Leonardo's Italian Grille in Romulus, Michigan

One of our great pleasures when traveling is discovering new restaurants that offer homestyle cooking in a cozy atmosphere.  While we find some of these gems through word of mouth, quite often we discover a good eatery by shear luck.  Sometimes it is the name of the restaurant, other times the  look of the exterior and others still a combination of both.  So it was during a recent road trip when we discovered a small, cozy Italian restaurant.

Leonardo's Italian Grille is located at 7575 Merriman Rd in Romulus, Michigan about a mile away from Detroit MetroAirport.  The restaurant is owned by brothers Vito and Joe Liparoto who emigrated from Sicily to America in 1969 with their family.  Years later the brothers opened their first pizzeria, now operating as Leonardo's Italian Grille.  They have captured the essence of authentic Sicilian cuisine with the inspiration of Chef David Neal. They offer a variety of Italian specialties as well as dishes from the grill.

The exterior of Leonardo's is modern architecture  with Italian overtones of red and green.  There is a large outdoor dining patio to the left of the entrance.  The interior is cozy and welcoming with shades of taupes and greens, lots of wood, and an Italian themed mural.  There is an impressive bar with comfortable sitting in the lounge area as well as tables and booths.  The atmosphere is cozy, casual with friendly waitstaff.

The waitress brought us a basket of fresh bake twisted Italian bread stick with butter to accompany our meal.  These soft chewy bread sticks were delightfully delicious!   The texture was quite similar to a crusty roll yet a slightly different.  A little twist opened the warm bread stick forming a small pocket perfect for the butter.  This is one recipe I will be looking for to make at home!

Entrées were served with soup or salad.  We both ordered salads with our entreé.  The side salad was a simple salad greens with shredded red cabbage, shredded carrots, red onion slices, cherry tomatoes, croutons and Italian dressing. 

Leonardo's serves Provimi veal, a superior milk-fed pale coloured, fork-tender veal, the finest available.  My husband ordered the veal parmesan ($19.95).  The generous portion of tender veal was coated with Italian breadcrumbs, sautéed in olive oil then topped with marinara sauce and baked with mozzarella cheese.  It was served with spaghetti in marinara sauce.  The dish was garnished with finely chopped red onion and carrot, something a bit different from the over . used sprinkling of dried parsley. 

My husband really enjoyed the veal parmesan.  It was tender with a nice richly flavoured mainara sauce and gooey melted mozzarella cheese.  This entreé was a sure winner!

I ordered the Sicilian pasta ($15.45) with a side salad.  This entrée consisted of sautéed tender peas tossed with homemade meat sauce and fresh ricotta served over bowtie pasta.  The fine textured meat sauce had a bit of a zip bordering on heat to it so I think the meat was hot Italian sausage rather than ground beef.  The Sicilian pasta was a delicious entreé!

Leonardo's is ranked #2 of 33 restaurants in Romulus on Trip Advisor and for good reason.   The waitstaff are friendly and provide fast service.  The unpretentious food is simply good, homestyle basic Italian nicely presented in a cozy, inviting family-style atmosphere.  The portion size for the entreés is substantial. It is child-friendly for those traveling with little ones but can also accommodate larger groups.  If you are in the vicinity of the Detroit Metro Airport, this is a great restaurant for lunch or dinner.

Slow-Cooker Tuscan Chili

I have enjoyed receiving Kraft Foods Canada's formerly free What's Cooking for several years.  I have kept every single copy!  It was with a bit of sadness to read that they will now be charging for a subscription.  The thing is every single recipe in What's Cooking uses one or more Kraft products so in essence the magazine is one big advertisement for Kraft products.  I pay enough for Kraft products as it is so will not be paying for a subscription just to find out how to use one of their products.  Instead I will be visiting their website for free recipes.

I browse though all the delicious dishes in the magazine, marking each one I want to try with a post-it.  As always the newest copy of What's Cooking (Festive 2011) had several interesting recipes.  Yesterday, I made the Slow-Cooker Tuscan Chili modifying it to use home canned diced tomatoes and home canned white kidney beans.    One problem in substituting home canned for commercially canned anything is the size difference.  The recipe called for 19 oz of diced tomatoes and the same amount of undrained white kidney beans but home canned sizes are 1L or about a quart (tomatoes) and 500 ml or about a pint for beans.  In order to make the chili according to the amounts in the recipe I ended up with part jars of tomatoes and beans left over.  The interesting aspect of this chili is there's no chili powder yet it is a rich and flavourable chili, sure to please.  I served the chili with fresh baked French bread (first bread baked in new natural gas oven) and extra virgin olive oil seasoned with basil for dipping.

