A Pleasant Italian-Style Dinner

For dinner tonight, I made three easy Italian-type dishes:
- A fig, prosciutto, salami, and greens salad
- A vegetable and pasta soup
- Orecchiette pasta with prosciutto and bread crumbs.

The salad and orecchiette dishes were really good. The soup was nice. All three were easy.

The orecchiette dish was from page 89 of Giada de Laurentiis cookbook, "everyday italian."
The fig salad was from page 16 of the "frame>by>frame italian" cookbook.
The soup was from page 24 of the "frame>by>frame italian" cookbook.

The first cookbook was a Christmas gift from our daughter, the second from our son and daughter-in-law.

The fig salad had figs, prosciutto, salami, basil, mint, and arugula with a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper. It called for fresh figs, which were unavailable, so I used preserved figs calimyrna from Fresh Market. I also forgot to buy the mint. Nonetheless, the salad was very tasty. It would have been fantastic with the fresh figs, and even better with the mint.

The soup was a filtered puree of onion, plum tomatoes, celery, and garlic, to which chicken stock and soup pasta are added.

The pasta was very tasty and easy to make. One browns Italian-style bread crumbs in olive oil, then adds the cooked orechiette pasta. After adding the pasta, one adds prosciutto and parmesan.

With the meal, we had an inexpensive Santa Cristina Sangiovese by Antinori. Since we once stayed at the Antinori Fonte de Medici property in Chianti Classico next to where this wine is produced, it always brings back fond memories.