Carla Lalli's New Cookbook Shares Four Seasonal Recipes

Chef and cookbook author Carla Lalli appeared on 'Good Morning America' on Thursday to share seasonal recipes from her new book, 'Food Is a Feeling.' She demonstrated a colorful citrus salad and a fruit-filled cobbler, while also providing the recipes for a hearty Bolognese sauce and a sesame cake flavored with miso, vanilla, and lemon. Abcnews.com first reported the story.

Lalli offered her top tips to help home cooks successfully recreate each dish. The recipes emphasize technique and seasonal ingredients.

Dreaming of Summer Citrus Salad

This salad for four combines various citrus fruits with savory elements. The dressing base starts with thinly sliced shallot and crushed fennel seeds seasoned with salt and pepper, then coated in distilled white vinegar. Oranges like navel, blood, Cara Cara, or Satsuma are peeled and sliced. Tangerines or clementines are peeled and separated into clusters.

Thinly sliced celery and smashed Castelvetrano olives are added. The salad is gently folded with a generous drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, seasoned again, and arranged on a plate-not in a bowl. It is finished with scattered roasted pistachios or almonds, Aleppo pepper, and flaky salt.

Black-and-Blue Cobbler with Jam Biscuits

This cobbler serves eight and features a unique biscuit topping. The biscuit dough is made in a food processor with flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, hard-boiled egg yolks, cold butter, and buttermilk. For a tender crumb, the butter is pulsed into very small beads until the mixture resembles cornmeal.

The dough is rolled out, spread with blackberry jam, and sandwiched with another layer before being cut into strips. The filling mixes blueberries and blackberries with sugar, cornstarch, salt, and lime zest and juice. Some berries are lightly crushed.

The fruit filling is placed in a baking dish, the jam-filled biscuit strips are arranged on top, and everything is baked at 350°F for about one hour and ten minutes. Lalli advises letting the cobbler cool until the dish is just warm to the touch before serving to allow the juices to thicken. It can be served with whipped cream, crème fraîche, sour cream, or vanilla ice cream.

If You Make One Bolognese

This recipe yields six cups of sauce, enough for eight servings. It starts with a soffritto of garlic, celery, carrot, onion, and fennel finely chopped in a food processor. Pancetta is cooked in olive oil until golden, then the vegetables are added and cooked until reduced.

Ground beef and pork are added and cooked until no longer pink. Tomato paste is stirred in and cooked, then whole milk and bay leaves are added and simmered until the milk evaporates. White wine is added, and the sauce is partially covered and cooked for about three hours until the meat is tender and the sauce is velvety.

The sauce can be made ahead and refrigerated for a week or frozen for three months. To serve, pasta is cooked very al dente and finished simmering directly in the warmed sauce with some pasta cooking water. It is served with Parmigiano cheese.

Just Like an Olive Oil Cake, but with Sesame Instead

Lalli's final shared recipe is for a sesame cake. The source notes it incorporates miso, vanilla, and lemon, positioning it as a variation on a classic olive oil cake. The full recipe details were not provided in the source text, but it is presented as a flavorful, less-sweet option from the new cookbook.