Porcini Chronicles

Greek Cheeseburger

2008-08-06T13:26:00.005+02:00

The New York Times has been reporting on high end burgers in fancy restaurants over the last couple years. I don’t see why not. Bread, meat and condiments can take a lot of forms and not all of them with special sauce on a sesame seed bun. Here, on vacation in Greece, this is what we did with our kilo of ground beef :

Burger ingredients :
2 lbs ground beef or lamb
1 small egg (if you have large eggs, use either the yolk or the white)
½ sm onion, minced fine
1 lg bunch fresh parsley, minced fine
½ cup breadcrumbs
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
4 thin slices of feta cheese

Assemble the ingredients as described on the counter. Mix all ingredients except for the feta in a large bowl with your hands. Divide mixture into 4 equal portions. Prepare a large plate with some plastic wrap to cover. Take one portion of the meat mixture and divide in two. Flatten one piece between your hands, trying to keep it evenly round at the edges. Once it is as flat as it can be, place it onto the plastic wrap and place 1 slice of feta over it. The feta should, of course, be smaller in diameter than the meat. Flatten the other half of the meat portion in the same way that you did the first and then place that over the feta. Now lift the plastic under the whole meat and cheese burger and place it between your hands. With your thumbs, connect the edges of the meat to completely enclose the cheese. Continue this way with the other three portions. Grill or pan fry the burgers as you please.

Sauce ingredients :
1 tsp olive oil
1 large garlic clove, minced
2 very ripe medium-sized tomatoes
½ tso dried oregano
salt and pepper to taste

As the burgers are cooking, place the oil in a small sauce pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and allow to turn blonde. Immediately add the tomatoes and simmer for about 5-10 minutes until the sauce reaches the consistency you like best. I cooked mine for 10 minutes and the result was thick enough to dollop on top of the burgers. During the last minute of cooking, add the oregano, salt and pepper. Set aside until the burgers are done. Serve on grilled bread, or if you insist, a sesame seed bun.

Brown Bag Lunch #6 Thai Chicken Peanut Noodle Salad

2008-07-23T16:41:00.005+02:00

Pregnancy vitamins don't contain protein. I think the medical establishment figures women in the Western world have no problem getting enough protein in their diets. In fact, most Americans get too much. I don't think I can count myself among them, though. I love starch, sugar and vegetables in that order. Meat is good but I don't really crave it, so here is a working woman's brown bag lunch which is also packed with protein for a growing baby.

Ingredients for 2 big or 3 small lunches:

1 full chicken breast (both sides) PROTEIN SOURCE #1
1 med clove garlic, minced
a 1/2 inch piece of ginger, minced
2 stalks of lemongrass, bulbous part only, minced very fine
1 tbsp vegetable oil

sauce:
1/2 cup peanut butter (crunchy or creamy, as you like it)PROTEIN SOURCE #2
1/4 cup soy sauce
juice of 1 juicy lime (or 2 not-so-juicy limes)
1 tbsp fish sauce
hot pepper to taste*
water for thinning (optional)

1 medium cucumber, peeled, quartred lengthwise and sliced thinly
2 green onions thinly sliced into rounds
1lb (450grams) package of very thin Asian rice, wheat or buckwheat vermicelli

*Use cayenne, use Thai red pepper-garlic paste, even use Harissa like I did. It was not terribly hot so I ended up adding 3 tsps and could have even added more.

Put the chicken breast in the freezer until it has become half frozen. This helps you to cut it into the small, 1/2 inch dice that you need. Place the oil in a large frying pan and add the chicken, garlic, ginger and lemongrass all together and sautee until the chicken is cooked through and beginning to turn golden. Take off heat and let cool.

Whisk all sauce ingredients together you will probably want to add a couple teaspoons of water to thin out the consistency. It should be as thick as stirred yogurt.

Cook noodles according to package instructions. Once done strain in a collander and do something no self-respecting Italian would ever do: pour cold water over noodles until they are cold. If taking to work, put a portion of noodles in one container and drizzle with a bit of vegetable oil to keep the noodles from sticking. Place all other ingredients in a different container and mix at lunchtime. If eating at home, spread the noodles on a plate, pour sauce over them and arrange chicken and vegetables on top. Music to eat Thai Chicken Peanut Noodle Salad or anything else by: punk band, Fugazi and the greatest You Tube video of all time: Waiting Room. Enjoy!

Anti-Morning Sickness Papaya Smoothie

2008-07-14T19:31:00.000+02:00

During my first trimester, I found that this smoothie calmed my nausea down. Don't know how it worked but I wasn't about to question a good thing. Even if you don't have morning sickness, this smoothie will kill your ice cream cravings while giving you a whollop of calcium and vitamins A and C without all the fat. By freezing the papaya in chunks, you don't have to add ice cubes which water down the smoothie. The result is thick and rich, sweet and creamy.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups frozen papaya chunks
1-6 oz container plain yogurt
1/2 cup low fat milk
1 tsp rose water
sugar to taste (I put in about 2 tbsps)

In a very large glass - you need to allow extra room for the blending), place all the ingredients in descending order. With an immersion blender, mix until you have a smooth, frothy, semi-frozen texture. Music to blend your smoothie by: Pete Rock and CL Smooth "Take You There". Enjoy with a straw of with a spoon.

Bun in the Oven

2008-07-08T15:37:00.002+02:00

Hello? Anybody there?

Boy has time flown by! Long time no see, huh? One day, I'm cooking up a storm and the next, I'm suddenly all preoccupied with so many other things to think about, plan, negotiate and imagine. Like a good former academic, I've been staring at my belly button for the last few months. You see, my innie is turning into an outie.

Seriously.

I'm pregnant!! and that fact has taken up a lot of my creative energy over the last few months, not that I haven't been cooking. One of these days, I'll give you a fabulous recipe for papaya-yogurt-rose water smoothie that's guaranteed (well, maybe not guaranteed) to make you forget your morning sickness. Then there's the tips on delicious and lysteria-free cheeses. I swear that French goat cheese made with pasteurized milk when eaten with "Cruscarelli" bran bread sticks tastes like the best Cheetos ever without the post-apocalyptic bright orange stains on your fingertips.

Anyway, I'll be back soon!

Tamales

2008-04-02T21:17:00.007+02:00

After thinking about it for years, making pale substitute dishes (tamale pie, the huge, sliceable tamalòn) and having the right ingredients for months, I finally made real, corn husk-wrapped, pork and ancho-filled tamales. My huge tamale steamer had been doing exclusive duty as a big stock pot*. They took a huge amount of work to make but I think they were well worth it and I'm sure that they'll become one of my many once-a-year cold weather projects. The work is divided into three phases: the "stew", pork shoulder simmered and shredded and mixed with an ancho chili sauce; the dough; and the assembly/cooking so you can interrupt the work between phases if you want to relax.

*Actually there's little difference between big stock pots and tamale steamers. Basically the difference is the disk-shaped rack that holds the tamales above the level of boiling water. If you have no tamale steamer, you could rig up a big stock pot with a couple small cups holding up a wire rack for cooling cookies.

Here's the recipe:

Pork ancho chili "stew":

1 1/2 pounds lean pork shoulder, in 1/2 inch cubes
3 fresh bay leaves, optional
3 tsps salt
7 large ancho chilis stemmed, and seeded
4 large pasilla chilis, stemmed and seeded
1 chipotle chili, optional(if you like it hot)
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground cumin
2 large cloves garlic
1 tbsp lard or bacon drippings
2 tsps sugar

The dough:

1/2 pound lard (it is best if you have rendered pork fat. I like to keep the drippings from fresh, unsalted pancetta)
3 1/2 cups masa harina
2 cups plus 4 tbsps hot tap water
2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp salt

About 40 corn husks (32 for the tamales, a couple for the strips to tie them with and the rest to line the tamale steamer). Boiled in abundant water in a huge pot and then allowed to soften in same water for 2 hours.

Making the "stew":

Bring 8 cups of water to a boil in a large pot. Add the pork, 2 tsps of salt and bay leaves and allow to simmer partially covered for about 40 minutes. While the pork is cooking, lay the ancho and pasilla chilis open and flat on a hot cast iron griddle. Hold down for about 5 seconds per side with a metal spatula. Once toasted, put into a small bowl of hot tap water. Once all the chilis are submerged, allow to soak for 20 minutes. then pour off the water.

Drain the water from the meat and reserve. This now flavorful water will help you make both the "stew" and the tamale dough. Place the drained chilis in the bowl of a food processor. Add the pepper, cumin, garlic, optional chipotle and 2 cups of the pork broth. Blend until smooth. Pass through a medium mesh strainer into a mixing bowl, reserve.

Heat 1 tbsp lard in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Once the pan is very hot, add all the chili puree in one go. Make sure you're wearing an apron because, this sauce will become angry, fuming, spiting and sputtering. Despite all thins, stir for 4-5 minutes until the puree has taken on a darker shade of brick red and has thickened. Add 1 1/2 cups of broth, reduce heat to medium low, and simmer covered for 15 more minutes. Once finished, add remaining 1 tsp salt and the sugar. Remove 1/2 cup of sauce to go into the tamale dough and another 1/2 cup to pour on finished tamales. There should be 1 1/2 cups left to mix into the pork.

Break up the pork cubes into shreds. Add the approximately 1 1/2 cups of sauce into the shreds and set in the fridge while you make the dough. OR, YOU COULD GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK AND PUT EVERYTHING IN THE FRIDGE OVER NIGHT. NO ADVERSE EFFECTS WILL OCCUR. GO AHEAD, RELAX!

In a large mixing bowl, mix the hot tap water into the masa harina and allow to rest for 30 minutes. If you have a hand mixer, your life will be a lot easier than mine for the next half hour. If not, get out the food processor (no need to rinse it since you'll be putting some of the chili sauce into the dough) and place the lard into the bowl. Whizz the food processor or use the hand mixer to beat the lard until fluffy and smooth. I once tried to do this by hand using my sturdiest wooden spoon and some elbow grease but I wasn't able to beat in enough air and the result was soggy and sad. Add the 1/2 cup of chili sauce and incorporate. Begin to add 1/2 cup-sized bits of the reconstituted masa while you beat. If you have a hand mixer, you'll do just fine but your food processor will probably whine and complain like mine did once most of the masa has been incorporated. When most the reconstituted masa has been incorporated into the dough, or when your food processor starts to show signs of stress, add some of the total 1 cup of pork broth that will eventually go into the dough. Whew! Ya still with me? Music to work your fingers to the bone by: "Hot Tamale" by Mr. Vegas. Continue to alternate masa and broth additions until everything has been added. Now, you're ready for the final step, add the baking powder and salt, and beat into the dough for about a minute to made sure they have been evenly distributed. At this point, a good test of future success is if a bit of your dough floats in a glass of cold water. Tamale assembly: If you've been powering on in the same day from start to finish, you should already have been soaking and softening your corn husks for 2 hours. If not, boil them for 10 minutes, keep covered and go watch a movie while they soak. Otherwise, set up your whole corn husks, dough, "stew" and 1/4 inch wide strips of some of the smaller corn husks for tying and the tamale steamer with some extra corn husks already lining the rack and several inches of water at the bottom. Take one whole husk, flatten out on a plate with the wide end toward the right. With a rubber spatula scoop up about 3 tbsps of the dough and spread in a 4 inch square at the edge of the wide end of the husk with at least 1 1/2 inches of empty husk on each side. Then place 1 1/2 tbsps of the "stew" in a line down the middle of the dough square. Take up the empty sides of the husk and bring them together thus enclosing the filling with the dough. Fold the empty sides over to one slice and fold up the empty bottom. Tie with a corn husk strip and place open top up along the wall of the tamale steamer. Continue this way (you'll get a feel for it after a couple) until you have made about 32 tamales and you've finished your ingredients. The last tamales tend to be very heavy on one ingredient and light on the other depending on how you proceeded previously. Lay all tamales standing up and leaning against each other on the rack. Cover the tamales with any remaining whole corn husks. Moisten 2 kitchen towels and lay them along the edge of the steamer. Place the lid on tightly over the towels. They should help keep a seal on the steamer and help keep insideous dripping into the open tamales. Place over a high flame to get the water boiling quickly, then once it boils, lower it to medium-low and steam for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 1/2 hours. Watch carefully so that all the water doesn't boil away. Once the tamales are done, take them out and unwrap a couple, pour a bit of the re-heated chili sauce over them and enjoy! They reheat perfectly. Just re-steam or microwave them until hot.

Lemon Rosemary Marmalade

2008-03-31T15:41:00.000+02:00

After such an auspicious beginning tasting rosemary lemonade for the first time, I decided to try rosemary and lemon in another combination: marmalade. After all, my stores of blackberry and fig jam are getting thin, I'll need new stuff to spread on my morning toast. I think it is important to use organic lemons here since you use all the zest, so it's best if it hasn't been sprayed.

Here's the recipe:

organic lemons, quartered longways and very thinly sliced, seeds removed
water to cover
confectioner's sugar
1 tsp of chopped rosemary per cup of fruit pulp
commercial fruit pectin for jams/jellies/marmalades

I haven't given much information in the way of quantities since this recipe works in ratios. Place the lemon slices in a non-resctive saucepan. I happened only to use 2 lemons. Just barely cover with water. Cook over low heat for 1 hour. Cover and let stand for at least 4 hours or overnight. Measure the amount of fruit pulp and liquid you have. I had 2 cups. Place pulp mixture back into the pan. Add as many cups of sugar as you have pulp into the pan. To that, add 1 tsp of chopped rosemary leaves per cup of pulp and fruit pectin as per package directions. I added 1/4 of a package given the small amount I made.

In a different saucepan, place the canning jars and their lids, cover with water and bring to a boil. Once the canning jar water begins to steam (before it boils) put your lemon, sugar, rosemary mixture on high heat and stir frequently. Once the marmalade has been boiling for about 5 minutes, you can begin to test it's doneness. Place a drop of marmalade on a cool saucer. Wait a minute or two to allow it to set. Draw your finger through the drop and if the two sides remain separate (do not run together), it's done. Take a jar out of the now boiling water and fill to the rim with the marmalade. Repeat with as many jars as needed. If the jarring has been done right, the marmalade will keep for more than a year. There are other methods that have you filling and sealing the jars before you boil them. I've never tried that, but it may be an effective method as well.

When the mood strikes you, open up a jar and spread on toast or even maybe some roast lamb. Music to eat lemon rosemary marmalade by: "King for a Day" on the release, Oranges and Lemons by XTC.

Powdery Mildew on my Sage: A Home Remedy

2008-03-25T15:17:00.000+01:00

I was strolling through an open air market last summer and bought a huge sage plant at a discount. It was glorious. I brought it home dreaming of ravioli with sage-butter sauce and even crisp fried sage leaves as a snack (the best alternative to potato chips there is!), but after about a week the plant developed powdery mildew. See the little white spot on the leaf in the middle? That's it. It's insidious. I fought a losing battle all last summer and fall. When I cut the whole plant down to the stalks in early winter, I hoped that freezing temps over the season would put an end to the bug. They didn't, so here's a home recipe for an anti-powdery mildew spray:

1 cups tap water
1/4 tsp baking soda

Place into a spray bottle. Saturate leaves in the morning so they have a chance to dry out in the afternoon sun. Since powdery mildew thrives in moisture, you want to limit the time the leaves are wet. Also, if possible, water the plant from the bottom by filling the saucer with water. So, this seems a bit paradoxical. You should spray with a water solution to get rid of powdery mildew but you should keep the plant's leaves dry to retard powdery mildew growth. I dunno; for now that's the best I got.

Now if anybody out there has any better home remedies, please let me know.

Good Friday Escarole & Beans

2008-03-21T03:05:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Marie of Proud Italian Cook and Maryann of Finding la Dolce Vita for organizing the Festa Italiana. My entry to this big Italo-pot-luck is Good Friday escarole and beans.

In Chicago, you still see particular observance of older Catholic traditions. Actually, with the major immigrant groups being Irish, Italian, Mexican and Polish, Catholicism is pretty important in Chicago. One such tradition can be seen in the Italian beef and sausage shops that have Friday specials of pepper and egg sandwiches from back in the day when every Friday was meatless. In many Italian restaurants in the winter months you can get schkarol' and bean soup (that's escarole and bean soup pronounced with that faithful Southern Italian accent of so many of my Italian-American friends).

Here is a Good Friday version of the classic Escarole & Beans (normally using chicken stock) here, flavored with a battuto of aromatic vegetables.

Ingredients:

The "battuto""
1 large onion
1 large carrot
1 rib celery
1 large clove garlic
2 tbsps olive oil

1 cup dried cannellini beans, soaked overnight
1 parmesan cheese rind
1 large bay leaves
1 large head of escarole, roughly chopped
1 cup pureed tomatoes
1 sprig fresh rosemary or 1-1/2 tsps dried and crumbled
1/2 tsp thyme or oregano
salt and pepper to taste
lots of freshly grated paremsan to sprinkle over

Place the "battuto" vegetables in a food processor and whizz around until you have very small pieces, almost a paste. In a large pot, heat the olive oil over medium then add the battuto. Sautee while the vegetables steam and let off their liquid. Stir until all the liquid has evaporated and the mixture starts to genuinely fry in the oil. You willl not get good browning with this but that's ok; it'll still be delicious. Add the soaked beans plus 6 cups of water, the parmesan rind and the bay leaves. Now your beans and flavorings are floating in a golden broth flecked with green. This battuto and water combination replaces the chicken broth; you'll never miss it! Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer for 2 hours or until the beans are tender. Add the escarole, the tomato puree, the rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper. Allow to simmer another 20 minutes until the escarole is tender and the flavors have melded.

Serve in big bowls with lots of parmesan to go around and crusty bread.Music to eat Good Friday meatless escarole and beans by: Good Friday by CocoRosie.

Rosemary and Lemon, Who Knew?

2008-03-19T15:34:00.001+01:00

The other day I posted about the weekly shipments of organic vegetables and herbs I get from our CSA and I posted about a particular problem, namely I didn't know what to do with all that rosemary. Well, you all came to the rescue with a variety of tips including drink recipes. Well, I went ahead and made a simple syrup infused with chopped rosemary and added that as a sweetener to lemonade with stellar results. Wow is rosemary lemonade delicious! You have GOT to try this! Run, don't walk to your nearest plant nursery and pick up a rosemary plant if you don't already have one, and make this recipe:

Rosemary simple syrup:

1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup water
1/2 cup roughly chopped rosemary leaves

In a small saucepan, place the sugar and water. Bring to a boil and once all the sugar has dissolved, put in the rosemary. Reduce heat to minimum and let steep (don't let this boil) for 10 minutes. Strain into a glass jar and reserve for your next glass of lemonade.

Rosemary Lemonade:

juice of 1 lemon
8 to 12 ozs cold water
tablespoon or two of rosemary simple syrup
ice

Mix all ingredients together in a tall glass, relax and enjoy. Music to sip cool Rosemary Lemonade on a warm Italian balcony: "Mambo Italiano" sung by Rosemary Clooney.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Irish Champ With Smoked Salmon (And a Rant)

2008-03-17T16:49:00.000+01:00

What's champ? It's simply mashed potatoes with scallions. A lovely side dish for any meat, really but especially nice with smoked salmon. With tasty, real butter, this is just yummy.
Ingredients:
2 lbs (1 kilo) russet potatoes
1/2 cup butter
1 cup milk
5 fat scallions (or less given your taste)
salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste

Peel the potatoes, cut them into chunks and place them in a saucepan. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20-30 minutes (depending on the size of your potato chunks). While your potatoes are simmering, slice the scallions into 1/4 inch thick rounds, place them into another saucepan along with the milk and half the butter. Bring to a boil and allow the scallions to soften. Once soft, turn off the heat and reserve.

Once the potatoes are tender, drain completely and return to the pan. Begin to mash with a potato masher, add the scallion mixture and incorporate. Add half of the remaining butter and keep mashing until you have a smooth texture. Some recipes say that there should be lumps in the potatoes so if you end up with them you can claim it was on purpose. Add the salt, pepper and nutmeg and serve piping hot alongside any meat dish you like. Music to eat Irish Champ by: Champs of Irish (ceili) dancing. It's always amazed me how these girls can be completely immoble from the waist up and look like they're battery operated from the waist down.

So on to my rant: Timothy Egan, New York Times blogger, has a recent post deriding the "leprechaun-lite version of Ireland's legacy in the New World", (picture the typical St. Patrick's Day parade activities of people drinking cheap, green beer, shamrock antennae on their heads). So Egan sets up the straw-man of loutish "Irishness" almost nobody would defend in favor of another tired and overused myth: the Irish as eternal sufferers and underdogs. As I read the blog, I couldn't help thinking how, unfortunately, suffering and underdog status are NOT exclusive to being Irish. I find it disingenuous to claim that the Irish have some special relationship with suffering, especially given the average income of Irish-Americans today, not to mention the fact that the Republic of Ireland is now the richer than the UK. But things get worse when you read the blog comments: either glowing thank yous by those who couldn't agree more or condemnations from Ireland claiming (rightfully) that the story of the Irish is more complex than all that but then characterizing Irish-Americanness in the same crude, stereotypical way as Egan characterizes Irishness. I dunno. I found it all so disappointing. One would hope the New York Times would come up with better food for thought.

Our Weekly CSA Bounty: What Do YOU Do With Rosemary?

2008-03-14T16:30:00.001+01:00

Fennel, Swiss chard, white and purple cauliflower, purple scallions, puntarelle, escarole, brocoletti, spinach, bay leaves and flowering rosemary. And it's all organic thanks to our CSA, Parco dei Buoi.

The weekly shipments usually send me into a flurry of vegetable prep: wash spinach and chard well and sautee, steam cauliflower and brocoletti, refrigerate (or freeze if still eating last week's shipment), hang rosemary and bay to dry.

Last week the cauliflower went into Indian cauliflower pakoras, (a disaster! I won't blog that one!) and we eat spinach and chard in myriad ways, including cooked and chilled from the fridge with a little tataki sauce on top.

This week, the scallions are going into my St. Patrick's Day Champ with Smoked Salmon and the escarole is reserved for "scarola e fagioli", my entry into Marie of Proud Italian Cook's "Festa italiana" event.

But, so far, I have not used one sprig of the rosemary that's arrived on my doorstep week after week. It's gorgeous stuff; see it there on the right under the purple cauliflower with its little lavender flowers on the stalk? I feel bad not using it, so I need ideas and inspiration from you. My question to you all is: What do YOU do with rosemary?

Chicken Coconut Curry

2008-03-12T15:05:00.000+01:00

I love Indian food! My first Indian cookbook, now held together by tape, more tape and string, contains a lovely chicken coconut curry dish that includes almost every spice you can think of. It's the most complex masala in the book. I have made this recipe many times as well as numerous variations on the theme. Usually, I would cut the amount of chicken down to half and add two large cubed potatoes, but this time I had only one single chicken breast to work with. That's 1/2 of 1/2. I added three large carrots to make up the volume and the result was really delicious served over steamed basmati rice. Here's my modified recipe.

Ingredients:

1 single chicken breast
1/4 cup plain yogurt
1/4 tsp salt

1 medium onion
1/2 in. piece of ginger
5 cloves of garlic
2 tbsps vegetable oil

1/4 tsp black peppercorns
1/2 tsp aniseeds (or fennel seeds)
1 stick cinnamon
5 cloves
2 1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or more to taste)

1 cup coconut milk
1 med. tomato, diced or 2 tbsp tomato paste
1 potato, cut into a fine dice
3 carrots cut into a fine dice
up to 3 cups water

salt to taste

Initial preparations: First, cube the chicken and mix it in a small bowl with the yogurt, turmeric and salt. While that is marinating in the fridge, chop the onion, ginger and garlic in a food processor*. Set aside. In a small frying pan roast the spices until they become fragrant and turn ever so minimally darker. I use a cast iron blini pan which looks like the teeniest, tiniest prying pan ever, and it's perfect for roasting spices. Take off heat, pour into a spice grinder and grind to a powder. Music to grind your masala by: A little Bollywood bump and grind.
*If you're interested in the rich flavor of caramelized onions, you should thinly slice the onion and sautee it until it's light brown before adding the ginger and garlic.

Cooking: In a medium pan over moderate heat, pour in the oil. Add the onion, ginger and garlic and sautee until it becomes blonde. Add the spices and mix for a minute. Add in the marinated chicken (without washing off the yogurt mixture)and mix into the pot. Now add the coconut milk, raise heat and bring to a boil. Add the tomatoes, potato and carrots. Finally add enough water to create the consistency you want. This curry can have the creamy texture of thick coconut milk or of a soup, you decide. Simmer for 20 minutes to let the flavors blend and the vegetables soften. Correct for salt and serve over fresh basmati rice.

Lapin a la Creme

2008-02-27T23:16:00.003+01:00

French food is so perfect for a chilly evening. It's often very substantial with lots of cream and butter. Well the traditional French cuisine is, not the 3 peeled baby carrots served with a raspberry coulis or somesuch of Nouvelle Cuisine fame. This lapin à la crème is from the annals of classic French cooking and it'll keep you warm, fortify you and stick to your ribs (thighs, butt, etc.).

