ...and a small amount of chocolate, maybe a quarter-teaspoon right in the center of the cookie.

And then you put the other cookie on top and they kiss.

And you just keep doing this part until you have all of your little bacis made.

The problem with these cookies is simple.

(sighs) You can't just eat one.

And I promise you, you can't just eat one.

So, as I finish my bacis, what are you waiting for?

It's time to get Back to the Cutting Board.

And I'll see you next time on Christina Cooks.

♪ ♪ (announcer) Underwriting for Christina Cooks is provided by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties.

Sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

Additional funding is also provided by Old Yankee Cutting Boards.

Designed for durability and custom crafted by hand with Yankee pride and craftsmanship.

Jonathan's Spoons.

Individually handcrafted from cherry wood.

Each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding is also provided by: You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at ChristinaCooks.com and by following Christina on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The companion cookbook Back the Cutting Board takes you on a journey to re-engage with the soul of cooking.

With more than 100 plant-based recipes, finding the joy in cooking has never been simpler.

To order your copy for $20 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

And Christina's iconic book, Cooking the Whole Foods Way, with 500 delicious plant-based recipes.

To order both books for $39.95 plus handling, call 800-266-5815.

♪ (bright music)