July's cookbook challenge:

For July's cookbook, DH chose Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I've been eyeing the Rotolo recipe so I thought I'd break my wheat embargo and finally give it a try.

Essentially it's a jelly roll with pasta as the wrapper and spinach, cheeses and prosciutto as a filling, cooked, then covered in a tomato sauce-bechamel mix, dusted with  parmasean reggiano then baked.

The recipe said to make the pasta as thin as possible. Well, you can make it too thin. I rolled it out on my pasta roller at setting seven... Six or even 5 would have been better. The pasta disappeared into the spinach. It was still damn tasty, just not as pretty as it could have been.

I made a salad as well, though somewhat altered; I forgot to write down the ingredients and came home with the wrong vegetables. The recipe was for cucumber and orange salad with mint and lemon juice; I bought fennel instead of cucumber. It was still tasty.

We had a 2006 Kalinda Sonoma County Zinfandel.

DH and I agreed, would Definately Cook This Again, although maybe with some practice for company.

For August, he's picked Commander's Kitchen. Would it be a cop-out to skip anything savory and go straight to their bread pudding souffle with bourbon sauce?