Ingredients:
1/2 cup "lardons" (unsmoked bacon or pancetta cut into 1 inch by 1/8 inch batons)
rabbit, cut into serving pieces, bone in
1 large onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 tbsp flour
1 cup white wine
water to cover
1 bay leaf
1 cup heavy cream (or as heavy as you heart/thighs will permit)

Method:
First put the lardons in a large pot over medium heat and allow then to get crunchy and all the fat to render. Remove lardons and leave fat. Place the rabbit pieces in one layer (you may have to do this in batches) raise the heat to high and brown on all sices. Remove rabbit pieces and leave fat. Now lower the back to medium and add the onions and carrots. Allow then to brown relatively slowly. Once they're brown add the flour and stir to create a roux (paste of fat and flour). Stir for 2 minutes to cook the flour then add the rabbit pieces and lardons back into the pot. Put in the bay leaf and add the wine. Cover just barely with water. bring to a boil over high heat then lower the heat to a bare simmer. Allow to cook this way for 1-1/2 hours partially covered. If the broth is too thin after 90 minutes, boil at high heat to get the sauce to the thickness of tomato sauce for spaghetti. Add the cream, allow to simmer for about 5 minutes and serve over something starchy like fettuccine, rice or polenta. Serve with a frenchy flourish. Something to eat Lapin à la crème by: Dinner theater: "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"

An Homage to our CSA, and How Do I Find One Nearby?

2008-02-25T15:00:00.001+01:00

Bloggers in Italy, I need your help! Anybody know of a CSA farm (Community Supported Agriculture) in Lombardy?

Since December, Gabriel, myself and another couple have split a weekly 5-kilo shipment of winter veggies from Parco dei Buoi, an organic, family-run farm in Molise, Italy. If any of you out there live near Molise, I really recommend Parco dei Buoi. On the whole it has been wonderful: loads of fresh veggies without trips to the markets with the pushy crowds, my introduction to the glorious broccoletti, recipes for what to do with that bumper crop of spinach. It's almost ideal. The only problem is Molise is really far away. Milan's way the heck up near Switzerland and Molise's almost as far south as Naples. Isn't the point of community supported agriculture that you should actually belong to the same community as the farmer? More importantly, how can we look down our holier than y'all noses at everybody when we're only eating organic and helping support a family farm but not doing it locally?

But seriously, I really love this CSA experiment we've conducted these past few months but the farm sends a special truck all the way up here just to ship our vegetables and what do you bet the truck goes back empty. Wouldn't it be great if we could get the same deal from a closer farm? All the veggie-goodness with half the carbon footprint? Does anyone out there know of a Community Supported farm in Lombardy (or even anywhere in Northern Italy) that's looking for a few more customers? Anyone?

Cinnamon, the Lesser Babka? I think Not!

2008-02-21T17:00:00.001+01:00

"Cinnamon takes a back seat to no babka. People love cinnamon. It should be on tables at restaurants along with salt and pepper. Anytime anyone says, "Oh This is so good. What's in it?" The answer invariably comes back, "Cinnamon". "Cinnamon". Again and again. Lesser babka - I think not." (Jerry Seinfeld from the "Dinner Party" episode of the eponymous show, which aired February 3, 1994.)

I have to agree with Jerry on this one although this LOOKS like lesser babka, that's mostly due to my photography skills. I made my first babka (a decadent, dark chocolate one) back in December and I froze half of the dough to experiment with Chocolate's Seinfeldian rival.

I found an appetizing-looking cinnamon filling from this Cinnamon babka recipe at Epicurious and got to work. Thing is as usual, I improvised. I figured a whole cup of white flour in a cinnamon filling would make it too cakey and not filling-y enough. I was wrong. You should follow this recipe to the letter and I'm sure it will come out better ("better", here meaning less runny and drippy all over the oven floor, and so smokey and fumey and...) Music to let your cinnamon babka filling run out all over the oven floor by: "Running Out" by Juliana Hatfield. Remember her? The Blake Babies? Thet early '90s famous romance with the sexy Evan Dando? No?

Pizzoccheri

2008-02-18T15:17:00.002+01:00

Pizzoccheri are buckwheat noodles in a "sauce" of cabbage, potatoes, brown butter with sage and fontina or bitto cheese. Sounds like an Italian/Irish/Polish fusion dish gone wrong, wouldn't you say? But it's actually a far Northern Lombard dish from Valtellina. And despite the apparent insipidness of the buckwheat, cabbage, potato combo, it is delicious and full of flavor thanks to the cheese, butter, sage and garlic! Obviously not for dieters, it's a good, stick-to-your-ribs kind of winter meal. We first had this in a mountain refuge after a 2-hour climb near Lake Como and let me tell you, the richness of the dish really hit the spot. I'm here to tell you how to make the noodles especially since I don't remember ever finding them ready-made in the States, and then I'll tell you the simple preparation for the finished dish.

The pasta:
2 cups buckwheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup semolina
2 eggs
water
1/2 tsp salt

Any recipe I have ever seen for pizzoccheri noodles calls for simply flour and water. I find that buckwheat flour makes for breakable dough and so I insist on using eggs to bind the dough to make intact noodles. Combine the flours in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the center. In a cup, beat the eggs and add the salt. Pour the eggs into the well and begin to incorporate the flour by mixing in a circle and pushing some of the flour at the sides into the center. As you are mixing, you will be able to tell if the eggs are enough to incorporate all the flour or if you need some water to help. In any case, the dough should be very stiff and quite on the dry side. You do not want sticky dough so if you do add water, do it by teaspoons so you don't end up adding too much. Once you have a ball of dough, let it rest covered for about 1/2 hour.

Using a pasta machine, roll pieces of the dough into sheets. Process them through to the second to thinnest setting and lay them out to dry just a bit. Once all your pasta is in long sheets, it's time to cut them into taglaitelle. Roll the sheets through the tagliatelle cutter and lay them flat on your work surface. Do NOT roll the noodles into nests as with other pasta since these noodles will glom together at any opportunity.

Leave the noodles lying flat on the table while you prepare your other ingredients:

4 cups chopped cabbage
2 medium russet potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 stick butter
10 fresh sage leaves, shredded
4 cloves of garlic, minced
10 ozs (approx. 300 grams) grated fontina or bitto cheese
4 ozs grated parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. In a large stock pot bring abundant water to the boil. You will be adding all the ingredients except the sage, garlic and butter into this, so make sure there's enough water. Toss in a tablespoon of salt. Add the cabbage and lightly boil for 5 minutes. Add the potatoes, raise the heat in the beginning to get the water boiling as quickly as possible and boil another 5 minutes, or until the potato pieces are just barely tender. As you are hanging around in these five-minute periods, melt the butter in a saucepan and add the sage and garlic. Cook over medium heat until the garlic is blonde and the butter itself takes on a light brown, nutty color and aroma. This is called "beurre noisette" Music to cook pizzoccheri by: the tune of the Italian National Anthem with the lyrics substituted by the directions on how to cook pizzoccheri. This, just in case you didn't believe this dish is really Italian. The last thing that goes into the pot is the pasta. Put it in, turn the heat up momentarily to get the pot boiling asap and stir to make sure nothing sticks. Boil for 1 minute and then check the consistency of the pasta. If it is al dente, pour all the contents of the pot into a large collander and drain completely. Pour half the cabbage, potatoes and noodles into a wide baking dish, taste for salt and add more if necessary, along with some pepper. Sprinkle on half the cheese and pour on the rest of the noodles and the rest of the cheese. Salt again if necessary. Now pour over the butter, garlic and sage sauce and mix everything to make sure it is all coated with the sauce. Place in the oven and bake until the cheese is melted, but not browned, about 10 minutes.

Nothin' Says Love Like Southern Greens and Ham Hocks

2008-02-14T15:23:00.004+01:00

Hey y'all, Happy Valentine's Day! Gabriel and I have just sent off one house guest and are welcoming another tomorrow so we've got one evening to celebrate Valentine's Day before becoming hosts again. This Southern greens and Ham Hocks dish, while made for our New Orleans Mardi Gras dinner, is so delicious, it will inspire passion so I think it's appropriate for Valentine's Day too. I could not believe how great they tasted. I have no access to collard greens here in Italy so I used the 2 longest-cooking greens we have: savoy cabbage and swiss chard. I also added some smoked pancetta cubes because I only had one small ham hock left, so this is another improvised recipe. A lot of online recipes call for simmering the greens in water but I went with chicken stock for fullest flavor and that really paid off. These were the most complex and delicious Southern greens I have ever had.

Here's the recipe:

4 ozs smoked pancetta in "lardons" (matchstick shapes)
1 onion, minced
1 green bell pepper, minced
3 medium garlic cloves, minced
1 ham hock
4 cups chicken stock
2-1/2 pounds of thick cooking greens such as cabbage and Swiss chard, roughly chopped
salt and pepper to taste
Tabasco sauce to splash as you will

In a large pot, heat the pancetta until it has rendered a lot of its fat and browned. Add the minced vegetables and sweat. Place in the ham hock and the chicken stock and simmer lightly covered until the ham hock starts to get tender, about 1 hour. Pour in the chopped greens, raise the heat to high and return to a boil. Lower heat and cook for 20-30 minutes or until the greens are tender. Remove the ham hock and shred the meat. Return the meat to the pot and season. Serve with love and your guests will go crazy over this, I promise. Music to go crazy over southern greens by: "Mad Over You" by Collard Greens and Gravy.

New Orleans King Cake

2008-02-12T15:33:00.000+01:00

I once read that the grand party season in Old New Orleans began with Epiphany (January 6th, a.k.a. Three Kings' Day) and ended with Mardi Gras. This makes sense to me. Coming from colder, darker northern climes, I have never had much use for winter after New Years is over. The idea that somebody'd hold a big party once every weekend until Lent (and Spring!) started, well...that sounds just downright civilized. But how to determine who'd hold all those parties? In New Orleans, it's the king cake. In ring form and decorated with purple, green and gold sprinkles, it hides inside a token, be it a plastic baby Jesus figurine, coin, bean or walnut (I prefer the pleasantly edible walnut). Whoever gets the piece of cake with the token holds next week's party. Clearly Mardi Gras brings all the revelry to an end at least for 40 days. This recipe turned out waaaay better than last year's king cake (I think I didn't even give you the bad recipe I'd followed). So this one's a keeper.

Here's the recipe:

1 cake of fresh yeast or 1 package of dry yeast
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 stick of butter
3 large eggs
1/2 cup warm milk (warmed not over 110F)
2-3 cups of all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsps of sweet spice. I used 1 tsp nutmeg and 1 tsp cardamom, but you can also try allspice, cinnamon or ground ginger
1 tsp grates citrus zest. I used orange zest but any other citrus fruit would work nicely
vegetable oil
4 ozs (120 grams) cream cheese
1-1/2 cups powdered sugar
1-3 tablespoons milk
purple, green and gold sugar for sprinkling
one walnut half

First mix the yeast cake with the sugar, butter, eggs and milk breaking it up and allowing it to get foamy. Let the mixture settle for about 5 minutes then add the spices, zest, salt and 2 cups of the flour and mix thoroughly. If the dough looks too impossibly gloopy to knead, add up to one more cup trying to use as little flour as possible. The less you add the springier the cake will be. Pour a few drops of vegetable oil on the dough and rub it all around to cover. Return to the bowl and cover with a damp towel. Allow to rise for about 2 hours or until doubled in bulk.

While the dough is rising, make the cream cheese filling. In a medium mixing bowl, add the cream cheese and blend in 1/2 cup of the powdered sugar. Mix until the texture is smooth. Refrigerate until needed.

Once the dough is risen, punch it down and place on a cool, smooth surface. **Even though it takes more time, I like to chill my dough before shaping it. This is a brioche-style dough and thus very loose and sticky. Chilling it helps to make it easier to handle. This allows you to shape the dough using as little extra flour as possible. Roll the dough out to 2 to 2-1/2 feet long and 6 inches wide. Music to roll king cake dough by: "The King Porter Stomp" by Jelly Roll Morton. Spoon the cream cheese filling along the center of the dough strip and fold one side over. Now's the time to hide the walnut, baby Jesus, bean or coin in the cake. Just place it somewhere along the filling and close up the dough. Pinch the seam of the dough and bring the ends around to touch making a ring. Place the dough on a greased pizza pan or cookie sheet with a greased, empty can in the center to hold the ring shape. Place in a very large plastic bag to rise again for about 1 hour. Pre heat the oven to 350F.

Bake for 30 minutes or until uniformly golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool completely before decorating. Rub the whole surface of the cake with a little melted butter on your impeccably clean fingers. Begin to sift the different colors of sugar to make stripes of purple, green and gold. Then mix the remaining cup of powdered sugar with 1 tablespoon of milk. If the consistency is solid, att more milk by drops until you achieve a putty-like consistency. The frosting should be only just liquidy enough to pour. If it is too liquidy, it will drip right off the cake into puddles on the plate. Serve with a flourish and an eye toward the next party!

Eggs Florentine (kinda)

2008-02-04T18:30:00.000+01:00

Boy have I been a bad blogger! Whew! Since getting back to Milan after the Holidays, I've been repeating a lot of my old recipes, muffuletta sandwich, flamiche, braised short ribs, etc., so I haven't had anything new to say to you all. Luckily, Gabriel came up with a great lunch dish yesterday of poached eggs on a bed of sauteed spinach, itself resting on buttered toast. Yum! It was like a delicious but healthier version of Eggs Benedict. The classic Florentine includes sauce mornay - basically a bechamel with cheese but Gabriel replaced that with simple grated parmesan. More flavor, less ooziness. Since we've been getting weekly shipments of organic vegetables (mainly spinach and spinachy things like Swiss chard) we need to do something with the veggies before the next case shows up at our door, so I give you Eggs Florentine (kinda)

for 2 people:

1 pound (450 grams) fresh washed spinach (seems like a lot but we really needed to use up this week's spinach)
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
4 eggs
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 large slices toast
1 tbsp butter
grated parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Sauteeing spinach: In large sautee pan, fry the garlic in the oil until is is blond, then add the spinach by handfuls stirring and turning the cooked bottom leaves over the raw ones at the top. Continue to sautee until all the spinach is completely wilted and the volume has reduced considerably. Leave in the pan off the heat until your eggs have been poached.

Poaching eggs: Gabriel did a bit of culinary blog research before attempting to poach the eggs. He found a genial idea (sadly I don't know from which blog) to place each raw egg into a tea cup and to drop the whole cup (right side up) into boiling water with vinegar and to allow the eggs to cook that way. The eggs stayed in the cups in the boiling water for 3 minutes. Note to serve hot Eggs Florentine: at the last minute of poaching, turn the heat on under the spinach again to re-warm it and place your bread in the toaster so that all three elements are as hot as they can be when you serve.

Assembling the dish: Place a piece of buttered toast on each plate. Sprinkle with parmesan. Arrange half the spinach on to each toast and then gently scoop the eggs onto the spinach. Shake a little salt and pepper over and serve immediately. Music to serve eggs Florentine by: "Eggs on a Plate" by Iggy Pop. Enjoy!

Butter Roasted Pecans

2008-01-25T22:00:00.000+01:00

Hey Y'all. It's been a long time. I was in Chicago for the holidays and have been back in Milan for a while now with no impetus to write at all. I've got a lot of catching up to do. So how the hell are ya?

Back in Chicago I found a delicious new recipe from an unlikely source: my Dad. Since his retirement, he's made a few forays in to cooking with his #1 result being Cabbage Soup of the famed Cabbage Soup Diet. "Eeew!", you say? Well I have to tell you that this stuff isn't half bad and having eaten it for lunch pretty much every day over the whole vacation, I actually lost weight at Christmastime! Can you imagine?

Anyway another yummy treat my Dad makes is butter roasted pecans. They are simple and delicious. Here's the recipe:

1 pound of whole raw pecans
3 tablespoons of butter
salt to taste

Heat the oven to 265 degrees fahrenheit. Place the pecans in a single layer on a large cookie sheet. Allow to slowly roast to extreme crunchiness for 30 minutes. The relatively low temperature and long cooking time allow the nuts to get fully crunchy and evenly brown, not burny on the outside, chewy on the inside. Music to slow-roast pecans by: "Pressure Drop" performed by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. Why? It's just the song I've had going around in my head for the last couple days after having viewed the "Grosse Pointe Blank" episode of my own personal John Cusack film festival. Speaking of John Cusack, did you know that, aside from having probably the best musical taste in Hollywood, he has a few rather strong opinions about the war in Iraq? Have a look here. Back to pecans: during the last 10 minutes of slow cooking, place the butter in a large glass or metal mixing bowl and put in the oven to melt. Take out the nuts and the butter. Immediately pour the pecans into the butter and stir to coat everything. Keep stirring until all the butter has been absorbed. Sprinkle with salt and mix again. Taste and repeat until the nuts are salty enough.

Croquembouche

2007-12-29T00:27:00.000+01:00

I just found a great way to make my standard croquembouche (meaning roughly "crunch in the mouth") much better. It's a tower of cream puffs glued together with hard crack caramel. You don't really see it at its best here because I made too little caramel and had almost none to make the gorgeous gold filaments encircling the tower. The dish has great aesthetic potential but before this Christmas, once guests started breaking off cream puffs, it got ugly. Since there's not much in the culinary world harder than hard crack caramel, my cream puffs would break and the half-eaten croquembouche would end up looking more like Miss Havisham's wedding cake.

But now, a simple trick fixes all that, after the cream puffs finish baking, turn the oven off and leave them in for 30 minutes as the oven cools. That's it! Now the puffs crack off whole and the tower gets neatly shorter and shorter until all the puffs are gone.

Here's he recipe:

the puffs:
1 1/4 cups water
3/4 cup unsalted butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups flour
6 large eggs

PLace the water and butter into a medium-sized, high-sided sauce pan and heat over medium-high until the butter is totally melted. Add the salt and the flour all at once and stir to combine. It will be very lumpy at first but don't worry, as you stir it will smooth out. Keep stirring until the paste ecomes a thick ball and sounds like it's frying. Take off heat and let cool for 10 minutes. Add each egg one-by-one stirring it in until it is totally incorporated before adding the next one. It's the eggs that will make the puffs puff. Once all the eggs have been incorporated, let the dough cool to room temperature while you make the pastry cream.

the pastry cream:

2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
4 tbsps flour
1/8 tsp salt

Scald the milk in a medium saucepan. In a medium mixing bowl, whip the sugar, eggs, egg yolk, flour and salt until combined and smooth. Once the milk is scalded, take it off the flame and pour it very slowly into the egg mixture stirring constantly. Pour the egg, milk mixture back into the saucepan and return to the stove at medium heat. Stir constantly until the custard thickly coats the back of your spoon. Take off heat and stir in the vanilla. Set aside and cover with plastic wrap. The plastic wrap should touch the surface of the custard so that it does not form a skin. Refrigerate for 3-4 hours until completely cooled.

Baking the puffs:

Pre-heat oven to 425F. Spoon enough of the cream puf dough to fill a pastry bag halfway. Using the widest tip (or no tip at all, just the screw-top opening of the pastry bag) squeeze out 1 inch diameter balls of dough onto two greased cookie sheets. It is best to hold the tip very close to the cookie sheet as you squeeze out the dough so that the result is an even dome shape. Once all the dough is used up, dip your fingertip in cold water and smooth out any uneven tips on the domes. Bake at 425F for 10 minutes then reduce the oven temperature to 400F and switch the cookie sheets (top goes to bottom, bottom to top for even baking). And bake for another 20 minutes or until the puffs are very round, puffy and golden-brown. Tuen oven off and let puffs rest for 30 more minutes. Remove and let cool.

* Party preparation tip> The puffs and the pastry cream can be made the day before and the croquembouche can be assembled within 1/2 hour on the day of the party!

With a small tip on the cleaned pastry bag, pour in enough pastry cream to fill the bag up halfway, twist the end of the bag and grip firmly. Poke a small hole in each cream puff with the pointy tip of the pastry bag (you can usually see where the puff is thin, and make the hole there.) and fill each puff about halfway.

the caramel:

3/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1 tbsp water

Have all your filled cream puffs and a cake plate to build the croquembouche on ready. Separate the larger creamp puffs from the smaller ones. The larger will go on the bottom of the tower and the smaller on top. In a small-medium saucepan, place the sugar and sprinkle the water over it. Heat over medium-high. You will see the edges begin to melt and eventually turn golden. I think it's ok to stir a bit the get all the sugar to melt, others disagree saying that it can cause the caramel to get grainy in texture. In my experience this doesn't happen with simple burned sugar hard crack caramel. If we were making soft, chewy cream caranmel, it could pose a problem. So, cook until the caramel turns a medium to light brown and take it off the heat. As you are building the croquembouche you may need to reheat the caramel to make it more liquidy and stickier so do not make it too dark in the beginning. Begin immediately to dip a corner of each larger cream puff in the caramel and place firmly on the plate in a circle. I make a 5-cream puff circle with one puff in the center. Then build upwards. Five cream puffs per layer is a good way to start for the first 3-4 layers, then you can taper as you build up. After you have laid on the lart cream puff I suggest you do what I didn't have a chance to this time: decorate the tower with filaments of caramel swirled around its perimeter. Dip an ordinary fork, into the remaining caramel and move it in a circle around the tower. A very thin stream of quickly hardening caramel will stick to each cream puff it touches making a web of golden filaments. Keep this up dipping the fork and encircling the tower until you are satisfied with the result. Once the tower is decorated it shoud NOt be refrigerated; the caramel filaments will get melty and drippy, and should be eaten within the day.

Superior Babka

2007-12-20T15:00:00.001+01:00

If Jerry Seinfeld knew me, he'd be proud. All considered, I think I did rather well for a shiksa on her first attempt at Chocolate babka. I'd never tasted this decadent dessert before making it so I have no nostalgic childhood expectations the way most babka lovers do. The only thing I knew was that Chocolate babka supposedly trumped the lesser cinnamon babka, according to Seinfeld lore. Having wanted to make this for Hannukah, I ended up procrastinating enough to miss it by at least a week and a half, but it seems that this dessert isn't strictly linked to the holiday anyway.

I found the recipe on Deb and Alex's excellent Smitten Kitchen who in turn got it from Martha Stewart, Queen of the Shiksas. So starting out I was in pretty good company. You can click on "Smitten Kitchen" for the recipe, itself.

As for me, I'll just tell you a couple of points about Babka from my first experience:

How to deal with Babka dough: Babka dough falls into the sticky, hard to handle brioche-like category, so I employed the survival tactics I developed to make Finnish pulla, namely resist the temptation to add extra flour and chill before kneading to keep sticking to a minimum. If you have a big Kitchenaid stand mixer like Deb and Martha, you don't even need to worry about this; brioche dough becomes effortless.

The streusel snafu: I may have screwed up the streusel topping. I have faith in Martha and Deb as great cooks so it must have been an error on my part that the topping resembled high-strength concrete rather than something edible. It broke off in big, extremely hard chunks that were not even chewable.

Death by Chocolate?: Finally the recipe called for more than 2 pounds of semi-sweet chocolate. I even mistakenly forgot one of the chocolate bars I was supposed to put in and the result was still very very rich, almost too much so. I was promised "unseemly amounts of chocolate" and I got them. I'm thinking the next time around I'll go for the cinnamon babka, which might be lighter. As Jerry, himself says, "Cinnamon takes a back seat to no babka...Lesser babka - I think not."

All in all, this is a lovely, rich deep dessert that if you have the nerve for it, (and the streusel ability) you'll love. Music to eat Chocolate Babka by: The Hannukah Song by Adam Sandler.

Leftover Turkey Mole

2007-12-18T16:54:00.001+01:00

Want a leftover holiday turkey recipe so good it'll make you forget the original dish? Whether you need to get that half a Thanksgiving turkey out of your freezer to make room for Christmas cookie dough, or you're planning ahead for what to do with the extra Christmas turkey, I give you ...Red Mole Poblano (my way with the Mexican ingredients I have left here in Italy)

Ingredients this time around (having made adjustments to fit my pantry):

12 guajillo peppers, seeded (keep the seeds)
8 pasilla peppers
1 big chipotle in adobo
3 large slices of stale white bread
1 sm. white onion
4 garlic cloves
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup walnuts
1/4 cup peanuts
1/4 cup almonds
10 cups chicken broth
1 20 oz jar tomato puree
1 sm tomatillo
1/4 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp Mexican cinnamon
1 tsp Mexican oregano
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 large green platano, peeled and cut into 1 inch slices
1 tsp plus 1/4 cup vegetable oil or lard
a 3-oz. disk of mexican chocolate
3 dried avocado leaves
1 tbsp salt
1/4 cup sugar

So how's that for an ingredients list?

