Archive for October, 2007
It’s been a long time since the Sloppy Dough Revolution, and although I’ve made my pizza crusts always using that recipe, I have never gotten around to the bread that brought this method to the public eye.
Today, however, two old friends are arriving from the United States, and what is more welcoming than the perfume of baking? And which of those perfumes is more seductive than bread? So, there’s a loaf of No-Knead bread nel forno and the perfume has filled the house and I at least feel very welcome and looking forward to lunch.
The original recipe published in the New York Times is here I didn’t follow that one, but more or less my pizza dough recipe less the oil and plus a ton of flour to keep it from sticking to the dutch oven. Photo to follow, I think.
Two days ago I made chicken liver spread which seems like a good way to munch on warm, crusty loaves. When it gets a bit stale, then we can have crostini to toast and spread.
October 10th, 2007
One of the blogs I enjoy following is Veronica’s Test Kitchen. She really takes things apart and in coming to understand them, make you understand them, too.
I read the other day that people are either bakers or cooks, and rarely strong at both things. I am not so much a baker. It doesn’t interest me as much, so I try less and have accomplished less. It’s interesting then, to me, when I run into a post like this one about macarons, that I want macarons right now. I would even be willing to make them, if I had the time. Go see Veronica play macaroon chef.
October 9th, 2007
Some time back, I decided that the Pecorino from Sardinia was the best I’d ever tasted. I use quite a lot of it and I recommend it to anyone who likes cheese. And then when I was in Florence with eg, I happened upon a Sardinian restaurant called “Terra Terra.” What food we had! It may just have been our luck in choosing blindly, but there was one dish I am trying to copy and I hope before winter is over I’ll have it done, but you never know. Remember the broccoli pasta! I’ve searched the internet for a recipe, but there just isn’t one and it must be their own creation.
To get to the cheesy point, two of the dishes had a mystical smoky tone and I asked the manager what was up with that. She introduced me to smoked Sardinian pecorino. When eg returned to Washington she arranged to order it. I have to go into my cheese shop and plead on bended knee. Hey, I deserve some love for having introduced grana di bufala to so many people.
Here’s what the Sardinian foods website has to say about it:
Sardinia’s delicately flavoured sheep’s cheese Pecorino is now exported all over the world. Authentic Pecorino is made without any anomalous ingredients such as cow’s milk (instead of sheep’s milk). The most famed Sardinian cheese is smoked, spicy and sharp Fiore Sardo, which is aged over a long period.
Another English language site says:
FIORE SARDO DOP
Fiore Sardo is a cheese of very ancient origins that predates the Roman conquest of Sardinia. Fiore Sardo is older than Pecorino Romano and is mentioned by, among others, Father Francesco Gemelli and La Marmora. Fiore Sardo enjoyed great popularity in the nineteenth century when it was the only cheese to be exported from the island. It was particularly sought after by merchants in Naples, Leghorn and especially Genoa, where it was used in the preparation of pesto. Pecorino Fiore Sardo is made using ancient and special artisan techniques. It is an uncooked hard cheese made from fresh whole sheep’s milk curdled using lamb or kid rennet. The mixture is poured into moulds that will give the cheese its characteristic shape. After a brief period in brine, the moulds are lightly smoked and left to ripen in cool cellars in central Sardinia. The average weight of the finished product is 3.5 kilos: sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less depending on the conditions of manufacture. The rind varies from deep yellow to dark brown in colour and encases a paste that varies from white to straw-yellow. The sharpness of the flavour depends on the length of maturation. Pecorino Fiore Sardo is a genuine product and becomes a superb table cheese after only a few months of ageing. If aged for more than six months, it becomes an excellent grating cheese. The ratio of fat to dry substance is at least 40 per cent. The area of manufacture encompasses the entire island of Sardinia.
So why did it take me so long to find it? Just unlucky, I guess. See who sells it near you. Fiore Sardo means Sardinian flower and you’d have to a romantic thing like that, wouldn’t you? Clicking on those blue quotes will take you to the pages they come from.
