As someone who lived a great part of her life near the Chesapeake Bay and her blue crabs, crab cakes and most things crab are dreams in Italy, where I can find only surimi or tins from Belgium. Have you evet heard anyone go faint with praise of Belgian crab? Me neither.
Go to Mary’s blog and let’s find out how she managed this elusive culinary specialty in this country where they serve you whole crabs the size of a shilling and then grin with pride!
May 9th, 2008
I really like this Italian food blog. Ginger and Tomato is full of sensible day to day information and ideas, and the language is very simple and easy to understand. I am not sure why the title is in English, but it is.
Vai al Zenzero e Pomodoro!
May 8th, 2008
This recipe is just a lovely thing, but I have been having a hard time sitting myself down to write it. It is the meat course from the menu of April 7, 2008. I’ve cooked it four times, photographed it once and still I haven’t typed it up and published it. I’m not sure why.
My suspicions lie with the fact that although it’s easy, it’s also easy to screw up. It depends very much on good meat. The first and third times I made it I used ordinary supermarket meat and it was a fine dish if you hadn’t had it the other way. When I used local hand-reared pork from this area that I bought and had prepared at the butcher shop for euro 13 per kilo, it was fabulous. My local Coop now offers the same service at half the price, and it was good, but not nearly as good as the pampered pork
The recipe here was inspired by a recipe I found in an Italian culinary magazine. I actually made their recipe, but I found the stuffing mixture of sausage meat, two cheeses and three salamis too heavy, although it might be great in January. I wanted something springy, and something in which I could use all the fresh herbs jumping up out of the ground these days.
The stuffing looks, even to me, unnecessarily complicated in terms of ingredients, but I found out the hard way that you really do need two different kinds of breadcrumbs and two different kinds of cheese.
The amount it makes is awkward. A whole one of these double chops is too much meat for one person, especially in an Italian meal. On the other hand, I found it impossible to cook less than one per person, because it thought it looked chintzy not to have one bony piece per person, just in case. On the plus side, the leftovers are terrific either cold or gently heated. Oh, and by the way, there is a reason why these are rib chops and not loin chops. By the time these thick stuffed chops were cooked through, the tenderloin bit of the loin chop would have become sawdust. Use the cheaper rib chop.
So how come if I like this dish so well, well enough to have cooked it four times, have fed it to clients and again to friends, how come I haven’t splashed it out onto this page? Never mind, it’s making it today.
Costellette di Maiale Ripiene or stuffed rib pork chops
Four pieces, which I think should serve six people
4 rib chops one rib wide, or about 2 centimeters thick, with a pocket cut in them to the bone
6 to 12 toothpicks
the stuffing:
soft breadcrumbs from one slice of Italian or other real bread
½ cup of dry bread crumbs (a couple of handfuls or 2 espresso cups full)
one medium onion, minced fine
2 teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons of minced chives
2 teaspoons of fresh oregano leaves
salt to taste
half of one beaten egg
enough white wine to moisten the mixture
3 ounces of coarsely grated relatively unaged pecorino cheese or another very tasty not very hard cheese
another stuffing:
4 ounces of Rambol herbed cheese in Italy and Boursin in other countries
the cooking:
olive oil for frying
about 2 teaspoons of salt
sprigs of all the herbs used in the stuffing
three or four whole garlic cloves
a couple of espresso cups of white wine
Preheat the oven to 375°F or 165°C
If you have not talked your meat seller into making the pockets for you, then you will need to use a sharp knife and carefully cut pockets from the fatty edge toward the bone, being careful not to let the knife wander and cut through the meat. I recommend using your charm on the meat person of your choice!
Mix up the stuffing. It should be moist and cling together when you gather it in your hand, but not wet.
Using your hands, (I use surgical gloves when cooking professionally and touching raw meat) open the pocket in the chop and stuff in a good spoonful of the herbed cheese. Then gather up a fistful of the stuffing and push it in after the cheese. Add another good spoonful of the cheese and then close the pocket up using one or two toothpicks, depending on how wide the meat person made the pocket opening. You can pretend you are a plastic surgeon when doing this part of the operation.
Heat a quite large frying pan, or two of them, if you don’t have one that fits all four chops. Pour in about 2 tablespoons of oil, and then brown the chops on both sides. Be patient so that you will get a lovely golden brown without chancing a scorching. When they are all nicely browned, toss in the garlic and the herb sprigs, toss the salt over the chops, then pour the wine into the sizzling pan.
Put the pan into the oven and cook about 40 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 160°F or 72°C. Remove the chops to a board and allow them to rest 10 minutes while you reduce the sauce in the pan over a fairly high heat.
Using a sharp knife, cut 1 cm (fat ¼ inch) slices off the chops until you almost reach the bone. Arrange the chops on a serving dish and garnish with some of the fresh herbs you used in the dish. Drizzle some of the reduced pan juices over the meat.
You know what’s really nice about this dish? That soft herby cheese melts and coats the inside of the pocket and the outside of the stuffing, making both things extraordinarily creamy and herbalicious. The meat is tender and gently seasoned. The stuffing is springlike with its herbs. I consider it a four-star meat course.
With it I served a good old American carrot and raisin salad which was new to my guests and they liked it!