The toasting: Place a large cast-iron skillet on a high flame and slice open the peppers, unfolding them as flat as you can. Dry roast each pepper for about 10 seconds on each side until you see the skin blistering and a wisp or two of smoke. Place each roasted pepper into a bowl of hot water and set aside. Place a piece of aluminum foil on the hot skillet and lay the whole, unpeeled garlic cloves on as well as the peeled and thickly sliced onion. Roast until very dark, about 5 minutes on each side. Remove and let cool. Now, toast the pepper seeds until they are jet black, no really! Do it because this time around I only got them to mahogany brown and the mole color and flavor were a bit more pallid than usual. See medium brown photo. Remove, cool and buzz to a powder in a spice grinder. Now, char the bread slices. You may choose to do this on the dry skillet or on that burnt toast setting on your toaster. You know the one you always thought was ridiculous, 'cause why would anyone voluntarily burn toast? Well, now you know why. It makes your mole rich and deep looking and tasting. Then toast the sesame seeds by shaking the skillet over the flame intil the seeds are dark brown and fragrant. Set aside. Now toast the nuts. Place them all on the skillet and stir frequently to get a rich and even deep brown color. Remove into the same bowl as the sesame seeds. Add a teaspoon of oil to the skillet and fry the plantain on the 2 flat sides along with the tomatillo until medium brown.

The pureeing: Place the soaked pasillas and guajillos along with the chipotle into the bowl of a food processor and puree adding up to 3/4 cup of the turkey stock to allow everything to whizz freely. Pour mix out into a mixing bowl add the cground chile seeds and set aside. Place the roasted onion slices and the now peeled, roasted garlic in the unwashed food processor, whizz for a second or two then add the roasted nuts. Process until the nuts are almost paste then add the tomatoes and process for another 15 seconds to combine everything. Pour out in to a different mixing bowl. Now put the bread, spices, tomatillo and platano into the unwashed processor and puree to a smooth paste with up to 3/4 cup of stock to keep things moving. Once you have a smoothe texture, pour out into a third bowl.

The cauldron:Now it's time to add your three purees into the big mole pot! You're almost there and at least most of your work is over. Pour 1/4 cup of oil or lard into the bottom of a large, heavy pot and heat over medium-high then add the pepper puree and allow to sear noisily while you scrape down the sides and bottom to keep the purtee from burning. Allow to darken to a rich red-brown before adding the tomato-nut puree. Stir to combine and let reduce for about 5 minutes before you add the bread, platano puree. Now, raise to temperature to the highest setting and pour in what remains of the stock. Stir and allow to come to a simmer. Add the chocolate and avocado leaves. Leave at the simmer for 1 hour and 1/2 returning periodically to stir and scrape the sides. to make sure there's no hot point burning. At the end of those 90 minutes, you should have a lovely fragrant, rich dark ruddy red-brown bubbling cauldron. Take out the avocado leaves and add the salt and sugar. Serve over warmed leftover turkey with corn tortillas and a cold beer. Music to slosh leftover turkey in loads of rich brown sauce by: "Thirty Drity Birds", my favorite song by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Happy St. Lucia's Day! Celebrate With Finnish Pulla

2007-12-13T14:48:00.000+01:00

Brioche makes me crabby. It's not the eating, the rich slightly sweet eggy dough is a pretty good mood booster but the making that's the problem. All the yummy rich ingredients, the eggs, the butter, make for the stickiest dough. Kneading something that is more adhesive than cohesive, that seems to want to glom onto your fingers more than stay in the bowl, just makes me crazy. My ordeal with brioche-like challah will fill you in on the details. So it was with a little annoyance and way too much flour that I made my second attempt at pulla bread from Finland. Looks pretty good, doesn't it? Well is isn't. The extra flour was a huge mistake; I was relatively happy kneading the controllable dough but the end result was solid. Doughy. Not light, stretchy and eggy. Normally, the lovely thing about pulla is the way the house fills with the scent of cardamom when it's baking, and of course the taste. Along with coffee and maybe some jam, it makes a lovely holiday morning breakfast, especially if your Scandinavian older sister serves it to you while wearing a crown of real candles. So it's not like you shouldn't try this. You should, really.

So, here's my do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do recipe pulled mainly from Finnish-American chef, Beatrice Ojakangas's entry in the Baking With Julia cookbook with a couple additions and changes of my own to help make this recipe workable without all the extra flour.

Ingredients:

1 cup milk
1 tbsp dry yeast or 1 block of fresh yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp crushed cardamom seeds
1 tsp salt
2 large eggs at room temperature
4-1/2 to 5 cups flour (and NO more!)
1 stick (112 grams)

1 beaten egg plus 1 tbsp milk for glaze

Place the dry yeast in a large mixing bowl and add the 1/4 cup warm tap water. Scald the milk in a small saucepan then set aside with a food thermometer in it. Let the milk cool to 115F then pour the milk in to the yeast mixture. Whisk in the sugar, cardamom, salt and eggs. In a medium mixing bowl, place 4 cups of the flour and add the butter in small chunks. Cut the butter into the flour with a fork or rub between your fingers until the flour looks more like white cornmeal. Add 2 cups of the flour/butter and mix with a spoon until you get a uniform consistency. Continue adding the flour/butter by half cups mixing and incorporating before each new addition. Then add the next 1/2 cup to 1-1/2 cups and mix. Cover the dough and let it rest for 15 minutes.

Knead the dough for 5 minutes on a cool surface (marble is excellent for this). If you've reached 5 cups of flour and you still have a too-soft texture, refrigerate the dough for at least an hour and then try kneading it. After kneading the dough should be smooth and uniform, even satiny. Grease a mixing bowl and place the dough into it. Let it rise covered for about 1 hour or until it has doubled in volume.

Punch down the dough and separate into 3 equal pieces. Roll each out to at least 2 feet long. Braid the dough and pinch the ends together to make a wreath. Music to braid pulla dough by: Minnesota (thus probably Scandinavian) Post-Punk geniuses, Lifter Puller. Carefully lift the pulla dough onto a parchment lined baking sheet and let rise at room temperature for about 1 hour.

Pre-heat the oven to 375F. Best one egg in a small bowl and whisk in 1 tbsp milk. brush the mixture on all sides of the dough then bake for 20-25 minutes. Serve with hot morning coffee and crown on your head.

Hazelnut Cocoa Biscotti

2007-12-10T13:27:00.000+01:00

While in the States, we like to crunch our biscotti with a cappuccino or a caffe latte, in Italy, they're dipped in a sweet wine called vin santo for dessert. These cookies went in style with the high-end coffee revolution in the States but in Italy, they're a classic. Oh and by the way, in Italian, they're called cantucci, since biscotti is a general term for any sort of cookies (think "biscuit"). The cocoa in this recipe mixes so well with the hazelnuts, it gives them a gianduja flavor right out of Piedmont.

1-1/2 cups hazelnuts, toasted
3 cups flour
2/3 cup unsewwtened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)at room temperature
2 cups confectioners sugar
3 large eggs at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract

Grind 1/2 cup of the hazelnuts and 1/2 cup of the sugar to a powder. Don't go so far as to grind it to a paste. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt. In a large mixing bowl beat butter and rest of the sugar until creamy. Add vanilla extract and eggs one at a time and incorporate until you get a uniform texture. Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture little by little stirring to combine. Add the ground hazelnuts and then the whole ones and mix to incorporate. Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour so that it will be less tacky and easier to manage.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Divide the refrigerated dough into 4 pieces and roll each into a long log shape. Place 2 on each sheet and bake for about 35-40 minutes or until the logs feel firm when pressed on top. Remove from oven and cool but do not turn the oven off nor throw away the parchment paper. Let logs cool for 15 minutes.

Slice the logs crosswise with a serrated bread knife making 1/2 inch pieces. Music to slice biscotti/(biscuits) by: "My Way" by obnoxious rockers, Limp Bizkit. Place the pieces back on the parchment-lined baking sheets leaving 1/4 inch spaces between each piece. Bake them again (not resting on one side, but standing up) for 15 minutes so that they can sufficiently dry to get that super crunch that goes so well dipped into coffee or Italian sweet wine. Oh and dry they last a long time in a tupperware container, if you don't eat them all up the first day!

Terrine de Lapin - Wild Hare Terrine

2007-12-07T09:30:00.000+01:00

Here is one of Gabriel's family recipes translated into slangy American English by moi.: A traditional French and Suisse-Romande (French-speaking part of Switzerland) dish for the holidays is wild-hare terrine, a pate' with morsels of wild-hare fillets inside and covered in aspic. Remember aspic? This is the part of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking" that gave Julie Powell so much trouble. It was a big fad in early 1960's American kitchens but it never really went out of style in traditional French ones. Gabriel's dad holes up in the kitchen every winter for 2 days straight and makes about 12 of these terrines as gifts for lucky friends. However, if you grew up with the idea that gelatin should taste like cherries, this dish might give you a little pause. And then there's the pork blood, but I'm getting ahead of myself... If you're feeling bold, (not faint of heart or kosher of spirit), I give you Wild Hare Terrine:

INGREDIENTS:

For marinaded hare/rabbit:
1 wild hare or rabbit, de-boned (Gabriel used Italian grocery store rabbit)
1 onion, diced
bouquet garni: 2 sprigs thyme, 2 sprigs parsley, 1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp juniper berries, bruised with the side of a knife
1/2 tsp hole peppercorns
1 sm clove garlic, bruised with the side of a knife
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup cognac

for the stock:
hare/rabbit bones
1 whole onion with 2 cloves stuck into it
2 carrot
1 clove garlic
2/3 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
2 thyme sprigs
10 whole peppercorns

for the pate':
1 sm. mild Italian sausage link, w/o casing
4 ozs pork fillet
4 ozs pork blood
4 ozs cooked ham
4 ozs roast veal
8 ozs fresh pork belly, or fatty non-smoked bacon
8 ozs finely sliced fatty bacon*
1 egg
1/4 cup cognac plus extra cognac for the chef (amount up to you)

* In Italy we're lucky enough to have a butcher slice only the fat side of fresh pork belly, which is closer to what the original recipe calls for.

for the Aspic:
2 packets of unflavored gelatin
optional garnish: French cornishon pickles (not sweet gherkins, they are flavored very differently even though they look similar), cocktail onions, capers

INSTRUCTIONS:

The Marinaded Rabbit: First, 2-3 days before you want to serve this, de-bone the rabbit/hare: if your butcher will do this for you, all the better! Make sure that the fillets on the back remain intact. They should be 2 long strips. The meat at the thighs should be sliced into long strips like the fillets. The shoulder meat has a lot of tendons that you really don't want in the terrine, so take care to remove them. Like I said, it's way better if you can find a butcher to do this!

Place the rabbit/hare meat into a medium-sized bowl with the marinade ingredients. Add extra wine and/or cognac to make sure everything's covered. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours. If you're using wild hare, the herbs will tone down the gaminess and if you're using supermarket rabbit, it will kick up the flavor.

For the stock: (it's also nice to do this part the same day as you do the marinade) Place the rabbit/hare bones in a large stock pot, cover with water and bring to a light boil. Remove foam from the surface and as soon as it stops producing the foam, add the vegetables and herbs. Allow to barely simmer uncovered for 4 hours while it perfumes your house with a chicken-soupy scent and you go do something fun. After 4 hours, strain the stock, cool and refrigerate.

For the pate': The day before you want to serve this, pre-heat the oven to 325F. Grind the pork fillet, cooked ham, roast veal and pork belly into a sort of Italian sausage meat consistency - not so fine that everything is totally uniform like in a kielbasa, if you get what I mean. If you have a kind butcher who will grind your meats for you, all the better! Otherwise, we have seen that a good food processor does the trick rather nicely. Place everything a large mixing bowl and set aside. Blanch the liver in boiling water for 5 minutes. Remove and place in the unwashed food processor and pulse along with the rabbit kidneys, if you have them, until you have small bits. Remove and place into the bowl. Add half the marinaded rabbit (the smaller parts, not the long strips) into the processor and chop to small bits as well. Remove and place in the bowl along with the liver mixture. Add 1/4 cup of cognac and combine.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes and have a shot of cognac or go to your happy place while you try not to think of what you're going to do next: In a small mixing bowl, beat the egg. Pass the blood through a mesh strainer to remove blood clots and pour in with the egg. Then add the mixture to the large mixing bowl with all the ground meat. (Yech!) Just think, to the Masai warriors (not to mention Julia Child), this is a standard everyday routine. Mix everything into a homogeneous pate'. Music to mix blood into your pate' by: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Goth greats, Bauhaus. Add salt, ground black pepper and ground nutmeg to taste. We're downing more cognac or going back to the happy place again as we take the risk of actually tasting this raw meat, egg, blood mixture or we whistle as we scoop up a teaspoon and fry it first. In any case knowing whether it's salty enough is very important since the dish should come out perfectly seasoned. You don't want to be sprinkling salt onto your terrine slices.

Preparing the terrines: M-kay, back to standard cooking practices. Line 2 standard (5"x9") bread loaf pans, with the thin slices of pork belly or fatty non-smoked bacon. All surfaces should be covered. Fill halfway with the pate' then add the rabbit/hare meat strips (2-3 per loaf pan) going longways. Add the rest of the pate' into the loaf pans, press down so as not to leave any bubbles or holes and cover over with the remaining sheets of pork belly or bacon.

Cooking the terrines: Get 1 large or 2 small, shallow baking dishes place the loaf pans inside and fill dishes with boiling water so that the water level goes up to at least halfway up the outside of the loaf pans. This bain marie will help modulate the temperature so the terrines don't overcook and dry out. Place in the 325F oven for 90 minutes. Remove from oven, cool and refrigerate overnight.

For the aspic: Several hours before serving, boil 2 packets of unflavored gelatin with the stock according to package directions (Gabriel was not too clear on this part, so if you follow package directions for amounts, you'll have plenty of aspic for the terrines. Cool the gelatin to room temperature. Take the terrines out of their loaf pans, place the empty pans in the freezer for quick gelatin setting and remove the strips of pork belly or bacon from the terrines along with any other fat on the surface. Place 1/4 inch layer of gelatin in the bottom of the loaf pans and place in the freezer for a few minutes until set, not frozen. Pour another 1/4 inch of gelatin on top of the first layer and place a few gherkins sliced in half the long way, cocktail onions and capers in an attractive way. Repeat freezer step. Remove the pans and place the terrines back into the pans. There will be room on the sides where the pork belly or bacon used to be. Fill in the gaps with gelatin up to about 1/2 inch and place in the freezer again. Once set, remove from freezer and add more garnishes. Pour in another 1/2 inch of gelatin, repeat freezing, garnishing and filling in with gelatin until you have reached the edge of the pans. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Pour the rest of the gelatin onto a square pan (to about 1/2 inch deep) and refrigerate until set. With a knife, slice the gelatin into cubes to use for decoration around the terrines.

To serve: Fill the sink with a few inches of warm water and dip the loaf pans in to help release the gelatin. Turn out onto a serving platter and slide the loaf pans up. Scatter gelatin cubes around the sides of the terrine. Serve with a flourish and wow your guests! (The pork blood will be our little secret).

Holiday Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

2007-12-03T14:48:00.001+01:00

The Holidays are officially upon us! One thing I really appreciate are the little pre-Christmas holidays that are celebrated in some European countries. Take, for example, Saint Lucia (December 13th) in Sweden where the oldest daughter wakes up before dawn to prepare an elaborate breakfast for her parents then dons a crown of candles and serves them breakfast in bed. A lovely family-oriented (and potentially pyrotechnic!) celebration. Or the feast of Saint Ambrose (December 7th, this Friday!) where the Milanese stroll the downtown holiday arts and crafts market drinking "vin brulee". Or December 6th, Saint Nicholas' Day where my Mom back in Chicago would have us kids put our shoes on the back porch and over night Saint Nick would come and fill the shoes with little treats. It was a prelude to Christmas stocking stuffers. Let's not forget Hannukah starts December 5th this year. Kwanzaa starts on December 26th, a.k.a. Boxing Day. Winter solstice is December 22nd and if you plan some pagan dancing 'round a bonfire, I do suggest the vin brulee to keep you warm.

Whatever holiday you'll be celebrating, here are some easy and dramatic-looking chocolate crinkle cookies that you can make quickly to help celebrate.

Ingredients:
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter, softened
1 egg, lightly beaten
granulated sugar powdered sugar, separate for double dusting.

Combine the dry ingredients (the first 6) in a large bowl. Add the softened butter and mix with one hand until the butter has been incorporated fully. Add the eggs and mix until it all just comes together. The dough should be barely wet enough to incorporate all the dry ingredients. Refrigerate until the dough is very stiff, about 1/2 hour. In the meantime, pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees, set up a small bowl full of the powdered sugar, and line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Take the stiff dough out of the freezer and scoop out the dough scant tablespoonful by scant tablespoonful rolling each through the granulated sugar and then the powdered sugar. No dark should show through the white sugar coating. Music to manipulate stiff Christmas cookie dough by: "White Christmas" by N. Irish punk band, Stiff Little Fingers". Enjoy! Place balls of dough 2 inches apart. If the balls of dough fade from stark white to gray (due to the thawing of the dough) roll in extra powdered sugar. You're going for black and white crinkly contrast and black and gray just doesn't have the same striking effect.

Place immediately into the oven and bake for 10-12 minutes.

Thanksgiving Guest Shot

2007-11-29T12:39:00.000+01:00

Right when all my Thanksgiving dishes were ready to go and looking good, my camera batteries died and I had no way to document the recipes for you. Luckily, Maria Grazia the guest who wins the Most Prepared Thanksgiving Participant 2007 Award, was on the scene with her cell-phone camera. She took a few shots of dinner including this one of the turkey with sage lattice design. Thanks Maria Grazia!

Thanksgiving Round-up and Pumpkin Roulade (Bûche d'Automne)

2007-11-26T08:05:00.000+01:00

Well, I rolled into work today after yesterday's chow fest that was the belated Sunday Thanksgiving. Our mainly Italian (plus 1 German) guests were rather entertained at the idea of participating in an American holiday made famous by Hollywood films - all Italians know about turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, so getting a chance to actually eat them is a kick. Think of how fun it would be to go to an Australian's house and eat shrimp on the barbie.

Brief Thanksgiving round-up:
°I was so excited I forgot to serve the glorious stuffing! I'm bummed since I think it's the most delicious Thanksgiving dish I serve and my guests went without it but also happy 'cause there's more for me! (sinister snickering, and hand-rubbing accompany this last remark).
°My Moroccan carrot salad was a bust! In addition to the spices called for in the recipe I added a tsp of ground coriander, and tipped the spice balance to a degree that made the dish inedible. Blech!
°The broccoli sauteed with pancetta was super easy, simple and yummy. So much better than last year's brussel's sprouts and the year before's fennel with Pernod. I'll do this one again and again.
°The turkey was great, tender, juicy and the sage lattice design was much prettier than last year's but the skin still wasn't crispy. None of this is documentable, however, since my rechargeable camera batteries instantly ran out of juice when I started taking pics yesterday. I was able only to take the above shot of the pumpkin roulade dessert before the camera crashed. Ugh!

On to the cake, a.k.a. Pumpkin Roulade, a.k.a. Bûche d'Automne (Autumn Log, as opposed to the Christmas chocolate Yule Log of fame).

I bricolaged a recipe an Epicurious cake recipe with a cream cheese frosting recipe with enough changes to warrant me writing the recipe out for you here:

The cake:

6 eggs, separated
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup pureed SWEET POTATOES, NOT PUMPKIN! (unless it's canned) see *explanation below)
3/4 cup cake flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/4 tsp ground ginger
3/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cream of tartar (optional for the egg whites)
Butter for greasing cake pan.

Pre-heat oven to 375F. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugars vigorously for 3 minutes changing arms according to your fatigue level. I find this a great upper body workout and an excuse to eat more cake! The result should be a thick, light-yellow cream. To this, add the canned pumpkin or pureed sweet potatoes and combine.
In a small bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and salt then add to the wet mixture and mix.
Whisk the egg whites, with cream of tartar if you have it, until stiff peaks form (with a food processor unless you're the reincarnation of Julia Child) and fold into the batter carefully trying not to deflate the meringue. WARNING: If you, (like I did the first time) don't bother to whisk the yolks and whites a. separately and b. a lot, you will end up with a sweet pumpkin frittata which is nowhere near as tasty as it might sound. There. You've been warned.
Pour onto a 15x10 inch cake pan and bake for 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Frosting:

16 ozs cream cheese at room temperature
1 stick butter at room temperature
12-16 ozs powdered sugar plus extra for dusting (the taste is up to you)
1/2 tsp ground ginger
cinnamon for dusting

Creating the "log"
Once the cake has cooled in its pan, run a knife along the sides and release the cake onto a smooth kitchen towel sprinkled with extra powdered sugar, not terrycloth. Spread half of the frosting evenly onto the cake and with the towel, begin to roll the cake over itself evenly. Keeping the cake inside the towel refrigerate for 1 hour so that it will stay intact. After 1 hour remove the cake from the fridge and uncover it. Slice 1/3 of the cake off and then cut that piece diagonally so that you have 2 "branches". Place one on either side of the "log" and put on the first coat of the room temperature frosting. At this point you will have gaps between the log and the branches, but in subsequent coats, you'll cover the gaps. Return the cake to the fridge. After about 20 minutes, take it out again and frost the cake again, It will begin to look nicer, smoother and more like a snow-covered log. Return to the fridge for another 20 minutes then put on the last coat. At this point, you can sprinkle the cake with cinnamon and decorate with real washed fall leaves if you like.

*Since I had no canned pumpkin to work with I tried roasting and pureeing fresh pumpkin, which aside from being a giant pain in the ass, yields very poor, stringy, watery results. I think pumpkin is the only fruit or vegetable that I prefer canned over fresh. After three attempts at this cake over the past couple weeks, I wised up and roasted the much denser, sweeter, less watery sweet potatoes and they did the trick! Fresh pumpkins are so much more impactful thrown from a 5 story building and smashed. Music to eat Sweet Potato Bûche d'Automne by: Chicago Alt-favorites, Smashing Pumpkins' "1979".

Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go...

2007-11-22T07:42:00.001+01:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,to those of you Stateside, Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be spending the real Thanksgiving at work giving a presentation, but will celebrate with friends and turkey on Sunday. Thus almost all the Thanksgiving recipes I'll have to offer will sadly come too late for most of you. But I love to keep this blog as a record of what was served, what went well and what didn't for my own benefit, so maybe you'll be interested too. Here's my plan for Thanksgiving 2007:

Endive Leaves With Gorgonzola and Walnuts
*****
Baud-Bovy Family Recipe Rabbit Terrine served with Homemade Sourdough Bread
*****
Brined Turkey with Sage Lattice Design
*****
Moroccan Carrot Salad, Broccoli Florets Sauteed With Pancetta, James Beard's Bread Dressing With Wild Rice, Mashed Potatoes With Giblet Gravy
*****
Pelion Pear Chutney and Roasted Quince Chutney
*****
Bûche d'Automne(Pumpkin Cake Roulade With Cream Cheese Frosting)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Quince Chutney

2007-11-21T12:07:00.000+01:00

A couple years ago when I started my big annual Thanksgiving dinner preparations, I had neglected to buy canned cranberry sauce. There was everythng else, the big turkey, the mashed potatoes, the pumpking pie, everything except the iconic cranberries which are so hard to find in Italy. So, as a substitute I made three chutneys that would go well with turkey. The Pelion Pear chutney was the best of the three and has become a perennial favorite. Last year I had had the presence of mind on my summer trip to Chicago to buy canned cranberry sauce, so I was all set for Thanksgiving 2006. Sadly, the reality of the thing did not live up to my nostalgic expatriate food memories; it was nowhere near as tasty as the pear chutney. This year I'm branching out with other chutneys that I'm pretty sure I've invented. This one is made from roasted quinces and is a take off on my very auspicious membrillo experiment. This is quince, lemon, lots of sugar and sweet and savory spices. Here's the recipe*:

3 large quinces (about 2 pounds)
1 pound sugar
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 in piece of ginger, finely minced and crushed with the side of the knife
1/4 tsp ground true cinnamon (Mexican)
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ground cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground coriander

§§§ One point: if you omit everything after the ginger, you can make a glorious quince jam great for spreading on toast and munching along with your steaming cuppa coffee on cold mornings.

The best way to cook quinces is to roast them whole in the oven for about an hour until soft since they are very hard and knobbly, which makes peeling them raw a task I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Pre-heat oven to 350F. Wash quinces and pat them dry. Place on a baking tray and roast for 1 hour or until a bit soft. Remove from oven and let cool until you can handle them with bare hands. Remove their peels. Cut them in quarters and remove the central pith. Put a very large stock pot to the boil with canning jars and tops inside, to sterilize them. Place the quince pieces in a medium pot with high sides and add the lemon juice, sugar and ginger. Cook over medium-high heat stirring constantly until the fruit mixture begins to boil. Music to make cranberry-sauce substitute by: The Cranberries' "Linger". Since most of the cooking has been done in the oven, the mixture should thicken up and the quince pieces should melt into a uniform creamy jam consistency almost immediately. Stir until your canning jar water is boiling. Add the ground spices and incorporate. Cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Now, you’re ready to jar the chutney. Utensils you will need: 1 long wooden spoon, 1 ladle, 1 plastic funnel cut in half so that the pouring space is narrower than the jar mouths but wide enough for the chutney to go through, 2 oven mitts and ideally 1 friend standing by, surgical technician-like, to make the process go more smoothly waiting for commands like "oven mitt stat!". Using the long, wooden spoon, fish out one of the jars and shake it upside down to remove excess water (the spoon should be inside the upside-down jar). Place the jar right-side-up next to the pot of chutney. Place the funnel over the jar, ladle in jam up to just millimeters from the very top, fish out a lid with the spoon and, using oven mitts, screw the lid on very tightly. Flip the sealed jar upside-down on the counter and proceed with the subsequent jars. Allow to cool completely.