Slow-Cooker Tuscan Chili
modified from:  Kraft Canada, What's Cooking (Festive 2011), Pp. 25

1 lb mild Italian sausage
1 onion, chopped
20 oz home canned diced tomatoes
20 oz home canned or fresh cooked white kidney beans
1 green bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
5½ oz tomato paste
½ tsp dried basil leaves
½ tsp dried oregano leaves
2 tbsp Italian shredded cheese mix per serving*

Carefully remove the casing from the sausage.  Break the sausage into pieces while browning.  Drain and spoon sausage into slow-cooker.  Chop peppers and onion.  Add vegetables, tomatoes and beans to the slow-cooker.  Stir well then stir in herbs.  Cover and cook on low for 4 hours.  Ladle into bowls.  Top with shredded cheese.  Serve with fresh baked bread and extra virgin olive oil for dipping.

*Shredded Italian cheese mix (brand name or store brand) can be found in the dairy section or you can make your own by combining shredded provolone, mozzarella, parmesan and emmental cheeses.

Palace Italian Restaurant in Lakeland, Florida

My husband and I have always enjoyed eating out.  By eating out I do not mean fast food restaurants but rather any restaurant from pubs, diners, drive-in, casual dining, and occasionally finer dining.  Our focus is usually on restaurants with home style cooking.   Not only is eating out a form of entertainment it is also a wonderful source of culinary inspiration.  Discovering that little pearl of a diner off-the-beaten-track -- priceless!

Palace Italian Restaurant is located at 6120 North Highway 98 in Lakeland, Florida.  There are five more locations in the Lakeland area.  The restaurant has been family owned since 1997.  This restaurant is well worth the visit.  The atmosphere is warm and welcoming with friendly staff.  The food is divinely delicious because they use only the freshest ingredients to create authentic Italian dishes.  To quote them "Mangiare bene per vivere bene! (Eat well to live well!)".  This is one restaurant were you will be eating quite well!

Prices at the Palace Italian Restaurant are more than reasonable with dinner pasta entrée $15.95 or less and a reduced price for the lunch sized portions.  They have a good selection of gourmet pizzas, of appetizers, and salads.  We spent $36.73 for two meals with drinks.

All of their classic pasta dishes are served with freshly made traditional focaccia served with a shallow bowl of dipping sauce made with sun dried tomatoes and olive oil, just light seasoned.  The sun dried tomatoes gave the dipping sauce a lovely, rich flavour.   I often serve bread this way at home so will work on a clone recipe for this one.

My husband ordered the veal parmigiana (not pictured)  while I ordered the spaghetti puttanesca.  Spaghetti puttanesca literally means whore's style spaghetti, made with ingredients typical of Southern Italian cuisine.¹  The sauce consisted of black olives, capers and garlic sauteed in marinara sauce so would be very easy to duplicate at home starting with the basics of a marinara sauce.  The sauce tops spaghetti cooked to al dente.  Although the dish is noted to be spicy by some sources, I found the spaghetti puttanesca to be quite delicious, definitely not too spicy.  The whole black olives combined with the capers gave an nice, chunkier texture that was quite pleasing.  The funny thing is I've put black or green olives on my pizzas for ages but never thought to use olives in a pasta sauce.  I can't wait to start experimenting to create a recipe for this yummy pasta dish!

Italian Wedding Soup

Niagara Falls being a tourist area offers ample dining attractions.  We ate at East Side Mario's on Fallsview Ave in Niagara Falls during our recent visit.   East Side Mario's is a chain restaurant featuring Italian cuisine.  The average entrée costs under $20 but includes soup or salad (all you can eat) as well as fresh baked bread.  The atmosphere is quite lovely.  During our visit we found the food to be average and the service lacking.

My husband ordered the Italian wedding soup rather than salad as a starter.  Italian wedding soup is an Italian-American consisting of green vegetables, meat and pasta, quite often spinach, endive, escarole, cabbage, lettuce, or kale in a chicken based broth.  It is popular in the United States.  The meat is usually in the form of small meatballs.


The term wedding soup is derived from the mistransation of minestra mariata, the term for married soup.  However, the term married soup actually means green vegetables and meat go well together.  There are ready-to-serve cans of Italian wedding soup on the market but in all honesty, this is an extremely easy soup to make from scratch.  The soup does freeze nicely and if you are a home canner, it could be canned for convenience without all the added preservatives as well as believe it or not high fructose corn syrup. 

Brano's Italian Grill in Cocoa Beach, Florida

We tend to eat out a lot more when we are on vacation even at our vacation home where we tend to have company staying for extended periods of time.  A lot of the homemade meals at our vacation home are breakfasts and lunches with the occasional homemade dinner.  The nice thing about this is we get to experience a lot of nice restaurants that serve as inspiration for later home cooking. We love our pasta dishes so I am always looking for a bit of inspiration to come up with something just a little different in a pasta dish.  What better place to look than in a restaurant that specializes in classic Italian pasta dishes?

