Giada De Laurentiis Talks Meatballs at the NYC Food and Wine Festival
By: Rosemina Nazarali
Published: October 1, 2011

Celebrity Chef, Giada De Laurentiis, hosted Meatball Madness at the New York City Food and Wine Festival earlier this week. The Food Network star gave attendees a few tips on all the different ways to cook meatballs.
"My secret to making the best meatball is a nice amount of pecorino cheese," De Laurentiis said. "Keep it nice and moist, not too many bread crumbs, and I personally love to make chicken or turkey meatballs. I'm a "light" girl so I want them to be light, too."
The chef also talked about her favorite things to make for Halloween. "I make these cute little bugs with my daughter, Jade, that are actually dried apricots. We use different colored thin licorice for the legs and chocolate chips for the eyeballs. Of course, as we're making them, I watch her eat all the chocolate chips. It's so much fun to make edible little treats like that."
With the end of the year just around the corner, De Laurentiis predicts that 2012 will be the year of the vegetarian. "Vegetarian, vegetarian, vegetarian. I think people are just really looking for lighter food on a regular basis. Because of that I'm testing out a lot of pizza recipes with gluten-free flours. Almond flour and quinoa are two of my new favorite ingredients to use in everything. I've been playing around with them a lot — how to make fresh pasta with it, how to put it into baked goods — and then, of course, agave as a substitute for sugar. I'm trying to find fun ways to incorporate these things that have actually been around for a long time, not necessarily in our culture, and make them more mainstream."