*This is a recipe that will make much more chutney than what you need for Thanksgiving unless you're inviting ALL your Irish-Catholic cousins, maybe your child's's basketball team or the like, so I've included some canning instructions so that you can enjoy the chutney all winter long with any roast meat dish.

Mandarin Orange Lanterns

2007-11-20T00:40:00.000+01:00

I've really been getting my holiday groove on lately. Yesterday I made my fourth version of a pumpkin roulade cake with fresh pumpkin in an attempt to make it edible for Thanksgiving dinner. Uch! frustrating pumpkin cake story to come soon!

Back to the holiday spirit: at baking breaks, I've been sitting down with my You Tube Christmas Carol list a couple mandarin oranges, clementines, or what have you and munching away. A very festive trick that Gabriel's grandpa taught him was how to make mandarin orange lanterns out of the peels. When you get three lit on a simple plate, they look glorious, very Christmasy and very elegant. Martha Stewart has nothin' on Grandpa Tsanos! Here's what you do:

1 mandarin orange
1 tbsp olive oil
1 paring knife

1.)Hold the mandarin with the stem end up top and the blossom end at the bottom, like the north and south poles. Score the peel along the "equator" carefully, so as not to slice the flesh. With your fingernails, begin to carefully separate the peel from the flesh. Work off the blossom end first. Separate the peel entirely. When working with the stem end, work until you have almost reached the place where the stem was. This is where you will work off the wick. You know how sometimes when you're peeling a zipper skin mandarin orange, you'll get some of the center pith along with the peel? That what will become the wick for your lantern. When you have separated almost all the peel from the stem half of the mandarin, you should begin to break the white filaments that attach the mandarin fruit sections to the stem. If you have broken them all before pulling the peel entirely, off you will take the white center pith with the peel.

2.) Once you have 2 empty hemispheres of peel, place the stem end on a plate and allow the wick to dry a bit. The drier it is the better it will absorb the oil.
While you are waiting, cut a small circle at the top of the blossom end to allow the lantern smoke to escape and the wick to get oxygen.

3. Pour a tablespoon of olive oil over the wick, and into the concave peel. Turn down the lights and place the blossom end with the hole over the top. Enjoy the orangey light and the citrusy perfume! Music to anticipate Christmas by: my pop song Christmas playlist.

Chinese Fried Dim Sum? No! Italian Paste Cresciute!

2007-11-15T14:30:00.000+01:00

Ladies and gentlemen, we're moving back to Italy after an extended tour of China. These lovely dumpling-y things frying in a wok are actually Neapolitan paste cresciute (raised dough). Valeria, our resident Neapolitan food expert, made a buffet dinner based on three varieties of paste cresciute. These first ones are plain, light and chewy on the inside crispy on the outside, to be served piping hot sprinkled with a bit of sea salt.
These babies are stuffed with a combination of ricotta, grated mozzarella and minced salami. Super rich and dead fabulous!
And finally these are plain paste cresciute, just like the ones up top but they're flattened out into disk shapes before being fried then topped with a simple tomato sauce and sprinkled with parmesan. Sooo good!

If you try this at home the filling/topping possibilities are limited only by your own imagination! Here's the recipe for the dough to start you out:

1 pkg dry yeast
1 tsp sugar
1/3 cup warm water (about 110-115F)
2 cups all-purpose or (ideally) bread flour. In Italy, choose 0 flour rather than 00.
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsps olive oil
oil for frying

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water. Allow to proof for 10-15 minutes until you see bubbly signs of life. If you see nothing, no foam at the top, you risk a failed recipe if you continue. Sift in the flour and combine with the water mixture. Mix until everything is uniform. Place dough on a board and knead for about 5 minutes until the dough is smooth and rather elastic. Coat the bowl with the olive oil and return the dough to the bowl. Cover the bowl and allow to rise for about 2 hours. Then separate the dough into 10 pieces and...

1.) roll into balls for the plain paste cresciute.

2.) For the filled ones, roll the balls into flat circles about 1/2 inch thick and place about 1 tbsp of filling into the center of each. Fold over and carefully pinch the edges. Make sure your filling is not runny or you risk exploding paste cresciute in your frying oil. Music to risk exploding paste cresciute by: "Season to Risk" by Jack Frost.
3.) roll the balls into disk shapes and prepare your tomato sauce for after the frying.

The Frying:

Heat a wok or other large pot with at least 2 inches of oil to 350F. Too cold and your dough will absorb too much oil, too hot and it will burn on the outside and be raw on the inside. Add the dough pieces one at a time and fry for a total of 4-5 minutes turning the pieces so they cook evenly. Remove and drain on paper towels. Enjoy!

Congee Breakfast

2007-11-12T15:24:00.000+01:00

A study was shown on Italian TV to demonstrate how the taste of many foods we love is acquired, not innate. All babies love sweet and dislike bitter but a taste for some of the foods we love as adults is learned. Take the example of wonderful gorgonzola cheese. I happen to love it but if you'd have tried to serve it to me when I was a kid with all it's veins of blue mold, I'd have run screaming from the room. Then take the Chinese delicacy of eggs preserved in ashes. On TV they looked like normal hard-boiled eggs with the TV color system screwed up. The whites were black and the yolks were green. I imagine that much like gorgonzola, these eggs have developed in flavor through the time their are aged and through contact with the ashes. Whether one appreciates that flavor is a matter of learning. A group of Italians were given the eggs to taste and a group of Chinese tasted the cheese. I'm sure you can imagine the grimaces on both sides. Nobody liked the taste of the new food.

Now why am I telling you about this?

My worst culinary experience in China was eating the traditional congee (a rice gruel) with traditional condiments for breakfast. It's pretty, isn't it? The pickled vegetable strips up top were pungently tasty and salty, the mushroom at 3:00 was yummy and chewy but the orange marinated tofu (still don't know what it was marinated in) just knocked me off my chair! I had to spit it out and then the flavor stayed with me all day long. It was a very strong flavor and I'm sure it is appreciated by people who've learned how, but I'll be happy not to run into it again. Not in a dark alley. I'm too scared.

All the Tea in China and Me, the Maniac With the Camera

2007-11-09T15:00:00.000+01:00

All the tea in China? Ok, I know the five kinds here wouldn't even count for all the tea in New Jersey. But anyway, here's the booty I brought home:
the little round balls in the center of the photo are Jasmine dragon pearls, super perfumey and with a light delicious taste. The dark disk at 6:00, is Pu Er a black tea with a rich taste that tolerates a long brweing (5-7 minutes) without getting bitter, the other three teas, (at 9:00, 12:00 and 3:00 are something of a mystery to me. I wrote down the the shop clerk's pronunciation of the teas in Chnese and now don't know which name corresponds to which tea. Sorry! 9:00 and 3:00 are daisy-like flowers and 12:00 seems like an algae, it's soo green.
One of the things I really wanted to bring home from China was lots of tea but I did no research beforehand to find out what I should be looking for so my pantomime shopping experience was a little shaky. In Beijing, I heard the specialties are jasmine and chrysanthemum teas, so I made sure to get them. Tea shops often display transparent glass cups of tea with bloomed flowers inside. At first I was charmed but after seeing this time and again, I got the impression that the bloomed flower tea was a sort of tourist trap, all looks and no flavor.

Now, the tea I saw almost everybody drinking on the street looks just like this. Standard green tea leaves floating at the bottom of very large glasses or jars, made to be sipped all day long. Music to sip tea all day long by: "Pennyroyal Tea" by Nirvana. When I took this photo the tea owner looked at me as if I were an absolute moron and giggled to himself. What a spectacle I was! I'm sure he thought I was so strange to marvel at what to him was the most normal everyday habit. I did things like that all over town and ellicited laughs everywhere I went.

Exotic Fruit from China

2007-11-07T15:28:00.000+01:00

Disclaimer: I thought of calling this post "Strange Fruit" but since this is just a post about what seems exotic to me, I thought the reference to Billie Holiday's song about lynching in poor taste.

So, on to the flippant: isn't this fruit fun? It's a type of persimmon and I just love the turban-like shape of it. Sadly, when I cut one up to eat, I realized this is the type that must be super-ripe before they lose their awful, acrid taste and become really sweet. I just didn't stay long enough in China to be able to enjoy them. My utter ignorance of the Chinese language prevents me from telling you what this fruit is. I had no way of asking what they were or understanding any answer. I thought this fruit, found everywhere in Beijing in October were cherry-sized apples, but after buying some at a road-side stand and biting into one, I discovered they resemble nothing I've ever tasted. They're perfumy but too sour to eat out of hand, and at the center they have a rather large stone. If I weren't living out of a suitcase when I bought them, I'd have made some rockin' jam out of them for sure. These may not look too pretty but they are delicious! We had these pickled in a restaurant in Shanghai and on the English menu, they were called "Chinese olives". They were crisp, juicy and sweet-and-sour. Very nice!
And after my first run-in with the cherry-sized apple things in Beijing, I found people everywhere in Shanghai eating them on a stick coated in hard crack caramel. Here you see a tiny shop display (I swear the shop was narrower than a fat Western tourist) where they've skewered mandarin orange sections, cherry tomatoes, grapes, something-like-pineapple and especially those cherry-sized apple things all covered in caramel and sometimes rolled in sesame or walnut. The hard crack caramel coating would do wonders with the tartness of the cherry-apple things. Sounds great, no?

Beijing Hot Pot! (With Super Beef and Chicken Feather-Shaped Vegetable)

2007-11-05T14:30:00.000+01:00

My very best meal in China was a Mongolian Hot Pot, well, actually, a Beijing Hot Pot since it's popular there too and they offer local ingredients to make the dish their own. That evening my boss and I went AWOL from an Italian Delegation group dinner and Shanghaied (pun intended) a China expert to take us to an authentic restaurant. What do I mean by authentic? A place that would seem normal to a middle-class Beijing resident. Pier Luca, our hijaked tour guide asked a cab driver (oh what an asset it is to speak the language!) to drive us to a good place to eat. It was that simple.
The menu came in Chinese to Pier Luca and he asked if there was an English-language version as well. Oh what fun that menu was! 5 pages of culinary adventure and hilarious/adorable Sino-English vocabulary choices. Have a close look at this menu page. (Sorry for the poor photo quality) We passed on the "artefactitious crab", "sheep's pizzle" and "ox throat" and went straight for the "super beef" and lamb. My boss wanted to make sure that we ended up with something relatively familiar. For vegetables, we chose some bok choy, mushrooms, cellophane noodles and my favorite, "chicken feather-shaped vegetable". See above. We had initially laughed at it but, when it arrived, we saw the utter logic and descriptiveness of the name, don't you agree? So we began to pick up slices of the raw meat and veggies and drop them into the boiling broth. We'd leave them in just until cooked (less than 30 seconds for the meat to a couple minutes for the bok choy) and then enjoy it hot out of the pot.Last but not least, the fabulous dipping sauce (sorry again for the photo quality) that flavored everything with hints of peanut, sesame, soy, chili and I'm sure a lot of other things. It was fabulous!

Happy Day of the Dead 2007

2007-11-01T16:43:00.001+01:00

I interrupt the saga of culinary adventures in China to celebrate the Day of the Dead. November 1st, the day after Halloween, is a big holiday in any country with a large Catholic population celebrating all our dearly departed and in Mexico, parts of Central America and many neighborhoods in the U.S., it's known as Dia de los muertos. I'm nostalgically missing Dead bread right now (a sweet yeast bread with lots of spices, often in the form of bones) but we're taking advantage of the national holiday in Italy and having a Mexican dinner party. Among other things, I'm serving "Sopa de chile poblano y espinacas" (Poblano Spinach Soup). As usual, this is adapted from a recipe in Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen

The recipe goes like this:

6 poblano peppers roasted, seeded and peeled
6 cups packed fresh spinach leaves
5 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 tsp salt
1 cup smoked ham in a 1/4 inch dice
1 cup cooked potato in a 1/4 inch dice

In a large stock pot, pour in 1 cup of the stock and bring to a boil. Add the cleaned spinach leaves and the poblanos and cook until the leaves are thoroughly wilted. Take off heat and blend with an immersion blender or in a food processor until smooth. A Day of the Dead video to puree soup by: Return to the pot and add the cream and salt, bring back to a boil and add the ham and potatoes. The smoky quality of the ham makes a nice foil to the spice of the poblanos and the richness of the cream. Serve immediately near the tomb of your favorite deceased relative accompanied by plenty of smoking incense and lively mariachi music.

Happy Day of the Dead everyody!

China: Extreme Eats

2007-10-29T14:56:00.000+01:00

I have to say that my whirlwind trip to Beijing and Shanghai brought me many delicious and memorable culinary experiences that I'll be telling you all about this week. The only really extreme eating I did, the kind that scared me, was on the last night there. I insisted on ordering chicken feet simmered in brown gravy. You see, one of the things I learned from a tour guide to the Great Wall of China was that China imports chicken feet and gizzards from the US. I believe this since chicken is really popular in the States (as it is everywhere) but most U.S. supermarkets do not carry these parts. The feet had to go somewhere, right?

Above you see the dish, 5 chicken feet in the promised brown gravy with broccoli. My adventurous spirit waned as soon as the waitress brought me the plate. The feet were much bigger than I had imagined. I had figured them to be half their actual size. And they looked fingery. Their slipperiness thwarted all my attempts to hold them up with chopsticks, which further weakened my resolve. But I tried them anyway. I finally got one foot within my chopsticks and lifted it up to my mouth. I bit off the middle finger from the top knuckle. It was...soft, kind of creamy. A bit like fat from slowly braised meat that becomes sort of gelatinous. The flavor was very good, very brown gravy-ish. I have to admit having exhausted all my desire to ever eat them again, but at least I tried it. Have you ever had anything like this? Did you like it?

Off to China!

2007-10-17T08:30:00.000+02:00

Hi folks, I'll be taking a 10-day blogging break because I'm leaving on a business trip to China this afternoon. I'm sure to come back on October 27th with some wondrous food experiences to share with you all. If the Chinese neighborhood in the 13th Arrondisement in Paris can offer me ham and jellyfish salad (delicious! no, really!), just imagine what Beijing and Shanghai hold in store.

I don't know how much extreme eating I'll get in since my traveling companions are all Italian, which leads me to believe they may not be too culinarily adventurous. My colleagues' idea of "exotic" is a chocolate-chip cookie or a blueberry muffin, so, we'll see. If they do have deep fried scorpions in Beijing though, I'll try 'em, after all, they look so much like shrimp scampi, don't they?

So if there's anyone out there who's been to Beijing and/or Shanghai and had a memorable eating experience, I'd love to know about it. Tell us all in a comment!

Ice Cream Men: Moda à la Mode

2007-10-15T14:46:00.001+02:00

In general, I would say that most Italians pay a lot of attention to their appearance, they tend to iron their trousers and shirts, they usually shine their shoes, the unkempt look is rather hard to find 'round these parts. There is one group of people who, while far from sloppy, are perversely entertaining. In the summer, many middle-aged men (never the elderly and never young hipsters) walk around with well-ironed bright or pastel shirt and pant combos that are much better suited to ice-cream cones than pants.

Now. you'll say, That's mean spirited; what did that guy ever do to you?" And you'll be absolutely right, I felt terrible pangs of guilt at taking this guys picture just to publicly expose him as the personification of a black raspberry - strawberry ice cream cone. The black bar over his eyes is to, in some small way, protect his privacy.

And these two, were thinking I jumped in front of them to get a good shot at the cathedral behind them when in reality, I just was stunned by their color coordination. Here we have lemon ice cream two ways: with custard on the left and with "puffo"* on the right.

This guy had no idea I was snapping his fior di latte** - mango sorbet ensemble.

Here's the coup de grace: kiwi ice cream with watermelon sorbet.

*"Puffo" ice cream in Italy is made with an eye toward kids. Its intense light blue color is meant to remind them of the Puffi or Smurfs, as they're called in the States.

**Fior di latte is ice cream at its purest, just cream, milk and sugar.
Music to dress like an Ice Cream Man by: the quasi 1950's do-wop song, "Ice Cream Man" by Jonathan Richman.

Rare Eats: Lampinou Restaurant

2007-10-12T20:33:00.000+02:00

Sometimes when we want a little change from the solitude of the house in Greece, the rare times when we don't feel like cooking, we head on the ancient stone footpath from the sea up the mountain to Lampinou town. The restaurant in the main square (simply called Lampinou Restaurant, as it's the only one) serves some typically Greek specialties as well as traditional, old-fashioned local dishes you might have a hard time finding elsewhere. I've already written about their hand-picked kritama leaves that, according to my Greek cookbook, are almost never harvested anymore in Greece. What you see here is a local, Pelion version of ratatouille. Large chunks of eggplant, red bell peppers and onions slow cooked in olive oil.

Voula is the chef and her husband, Dimitri is the maitre d' while their daughter, Dimitria, helps out by serving. As you sit out at gas lamp-lit tables on the large patio under the giant Sycamore tree, amidst a few tourists but mostly locals, you can get a sense of a particularities of the area. Things here are simple and unpretentious. The wine is good and nameless and the excellent food is served unadorned. The straight-forwardness of everything really gives you the sense that nobody's pulling the wool over your eyes.
What you see here is a very particular version of melitsanosalata. In Dimitri's home town, the workers in the firlds in summer used to fortify themselves with this eggplant salad that, aside from onion and red and green peppers contains a tremendous amount of garlic. The belief was that the garlic would help the workers get through their grueling day of tending the fields. Today the dish is served with crunchy country bread as a reminder of those times.

Persimmon With Chile, Lime and Salt. Would You Eat This?!

2007-10-08T15:10:00.000+02:00

I think most people wouldn't say no to a ripe persimmon. It may not be the most popular fruit but its sweet, sweet sweetness is hard to turn down. But what about persimmon sprinkled with a Mexican fruit condiment of red pepper flakes, powdered lime juice and salt? Does it sound terrible to you? If you live anywhere in North America, not just in Mexico, this stuff is readily available. I have some of this here in Italy because some friends just got back from the Yucatán and they bought this thinking it was normal chile for salsa or something. Needless to say, they were not impressed when I told them it was for fruit. When I was teaching Spanish at University of Minnesota, I once bought my students watermelon suckers coated with this spice combo for a little cultural introduction. Most of them freaked out and those that actually ate the suckers did so as a sort of proof of their mettle, kinda the way a fraternity pledge might swallow a live goldfish.

So here's my argument for this unusual snack: once you get over the initial gross-out impression, I think the "Chile, Limón y sal" makes sweet fruit even better. Persimmons don't have much sour tang to them so this addition makes its sweetness more complex, gives the sugar some sour, salty and spicy to go up against. The condiment is also great on bosc pears, black plums and papayas and ripe mangoes. So the question is: Would YOU eat this?!

Happy Ramadan?

2007-10-04T03:20:00.000+02:00

I walked into my favorite Halal butcher's and grocery store on Tuesday with a big sweet tooth and found a bonanza of North-African desserts waiting for me, much more than usual. Tuesday, evidently was the start of Ramadan, the season of atonement for Muslims. The practice is to fast during daylight hours, but once the sun goes down you're allowed to replenish yourself and at least some Muslims really do that in a big way. The store was was displaying a wider array of sweets than usual as well as three different types of flatbreads, for soaking up all the homemade cooking.

I snapped up the mille-feuilles (Napoleons) that Moroccans call their own as well as the twisty, deep fried, honey soaked nests you see in the center. They were both excellent and I'm still coming off my sugar-high.

As far as I know, Ramadan is celebrated in vastly different ways depending on country, sect and probably family. Some consider the holiday a very solemn time for which you'd never wish "Happy Ramadan" but others seem to focus on the moments of celebration that evenings and the end of Ramadan, Eid Al Fitr, bring. So to any Muslim readers out there I wish a tentative Happy Ramadan or a solemn Ramadan in the spirit of recognizing this important time for Muslims around the world, especially in my neighborhood. I can't wait to celebrate with you on Eid al Fitr!

Pa Pa Pa Parmigiano, Irritating Schlock or Brilliant Satire? You decide.

2007-10-01T14:48:00.000+02:00

Last Christmas there was a tv commercial for parmesan cheese in heavy rotation here in Italy. The deliriously happy-looking actors dressed up as colored metallic foil vegetables and short pasta shapes dancing like morons around a giant wheel of parmesan and singing one of the stupidest songs I've ever gotten stuck in my head, filled me with exasperation. What had those actors ever done to deserve such indignity? I couldn't help but think that whoever came up with this commercial must be some kind of sadist to make those actors humiliate themselves to such a degree just for a paycheck. I couldn't understand why else such a spectacle of schlock could come to be. Have a look to see what I mean.

You see? Doesn't that just make you want to drive a pasta fork into somebody's eye? A friend of mine recently told me that this video has been making the rounds of Anthropologist You Tube fans back in the States. She really likes the video, thinks it's funny, and that fact drove me even crazier. But then I found out that the stupid "Pa Pa Pa Parmigiano" jingle comes directly from a 1980's Italian pop hit by the band "Ricchi e Poveri". Have a look here:

Can you believe that? There's the same stupid tune and the female singer bounces along pantomiming every lyric as if she were singing to an audience of Korean speakers who had no clue what she was saying. Seeing this made me realize, maybe, just maybe the "Pa Pa Pa Parmigiano" commercial's send-up of the song "Ma Ma Ma Maria" is fitting punishment for all the torturous earworms* Ricchi e Poveri have put into the heads of Italians over the years. What do you think? Am I being to critical?

*Earworm: From the German ohrwurm, a song that gets stuck in your head.

Stinging Nettle Soup: A Tale of Revenge

2007-09-27T15:08:00.000+02:00

Just outside the vegetable garden fence at the house in Greece there was a patch of ~~poison ivy, st least I think it was poison ivy. In French we called them "des ortilles", which translates as nettles.~~ stinging nettles which are safe to eat cooked but really nasty to touch raw. In any case they sting/itch with a violence I'd never before felt. I backed into them and was struck with an almost vibrating sensation on my ankles where they touched. I immediately ran for the anti-itch cream and began to plot my revenge.

Ever since spying nettle recipes in Italian cookbooks, I've been intrigued by the idea of eating poison ivy. Thing is, unless you walk through the wrong place in the wilderness, it's not that easy to find. Imagine picking up something like that in a grocery store! So aside from being irrationally angry at the poison ivy for itching me, I knew a rare culinary opportunity when I saw one, so I donned the thickest pair of garden gloves I could find, grabbed some pruning shears and whacked that poison ivy patch to the ground.

When I brought the bounty in to the kitchen, my father-in-law got a really bright look on his face. He had a really easy old family soup recipe called "Soupe des ortilles".

Here's the recipe:
1 big bunch of nettles (don't ask me how much, but enough to fill a large plastic collander)
water to cover
1 garlic clove, minced
1 large baking potato
small dollop of cream or butter
salt and pepper

This recipe is in the potage parmentier family, which means a few vegetables boiled in water until soft, with minimal seasoning added, which as if by magic, tastes really, really good. A soup much more than the sum of its parts. Music to sip soupe aux ortilles (nettle soup) by: Jennifer Nettles singing "Who says You Can't Go Home" with Jon Bon Giovi.

Sun-Dried Octopus: Would You Eat This?!

2007-09-24T17:05:00.000+02:00

Oregano-rubbed octopus tentacles drying in the sun outside of seaside tavernas are a surprisingly common sight in Greece. I've heard the drying tenderizes the octopus a bit before it's grilled and served but I can't confirm that. (If anybody out there can explain, the rationale for the sun-drying, I'd love to know.)
At any rate, I think grilled octopus is pretty great, but the question of the day is: Would YOU eat this?!

Kritama

2007-09-19T07:06:00.000+02:00

Here's another wild, edible plant that grows along the rocky coasts of Greece (and certainly other parts of the Mediterranean as well) alongside the flowering caper plants. In Greek it's called kritama and it tastes very unique; its succulent leaves are naturally salty with notes of celery and citrus zest. I really love it. My Greek Horta cookbook explains that this plant is hardly ever harvested anymore, which I think is rather a shame.
Every summer I pick about a pound and put it up in jars. As you can see in the photo, I like to pick the last 5 leaves at the tips of the stoutest, pudgiest plants. The recipe goes something like this:

1 pound kritama
dry white wine to cover
a pinch of salt*
3-4 bay leaves

* The leaves, eaten raw are salty enough but once they're boiled in the wine they need a bit more salt for flavor and it couldn't hurt their shelf-life after jarring.
I bring the wine to a boil and add the kritama leaves, the salt and the bay leaves. I boil some clean glass jars in water. After 10 minutes of boiling, the kritama leaves are ready to be jarred. I take a jar out of the boiling water and spoon some kritama and wine into it, the seal tightly, and set upside-down until it cools to room temperature, then repeat with the other jars.