October 8th, 2007
Hot and humid days all of a sudden, with intermittent cloudiness and one real rain. How can one get the clothes dry?
Still experimenting and what I ate last night was strictly because it was healthy, because the combination I thought would be so good was a mis-mate. It was also, unfortunately, something no self-respecting cat would touch, even had it been delicious.
On the other hand, there’s a sauce for grains that so far makes me slurp every time. Two more trials and it will appear here.
October 7th, 2007
Here is a list of things to make starting now. They’re all from past indulgences eaten at my table. So, gobble these up while I finish the experiments I’m working on now.
Barzottini to start off with. A delicious appetizer/antipasto as crisp and savory as October days.
A pasta to love now that leeks are back in the markets? Try this Toasted Leek and Pecorino with Penne!
One of my favorites, the crunchy topped, cheesy goodness of this leek, bread and cheese casserole, as a replacement for pasta, a vegetable or a hearty meal in one.
Who has forgotten La Bomba? Not I. This is an ongoing love affair for me.
Where’s the meat? If you haven’t fixed this one yet, you’re missing one of the recipes I’m proudest of.
Room for dessert? Sin along with me with a bit of Hot Silk.
There, that ought to keep you busy for a day or two.
October 5th, 2007
Everybody in Italy is yelling at me, “Those aren’t orecchiette!” And they’re right, they aren’t. They are the same boiling water and flour pasta, but shaped a different way. They might be considered cauliflower ears (orecchiette is little ears) except the traditional recipe is not made with cauliflower, but with broccoli.
This, unlike almost all the recipes here, is not my recipe. You would not like the recipe I came up with for this pasta dish when I tried to recreate it on my own. It was never good, no matter how good the broccoli or how authentic the pasta, so in desperation I went to the website for Bari, Italy, where this dish comes from. The local radio station had posted an official recipe with an ingredient I would never have guessed if I’d tried for years. Without it this is just broccoli with some pasta. Meh. With it, it’s “Orecchiette con broccoletti”. The secret ingredient disappears completely, but creates the genuine flavor although it’s unidentifiable. The Baresi use what we in the US called broccoli rabe. I like it, but I love broccoli, so that’s what I make and it is grudgingly acceptable to the Baresi.
This is the first broccoli of the year. It is not the best broccoli of the year, because it hasn’t been cold yet and that’s what makes broccoli go from nice to slap-me-in-my-face wonderful. There’s a whole nutty thing that goes on in frostbitten broccoli. Still, not having seen a stalk of broccoli since May, I was pretty darned happy to see this nice big flower in the market Wednesday afternoon.
Here’s what goes into this pasta for two people:
200 grams of orecchiette or another similar pasta
8 ounces of fresh broccoli; stems, leaves and all, cut into smallish pieces
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 fat cloves of garlic, sliced
2 hot chilies, broken up with fingers – mine were the standard little hot ones found here, you might want to use one if yours are hot or if you feel wimpy
2 anchovy fillets
Put a big pot of water on to boil and then clean, cut and slice the various ingredients. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and put the broken chilies, the garlic slices and the anchovy fillets into it to gently fry. This happens to be one of only a few recipes in which you brown garlic, but you can’t burn it or it will all be ruined forever, like Scarlet O’Hara. So keep the heat low and just let the oil simmer.
Once the water is boiling, throw a lump (an all-fingers pinch) of coarse salt into it and then the pasta. Check the package for cooking time, because you need to know the estimated finish time. Stir it up and then let it boil. About three minutes before the cooking time elapses, add the broccoli into the pasta. Take a ladle full of the pasta water and spill it into the frying pan so the garlic won’t burn.
A minute before you expect the pasta to be done, start biting it to test it. You will want it to be a little less done than al dente. When it is, drain everything that is in the pot and put it into the frying pan, stirring it around and getting it well covered in the garlicky sauce. The pasta continues to cook during this, and this kind of pasta goes soft very fast, so it should go in a bit too firm. Once it’s mixed and wonderful, drizzle a little raw oil over it and serve it up. Delicious.