May 7th, 2008
Some days ago I went here and was inspired to try the recipe because I had just done some very different caramel covered nuts from another source. 
That David never misses, does he? This took some time, but it is excellent and easy. The only thing you need to watch out for is not to let that blazing sugar touch you.
I followed his directions to the letter except I cooled them on my Silpat to avoid leaving any temptation for ants. The added plus was by rolling up the Silpat I was able to separate more of the nuts than was easily accomplished with two spatulas.
The other recipe is good too, but entirely different. I’ll post a photo of the result as soon as I scan it. I gave them to my neighbors as fast as could be!
May 2nd, 2008
Judy Witts, the American cook that Italians respect, has posted this week’s recipe for La Buona Cucina Americana. I think it would be just amazing if everybody made pickles this year.
Uhh, Judy? When I made dill pickles I had to grow my own pickling cucumbers. Where are you getting yours?
May 2nd, 2008
I had friends to dinner Saturday night. Because I was making the meat dish from the April 7 2008 menu, I decided to do a home-sized version of the Pugliese antipasto, because it keeps people busy and fed while a more complicated dish finishes.
One thing that makes this workable and tastier is that not everything is made at the last minute, or even made at home. I served no meat or fish because the course that followed is very meaty, but with something like prosciutto, pancetta or a few spicy mussels, I would consider this antipasto a whole meal and be happy to have it. I am not, however, all Italian– yet.
The dish on the left is of fried red peppers, but I think they are more accurately called braised peppers. It’s peppers, salt and oil, cooked covered for a long time and then served at room temperature. Directly in front, in a tray made just for antipasto, are fresh green olives, goat’s cheese for the potatoes, a cheese called “Crema di Maggio” or May cream cheese, and black olives. The olives are both from tubs and are not very salty. I don”t know why that is, because olives are picked once a year and I think they must be preserved the same length of time, but anyway, I like these very much and often buy them. This tray illustrates Judy Witts’ oft stated philosophy of shop more and cook less. Those four things are really good and I tried a lot of less-good things before deciding these were worthy of replacing something homemade.
To the left is a plate of tiny baked potatoes cooked under salt. On the right is a loaf of pane di Altamura, a DOP bread that is trucked into my Coop from the south every morning. The hand is Paolo’s, who is pouring a Pugliese rosé wine.
This is, once again, purea di fave secche, which recipe was published here a few posts back. It is served warm. My Umbrian guests really liked it, and it surprised me to find that none of them had ever had it before.
Eating like this, among a few friends, is just about my favorite thing. I’m not so busy that I don’t get to talk and eat with everyone else, because they are friends I can experiment a little, and the evening feels relaxed and healthy.
April 28th, 2008
This is a public service announcement to allow my houseguest to send greetings to her mother in Seattle.
This is Tilda.
As you can see, her haircut is improving quite nicely. She doesn’t do many picturesque things, but goes from favorite chair to windowsill and back again. She doesn’t like the other cats any better than she did, my animal expert sister says Persians do not know they are cats, but she certainly enjoys company if they will pet her. With four windows to choose from, her view on the world while not wide, is varied. She has actually been on the ground of outside once, but hasn’t expressed much interest in returning.
April 28th, 2008
I’m going to let Linda Grant say it for me, using her sock puppet Stone.
If this man had no other purpose in the world, to me it would be enough to know that no matter how bad I may look any particular day, he looks worse.
April 25th, 2008
Cherrye is cooking up biscuits Texas style! Biscuits are just as important in New England, from where I hail, but they are made vastly different to Texas ones. Jump over and have a look at America’s famous hot and flighty quick bread.
April 25th, 2008
I made Gateau St. Honoré yesterday for Gianna’s birthday. To make it I had to unearth skills I had not used in years or even decades. No part of the job is very difficult, but unless you do some of them all the time, your result, like mine, will not look like a pro’s work. I am not a pastry chef and generally leave pastries to people like Shuna Lydon and David Lebowitz. Birthdays, however, bring out the sugar baker in me. Whether it is a layer cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with marshmallowy frosting and flaked coconut, or a chocolate sponge with raspberry sauce and chocolate ganache, or even nine pumpkin pies, if it is your birthday, you can count on me to make a “cake”.
This particular cake requires what Americans call cream puffs and Italians call beignets, which are made of pate choux. The recipe I chose made so much pate à choux that I ended up making cream puffs and éclairs for the neighbors as well as the cake for Gianna. It’s pretty darned easy to make pate à choux, not so darned easy to pipe it out evenly so it puffs up into predictable balls like those you can buy by the bag n the supermarket. My newest philosophy is quickly developing to be “If it looks sort of crazy and resembles farmyard animals more than pastry, it’s bound to be good.” As you can see many of my puffs resemble chicks more than Peeps do.
What the heck! I know from experience that most people have never had the real thing. Most people have only had this gateau made with ice cream as a frozen dessert or plopped together from a bakery that uses pastry cream from a barrel, stabilizer in the cream and the pate à choux comes in 50 pound sacks and you “just add oil and water”. The real thing takes four hours of steady work if you have one oven.
I don’t expect most of you or perhaps (more…)
April 19th, 2008
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