One pound of kritama makes enough small jars to serve as an appetizer along with the house olives at the occasional Greek dinner party. Because I was taught to be really selective in my kritama picking (only the last 5 leaves from the fattest plants, I've passed a lot of kritama by in my time) I was really surprised to find this dish served as a vegetable, not a tiny appetizer at the restaurant in Labinou town, Pelion. Here's their version, dropped into boiling water, boiled until tender and served simply with salt, pepper, white wine vinegar and really good olive oil. I have a lot more to say about this restaurant that seems to specialize in old-fashioned peasant food. It's really neat because the dishes at this place are hard to find anywhere else. Music to eat the rare Greek delicacy, kritama by: "So Unusual" by Jason Mraz.

The Name Game

2007-09-14T14:47:00.000+02:00

Susan, Susan Bo-Busan, Banana-fanna Fo-fusan, Me mi mo musen, Susan! No, actually it's not THAT name game; this is something completely different.

Actually the real game comes to us thanks to Judith of Shortcut to Mushrooms for tagging me on this meme even though it was so hard to do! The name of the game is to choose a fact, word or tidbit that's somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your name. Let me say that this was the hardest meme I've ever done. I don't know why, maybe it's the crippling idea that I have to think of 5 things (1 for each letter in the name Susan) that identify me or sum me up. I had to stop thinking that way, or I'd never finish this so here all of my chosen words are culinary.

SUSAN

S is for Sweets. The world can fairly be divided into salty snack lovers (munchers of potato chips, peanut and pickles) and sweet-tooths (why isn't it "sweet teeth"? - lovers of cakes, cookies and candy). I'm firmly in the latter category. I've even dedicated a recipe category to sweet things.

U is for Unagi, freshwater eel, my all-time favorite sushi ingredient. It's even great for the culinarily non-adventurous because it's served cooked.

S is for Sourdough. I you have read this blog even just a few times, you're probably aware of the sourdough bread starter colony that can be seen seething in my fridge. I grew it from scratch out of organic grapes, some water and some flour. If anyone wants any, just ask.

A is for Ancho. Rick Bayless calls ancho chilis the powerhouse of Mexican cuisine because they are used as a base in so many delicious dishes. They're as flavorful as they are hot and since they're almost impossible to get here in Italy, they're precious to me.

N is for Nigella. NOT Nigella Lawson (nothing against her but I've never even seen her show) but little black nigella seeds. They are great in flatbreads (giving them a punchy, crunchy edge) and pretty much nothing else as far as I know. I bought a ginormous bag of them to make naan bread a while back and now don't know how I'll ever finish them. Any ideas out there?

Now, I'd like to invite any of you out there to consider yourselves tagged and do this meme. Let me know in a comment that you're doing it and I'll be by to see how it all turns out.

Greek Yogurt with Wild Blackberry Preserves

2007-09-12T17:30:00.000+02:00

One of our favorite Greek vacation house pastimes is making preserves out of the abundant fruit harvest from the grounds around the house. The wild blackberries that grow along the road and footpaths are large and sweet. If you follow a general recipe here and your preserves turn out just a little liquidier than "set", they make a great topping for the super-dense Greek yogurt. In summer, we spend mornings lingering a bit over breakfast because we have such good stuff like this to eat.

Um, hi remember me? (Blame it all on Wentworth Miller)

2007-09-09T15:18:00.001+02:00

I have been such a bad blogger. I had every intention of getting back into the culinary swing of things when we came home from Greece but pure sloth got in my way. My return from Eden left me with only the energy after facing work to turn on my E Mule and watch seasons 1 and 2 of Prison Break. That's 44 episodes in 3 weeks, so you do the math. My brain's gotten a little fuzzy after all that. Thing is, Wentworth Miller is cute and everything, but the show just isn't coherent enough to be worth 3 weeks of virtually undivided attention.

So, I'm ready to pick up where I left off. Actually some nostalgic blogging on food of a vacation past is just the thing I need...so here's what I did the first week of vacation with a couple kinds of weeds (purslane and caper leaves) and some salt:

In the one Greek-language cookbook I own (it takes me quite a while to translate a recipe before I can begin to make it) there's a recipe for sun-dried, salt-cured purslane (glisistrada) and caper leaves (fylla apo kappares). First you pick 1 kilo of purslane (the 6th most common weed on the planet, and an excellent substitute for okra in gumbo) and 1/2 kilo of small, tender caper leaves. Wash and pat the leaves dry. Place them in one layer on a dry towel and leave in the afternoon sun for at least 1 hour.
With a glass jar and 1/2 kilo of salt, layer the leaves. Begin by pouring a little salt in the bottom of the jar, drop in a few purslane leaves, more salt, some caper leaves, more salt, more leaves, yet more salt and still more leaves until your jar is full. Make sure the top layer is about 1 centimeter of salt. Then... get this: leave it in a cool, dry place for 8 MONTHS until the leaves are ready to eat. Music to sit around for 8 MONTHS by: (well, not really but this is the coolest song played in any episode of Prison Break): "Home" by Alexi Murdoch. The recipe said something about this being good in salads. I'm not sure but I'll let you know in April.

Homemade Raw Goat's Milk Feta

2007-08-04T15:48:00.000+02:00

The neighbor down the road here in Greece makes her own feta every morning from the milk of three of her goats. The one you see here is Margarita, named for the daisy-like white pot on her nose. Mina and her husband are city folk who retired to the country and took up a little substance farm to spend their golden years tending. They have 15 goats, three of which are milkable, loads of rabbits, countless chickens, special breed pigeons (a.k.a. “squab” in your fancier restaurants) 12 dogs, who knows how many cats and if that weren’t enough, they hunt boar in winter.We caught up with Mina at about 10am yesterday since she dedicates mornings for cheese making. The goats had been milked and the 5 liters of fresh milk (from that morning and the night before) had been mixed with 1 tbsp salt and 1/4 tsp powdered casein (the enzyme that turns milk into cheese) dissolved in ¼ cup warm water. After 1 hour, the cheese looked like this: It seemed like the consistency of a light pudding.Then Mina poured the cheese into a large cheesecloth (about halfway between what we know as cheesecloth and a smooth cotton dish towel) over a very large bucket to catch the whey, and began to squeeze. She lifted the gathered cloth and let the whey pour down. She twisted the cloth and let more whey out.She kept pushing and twisting until finally the contents of the cheesecloth fit into her specially made Cretan cheese basket (at left).There they rested hanging and draining for 2 hours until she unveiled this:

This very fresh cheese can be eaten as is (but it tastes nothing like feta) or it can be placed in salty water* for 4–5 days where it will harden and mature and then can be eaten as regular feta. Since the milk used here is raw and Mina uses no preservatives, Mina ages her cheese in a highly salty brine.A few hours before you enjoy it, you must let the cheese rest and desalinate a bit in fresh water. Once the 4-5 day salting process is complete, the cheese can stay in the brine for months. Here in the back of the photo, you have the freshly-made cheese and in the front, you have Mina’s traditional feta. My favorite is the aged, salty traditional feta, eaten with oregano and tomatoes (about evry day of our vacation so far!) while Gabriel prefers the soft, fresh cheese, which is lovely drizzled with some Greek honey.

*Mina’s test to see if the brine is salty enough entails placing a freshly lain egg in the water and adding salt little by little. When the egg floats, the brine is salty enough. And in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t ask about salmonella.

Of Capers, Caper-Berries and the Salty Sea

2007-07-25T11:19:00.000+02:00

Capers. The delightfully salty little cousins of the olive, at least I've always thought of them that way. I'd heard they were unopened flower buds, but what about the caper-berry, darling of the martini craze from a few years back? The caper and the caper-berry are not the same thing but they come from the same plant. When I came to Greece for the first time I found out the real deal:

Here is the caper plant, itself, a rugged coastal Mediterranean plant, it seems to thrive on sea air alone, growing through cracks in rocky cliffs along the shore. The disk-shaped leaves are succulent, juicy and are still used in cooking by the very few older folks who still remember how to cook "horta", the wild-growing greens of Greece. I'll try out a recipe in my Greek cookbook as soon as I translate the thing, gimme a week or two.

The buds start coming up in early summer and flower throughout the month of July (at least here in Pelion, Greece). Here you see a branch with a tiny, non-pareil caper at the tip, a couple large ones further up and a rather spent flower. As I said before, the caper is the flower bud but the caper-berry is actually formed after the flower dies (see photo at top). It is the seed sack that,when saved from the martini glass, grows to the size of a small pear and bursts open to shower the rocks with seeds for next year's capers.

Heading to Greece

2007-07-15T12:22:00.000+02:00

See you soon everybody! We're packing our bags and heading to Greece tomorrow. This here's our swimming hole and sea urchin hunting grounds. Hope y'all have a great summer. Be back in mid-August to tell you all about our Greek culinary adventures. See you then!

Tart Plum Tart

2007-07-11T15:15:00.000+02:00

The other day I bought a kilo of lovely-looking red plums at the open-air market. I sliced the first one open, a rich dark red tending toward purple with soft but not mushy flesh. It looked and felt perfect. Then I bit in and tasted juicy but sour and actually a little bit bitter plum flavor. I got a kilo of bad plums. This happens; we all know it. Even Jerry Seinfeld once said; "Fruit is a gamble. I know that going in." And so, I started to think of a way to use these plums without having to make tart plum wincy faces every day until they were finished. I started thinking about making a tart plum tart.

Julia Child has somewhere a fabulous recipe for plum and yogurt tart that I made last summer. The result was sooo delicious and sooo beautiful to behold that I thought, "Why not make Julia Child's plum yogurt tart out of these red plums and just add a bit more sugar?". So a plan was born. Except that going online, I couldn't find the same recipe again. Has anyone heard of Julia Child's plum yogurt tart? I'd love to have the real recipe. JANUARY 26TH, 2007 UPDATE: LOOKING FOR INSPIRATION IN MY "BAKING WITH JULIA COOKBOOK, I FOUND THE RECIPE! IT WAS NOT ON LINE BECAUSE IT COMES FROM LESLIE MACKIE, WHO IS ONE OF THE CHEFS WHO BAKES WITH JULIA IN THE BOOK. NEXT TIME I'LL DO THIS RECIPE RIGHT WITH GOOD PLUMS AND THE ORIGINAL RECIPE.

So I winged it trying to remember as much of the recipe as I could. I know there was a base of yogurt whisked with sugar and an egg and then sugar-macerated, quartered plums. Here's the recipe I remember:

1 lb plums, pitted and quartered
6 tbsps sugar
1/4 tsp allspice
1 tbsp lemon juice (that I didn't put in since the plums were tart enough)

1 sm container of plain yogurt
1 lg egg
6 tbsps sugar

1 recipe of standard pate brisee This recipe works well for me.

Combine the plums, sugar, allspice and optional lemon juice and let macerate until the sugar has dissolved, about 30 minutes. Whisk together the yogurt, egg and sugar. Add the yogurt mixture to your rolled-out pie crust then arrange the plums on top in any order you like. Music to arrange macerated plums by: "I Want It All" by Eve's Plum Pour on the syrup that has formed around the plums evenly onto the pie. Bake for 1 hour in a 350F oven.

This ISN'T Julia's recipe, though. There's something other than the substandard plums that makes this summer's tart so much less desirable. Again, if anyone out there knows Julia's plum yogurt tart recipe, let me know and I'll print it out next time. I have to say the plums taste better in tart form than they did out of hand, but still what TV chefs say is really true: you should use impeccable fruit even in your pies and tarts because good ingredients make a good recipe.

Roasted Poblano Soup

2007-07-08T20:40:00.001+02:00

The Scoville units of Poblano peppers can range so greatly that sometimes you want to use a poblano as a vegetable and other times, as a condiment, and you never really know if you've got a vegetable or a spice until you bite in to it. Adventurous, no? Yesterday, I made roasted poblano soup out of my fall stash of balcony-grown poblano peppers. Some of them had turned a bright red while others remained the classic dark forest green. After following the recipe, I took one taste and immediately gulped down 1/2 liter of water, which actually doesn't help much. If you find that your poblanos are too spicy for your palate, you can doctor this soup in a few ways to calm the heat down: add in some green or red bell pepper to soften the impact of the poblanos, add a bit of sugar to contrast the heat intensity or add lots of milk products. I prefer yogurt for thickness but take your pick of milk, sour cream or crème fraiche. Sprinkling on some Mexican queso anejo wouldn't be a bad idea either. The soup is delicious, wakes you up and gets the endorphins kicking. Here's the recipe:

6 green (or red, if you can find them) poblano peppers
4 cups chicken stock
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
2 cups yogurt (more or less depending on the scoville units of your particular poblanos.)
1 tsp sugar (optional)
salt to taste
cilantro (a delicious option)
queso anejo (another yummy option)

First, roast the peppers on a barbecue grill, over a gas flame on the stove or on the top rack in your oven until the skin is blistered and charred all over. Take off the heat and place in a plastic bag, seal well and wait for about 5 minutes until the steam loosens the skin. Peel the peppers and seed them. (I did this last fall and these roasted poblanos have been in the freezer since. They were in great shape when thawed, so I highly recommend freezing.)

Place the peppers in the bowl of a food processor and whiz until they are reduced to a smooth puree. Add as much chicken stock as necessary to get the peppers moving.

In a medium saucepan, add the butter and melt over medium heat. Add the flour and mix to form a paste called a roux. Fry the roux until it is blonde, about 2-3 minutes. Raise the heat to maximum, add whatever chicken stock you didn't add to the poblanos and whisk to smoothness. Now you have a thin sauce veloute. Add the pureed poblanos with the rest of the stock and whisk in. Add one cup of yogurt and taste for heat. Continue adding more yogurt until your soup is mild enough for you. Add a teaspoonful of sugar to help calm the heat. Music to make hot poblano soup by: "Hot Hot Hot by Buster Poindexter (a.k.a. David Johansen of the New York Dolls) My poblanos were super hot, so I added both cups of yogurt and the sugar. Correct for salt. Serve hot or cool.

Sourdough Naan

2007-07-04T15:50:00.001+02:00

Calcutta (Kolkata) by way of California, this is traditional Indian Naan bread made with a San Francisco sourdough starter, a recipe I took word for word*, step by step** from Hindu-convert, Yamuna Devi's (nee, California Hippie-chick, Joan Campanella's***) "The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking". The curries in here are not stellar but the breads and sweets are fit for Lord Krishna, himself. Devi's suggestions for naan bread include a traditional sponge starter method, a packaged yeast method and happily, a Sourdough Starter Method. If it's one thing I have an endless supply of, it's sourdough starter, so I rolled up my sleeves and got kneading.

***Ok, ok, I'm only assuming the Hare Krishna cliché. I admit it's almost too easy to make fun of the sincerity of someone from California who went to India to become a Hindu in the late '60s. Maybe I've read too much Salman Rushdie to not be cynical. Anyway, here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup liquid sourdough starter
5 tbsps vegetable oil, divided
1/2 cup yogurt
3 cups bread flour
2 tsps sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsps kalonji or poppy seeds (*ok, so I substituted nigella (black onion) seeds because I couldn't find kalonji. Actually, I don't even know what kalonji seeds are; does anyone out there know?)
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Mix the sourdough starter with 4 tbsps of the oil and yogurt in a small bowl. In a larger bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt baking soda and your seeds of choice. Pour the sourdough mixture into the dry ingredients and mix first with a spoon then with your hands adding a bit of flour if it is too sticky. Knead for 6-8 minutes or until the dough is smooth and elastic. Cover and let stand for about 4 hours until well risen.

Punch the dough down and roll out with a floured rolling pin until the dough is about 1/4 inch or 1/2 centimeter thick. Divide into 6 pieces. (**This next part is a divergence from the original recipe in which I do not heat up the oven and bake the naan on a cast iron skillet inside it, but get great results with a covered cast-iron frying pan on the stove.**) Heat a cast iron skillet with a small amount of vegetable oil and with its cover on, on the stove to the smoking point. Take off the cover, slap a piece of dough flat onto the skillet and replace the cover. After 30 seconds, check the naan. It may be burned already or still quite pale. Adjust your heat accordingly and move forward. Like crepes, the first flatbread off the skillet often ends up an offering to the gods. Flip with a metal spatula and prepare a plate to receive the baked naans. After another 30 seconds, check the other side and remove from the pan. Repeat until you've a.) baked all the naans and b.) you've gotten the hang of this stovetop naan baking thing.
Music to munch naan by: "Dear Prudence", dedicated to Mia Farrow's sister Prudence, by John Lennon during the Beatles' own short-lived Occidental Hindu phase. Serve as an accompaniment to an Indian meal or informally with chutney.

Gazpacho Blanco

2007-07-02T08:12:00.000+02:00

Last summer I made caraffe after caraffe of delicious, zingy Andalusian gazpacho because a.) it's eaten chilled and just feels so good on a hot, unairconditioned day and b.) it doesn't get cooked so you don't heat the house up making it.

For a little excitement, I have a variation for you that's as traditional but probably a surprise for anyone who isn't from Southern Spain: White Gazpacho. No tomatoes or red peppers but you get the smooth creaminess of blanched almonds and the cool of fresh cucumbers:

1 cup skinless blanched almonds
crumb of 4 pieces of white bread (not wonderbread, but something more flavorful and substantial)
2 medium cloves garlic
2 medium cucumbers, peeled and roughly chopped
4 cups cold water
2/3 cups olive oil
salt to taste

In the bowl of a food processor, pulverize the almonds and the garlic until they are in very fine pieces. Add the chopped cucumber and process until you have a paste. Add the water and process for 1 minute to make sure that you get a smooth, liquid consistency then open the "feeding tube" (you know that thing in the lid of the processor that you can pull off to add stuff while you're already processing? Well that.) and add the salt and drizzle in the olive oil. You will have a green-white creamy soup. Strain though a mesh strainer, chill and enjoy.

What I've made for you here is a variation of the classic Arabo-Anzalusian soup, Ajo Blanco. The original dish has no cucumber and adds halved green grapes as garnish. With or without cucumbers, it's a rich and delicious way to chill out and relax. Music to chill out and sip White Gazpacho By: "Chill Out" by Carlos Santana. Happy Dog Days!

Mediterranean Farro Salad

2007-06-29T14:58:00.000+02:00

I just love David Rosengarten. He used to host one of the greatest cooking shows of all time, "Taste" where he gave loads of context and lore to one particular ingredient and then demonstrated the technique for cooking one dish. A whole half-hour show and he only ever produced one dish per episode. But it was well worth watching. I know a lot more about Argentinian grass-fed beef, apple tarte tatin and the flavor umami that I ever would have without him.

He also taught me about farro before I moved to Italy and had a chance to actually taste it. Farro, or spelt in English or Triticum dicoccum in Latin is an ancient grain, given as rations to Roman soldiers and ground up and eaten like polenta by the poor. In more recent times, farro went by the wayside in favor of grains that yielded more kilos per acre than farro. About 20 years ago, however it made a comeback with inventive French chefs who tried to outdo each other in originality reaching back through the centuries to create dishes that were simultaneously "new" and traditional. Once farro hit France, it made it's way back to chic tables in Italy as well.

Here's my take on his recipe from the Dean & Deluca cookbook:

1 cup farro (or kamut or whole wheat berries)
1/2 cup crumbled feta (of any nationality you want)
1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion rings
1 crushed garlic clove
1/2 cup diced cucumber
1 roasted and peeled red pepper, diced
2 tablespoons of chopped kalamata olives or whole capers
1 sprig fresh mint minced
1/4 cup minced flat-leaf parsley
10 medium leaves of basil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup the best olive oil you can afford
salt and pepper to taste

(from the original recipe, I've tweaked the amounts a bit and have added basil while taking away cumin and cayenne pepper. The hot pepper in combination with the piquancy of the feta created a flavor clash that actually kind of hurt the first time I made this.)

Place rinsed farro in a pot with water to cover by 2 inches. Bring to a boil and cook for 40 minutes or until grains are tender. Music to boil farro by: The First Taste by Fiona Apple Drain off water and pour farro into a large salad bowl. Add all other ingredients stir to combine and serve at room temperature.

Emilia Road Trip

2007-06-27T16:12:00.000+02:00

On our way to Regina and Alessio's wedding in the Emilia Region, Gabriel and I rented a car and once we got off the big, ugly circular highway around Milan, we took small country roads all the way to the little town of Ramiseto. Winding on our way, we first ran into the Oltrepo Pavese wine country and saw rolling hill after rolling hill full of green vines and tiny grapes. Come September, we'll have grape must out of these babies here and after a few months, Prosecco!!

When we were almost at our destination, we paused and had a little walk along the road where golden wheat was glistening in the afternoon sun. This may seem strange but where I grew up in the Mid-West where mostly corn and soybeans are grown, wheat fields seem so exotic.

Believe it or not at the restaurant parking lot where the reception was held, we almost parked on top of a patch of these wild strawberries. I ran out of the car and picked a handful to bring to the reception.

A Wedding in Emilia

2007-06-25T12:33:00.000+02:00

We've just got back from our friends, Regina and Alessio's wedding in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. I was so looking forward to this day to see such dear friends get married but also to experience my first real Italian wedding pranzo. And this being Emilia, a region known in Italy for its gastronomia. I knew it was going to be an event to remember. I won't bore you with photo after photo of insalata di farro (recipe coming up soon!), copious amounts of salumi and formaggi, gnocchi fritti, pizzette, between-course sorbetto, frittata, prosecco, mirtillo, and the 7 tiered tutti frutti wedding cake. No, I'll just focus on two dishes you may not have heard of before: ciccioli and the hunka-hunka parmesan.

In Italy, parmesan is not just a condiment to sprinkle on pasta. At big events, weddings included you'll often find huge 1/2 or 1/4 wheels of parmesan sitting on a buffet table with short, wide knife/spatula things to insert and twist off a hunk of parmesan. This is lovely to eat with a glass of wine or with a little balsamic vinegar drizzled on top.

Ciccioli, I must say was a mystery even to some Italians at the wedding. There were a few "cakes" of this fried, salted and pressed pork fat on the antipasto table waiting to be broken off and munched as a snack. This is not for the faint of heart (or for the faint of artery). But I must say it was delicious. Crunchy and satisfying, it's Italy's answer to Southern pork cracklins and Mexican cicharrones. fact, these little crunchy chunks of pork are the key ingredient to cracklin' bread.

Thé à la Menthe Algerien

2007-06-20T09:52:00.000+02:00

About 15 years ago, I went to Paris for the first time and had a blast trying on vintage clothes at the "Marche aux puces de Montreuil" with my friends, Agnès and Laurence. We stopped at a catering truck parked nearby comically called, "Le Roi de Frites" (French-Fry King) run by a guy who also served the greatest North African Mint Tea I'd ever had up until last week. I loved it so much that when I got back home to Chicago I immediately grabbed some fresh mint from the garden and steeped it in just-boiled water for 10 minutes. The result was nowhere near. I tried with Celestial Seasonings' peppermint tea, which was certainly better but still not the real deal. I had no idea how to make mint tea taste like the stuff I had in Paris.

Then last weekend, we were invited to our friends', Sana and Maher's for a Lebanese/Algerian Sunday lunch. After the baba ghanoush, the hummous, the tabbouleh, the rice pilaf with sausage, chicken, pine nuts and raisins and the amazing super hot roasted green pepper dish whose name I don't remember, our hosts made us thé à la menthe, Algerian style topped off with toasted pine nuts.It was such a wonderful way to end a big meal. We sipped our the a la menthe and smoked a narghilé with rose-scented tobacco and spent a couple more hours relaxing and talking. What a way to undo the stresses of the week! Here are us two innocent Alices sipping our tea and flanking a couple of hookah smokin' caterpillars. I must say smoking scented tobacco from a narghile is far more pleasant that smoking a cigarette. The smoke, having filtered through a pool of water goes down cool and when you exhale, leaves a perfumed flavor/scent that's just so pleasurable I'm glad I don't have one of these in my home or I might never leave it.

Anyway, the important thing here is I got the recipe! I now make iced tea out of this thé à la menthe, which is even more refreshing. Here's the recipe:

2 cups water
2 scant teaspoons loose green tea (I use Chinese Gunpowder tea)
4 tablespoons of whole mint leaves
sugar to taste

Bring the water to a boil then reduce heat to the lowest setting and add the green tea leaves. Let simmer, not boil for 10 minutes. Strain and pour the clear tea back in to the pot. Add the mint and simmer for another 2 minutes. Add sugar and stir. Pour into a teapot and serve immediately, piping hot with or without pine nuts or chill and serve as iced tea. Music to chill out and sip thé à la menthe by: "Le Roi Soleil" by Kahimi Karie off Chicago indie label, Minty Fresh Records. So cool...