Brano's Italian Grill is located at 3689 North Atlantic Avenue in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  It is a smaller restaurant set back from the road a bit but don't let that fool you.  This restaurant that specializes in classic Italian pasta dishes is a definite gem!  The atmosphere is warm and welcoming.  The wait-staff are friendly, attentive and very efficient.  The wonderful pasta dishes are tasty and nicely presented.

We visited Brano's on Christmas Eve with a couple of our kids.  It was busy but the food and service was excellent!  With an appetizer and drinks our bill came to $91.21 for four adults which isn't a bad price for what we enjoyed.  The only negative thing that I can say about Brano's is the overuse of dried parsley flakes as a garnish.  It was virtually on every dish we ordered.  It was even on the salad, the soup and the bread so it was rather redundant.  Other than that we had no complaints so this restaurant has made it onto our must visit when in the area list.

We ordered the shrimp & crab parmesan dip served with warm pita bread (not pictured) as our appetizer.  It was a lovely, rich tasting appetizer to start the meal with.  Entrées are served with your choice of soup or salad and dinner rolls.  The salad is simply romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers & onion with your choice of dressings but it is nicely presented.

One of the kids ordered the backened snapper with shrimp entrée.  Sides included mashed potatoes and grilled vegetables on a bed of baby greens.  Blackened refers to a Cajun seasoning  blend used to coat the fish before pan frying.  You can buy prepared blackened seasoning or make your own blend as desired for home cooking.

One of our kids ordered the Fettucini Alfredo with chicken entrée.  And doesn't it just look scrumptious?  Alfredo sauce is simply a bechemel sauce (white sauce) with parmesan cheese added.  It is rich and creamy, a true comfort food.  What was a bit different with this Alfredo sauce was the consistency.  It was thinner than most Alfredo sauces giving an almost borderline stoup to borrow from Rachel Ray's favourite saying.  A stoup is thinner than a stew but thicker than a soup.

This would be a very easy dish to duplicate at home.  I think the only thing I would do a bit differently is to sear the chicken for a bit of colour and flavour.

I ordered the spaghetti your way with a plain meat sauce (not pictured).  It was delicious!  My husband ordered the veal parmigiana.  This gorgeous entrée came with a serving of spaghetti with a choice of marinara or marsala sauce.  He had the marsala sauce.  The veal was smothered with a marsala wine and mushroom sauce then topped with a wonderful coating of parmigan cheese.

This too is another easy to duplicate dish at home.  Veal cutlets can be purchased already breaded or you can easily bread them yourself.  Marsla is an Italian fortified wine very similar to a port wine.  The marsala spaghetti sauce is essentially a marinara sauce with marsala added for flavour and body during the cooking process.

Tuscan Tomato Salad

If you have been following this blog you will know that we eat salad almost daily and sometimes more often.  Salads do not have to be lettuce based although that is the image that comes to mind when talking of salads.  A wide range of vegetables can form the basis for a delectable salad perfect for any occasion.

My husband's ultimate favourite meal is grilled steak and potatoes.  That's it!  He would gladly eat this meal 7 days a week without complaining.  I make sure to add in vegetables and some type of side salad to balance out the meal.   I made a Tuscan Tomato Salad as a the side salad to compliment our Father's Day dinner.   The meal consisted of grilled sirloin steak, foil wrapped grilled seasoned potatoes, steamed asparagus and the Tuscan Tomato Salad.

When I think Tuscan I think of Tuscany and the rich Italian flavours.  I used a basic vinaigrette consisting of 1 part vinegar, 3 parts oil and binder then built from there using flavours from Italy.  Those flavours include olives, tomatoes, onions, basil, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, and sage as well as extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar.  The resulting salad was as tasty as it was colourful!  It will be ever so much better tasting with home grown tomatoes as soon as the garden starts producing.

Tuscan Tomato Salad

1 large tomato, diced
½ small onion, chopped
3 tbsp, diced green onion
8  pitted black olives, sliced
Tuscan vinaigrette (recipe follows)
2 sprigs boxwood basil**

Prepare the vegetables.  Stir tomatoes, onion, green pepper and olives together.  Divide into 2 - 4oz bowls.    Drizzle the prepared Tuscan Vinaigrette over the vegetables.  Place a sprig of boxwood basil into the centre of each bowl.

Tuscan Vinaigrette

1 tbsp Italian Red Wine Vinegar*
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
¼ tsp honey
½ tsp Dijon mustard
½ tsp Italian seasoning
½ tsp chopped chives

Whisk the ingredients together.  Pour over salad as desired.

* I used Alessi Italian red wine vinegar from Tuscany.
** Boxwood basil is a strongly flavoured basil with tiny leaves.