Anna Maria McClenaghan

After trying out recipes from a Tagine cookbook and a Cake cookbook , the next supper adventure for the SASSY Supper club was to try the recipes from Italian SENSATION! (cucina). This is a coffee table-perfect work of love for all things Italian, written by a Vancouverite, who has cooked Italian family dinners most of her life.

Seven members of the SASSY Supper Club picked a range of recipes from the book, encompassing seafood, chicken, vegetables, pasta, salad and a frittata. Four of us original SASSY Club members picked our recipes during our SASSYs Taste Soft-Ripened Bloomy Rind Cheeses evening.

The other three guests,  all of whom live various walking distances away, on a later occasion picked recipes that appealed to them, and that could be carried easily. The consensus was that the recipes seemed straightforward family style cooking that we should all be able to handle easily.

Since I was host, and instigator of the SASSY recipe testing series, I thought I would try something special and chose a lobster dish - Lobster (surely there is an Italian word for lobster) con Arance & Limoni. Disobeying my own injunction to stick exactly to the recipes, I headed off to Costco and bought two boxes of frozen lobster tails. A bit pricey but this was going to be something special.

The recipe looked so simple that I felt a little guilty about only doing one dish, so I turned to a page that had a  picture of a delectable looking Pepper Salad, and decided to make that. Urban fare was featuring shallots this week so I added the Baked Shallot recipe on the same page. Then I looked at the dish I was going to serve them in and decided that green asparagus would finish off the look of the dish. So I found a recipe for Sauce All' Asiago- milk, cream and Asiago cheese that could be poured over the asparagus ... and thought "how simple is that?"