Asparago di mare A.K.A. Samphire

2007-06-18T22:44:00.001+02:00

Mmmm... seaweed! here's a vegetable I would have run away from as a child if it had ever occurred to my mother to serve it. Having tried it as an adult, I can say that it's delicious. The English call it "samphire" and it grows in a few coastal areas including Norfolk, where I had it for the first time about a decade ago. Its also rather common here in Italy where it's called Asparago di mare (Asparagus of the sea). This is probably more for the looks of the vegetables than for the flavor. Samphire tastes of the sea, its stalks seem to be pumped full with sea water. This veg obviously goes great with fish and is for sale, in fact at fishmongers and never in the vegetable aisle.

To prepare, just drop into some unsalted boiling water until tender, about 4-5 minutes, then if you're a typical Italian, you'll drizzle on some really good olive oil. If you're a traditional Brit, you'll melt a pad of butter on top. Either way, it's a simple and delicious dish.

To eat: Samphire can be a lot of informal fun. It comes in clusters that resemble long, thin green hands (creepy, no? Just the thing for kids who hate vegetables. I can hear Calvin's mother now: "O.K. Calvin, it's time for fillet of sole with mermaid fingers!") If the samphire is on the large side, there is a filament at the "wrist" that you should hold on to as you put the samphire in your mouth and scrape with your teeth as if this were an artichoke leaf. If the samphire is small, you just eat everything.

Pasta alla Norma

2007-06-13T15:27:00.000+02:00

So who's Norma? Jamie Oliver has no idea but thinks she must have been, "a good old girl". Epicurious, however alleges that this classic Sicilian dish was not invented by an Italian lady named Norma but created for the 1831 debut of the opera "Norma" by Vincenzo Bellini. Despite the fact that "Norma" debuted in Milan at La Scala, I'm going to stick with the Epicurious story because, after all Bellini was from Catania, Sicily. You could imagine the home-town folks celebrating the success of one of their own. no?

This dish goes best with the round, firm-fleshed light purple Sicilian eggplants that are starting to pop up in the open-air markets around Milan.
Dinner for a hungry 2 or primo piatto for 4:

1 medium-sized Sicilian eggplant (about 1 lb)
1 tbsp salt
5 tbsps olive oil, total
2 med. garlic cloves chopped fine
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp oregan dried, of course
1 lb fresh or canned roma tomatoes, diced
1/2 pound (250 grams) spaghetti
5-7 medium fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup crumbled ricotta salata (a dry, pressed version of fresh ricotta, similar to feta (but drier) in texture.

First cut the eggplant into a 1/2 inch dice and place in a collander, sprinkled with salt. Let stand for 1 hour. Meanwhile, prep all the other ingredients.

Place 2 tbsps oil in a large frying pan. Sautee the garlic for less than a minute until it turns blonde, no darker. Add tomatoes, oregano and red pepper flakes and simmer until the tomatoes break down into a chunky sauce, about 15 minutes. At this point take them off the heat.

Put the remaining 3 tbsps of oil in another frying pan and add the drained and towel-dried eggplant pieces. Fry them on all sides, about 7-8 minutes. Music to fry Sicilian eggplant by: "Infranta, sì, se alcun di voi snudaria" from "Norma" sung by none other than THE Maria Callas. Transfer eggplant to the tomato sauce, and don't forget to hit those high notes.

Boil the spaghetti according to package directions and add it to the sauce once it's al dente. Flip the pan a few times to distribute the sauce onto all the spaghetti, sprinkle on the basil and ricotta salata and serve piping hot. Enjoy!

Lemon-Basil Flan

2007-06-11T15:39:00.000+02:00

Marta of An Italian in the US has started a Fresh Produce of the Month event and this June, it's lemons. I was inspired to make a dessert with a simple syrup (sugar and water) scented with lemon zest and basil after spending a recent weekend in a small hotel with an accomplished chef in residence. His desserts were always complex and architectural with unusual ingredients. Lemon-basil syrup was one of these. In this flan recipe, I substitute the deep, rich flavor of burned sugar caramel with the bright flavors and colors of lemon and basil. Serves 12.

Ingredients for the custard:

1 cup sugar
4 cups milk
2 whole eggs plus 4 yolks
zest of 1 lemon
4 large basil leaves

Preheat oven to 400F. Place milk, sugar, lemon zest and basil leaves in a medium saucepan and bring to a light simmer. Simmer for 7-8 minutes, being careful not to let the milk boil fully. Take off heat and reserve.

Ingredients for syrup:

2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
3 large basil leaves
zest of 1/2 lemon

In a small saucepan, place the sugar, water, lemon zest and basil leaves. Bring to a boil and cook until all the sugar is dissolved and the boiling bubbles remain intact for a couple seconds before bursting. Music to simmer lemon-basil syrup by: The Lemonheads' 1992 hit single, "It's a Shame about Ray". This means the syrup is thick. Do not let the syrup brown at all. Take pan off heat, remove lemon zest and basil leaves and pour into the bottom of individual ramekins.

Preparing the flan:

Whisk the eggs and yolks together and slowly add the milk mixture, whisking constantly. Pour this mixture through a mesh strainer into each ramekin. Place ramekins in a large baking dish and fill the dish with warm water to 2/3 up the sides of the ramekins. Place into the middle rack of the oven and bake for 35-45 minutes until the custard is firm to the touch and slightly browned.

Chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before serving. To serve: run a knife along the edges of the ramekins, invert onto plates, shake a bit to unmold. The thick syrup will have turned thin in the oven and will make a pool surrounding the flan, like a fortress with a moat.

Weeds, Glorious Weeds

2007-06-08T16:48:00.000+02:00

In the late spring and early summer the most glorious "weeds" sprout up in the most abandoned of places here in italy. Fallow fields and stretches of land along railroad tracks fill with red-orange poppies. This photo was taken in the rut along the tracks of the Greco Pirelli train station in Milan. To me, it's like magic but they seem to go unnoticed, maybe becuase they're weeds.

On the way to work ,I ride my bike past the Martesana canal which is a bit greener than most of Milan. Among the wild plants and trees lining the canal is this fig, full of fist-sized fruit not ripe yet but in August, watch out!

Mrs. Field's Chocolate Chip Cookies

2007-06-06T15:35:00.001+02:00

Did you ever hear the Urban Myth surrounding the Mrs. Field's Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe? The one where your friend tells you about his/her friend who is buying a dozen Mrs. Field's cookies and sees that they're selling the recipe as well? And then the friend-of-a-friend asks the clerk what the recipe costs and hears, "two-fifty" and says, "helluva deal! I'll take the recipe too and put the total on my VISA card."? And then when the friend-of-a-friend gets home and looks at the receipt (s)he sees that the "two-fifty" is actually $250.00 and not $2.50, tries to take it back to the store but of course they don't accept it since (s)he could have easily photocopied it so (s)he gets so mad (s)he gives the recipe away to as many people as possible in hopes of putting Mrs Field out of business? Have you heard that one?

Well, this is that recipe. My friend, Angela actually conned me into believing this story happened to her cousin (funny, she didn't mention which cousin...). I was shocked when I began hearing the same story from other people, but in the end, who cares? This is my #1 favorite chocolate-chip cookie recipe, it's crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside and it didn't cost me a dime.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter
1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 regular sized semi-sweet chocolate bar
12 ozs. chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts (I've actually never added these)

The day before you want to bake the cookies, make the dough. It benefits from a good night of chilling tightly covered in the fridge. Cream the butter and the sugars together in a large mixing bowl, then add the eggs one at a time mixing the first in thoroughly before adding in the next. Add the vanilla and mix. Set aside.

Whisk the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder together in a medium sized bowl. In a food processor place the oats and chocolate bar and process into a powder. Add to the flour mixture.

Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, scoop golf ball-sized portions of dough onto parchment lined cookie sheets and bake for 10-13 minutes, no more. slide parchment with cookies off the hot cookie sheets, wait a minute and remove to cooling racks. Makes 50 cookies. Music to chomp on cookies and get in touch with your inner child with: "Chocolate Chip Chamber Music" by Helen Richman. What are the odds she ISN'T related to musical man-child, Jonathan Richman? See him here singing "I'm a little Dinosaur"

Raclette al Fresco

2007-06-03T10:45:00.000+02:00

We came to this little hamlet in the mountains of Switzerland to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday. Last Sunday, a bunch of her friends arrived to surprise her (she thought it'd be an intimate affair) and to eat a delicious, local raclette. What's a raclette, you ask? Cheese melted over an open fire covering tiny new potatoes (in the above photo, ready after their preliminary boil) accompanied by assorted cold cuts: pancetta, viande sechee, and jambon fumee and mini cornichon pickles. Not what you'd call a light lunch, but hey, it's Switzerland, and there were mountains to climb so we needed our strength.
The raclette cheese (yes, the finished dish as well as the cheese itself, are both called "raclette") is melts in front of the fire, each half on a piece of slate (this area is a source of slate for rooftops all over Switzerland) with the front part propped on a block of wood, so only the cut part melts and not the whole bottom. While this is happening, the guests enjoy some cornichon pickles, viande sechee and white wine.
Then the magic begins. Our hosts, the Berger family who run the Auberge de Pont-de-Nant, pass around a large bowl of steaming, whole new potatoes and we each take a few as a base for our cheese. The hosts scrape the melted layer off of one cheese half and serve the birthday girl first. Then they proceed with the other half and serve us all in turn. We get a small boel of cheese-topped potatoes, sprinkle on some coarsely-ground black pepper and dig in while it's still hot. The nice thing about this lunch was that the large number of people meant that each of us had time to sit, relax and digest a bit before getting another helping of such substantial stuff. In a party of two (the only other time I've eaten raclette), this meal can be a killer, too much too fast.
If anybody had gotten away without stuffing themselves with the raclette, they were caught by dessert. What could be better than having a cousin-in-law who's a chef in a luxury Geneva hotel? What, indeed? Jerome provided us with this Swiss chocolate bomb of a cake to finish things off.
What to do after such a formidable meal? Sit for an hour and sip black coffee and then start on a mountain walk. Start slowly at first, then later you'll find you have a lot of strength and energy to walk for miles.

A Culinary Alpine Hike

2007-05-28T22:00:00.000+02:00

This past long weekend, we spent in Pont de Nant, Switzerland which is a lovely and rather remote spot in the Swiss Alps. The idea was to surprise my mother-in-law who was expecting a quiet weekend in the mountains. In the end there were about 25 of us all celebrating in the gorgeous, fresh mountain air. We went for a hike on Saturday that made me think of how well one would be able to survive if they had to live off the land here. First off, if you have temperate, rainy weather (it rained a lot this past weekend) you have big, big snails (that's escargot, folks!) left, right and center. Evidently, to make them edible, you must catch them and soak them in different changes of fresh water for at least a day to get all the sand out. Then they're great right out of the oven with garlic, parsley and butter.

Then with the gentiane flower (well, actually the root) you can make the famous Gentiane liquor. What you see here is a small gentiane flower, but the one you can make booze from is the "gentiana lutea" the large gentaine flower, another type from the species. I actually have no idea how one makes liquor out of it but it's available all over the Vaud region of Switzerland and probably elsewhere as well.

Finally in the late spring and throughout the summer there are berries everywhere. Here you see a wild strawberry flower that will become a strawberry within a month. After the strawberries, in July and August, there are wild raspberries to pick.

Not too shabby!

Balsamic - Wild Strawberry Preserves

2007-05-25T08:00:00.001+02:00

Balsamic vinegar is the best thing that's ever happened to strawberries. Now strawberry preserves have always left me a bit cold. Why spread that on your toast when you have fig jam, wild blackberry preserves and pear-coriander chutney, I ask? It didn't occur to me until very recently, that if balsamic vinegar can bring out the strawberriestness of fresh strawberries, then it can do the same for strawberry preserves. At the market last Saturday, I bought more tiny wild strawberries than we could finish and the rest were getting a bit soft so I went online trying to find a good balsamic-strawberry preserve recipe and found out that this is much more the kind of thing one spends $10 a jar on in a schmancy shop than it is a thing one makes from scratch. (Meaning I didn't find any recipes.) So I winged it. For those of you with more time and culinary talent than money, here's the recipe:

1 lb strawberries (wild, if you're really lucky)
1 lb sugar
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar (please! no aged-for-25-years stuff, save that for drizzling and use the cheap stuff for this, ok?)

In a large stock pot place 2-3 clean empty glass jars (recycled jars with screw-tops will do just fine), cover with water and put over high heat. It usually takes a long time to get a large volume of water to boil, so put the jars on the stove before you start the preserves. Place the strawberries, sugar and balsamic vinegar in a medium-sized sauce pan and bring to a boil. Cook until the boiling bubbles seem thick. This took me 15 minutes. (When the preserves are thick enough, the bubbles at the surface seem to take longer to pop). Test the doneness of the preserves by letting a drop of it fall onto a room-temperature saucer. Music to test wild-strawberry preserves by: "No Way to break My Heart" by the Wild Strawberries". The drop should remain like a high dome. If it spreads at all, the preserves are not done yet; continue cooking for another couple minutes and try again.

Once your preserves are thick enough and your jars and lids are at a rolling boil, you’re ready to jar the preserves. Utensils you will need: 1 long wooden spoon, 1 ladle, 1 plastic funnel cut in half so that the pouring space is narrower than the jar mouths but wide enough for the preserves to go through, 2 oven mitts and ideally 1 friend standing by, surgical technician-like, to make the process go more smoothly. Using the long, wooden spoon, fish out one of the jars and shake it upside down to remove excess water (the spoon should be inside the upside-down jar). Place the jar right-side-up next to the pot of preserves. Place the funnel over the jar, ladle in jam up to just millimeters from the very top, fish out a lid with the spoon and, using oven mitts, screw the lid on very tightly. Flip the sealed jar upside-down on the counter and proceed with the subsequent jars. Allow to cool completely. There are often some extra preserves that won’t fit into the jars and that can be ladled into a cup and eaten with toast the next morning.

Le Nespole - Would You Eat This?!

2007-05-23T08:24:00.000+02:00

In the spring, Milan's open-air markets fill up with two great types of fruit: strawberries and medlars. Ever heard of a medlar? I hadn't until about 2 years into this European living experience. I figured "nespole" in Italian and "nefles" in French didn't have an English translation like mango and papaya are always called "mango" and "papaya" in Europe and the Americas. I like them even though I have to avert my eyes while I'm eating them. Have any of you English-speakers ever heard of this fruit?

Then I remembered a jelly recipe in "Perfect Preserves" by british food writer, Nora Carey. To give you a sense of the medlar's popularity, she had to introduce the recipe by explaining to her English-speaking audience what a medlar was: "a somewhat forgotten, old-fashioned fruit" and how you're supposed to eat it: "The medlar is not considered mature until it is completely rotted which can occur on the tree...or the fruit can be picked earlier and then spread on a straw mat in a cool place." To the left, you see fresh, pretty medlars ready for buying, but nowhere near ready for eating. The looks of a ripe medlar (photo up at the top) are, I imagine enough to warrant their unpopularity but they really are good, sweet and tangy once they're full of ugly brown spots.

So my question is, would you eat this?

Homemade Soba Noodles With Sesame Dipping Sauce

2007-05-21T15:34:00.001+02:00

Japanese soba noodles are often (if not always, I'm not a Japanese food expert) served cold, so they're an excellent choice for Brown Bag Lunch #5. Delicious and wholesome, this is a dish that makes my restaurant-going co-workers green with envy.

Here in Italy, packaged soba noodles are hard to come by, so I decided to make some myself. The combination of all-purpose and buckwheat flours give the noodles a brown-grey cast, almost exactly like Italian Pizzocheri. In fact when Italians ask me about soba, I tell them it's Japanese pizzocheri, and they get it, sort of.

I followed an online recipe that seemed to be genuine and traditional. It called for all-purpose, buckwheat and high-gluten flours plus salt and water. That was it. It produced a very dry dough that I thought would work well. As I rolled it through the pasta machine, it seemed too easily breakable, but I soldiered on. The first soba noodle brown bag lunch was tasty, but by the time the noodles were rolled out and boiled, they had almost all broken into 1-inch pieces. This was worrying to me since I'd read online somewhere that the longer the soba, the longer your life! So, I modified the recipe by adding an egg to the dough to bind the noodles and keep them in long pieces. The egg did the trick and, traditional or not, I'll be using it here on in.

Here's my recipe whech serves two:

1 1/4 cups buckwheat flour
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup high gluten flour (bread flour)
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 egg, beaten
up to 7 tablespoons of cold water
extra all-purpose flour for dusting

Combine flours and salt in the bowl of a food processor pulse to combine. Add the egg and 2 tbsps of water and mix until they are incorporated. Open the food processor, grab some dough and squeeze it between your fingers. If it falls apart in crumbles, add more water one tablespoon at a time. When you have a cohesive dough, let it rest in the processor for 30 minutes.

Take the dough out of the processor and onto a floured wooden board. Cut the dough into 6 pieces and process them through a pasta machine until the 5th setting flouring after each roll-through (for me the 5th is the second to thinnest setting) Flour the lengths of pasta again and process them through the thin spaghetti cutter. Music to cut soba by: "Soba Violence" by the Beastie Boys from the release "Anthology".

Boil for 45 seconds to a minute in abundant salted water. When cooked, run under cold water to chill.

Serve with Sesame dipping sauce:

4 tbsps sushi seasoning (or a combo of rice wine vinegar, sugar and salt)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp toasted sesame seed oil
1/2 cup minced cucumber
2 tbsps minced chives or green onion
1 tbsp minced ginger
1 tbsp sesame seeds

Whisk the first 3 ingredients together and pour onto the cold soba noodles. Sprinkle the opther ingredients on top. Pack into your Beastie Boys lunchbox and enjoy!

Martha Stewart Pound Cake With Orange-Blossom Syrup

2007-05-18T15:38:00.000+02:00

Indian, Middle Eastern and Greek desserts have captured my attention for years now. They're the pinnacle of sweet decadence often deep friend and then soaked in a sugar syrup. It's hard to eat a lot because of the intensity of sweet. Our Halal butchers offer a variety of Middle Eastern sweets that knock your socks off (and your blood-sugar levels up) like Baklava, Bellah Essham (churros-like dough fingers deep fried and soaked in syrup) and Basboosa, a coconut cake, which once baked is also soaked in syrup. Clearly in the Middle East dessert is all about the syrup.

I made a loose version of the Basboosa minus the coconut that features orange-blossom essence in the syrup that permeates the cake. I use a modified version of Martha Stewart's pound cake recipe adding a syrup of sugar, water and orange-blossom essence while the cake is still hot out of the oven.

Here's a half recipe of the pound cake:

2 cups sifted flour (Martha suggests cake flour but I used all-purpose to a good result)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsps baking powder
1-1/2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar (the original recipe calls for more than twice that but we'll be putting enough in the syrup)
8 eggs at room temp.
1/2 cup milk at room temp.
2 tsps orange-blossom essence (Martha called for 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1/2 tsp grated lemon zest, but we know better)

Here's the recipe for Orange-Blossom Syrup:

1-1/2 cups water
1-1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup orange-blossom essence

For the Cake:

Preheat oven to 325F. Butter and flour a round 9 x 3 inch cake pan. Whisk the flour, salt and baking powder in a medium-sized bowl and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, mix the butter and sugar together until fluffy (this takes a lot of elbow grease and some time or you can just use a mixer if you have one, I don't). Add one egg to the sugar-butter and beat until fully incorporated. Add each other egg one at a time beating to fully incorporate before adding the next. Once the last egg is incorporated, add the milk and orange blossom essence and stir until they are well mixed in. Add the flour mixture into the wet ingredients 1/3 at a time. Bake for 1 hour or until the cake is a deep golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. With the same toothpick poke deep holes all over the cake at 1 centimeter intervals. This will help the syrup to be absorbed.

For the syrup:

Pour the sugar and water into a saucepan and bring to a boil, cooking until all the sugar is dissolved. Take off heat and add the orange-blossom essence. Pour slowly onto the cake, making sure to saturate every part of it. Hopefully you will be able to use the high rim of the cake pan to catch extra syrup so that it doesn't spill over. Let cake rest until completely cooled (a few hours at least) before serving. Music to let cake rest by: "Stickshifts and Safetybelts" by CAKE (you just gottsta LOVE this song!) This is very sweet (but not as sweet as the halal butchers' Basboosa!) so it goes very well with an unsweetened cup of black coffee or a shot of espresso.

Now, my cake is tasty, but to see orange blossom cake at its beautiful best, go to Passionfruit and Mangoes!

Middle Eastern Rice Pudding With Essence of Orange Blossom

2007-05-16T15:24:00.000+02:00

This rather easy dessert, with the milk and orange-blossom is the essence of cool. You'll actually feel a degree or two cooler once you've tasted it. On a quest for a standard rice pudding recipe, I found this one and made it a bit less super-sweet, added some salt for complexity and took out the cinnamon so that all you taste is orange blossom.

Here's my version:

1 cup of raw arborio rice
2 cups water
3 cups whole milk
1/2 to 3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon orange-blossom water
1/2 tsp salt

Heat the rice and water in a very large pan to the boiling point then lower the heat and simmer covered until the rice is done and the water is completely absorbed, aprox. 15 minutes. Add the milk and stir to incorporate paying particular attention to scraping all the rice from the bottom of the pan. Bring to a simmer and cook stirring periodically until the mixture becomes thick and creamy. Add the sugar and orange-blossom water. The consistency will become more liquidy as a result, so continue cooking and stirring for another 5-10 minutes until it is thick and creamy once more. Refrigerate for a few hours and serve chilled. Music to chill out with Orange-Blossom Rice Pudding: "Rice Pudding" by Jeff Beck.

The Glory of Orange-Blossom Water

2007-05-14T15:13:00.001+02:00

I was doing a sort of kitchen inventory the other day and realized that my almost full bottle of Lebanese orange-blossom water expires in 2 weeks. My main use for this up to now has been to add it to plain yogurt, along with some sugar making a delicious and fresh-tasting snack. Evidently, I haven't been keeping up on the plain yogurt consumption, so with an orange-blossom emergency on my hands, I went to work.

I googled "orange-blossom water" and came up with a goldmine! A thread on the Chowhound forum all about different uses for orange-blossom water from orange blossom cocktails to fresh, savory salads to dozens of sweet, fresh desserts. For me, though the most appealing ideas were the simplest: orange-blossom iced tea, orange blossom rice pudding and Martha Stewart's pound cake with orange blossom syrup. This stuff is so good, I've already bought a new bottle to replace my quickly dwindling supply.

Here's my simple recipe for orange-blossom iced tea:

4 cups water
4 tsps loose assam tea
8 tsps sugar
2 tsps orange-blossom water

Fill a 1-quart (1 liter) container with tepid water and stir in the tea leaves. Allow them to steep for several hours or overnight. Strain and pour in to 2 - 1/2 liter (16 oz.) water bottles, add sugar and orange-blossom water and shake. Music to shake orange-blossom iced tea by: "Orange" by The Dandy Warhols. Serve well chilled. The effect of the orange-blossom water is to make the iced tea seem even more cooling, so it's perfect for hot days.

Tune in next for a great Middle Eastern orange-blossom rice pudding dessert and Martha Stewart's pound cake with orange-blossom syrup.

Lavender Sea Salt Scrub

2007-05-09T14:30:00.000+02:00

Disclaimer: This is NOT an advertisement for EO brands (I'm just recycling the jar), in fact it's the opposite. Here's a recipe to make your own lavender-scented olive oil sea salt body scrub for next to nothing. An Italian friend of mine told me about this skin smoothing secret. In a moment of student poverty, she made this scrub as a Christmas present for all her friends and family. She bought 1 bottle of essential oil of lavender (this'll run you from 15 to 20 euros but a little goes a long way), a bottle of olive oil (couple euros) and a couple kilos of non-iodized salt (cheaper than dirt). The beauty part is that for very little money, you can give presents that seem chic and sheeshy!

Ingredients:

2 cups non-iodized salt*
3 tbsps olive oil**
15 drops of essential oil of lavender (or be creative and use essential oil of anything else, rose geranium is a favorite of mine)

Pour the salt into a sturdy, sealable container (plastic or glass jars are perfect). Make a well in the center, pour in the olive oil and drop in the essential oil of lavender. Mix first with a spoon then by closing the containet and shaking like mad. Music to shake Lavender Sea Salt Scrub with: OutKast's "Hey Ya" (shake it like a Polaroid Picture!) Get in the shower or tub, get wet (if you really want a really, really effective skin-sloughing effect, soak in the tub for 15 minutes then start scrubbing) Grab hanfulls from the jar and scrub all over with this mixture (singin' OutKast all the way through) and then use soap and water to wash away the oil. You will feel like a pink and shiny new person.

*Here in Italy, the cheapest stuff is sea salt but non-iodized Morton's or, better yet, the generic brand will scrub just as well.