Even if you think you don’t like anchovies, do try this, because you can’t tell they’re in there. Promise. I buy them in little jars that I keep in the fridge, as you can see from the fogged up glass in the picture. Do not put cheese on this, because it ruins it. Baresi propose that you brown breadcrumbs in oil to sprinkle over it, but I never bother. And now, we will send this off to Presto Pasta Night.
October 5th, 2007
I have found a new toy. Because I own my site, it comes with some things I never got around to looking at until yesterday. One of them offers a bunch of different statistics programs that allow me to see who comes here (generally, it doesn’t give me your name or age) and from where. It also tells what OS you use and which browser, and there were some I’d never heard of in my life. It also tells how many pages were looked at and how much time was spent on the site. None of this information is connected, so I cannot say that someone from the Netherlands spent an hour here, but I hope (s)he did.
It is a revelation to me. In October people have come from absolutely everywhere. Kuwait, Slovenia, Korea, Japan and a list as long as my arm of places I’ve never been and may never go. Not that I wouldn’t love to go, but you’d have to send tickets.
Now the truth is that most of you are in the United States, as one would expect. After all, that’s a big population. Then the United Kingdom and Italy and other EU nations. But some of you are visiting from Russia, too. And quite a few are here from China.
Do you know how much that means to me? Do you understand how happy I am that you come here? Now that I know about you, I think of you when I’m writing. I wonder what appeals to you, what you’d like to know that I can find out, and if you are English mother tongue folks who happen to be in those places or if you are reading English as a second language.
One of the programs available shows a list headed by flags. I am so delighted when I see that row of flags marching down that chart. Jamaica, Barbados, Canada, Malaysia. It gives me a thrill so potent that I sign in and look just to see it. And that is just for October, only four days old. Over eighteen-thousand page requests from dozens of countries. I hope the only change will be that the list grows longer and longer… just how many flags exist anyway? I want them all.
I am left with only one question: why don’t you talk to me? Imagine how happy I would be to hear what it’s really like in places I barely know!
October 4th, 2007
“Vacuum cleaners and clothing formed a bizarre fashion marriage of style and science on the Paris prêt-à-porter catwalk yesterday.”
I cannot adequately explain the article from which this quote came. You will have to read it yourself here.
I want you to know I looked at hundreds of runway shows until 01:00 this morning and there is good news to report. Lots of good news.
October 4th, 2007
Sure, this is the way we want to look next spring and summer.
or at least Jean Paul Gaultier thinks so.
But then, Jeremy Scott thinks we should get down and dirty. I don’t think that phrase has entered my head since the 1970s.
Comme des Garcons has entertainment in mind. Let’s all run off and join the circus!
The grand illusionist, Christian Lacroix, who once presented us with the most beautiful boots ever made, has designed a dress a girl could wear, but NOT THAT HAT!
Dries van Noten does not do pretty girl, but this? I think I saw her at a bike shop in Adams Morgan a few years back.
We have at last reached the zenith of the ripped jean in this Maison Martin Margiela presentation.
I have some curtains I could copy Junya Watanabe with.
I want you to know, this is the best of Bernard Willhelm.
One doesn’t expect to be able to wear Vivienne Westwood, but surprise! Perhaps not in all of its many details, one could actually wear this Little Brown Ridinghood outfit without creating disaster in the streets– at least if you were in Milan or New York.
All photos are linked from the wonderful UK Telegraph Fashion pages. They don’t design them, folks, they’re just reporting. And so am I.
Later I’ll show some things that one actually might wear– at least once they get humanized from the runway version.
October 3rd, 2007
Memories of a rainy Saturday afternoon in Lecce, Puglia. Everything in this photo is sweet. Everything. It’s not tourist season, there’s practically no one on the street, so it must be for the Leccesi.
This too, a mortadella made of almond paste. What a sausage!
October 2nd, 2007
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