** I used extra virgin and its rich yellow-green color left an ugly, yellowy tinge in my scrub, so I'd suggest to save the evoo for your baby field green salads and use lesser grade which will be clearer.

Buen Cinco de Mayo!

2007-05-06T18:28:00.000+02:00

Ok, ok, so I've been a bad blogger. I'm posting my Cinco de Mayo recipe one day late. Sorry. I'm finding my work-blog balance a little tough these days. I've also been experimenting with new recipes and learning that I have to tweak things a bit in order to come up with some blogworthy recipes for you all. The upside is that you'll be finding out about at least 3 new recipes using orange-blossom water.

But on to great, quick and easy Mexican food. Yesterday Gabriel and I celebrated Cinco de Mayo with these tacos al pastor and tacos de chorizo mexicano. Living in Italy means having to run your own personal import-export business if you want to eat good Mexican food. This past Christmas, I brought back Mexican chorizo, fresh corn tortillas (which have both been waiting in my freezer), a can of chipotle chiles in adobo, and dried corn husks (for the tamales I failed to make over the winter).

Yesterday, I made pork carnitas, crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside pieces of pork that are the basis of great tacos al pastor. I browned some chorizo and made a quick chipotle-tomato salsa to flavor everything. Granted, if the tortillas had come directly from one of the 3 tortilla factories around Chicago yesterday, and not 5 months ago, it all would have been even better, but the rarity of this meal on this continent made up for everything.

Recipe for pork carnitas:

1 kg (2.2 pounds) of bone-in pork shoulder
2 tbsps salt
the juice of 1 lemon

Cut the pork into 1-inch cubes. Place them in one layer into a large sautee pan. Use 2 pans if necessary. Cover the pork pieces completely with water and put over a high flame. Add the salt and the lemon juice. Bring to a boil and skim the foam off the surface of the water until it subsides (about the first 5 minutes of boiling). Keep boiling until all the water has evaporated. At this point, all the rendered fat from the meat will become the frying fat to make the carnitas crunchy and brown with no extra fat added (hey, it's almost diet food! - almost). Brown the cubes on all sides and transfer them to a paper towel-lined plate. These crunchy, brown bits of meat are so good, you could eat them all before you get the chance to assemble the tacos. But if you have patience, a little salsa and some queso anejo, you can make a great informal dinner.

One side benefit to carnitas is all the rich, brown fond that's left in the pan when you're finished. You can take 1 cup of medium-grain rice, toast it in the remaining fat in the pan, add 2 cups of water, cover and in 20 minutes, you have the most flavorful rice you've ever tasted. Try it!

Trout in the Bag (Literally!)

2007-04-30T14:45:00.001+02:00

Trota al Cartoccio con Risotto di Asparagi a.k.a. Trout Baked in Parchment with Asparagus Risotto.

Here's an answer to the spring cooking challenge set by Julie, Cherry and Scott named "In the Bag: Cooking in the Month of May", which requires the use of the springtime ingredients trout, asparagus and spring onions. With ingredients like that, what's not to love?

Trout packet ingredients:
2 trout
2 square pieces of parchment paper
salt
6 thin slices of fresh lemon
a few sprigs of chive
4 tbsps white wine
I started by pre-heating the oven to 400F and then prepared the trout. This was dinner for two so I just made two parchment packets. I placed each trout on the top end of a square of parchment paper, salted and peppered the fish inside the cavity and all around the skin. I prepared three very thin lemon slices and set them overlapping on the fish, then sprinkled a little minced chive on top. Music to season trout by: "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by XTC on the album "Oranges and Lemons". Then I folded the lower half of the parchment paper to cover the fish and began to seal the packet by making folds all along the rim. I started at the fish's tail where the parchment was folded over itself and created a tiny triangle-shaped fold. I moved up about 1/2 inch and made another triangle fold on top of the point of the first and continued that way until I had almost sealed the entire packet. Each successive fold anchors the previous one. When there was only a small opening left in the parchment packet, I poured in 2 tbsps of white wine to help steam the fish, and completed the folding process.

Asparagus Risotto:
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup minced green onion
1 cup arborio rice
1/2 cup white wine
3 cups chicken or fish stock
1 small pinch of saffron
1/2 lb asparagus, cleaned and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 tbsp butter
salt to taste

Once the trout packets are sealed, heat the stock on the stove to simmering and add the saffron. In a medium saucepan, heat the oil over medium and then add the green onion. Sautee for 1 minute (stir constantly; do not let burn!)and add the dry rice to the pan. Stir to coat each grain with oil and toast for about 2 minutes. At this point, put the trout into the oven to bake/steam for 20 minutes. Add the wine to the rice and let feverishly bubble until it's almost totally evaporated. Then add the saffron stock ladle by ladle stirring constantly and waiting until the stock has been largely absorbed before adding the next ladleful. This will take between 15-18 minutes. Once the last ladleful of stock has been added, stir until it has been absorbed, add butter and salt, mix and cover for 2 minutes. The final result should be creamy and liquidy enough not to stay in a mound when you shake the plate.

Take trout out of the oven, open one packet and check for doneness (20 minutes was perfect for my standard-sized trout). Let your guests open their trout packets and spoon in the risotto themselves.

Happy Liberation Day, Italy!

2007-04-25T19:24:00.000+02:00

April 25, 1945 was the day all of Italy was officially delivered from World War II and the clutches of Fascism. It's a national holiday in Italy, one that is celebrated in two ways. One, by official ceremonies honoring the wonderful old folks who fought Mussolini's rule as Partisans and the American and British forces who came to sweep the last enclaves of Nazi power away. Two, by street demonstrations decrying tyranny around the world today. Guess who they're mostly protesting against (Here's a hint, they rhyme with "Tush" and "Claire"). Needless to say, from many Italian perspectives, the U.S. and British governments had a much better reputation back then than they do now. Our soldiers in WWII were given a job to do that won them genuine and undying respect in Italy that you still feel today despite the fact that most Italians would like to sing to Tush and Claire "Bella Ciao".

Tuscany, When the Rosemary's in Flower

2007-04-23T16:20:00.000+02:00

Back to our drive through Tuscany. One of the loveliest things we saw that weekend was enormous rosemary bushes (3 -4 feet high) covered in tiny purple flowers. What I would have given for a leg of lamb to roast with all that rosemary abundance!

On our way through Chianti wine country, we ran into a big, scary pack of Vespa bikers. Doesn't this display just strike fear into your hearts? I'm imagining these guys parked all together in Sturgis, South Dakota just scaring the pants off of everybody else.

A tour of Tuscany is incomplete without an image of the gorgeous rolling hills where the grapes grow. Right now, the fields are laden with empty grape-vine trunks, no leaves or fruit to speak of yet. I'd love to be here in summer when this is all green and in fall when they harvest. Guess I'll just have to come back!

Bye Bye Miss American Muffins

2007-04-20T15:35:00.000+02:00

My boss at the Bicocca is going on maternity leave as of today so we're having a bon voyage pot luck for her. She's quite curious about American stuff so she asked me specifically to make "muffins, the real American kind" (as opposed to the muffin recipes that are popping up all over in Italian cookbooks these days - really, it's true!) I think she figured there was some sort of Real American secret recipe and as I'm a Real American, I'd be a muffin expert. I've made muffins about 3 times in my life but hell, I can follow a recipe as well as the next person. So I sent her a short list of muffin possibilities (Date Nut, Blueberry, Lemon Poppyseed, etc) and she chose the Chocolate-Chocolate Chip by Nigella Lawson. Isn't Nigella English, though? If so, I won't tell my boss.

Here's the recipe I nicked off of The Food Network Website:

Makes 12 standard-sized muffins Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tbsps cocoa powder
3/4 cup sugar
3/3 cup chocolate chips, 1/4 cup for sprinkling
1 cup milk
1/3 cup plus 2 tsps vegetable oil
1 egg
1 tsp valilla extract

**It looked like too much baking soda and powder for so little flour, and I have no baking powder at the moment, so here's what I did differently: I used 2 tsps baking soda and 1/2 tsp salt (for taste only) Since baking soda needs acid to work well, I replaced the 1 cup milk with 1/4 cup of plain yogurt and 3/4 cups of milk.

Pre heat oven to 400F
Combine the dry ingredients (the first 6 minus 1/4 cup chocolate chips) in a large mixing bowl. Mix the wet ingredients (the last 4) until smooth. Add the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Mix until the dry and wet are just barely combined. Overmixing can leat to less fluffy, denser muffins. Music to barely mix American muffin batter by: "American Pie" by Don McLean. Pour into muffin tins (either lined with muffin cups or VERY well greased. Sprinkle on remaining chips and bake for 20 minutes. Halfway through baking turn the pan to ensure even cooking.

Serve these to non-Americans who will think they're the most exotic thing they've ever seen!

My Dinner With Paolo

2007-04-18T15:06:00.000+02:00

Dinner at Paolo's house is always a delicious, belt-loosening and often culturally enlightening affair. The food is great and can be enjoyed to the fullest when you've prepared yourself ahead of time by fasting for at least several hours before. Since Italy is so regional when it comes to cuisine, Paolo is almost as much of an immigrant to Milan as I am. Hailing for Naples, he keeps the Neapolitan delis here in Milan in business buying freshly flown-in mozzarella di buffala, wonderful, real "Italian sausage" like the one I know, babas, cassatas, and other assorted "imported" food. Paolo's also not much for light meals. See him at the upper left on his Flickr page. Hell, have a look at the cool black n' whites he's put out too. He shuns salads, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend who loves them and generally enjoys introducing his guests to the wonders of Neapolitan food. This gorgeous fresh mozarella sliced and eaten on its own (all the better to taste the real mozarella di buffala difference) was our antipasto.

This pasta was as delicious as it is enticing to look at. The sauce, rather than being a traditional Neapolitan dish I think was invented by Paolo. To reproduce it, fry some pancetta until crisp, don't toss out any of the rendred fat (it's delicious!), add a couple dollops of ricotta cheese, mix briefly, take off the heat and pour onto pasta al dente. Serve with a sprinkling of grated Parmesan. It's salty, creamy and crunchy all at the same time. Very satisfying. After a hunk of mozzarella and this none-too-light pasta dish I was very satisfied and quite happy there was no secondo (meat dish) between me and the dessert!

We finished off the meal with these Neapolitan "Ministeriale" bon bons from the famous Scaturchio pasticceria. They are dark chocolate with a rum cream on the inside. Really good. They were first made by Francesco Scaturchio as an attempt to seduce a noblewoman. She loved them and so did the rest of Naples. Go here for a short history of the Ministeriale bon bon and a bit of Italian language practice.

Tuscan Fiorentina

2007-04-16T15:36:00.000+02:00

We recently took a drive among the rolling hills of the Chianti region of Tuscany. It strikes me whenever I go to another region of Italy just how different the food offerings are from place to place. We traded in our glasses of Oltrepo Pavese for Chianti glasses and a new attitude on red meat. Here in Lombardy, it seems that meat is not the great specialty that it is in Tuscany. "Roast Beef" is sold in thin slices that you're supposed to pan fry and people generally seem suspicious of rare meat, preferring a rather pinkish-grey tone to their steaks. (Fish, however is sublime.) So it was with great relish that we headed to Tuscany, the capitol of the Fiorentina (it means "from Florence") steak, a.k.a. the T-Bone! Yum. Now that I live abroad, eating a good, rare steak transports me back to Sweet Home Chicago, "butcher to the world", so I felt at home in Tuscany. Here are Giuseppe and Paolo about to enjoy their rare, 2-3 inch-thick Fiorentina. They serve them so large that the menu suggests Fiorentina as a main dish for two.

In Tuscany, they prize (and advertize) the razza Chianina breed of steer as much as we do the Black Angus. These big, gorgeous white animals have been bred in Italy since ancient times, were used for sacrifice by the Etruscans and then by the Romans; they have been beasts of burden and food for millenia. A few years ago, the Fiorentina was banned since part of the bone could contain spinal cord fluid and thus endanger the eater with Mad Cow Disease. One butcher and self-named glutton, Dario Cecchini held a funeral for the bistecca alla fiorentina as a symbolic protest against the prohibition. Luckily, they have gone a long way to reducing the risk of the disease and the steaks are now back on the market and absolutely delicious!

New York Times No-Knead Sourdough

2007-04-11T23:36:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Andrew of Spittoon Extra for hosting "Waiter, There's Something in My...Bread" and spurring me on to finally work this recipe out. Any of you who follow the foodie world even a little will remember Jim Lahey's New York Times No-Knead Bread recipe that was published a couple months ago. It's the simplest thing in the world; the secret to great bread, it turns out is not work but time. It's one of those culinary miracles.

Thing is, it calls for store-bought dry yeast. For most of you out there, that's a boon, it means you don't have to go through the trouble of having a sourdough starter in order to make great bread. For me though, my bread starter and I go way back, I couldn't abandon it. So, I set out to apply some of the No-Knead Bread Recipe genius to the sourdough process I learned from Nancy Silverton.

Here's what I found out:
1. You really DON'T have to knead your very wet and sticky dough! I was a skeptic but it's true.

2. No shaping the dough by stretching it into a tight ball since the sides of the Dutch oven hold its boule shape perfectly.

3. Baking your risen dough inside a Dutch oven within your regular oven is the #1 way to get a great crust without schpritzing the oven with water in the 1st 5 minutes of cooking.

4. No need to score the risen dough before baking; it opens itself up in the (double) oven.

5. The New York Times suggestion that the bread should rise at 70F for 12-18 hours is unworkable for my sourdough. I've spent lo these many months fighting the stickiness factor caused by the heat and have eaten way too many sad-looking New York Times No-Knead Flatbreads as a result. I'm with Nancy Silverton on this one: Rise, then refrigerate!

Here's my adaptation to the New York Times No-Knead Bread recipe for sourdough

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups sourdough starter
3 cups high-gluten flour
2 tablespoons salt

Mix ingredients together just until you have a smooth, lump-free dough. Place in a floured proofing basket. Place that into a puffed plastic bag. Close the bag making sure it's full of enough air that the rising dough won't stick to the plastic. Let rest at room temperature until doubled in bulk (about 5 hours) place in the fridge overnight (12 hours). Pre-heat oven WITH DUTCH OVEN INSIDE for at least 45 minutes at the highest heat possible (my oven does 500F). Music to bake sourdough by: While Light, White Heat by the hottest band nobody'd ever heard of while they were still together, The Velvet Underground!! Take Dutch oven out of the oven carefully, remove lid and place a piece of parchment paper at the bottom (best to have measured this first) Pour out the dough and quickly close the lid and return everything to the oven. Bake at highest temp for 30 minutes then remove lid. The bred should be puffed and cracked at the top. Reduce heat to 400F. Another 15-30 minutes more and the bread is ready to take out of the oven and place on a cooling rack.

On top of the above revelations, the crumb is extremely elastic and I get much bigger holes (see image) than I used to with the regular method.

Lamb and Vegetable Tagine With Dried Fig Couscous

2007-04-10T14:54:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Meeta of What's for Lunch Honey for thinking up this great Middle-Eastern cuisine round-up! The Arabian Nights theme is actually perfect for me since I live in the largest Arabic-speaking neighborhood in Milan. There's a mosque around the block and a Halal butcher on every corner, so the cuisine is very accessible. Our Moroccan grocers around the block are the only Halal butchers to carry Merguez sausage (my favorite!), cracked Moroccan green olives and preserved lemons, so I go to them a lot. The other day, for a 10-person dinner party I made a lamb and vegetable tagine perfumed with preserved lemons, cumin, cayenne and cinnamon.

1 cup dried chick peas (or other beans. I actually used unorthodox black beans here)
1 bay leaf
2 lbs lamb shoulder
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cups diced onion
4 garlic cloves, minced
at least 4 cups stock (chicken, beef or lamb all work well here)to cover all other ingredients
4 medium carrots, roughly chopped
2 medium potatoes, roughly chopped
1 cup cracked Moroccan green olives
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsps cumin
2 tsps cinnamon
1 medium preserved lemon, minced
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsps honey

The day before you make the tagine, soak the chick peas in water over night. The next day, boil them with a bay leaf for 2 hours or until tender. Meanwhile, in a Dutch oven, heat the oil over a high flame and sear the lamb pieces on all sides. Remove from the pot and add the onions. Reduce heat to medium and sautee until they are soft and brown, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, stir and immediately add the lamb pieces back into the pot. Add the 4 cups of stock or more to cover. Bring to a boil then lower heat to just a simmer (medium-low). Let simmer for 1 hour. Add the carrots and continue simmering for another 15 minutes. Add extra stock or water to keep everything covered. Add the drained chick peas, the olives, the potatoes, the honey and all the spices and cook another 15-20 minutes or until the potatoes are done. Turn off heat.

Dried Fig Couscous

1/2 cup dried figs, in a 1/4 inch dice
1/2 cup raisins
5 cups chicken, beef or lamb stock
4 cups fine-grain couscous
salt to taste

Heat the stock with the fruit in it to the boiling point, take off heat and pour over the couscous. Stir to make sure all the grains have been incorporated. Cover and let stand for 5 minutes.

To serve, spoon out a mound of couscous on each plate and ladle the lamb tagine on top. Music to eat couscous by: the Italian song "Notti Arabe" by Amir. Check out the lyrics all about the sensuality of love and Middle Eastern food! Enjoy!

Tsoureki (Greek Easter Braid)

2007-04-08T22:43:00.000+02:00

Happy Easter to all of you Western Christians and Kala Paska you all of the Orthodox persuasion. This year the Julian and the Gregorian calendars coincide so both Easters are on the same day. Here is a delicious Greek Easter bread that anyone would enjoy, similar to challah, braided, coiled around itself, bedecked with Greek red Easter eggs and perfumed with the Greek spices, mastiha (a resin from trees that grow only on the Island of Chios) and mahlebi (the tiny stones of Mahaleb cherries). The flavors of these exotic spices liken cinnamon, cloves and ginseng, and their scent is heavenly.

For one large loaf:

1/2 tbsp mahlebi (or mahlepi) stones
1 tsp crushed mastiha resin
1/4 cup water
5 cups all-purpose flour
1-1/2 packages yeast
1/2 cup warm milk
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter
3 raw eggs total
1/2 cup sugar
a little vegetable oil for greasing
3 hard-boiled dyed eggs for decoration

Begin by crushing the mahlebi and the mastiha to a powder. Mix the yeast with the milk and proof for about 1/2 hour. Add the water and 1/2 cup of the flour to make a sticky mass called a sponge. Cover, and let double in bulk, about 2 hours.

Punch down and add the sugar, then two whole eggs, one at a time, being careful to fully incorporate each before adding the next, then add the white of the 3rd egg and mix. Reserve the yolk for the egg wash. Now, slowly add the 4 1/2 cups of flour, the mastiha, the mahlebi and the salt, mixing well to incorporate. Turn out onto a bread board and knead until you have a smooth, uniform texture. Grease the bowl then return the dough to it, cover and let double in bulk, again about 2 more hours.

Once the dough has risen, punch down and form into three even pieces. Roll each piece out on the board to long, even ropes (the length depends on you, I rolled really long, thin ropes so that I could coil the braid around itself into a pretty circle.) Pinch the ropes together and begin to braid, rather loosely, as this will puff and you'll need room to fit the eggs in. Music to braid your Tsoureki by: "Do You Love Coffee?" by Braid.
Place the braid on a baking sheet ideally on a piece of parchment paper and let rise again. Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Once the braid is risen, fit an odd number of dyed-red eggs into the braid, brush with the egg yolk and bake for 30 minutes. If, after 15 minutes, the bread looks a bit too dark, lower the temperature to 300F and bake for another 30 minutes for 45 minutes total. Remove from the oven when you've achieved a rich brown color and the loaf sounds hollow when you tap it. Enjoy with your Easter meal.

**Thanks very much to Julia of A Slice of Cherry Pie for hosting the Easter Cake Bake!

The Seven Songs I Would Pick If I Could Only Listen To Seven Songs For The Rest Of My Life, Which, Yeah, Like Someone Is Going To Impose That...

2007-04-05T14:41:00.000+02:00

...Condition On Me, And Assuming I Can Even Come Up With Seven.

I'm loving the title of this meme Loulou of Chez Loulou tagged me for. This is right up my alley, it's pretty limited, no top 100 or nor is it Your One And Only Favoritest Song Of All Time; it's doable!

Here's my committed-forever-song list: (click on the links and hear these beauties for yourselves!)

This is in no way ordered by favoriteness, just so you know.

1.) "Train in Vain" by The Clash. I got myself a fake ID just so I could attend "alternative night" at The Jungle in college and dance to this song. Sing along with this fun video

2.)"Here Comes Your Man" by The Pixies. Well, unsurpassable as they were, we knew they were on heroin, but this video proves it. And if you can crane you head away from the visuals enough to listen to this, don'cha just dig it when the bass is the principal instrument in a rock band. "Funky" just doesn't even cover it.

3.) "American Pie" by Don McLean. I never identified with a TV commercial more than when I saw some guy (selling who-knows-what) sitting parked in his garage, unable to get out of the car and into his house until "American Pie" finished.

4.) "Fuck and Run" by Liz Phair. Any of you ever regret a one-night-stand? No? Me neither! Listen to this and imagine what that must be like.

5.) This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) by Talking Heads. I realize this is about somebody who's feebly putting a thin domestic blanket of calm over some serious problems, but still, it relaxes me.

6.) "Dreaming" by Blondie. "When! I met 'choo in a restaurant! you! could tell I was no debutante!". Says it all, doesn't it?

7.) "Love is Here Where I Live" by Everything But The Girl. Whether it's this soft and sweet (if cheesy) 1980s stuff or their more trip-hoppy current incarnation, I just love EBTG.

Barba di Frate (Monk's beard)

2007-04-02T12:47:00.000+02:00

Here you have the "contorno" (side dish) from last night's dinner, some boiled potatoes and this delicious vegetable, barba di frate, a.k.a barba dei frati, agretti or monk's beard. It's a dense, heavy vegetable as muddy as spinach, so clean it well, and it's a bit of a pain to separate the edible green "leaves" from the hard, pink stem and root, but it needs only about 3-5 minutes in boiling water to turn out tasty and fresh. The "leaves" are naturally a bit salty in the way swiss chard is. Dressed simply with some lemon and a bit of the best olive oil you can buy, they're one of the most delicious springtime vegetable experiences. They're an excellent compliment to the trout "al cartoccio" (baked in parchment paper) that we had for dinner last night.

Barba di Frate was an Italian culinary revelation for me as I'd never seen it in the States but it seems that if you are willing to grow it, you can get the seeds here. To be honest, if I couldn't get this veg at the market, it would be one of those I'd take the time and effort to grow. It's really that good!

Nancy Silverton's Maximum Fuss, Pain-in-the-Ass Challah

2007-03-30T18:04:00.000+02:00

Some of you may remember me describing my foodie extremist forays into making my own sourdough bread starter. That adventure was spurred on by my reading "Breads from the La Brea Bakery" by Nancy Silverton. When I first picked the book up, I thought, "Jeez! This lady is a nut! Who would go through all this?!" And the answer is: Me.

It's been years since I've baked anything new out of this book, I've longingly eyed the gorgeous photos of homemade, sourdough bagels, soft-dough pretzels, caramelized onion-kalamata focaccia and challah bread. Well, I finally accomplished the challah the other day. I have to say that these loaves were excellent, rich, eggy, baked to a deep crunchy brown crust. They are the pinnacle of challah. OK? So I give Nancy Silverton her due. Now, on to the kvetching:

1. This is a 2-day recipe. Not that I'm not used to that with the sourdough, but still...after the first night of rising, you knead eggs and more flour into the sponge and then wait another 5-6 hours for another rising. It should be called "Midnight The Next Day Challah". To the right, you see the bread making a run for it only after 3 hours of second-day rising. Imagine what it would have done if I'd waited the whole 5-6 hours!

2. The first day's work includes making your own applesauce by boiling an apple to the mush stage to mix into the dough sponge. Why? The result didn't taste like apples, couldn't store-bought have sufficed? Not that I would know since they don't have applesauce in Italy so I plodded my way through making applesauce. Grrr!

3. 3 types of flour are called for: high gluten (check), semolina (check) and durum flour (che-- wait a minute, isn't that the same thing as semolina?) I just added more high gluten 'cause in my experience, semolina flour loaves are toothsome and rather hard.

4. The braiding is done among 6 ropes of dough. It was so wierdly complicated, I could never get the sequence right. But anyway, it still turned out pretty even if I felt like a moron trying (and failing) to braid the things.

But, like I said before, this DID turn out really well (I gave the second loaf to a nice widowed neighbor downstairs) and it's so far the greatest vehicle for peanut butter and jelly I have ever tasted. So, if you start making this challah now, you'll be just ready for Shabbat!

Basque Red-Bean, Chorizo and Borage Stew

2007-03-28T19:11:00.000+02:00

The other day at the open-air market I saw a vegetable monger from another time. Unlike all the other sellers who buy fruits and vegetables from a central wholesale market, this rugged old guy looked like he had actually cultivated the produce himself. He was only selling "borrage" (different from the standard Italian word for the vegetable, "Borragine") "cima" (literally, "tops" as in turnip tops) and "coste" (chard). His rough hands with short, thick fingers had no problem bunching up the kilo of prickly, spiny borage I asked for. I was impressed.

I brought home my loot, excited to try a new vegetable and proceeded to comb epicurious.com and FoodTV to find a way to eat borage. The few recipies I found included borage as one of many raw ingredients in salad. You can also evidently candy the stunningly deep blue leaves to use as a cake decoration. It's true that the gorgeous cucumbery fragrance they have does make you think raw; I was immediately transported back to my last sushi esperience with the cucumber scent. But, if you could feel these leaves (ouch!) the last thing you'd want to do would be to stick them in your mouth raw! Evidently in the Anglophone online world, only the newest leaves relatively free of painful spikes are used.

So then I went Italian and googled "borragine" but no dice. So, I thought, Spanish? I googled "borraja" and came up with a goldmine! Evidently, the Basques of Northern Spain are so enamored of this cooking green, they call it "la reina de las verduras", the queen of vegetables. Who knew.

This recipe for "alubias con borraja" (beans with borage) sounded like a sure-thing, (even though the ingredient amounts weren't clear). It's typical of Spanish stews in that the flavoring comes from chorizo. Most stews and vegetable dishes are flavored with a ham bone, cured jamon serrano (which puts Italian prosciutto to shame!) or one of many Spanish pork sausages like chorizo. Here's how I interpreted the recipe:

1-1/2 cups dried red beans
4 ozs Spanish** chorizo, diced
1 large onion, diced
1 pound well rinsed borage leaves & flower buds
1 tbsp olive oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp smokey-sweet Spanish paprika
salt to taste
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)

Soak the beans in water to cover by a couple inches overnight. The next day, drain the water and boil the beans, the chorizo and the onion (again, in water to cover by a couple inches) for about 2 hours or until tender. Add extra boiling water to keep the beans covered by an inch.
Once the beans are tender, boil a pot of water and add the borage. Boil for about 5 minutes or until the leaves are tender. Music to boil borraja by: "Spanish Bombs" by the greatest punk band of all time, The Clash! Drain and chop finely. Add to the beans. Heat the olive oil in a small frying pan over medium-low add the garlic and sautee for about 30 seconds or until it just barely golden. Add the paprika and optional cayenne stir for 10 seconds and pour everything into the bean pot. Simmer for another couple minutes and stir to combine flavors. Turn off heat and let rest for 10 minutes before serving with crusty country bread.
**Not Mexican chorizo, although the result would probably be great, It'd be a totally different thing.

Brown Bag Lunch #4: Frittata degli Spaghetti

2007-03-26T15:28:00.001+02:00

I used to be very careful about how much pasta al pomodoro to make (just enough, not too much!) because the texture of reheated leftover pasta is just awful, starchy and too soft. But now after discovering frittata degli spaghetti, (a.k.a. lefotver spaghetti omelet) I make sure to make extra pasta every time. The tomato sauce on the angel hair pasta (my favorite) mixes with the eggs and infuses them with flavor; the edges of the frittata get crispy and brown so the texture is perfect. Frittatas are great hot or at room temperature, so this makes a wonderful brown bag lunch and it's easy as all get out.

The ingredient proportions are very flexible, which is good 'cause you don't always have the same amount of lefotvers. You may want just enough eggs to coat the pasta or you may want an egg-rich frittata.

Ingredients:
1. last night's pasta al pomodoro, perfectly seasoned (today, I have 8 ozs or 1-1/2 cups of leftover angel hair pasta)
2. enough eggs to just coat or more (for me that's 2 lg. eggs to barely coat and 3 for the "swimming" effect")
3. salt and pepper to taste
4. optional: anything else. You could add diced mozzarella, leftover wilted spinach or anything else that strikes your fancy. I once make a huge frittata with leftover spaghetti and leftover ratatouille, which knocked everybody's socks off.
5. 1 tsp olive oil

Place the spaghetti in a medium-sized bowl and add the eggs. With a fork, break up the eggs and mix them until all the noodles are coated. Add salt and pepper and any optional ingredient. If you'd like alternative suggestions about making this frittata, go here.

Put a non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the spaghetti/egg mixture and swirl the pan slightly to keep the frittata moving and not sticking to the pan. The edges should puff up. Music to swirl angel-hair pasta by: "Angel Face" composed by the great Enio Morricone from the Spaghetti Western, "A Gun for Ringo" Once you have assured that a crust has formed at the bottom lower the heat to the medium-low and continue cooking for about 5 minutes until the top is partially set or at least not really really liquidy.

At this point, follow my instructions very carefully: with a steady hand and your widest spatula under one corner of the frittata, scoop it out onto a dinner plate. Then, invert the frying pan on top of the frittata, hold the pan handle and the bottom of the plate really securely, think inspiring thoughts, believe in yourself (I think I can, I think I can…) and flip*. Now cook the frittata for another 2-3 minutes or until you feel with your finger that the center is firm.

Cool, pack into your brown bag, add a navel orange and a leftover piece of Guinness cake sandwich (2 slices of cake with the frosting between them) and you're set for a fab lunch tomorrow!.

*With practice you should be able to avoid dumping half the frittata on the floor. If this process makes you nervous, pre-heat your oven to 425F and place the pan in for a couple minutes until you see the top getting puffy and brown.

Great thanks to the Daily Tiffin, What's Cooking, and Eating Out Loud for hosting such fun food events!

Marinated Oven-Grilled Rabbit with Roasted Vegetables

2007-03-23T15:15:00.001+01:00

Whenever I eat rabbit, I think back to this one Bugs Bunny episode where the king keeps demanding Hasenpfefer! Where's my hasenpfeffer? Before that, I never knew rabbits were edible. I mean Elmer Fudd just seemed like he was there 'cause Bugs needed a foil.

As with many cultural references, I experienced the Bugs Bunny version first: to this day I remember learning that the real title of Elmer Fudd's anthem, "Kill the Wabbit" was indeed Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries", that funny, myopic Asian guy with the bucked teeth was actually General Tojo, the leader of Japan during World War II. (Amazing to see the kind of racial stereotyping only 60 years ago) and the super strong working mom with the unruly brat babysat by Bugs was Rosie the Riveter, archetype of female factory workers during the war.

So I was in full nostalgia mode the other day when I made this oven-grilled rabbit, heavily adapted from Rosengarten's Dean & Deluca cookbook: Their idea was a summery marinated, outdoor-grilled rabbit with aioli. I turned it into an oven-grilled winter dish with lots of crispy-brown root veggies.

1 whole rabbit, cut into serving pieces (by your husband who knows how to do such things)
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp marjoram
1 tsp thyme
3 cloves garlic, mashed
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
red wine just to cover

olive oil for drizzling
1/2 pound bacon

roughly chopped root vegetables such as: carrots, red onions, turnips, potatoes, fennel (ok, so fennel's a fat stem and not a root, so sue me)

Place the rabbit and the next 7 ingredients in a bowl or zip lock bag (with the zip lock, you can add much less wine and still get the same marinading effect) and let marinate in the fridge over night. Next day, pre-heat oven to 425°F. Wipe off the rabbit pieces reserving the marinade, wrap each one in bacon, drizzle with a bit of olive oil and arrange on a grill fitted with an under-tray where you can put half the veggies (see image). Add a bit more olive oil (to your taste and calorie limits) to the marinade and toss with the roughly-chopped root vegetables. Arrange on wide oven trays or baking dishes. I did 2 layers in the oven. Roast/grill for about 45 minutes (stirring the vegetables a couple times) or until everything is browned and crispy. Music to roast rabbit by: "Kill the Wabbit" sung by Elmer Fudd, composed by Herr Richard Wagner.

Potage Parmentier / Vichyssoise

2007-03-21T20:10:00.001+01:00

The meme that J. from Thinking About... tagged me for recently, reminded me that it's been too long since I've made the miracle soup, Potage Parmentier from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The chilled version, called vichyssoise might give you the idea this is something snooty you have to eat with your nose in the air and your pinkie finger at a sharp angle. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The ingredients are as humble as they can get, leeks, potatoes, water, butter, salt. Unlike many humble-ingredient recipes this dish requires no culinary gymnastics to make them taste good; Julia Child calls it, "simplicity itself". It was actually Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project who inspired me to try this. Hell, she inspired me to start blogging all together.

So in tribute to Julie, Julia and J. here's Potage Parmentier:

1 lb peeled, diced potatoes
1 lb thoroughly washed thinly sliced leeks
2 quarts water
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp butter
minced chives for garnish

Simmer the potatoes and leeks in the salted water for 40-50 minutes. Music to simmer French soup by: "C'est comme ca" by Les Rita Mitsouko & The No Comprendo. I just love how they got three languages into their band name. Puree the soup using a food mill or an immersion blender. Add the butter in small bits and whisk in. Taste and correct for salt. Add chives and enjoy. See, wasn't that easy?

If you'd like to try vichyssoise, replace the water in the recipe with chicken stock and the butter with 1/2-1 cup whipping cream. Serve chilled. For my money, though. The hot potage is much better.

St. Patrick's Day Guinness Cake

2007-03-19T16:08:00.000+01:00

As usual, just in time for St. Joseph's Day. (Happy Birthday to my brother Brian).
Yesterday our friend, Yovan who lives in Barcelona, visited and prepared a huge Catalan feast complete with chistorra sausage on toast points, deep fried whole green "pimientos del padron" (all mild this time! Usually one of them will blow your head off with no warning), deep fried "chipirones" (itty bitty little squids you eat whole) and the showstopper, two giant paella pans full of fideua, like paella but instead of rice, it's made with super thin toasted 1-inch lengths of angel hair pasta) one traditional and one "a la tinta", (that is, laced with black squid ink) Recipe coming soon.

I provided the superfluous dessert. We were all stuffed after those delicious tapas and the fideua but Guinness Cake presented itself as a patriotic must (at least for me as I was the only one in the room with Irish roots).

I more or less followed the Oprah Winfrey (of all people) recipe here. I replaced half the butter in the cake batter with home pureed pear sauce (works just like apple sauce) and then through a series of mishaps, I changed the frosting recipe entirely. I replaced the cream cheese with "light" cream cheese (the grocery store was out of the regular kind) only to add a bunch of mascarpone to the mix later to thicken it up. I used a simple sugar syrup rather than the powdered sugar (it was Sunday and I had forgotten to get powdered sugar when the stores were open on Saturday) All was well that ended well, the mascarpone rescued my too-thin-to-spread-well frosting and it turned out pretty tasty too. The Guinness does indeed add a coffee-like flavor to the chocolate-spice cake.

Braised Short Ribs With Root Vegetables

2007-03-16T14:52:00.001+01:00

One of the great, stick-to-your-ribs, winter-weather treats is braised short ribs with root vegetables. It's so rich and satisfying. But now, it's getting springy outside and soon, we'll be dining on asparagus and strawberries, so now's the time to get all those hearty stews out of your system. I'm trying to think of when I can orchestrate a tamale assembly line to enjoy them before it gets too warm to steam huge batches of food in the kitchen. In the meantime, here's a great short rib dish. It's just a simple, one pot meal but oh so trendy! Impress your friends and neighbors with this one:

3 lbs short ribs
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 bottle of red wine
2 cups beef or chicken stock
1-14oz can of chopped tomatoes

mirepoix vegetables (all finely minced): 1 med onion, 1 lg carrot, 2 ribs celery, 3 cloves garlic

stew vegetables in large chunks: 3 med carrots, 1 lg fennel bulb, 2 med. potatoes, 2 sm turnips

herbs and spices: 1 tsp thyme, 1 tsp marjoram, 2 bay leaves, 1/4 tsp ground black pepper, salt to taste

In a heavy, cast-iron pot, heat the oil over medium-high then add the short ribs in one layer (no crowding the pan). Brown on all sides flipping every 2 minutes or so to get a good, medium brown color.* Remove the meat onto a platter, leaving the oil in the pot. Add the mirepoix of vegetables and sautee until they have sweat a lot of their moisture and begin to fry in the oil. At this point, return the meat and add the wine, stock, bay leaf and tomatoes. The level of liquid should just cover the meat, if not, add more wine or stock. Bring to a boil, then lower the flame so that the pot just simmers. Let simmer for 2 hours until the meat almost falls off the bone. Add all the chunky stew vegetables except the fennel 45 minutes before serving. Music to simmer root vegetables by: "Root" by The Deftones (on tour now and coming to a European capitol near you!) Add the fennel 20 minutes before serving along with the thyme and marjoram. The final product should be thicker than what you see in the photo. You should have tender meat and vegetables enrobed in a sauce thick as tomato sauce for pasta. If your meat and veggies are thoroughly cooked, remove them and boil the sauce down to the correct thickness, add salt to taste, and serve. Yum!

*This does NOT seal in juices or make the meat tenderer. Actually it does the opposite; you'll have to braise the meat longer than you would without the browning step to get it tender but I think it's worth it since it DOES create a lot of delicious, meaty flavor)

Let's Play...20 Questions

2007-03-14T15:41:00.000+01:00

Thanks to J. from Thinking About... for tagging me on this one. You're such a flatterer!

1. What’s your #1 comfort food? For the moment it's white chocolate. Don't think of it as chocolate but as rich, creamy butter candy.

2. If you were on a deserted island, what one food would you want to have with you? What's got all the 4 food groups? Minestrone with pancetta and parmesan.

3. What is/are your signature dishes? (What dishes are you ‘known’ for?) I'm best known from my own sourdough bread from the starter I grew a few years ago and lives in my fridge.

4. It’s Friday night, you don’t know what to cook. You opt for…Easy pasta al pesto from the pesto cubes in the freezer. Snap.

5. What’s your biggest weakness when it comes to food? Sugar, sugar, sugar. It's been that way all my life.

6. What food can you absolutely not eat? Bananas. I hate their smell, their texture, their taste, everything. I once threw up after eating the required 1/2 banana on some fad diet when I was in 8th grade. I actually tell hosts who try to serve me something with bananas in it that I'm severely allergic.

7. You need a drink. You grab a… um...whaddya mean, by drink? am I thirsty? (water) or stressed? (red wine)

8. What’s the most decadent dish you’ve had? Another question with multiple interpretations: calorie-wise it would be the full cajun gumbo dinner last year where a guest brought some lasagne to share. Jeez. Money-wise, our wedding feast at Charlie Trotter's

9. What’s your favorite type of food? My favorite food nationalities are: Italian, Mexican, Indian and Thai.

10. Favorite dish? Come on! That's as hard as asking my favorite song! I could give you my top 100. But the first one that comes to mind right now (think! think!) is Gabriel's taramasalata.

11. If your partner could take you to any restaurant you wanted, which one would it be? Since I've already mentioned Charlie Trotter's (maybe for an anniversary) I'll say Chez Panisse in San Francisco. Gotta love that Alice Waters.

12. Are you a soup or salad person? Salad's great but soup all the way. Refer back to the desert island question.

13. Buffet, take-out or sit-down restaurant? I sooo miss the fantabulous street food of Chicago, Italian beef, tamales, paletas, Italian subs, etc. Guess take-out's the closest.

14. What’s the most impressive dinner you’ve ever made? Gabriel and I have collaborated on many an impressive dinner. Maybe the time he shucked 20 oysters for an appetizer, I made osso bucco with risotto alla milanese a green salad along with the cheese course and floating islands for dessert. It was really good.

15. Do you consider yourself a good cook? Yeah. I love it and I think I'm good at it.

16. Do you know what vichyssoise is? Yeah. It's cold Potage Parmentier. Believe me, the hot version is better.

17. Who’s your favorite TV cook? Um, believe it or not, there are only really sucky TV cooks in Italy.

18. Can you name at least three TV cooking personalities? Sure here's 3 I've heard of but never seen in action: Nigella Lawson, Alton Brown and Rachel Ray.

19. Homemade or homemade from a box? All homemade, all the time. Even bread and mayonnaise.

20. Name 3 or more other foodies you are going to tag. Hey you out there, are you feeling taggable? Get to it! Let me know in a comment if you decide to do this one.

Tortilla de patatas (The REAL Spanish Omelet)

2007-03-12T22:05:00.000+01:00

Here's Brown-Bag Lunch #3. Any American diner'll offer the "Spanish Omelet" with peppers, onions and tomatoes, which is lovely and a helluva hangover cure, but in Spain the default omelet (called a tortilla, even though there is no flatbread involved) is made of potatoes. Seems boring? Not at all! This is the epitome of rich, satisfying, comfort food a la española.

With this recipe, you have to unlearn everything you’ve ever known about how to fry potatoes. No high heat to create a crunchy seal and keep the potatoes from absorbing all the oil. In fact absorbing all the oil is precisely the goal here. I said, rich, didn't I? This is one of those pre-foodie movement dishes where you use a lot of fat to make humble ingredients taste great. The thing is, despite the calorie content if you do it right, tortilla de patatas is fabulous.

Ingredients: (The austerest list you'll ever see)
1 lb potatoes
1 medium onion, diced
¼-1/2 cup olive oil
5-6 large eggs
salt
Cut potatoes in half, longways and slice in ¼ inch thick slices. Pour as much olive oil as you can possibly force yourself to into a smallish non-stick frying pan, heat to medium-low and add the potatoes. They should be at least half submerged. Keep them at a simmer, not a bubbly frying pace. As they cook, break the pieces up with your spatula. After 15 minutes, add the onion and continue cooking and breaking up the potatoes. By the time the potatoes are tender and permeated with oil (Mmmm…keep thinking "olive oil is GOOD for you!") they will look like corned beef hash made entirely from potatoes and onions.
At this point tip the pan forward and allow the oil to pool at the far end, while you scoop up the potatoes into a bowl, leaving as much oil in the pan as possible. Turn off the heat. Allow the potatoes to cool for 5-10 minutes until they are cool enough not to cook the eggs as they are added in. Add the eggs and mix, add salt to taste. Turn the heat back on to high under the frying pan and get it very hot before adding the potato-egg mixture. Once you add it, swirl the pan slightly to keep the tortilla moving and not sticking to the pan. The edges should puff up. Once you have assured that a crust has formed at the bottom lower the heat to the lowest setting and continue cooking for about 15 minutes until the top is partially set. At this point, I suggest you follow my instructions, contrary to those of every Spaniard I have ever met*, and with your widest spatula under one corner of the tortilla, scoop it out onto a dinner plate. Then, invert the frying pan on top of the tortilla, hold the pan handle and the bottom of the plate really securely, think inspiring thoughts, believe in yourself (I think I can, I think I can…) and flip.

Now cook for just another 2-5 minutes. I like my tortilla completely cooked inside, solid but not dry. Some people, Gabriel for example, like a bit of uncooked egg in the middle (the nutters!). Tortilla can be eaten hot or room-temperature, so it's great for brown-bag lunches. Cut into wedges for a simple lunch accompanied by a green salad or cut into cubes, putting a toothpick into each one for the most popular appetizer at any party**.

*Spaniards will have you placing a plate upside down on top of the tortilla-filled frying pan and flipping and then oozing the upside-down tortilla back into the pan. To me that’s just too messy.

**at any party where there are Spaniards.

Brown Bag Lunch #2: A Little Dab Nduja

2007-03-09T21:48:00.001+01:00

Believe it or not, this is a jar of sausage. Nduja, pronounced /n-DOO-yah/ is a spreadable sausage from Calabria where word has it, people like it hot. This sausage spread has at least as much red, hot pepperoncino as it does pork and interestingly, the name derives from the French, "Andouille" sausage, the ancestor of Louisiana Andouille, the be all and end all of gumbo.
After almost 4 years of living in Italy, I have become accustomed to disregarding Italians' warnings of how "piccante" some food might be. As a rule Italian food (at least all the way up here in Milan) is mild, and Italians I know rather wary of spice in general. So when I saw this jar, I thought, "eh, it's probably moderately spicy." Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, this is 4-alarm chili hot! I stuck my pinkie finger into the jar and tasted less than a 1/4 teaspoon of this and proceeded to gulp down a full glass of water to calm the inferno on my tongue.
Don't get me wrong, this stuff is really good. Spread really thinly on a sandwich with some fresh mozzarella cheese and bread (both things help moderate spiciness) you can taste a good earthy base to the chilis here, there's an umami quality along with the spice that's really pleasant. Music to eat Nduja by: "Runnin' Wild" sung by Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like it Hot" And it makes a helluva lunch.

Rose Geranium Cookies

2007-03-05T21:01:00.001+01:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, spring has sprung in Milan! We're wearing spring jackets to work (couture, of course!) and our herbs are sprouting on the balcony. We used fresh balcony chives in our risotto the other day, and today we introduce, cookies flavored with rose geranium. Oh they're sooo good! The dark flecks you see in the photo are the geranium leaves, themselves minced into the batter.

You Italians out there, don't be so shocked, scented geranium is not just for mosquito repellant anymore! It is very edible; the Victorians used to use it all the time in cooking, not that you lot would likely be impressed with what the English did with food 100+ years ago, but anyway...

Here's the recipe (improved from a mediocre cooking-with-herbs cookbook, which doesn't deserve to be named):

1 large egg
one scant 1/2 cup sugar (plus some for rolling)
3 tbsps unsalted butter, softened (add more if you want a more cookie-like and less fluffy, cake-like texture)
2 cups flour
2 tsps baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp minced rose-geranium leaves
1/3 cup vin santo or other sweet wine
2 tsps rose water

Cream the scant 1/2 cup sugar and butter together and add the egg, mix until homogeneous, then add the wine and rose water. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt and rose-geranium leaves. Music to mix rose-geranium leaves by: the release "Red Roses for Me" by Celtic punk-rockers, The Pogues. Add the dry ingredients to the wet by thirds and mix until only just incorporated. Chill for 30 minutes to an hour. Preheat oven to 350F.

Once the dough is chilled, shape into a log and slice into 24 discs. Press each disc into some sugar on each side and place on a cookie sheet 2 inches apart from each other. Bake for about 12 minutes or until ever so slightly golden.

The result is a light and pretty sweet cookie full of rose flavor. Imagine inviting the ladies over for a schmancy 4:00 tea with these!

Whitefish Risotto With Saffron and Fresh Spring Chives

2007-03-04T15:58:00.001+01:00

Here's a great dish to make with any leftover shrimp stock from your Louisiana gumbo experience! Most Americans I know think of risotto as difficult and most Italians seem to think of it was easy. It certainly is quick, cooking time being about 15 minutes, but the dish definitely has its particularities. The process becomes easy only once you have figured out the parameters of the situation. In order to cook a perfect risotto, you need to feel out (or mistake your way toward) the right balance between amount of heat (which determines how fast the liquid boils and thus evaporates), width of the pot (which helps determine how much evaporation occurs) and cooking time. I think Italians who’ve grown up watching their parents make risotto, don’t have to reinvent these particulars; they just reproduce what Mom & Dad did. If we had no risotto-making genitori growing up, we need to suss things out for ourselves. As you see in this photo, I let the risotto go a bit too long, having not set the table beforehand, so it got too thick. The fish was perfect, though.

4 cups shrimp (or fish) stock
2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup minced scallions
2 cups arborio (or carnaroli) rice
½ cup white wine
1 pinch of saffron stamens (or 1 pkg saffron powder)
¼ to ½ pound of whitefish, cubed (I used plaice*)
1-2 tbsps minced fresh chives
salt to taste

Heat the shrimp or fish stock in a medium pot over a medium-low flame until it simmers. Hold at low throughout the recipe.

In another medium-sized pot, heat the oil over medium and add the minced scallions. Cook, stirring constantly until they are wilted and transparent. Add the rice and stir until each grain is shiny, coated with the oil and has toasted a bit, about 2 minutes. Add the wine and stir vigorously as it fervently boils and steams and almost completely evaporates/gets absorbed.

At this point the stock should be simmering. Add one ladleful of stock to the rice, stir constantly. Once that has been mostly absorbed, add another and continue this way until the stock is gone. Ideally this will take 15 minutes. During the last 2 minutes of cooking time, add the cubed fish and stir in. It will only take that long for the fish to get cooked through and still be tender. Salt to taste. Sprinkle on fresh chives at plating time.

If you got your heat - pan size - time ration right, the final product should feature tender, ever so slightly al dente rice grains and should be able to perform “the wave”. That is if you shake the plate your just-poured risotto is sitting on, it will shake it’s way down, and spread out. Music to shake your risotto down by: "Walking on Sunshine" by one-hit-wonders, Katrina and the Waves. You should not be able to make restaurant-style “tall food” on it. No placing, for example a fillet of pan-fried halibut diagonally up the side of your risotto mountain. Ditto, no staking chive shoots, flagpole-style in the middle of your mound o’risotto. If you’ve done the risotto right, it’ll be too liquidy for all that.

*I used plaice for this dish, but you can use haddock, cod, pollock, hake, whiting, sole, etc. You get the idea. In fact, if you use lake perch, you'll be creating your own version of Lake Como's famous dish, "Risotto al pesce persico"