Archive for November, 2007
This is a recipe I developed for Slow Travel. It’s a pasta I really love, and thanks to a fine friend from North Carolina, I have the pecans to make it with. It’s rich and crunchy and deeply satisfying to eat on these cold and gray days. Pecans are difficult to find here in Italy other than in my freezer or a big city like Rome, Milan or Torino.
Definitely use a mild blue cheese for this pasta. Experiments during the trial and testing period showed that to be essential. The pasta does moderate the flavor of the blue cheese, but not enough if you use a strong one. It become ammoniac with strong cheese.
Pasta with Gorgonzola and Pecans
* About 280 grams (10 ounces) of penne
* A huge pot of water
* A small handful of salt
* 1 tablespoon/cucchiaio olive oil
* A small onion, chopped somewhat finely
* A couple of handfuls of coarsely chopped pecans
* 250 grams (8 ounces - a typical package) of Gorgonzola dolce or other mild blue cheese, broken or cut into smallish pieces
Start the pasta water to boil. When the water is boiling, add the salt and the pasta and stir.
In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, and add the onion, cooking it slowly until it is softened. Add the pecans and stir about to toast and crisp them. Add the broken up cheese to the fried onions and pecans, stirring to melt. Ladle a small amount of the pasta cooking water into the pan to make the sauce creamier. At this point, the pasta should be about done. It should be quite firm. Drain the pasta and toss it into the frying pan, stirring to coat the pasta with the sauce. Taste for salt and correct if necessary. Some cheeses are saltier than others, so you can’t tell ahead whether you’ll need it or not. Serve immediately, smoking hot.
Warning: This is a fast sauce. If it is cooked too long or cooked and reheated it will become lumpy and unpleasant. Gorgonzola piccante is very unpleasant in this sauce.
A fruit salad is nice with this if this pasta dish is your main course. And now let’s send it off to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night. Don’t forget to click into her terrific roundups to see what people all over the world are doing with the nicest noodles.
November 9th, 2007
Three cheers for Smitten Kitchen. Go have a look at her apple tart post, which is absolutely terrific. It’s accessible to amateurs and beginners, and different enough to appeal to veterans.
November 9th, 2007
Don’t use the Yahoo! address. Something has happened and I can’t get the mail in there. You can go to the website upon which this blog lives and use the contact address there, or the gmail address still works… at least for now.
November 8th, 2007
I could have written pages and pages of the pain and desperation I’ve heard from young Italians and their struggles to have a home away from their families, but Spaghetti Mamma has done it better than I ever could. Read Dream Home and you’ll learn what the traveler never knows.
An Italian home is overwhelmingly an apartment. It is expensive when compared to the Italian salary. Mortgages are hateful to Italians, but necessary these days.
On the other hand, most Italians don’t want to buy old homes and fix them up, much preferring new or as close to it as they can get. They don’t get romantic about inadequate plumbing and electricity that come with ancient tiles and beams. It keeps the prices of rural housing down, so we foreigners can swoop in and go nuts trying to get the work done that these old homes need to be livable. Fortunately, there’s enough romantic impulse among us to save a great many crumbling homes from disaster.
November 8th, 2007
I decided to try something different for a change. As I work through developing a recipe, I thought I would post the versions as they happen, as long as they are good to eat. Tonight I started working on this one. The dish as I ate it at a restaurant called Terra Terra in Florence, was brilliant with flavors and spicy and red as a devil. The waiter told me that vinegaring was one of the ways the old timers used to preserve pork before refrigeration.
I loved that risotto. As eg could tell you, I didn’t want to eat anything else, but went back and had to be cajoled into trying other dishes by being given a free sample of it. I love Italian food, but I miss hit-you-in-the-face strong flavors. They’re rare here.
When starting a new recipe, I always try the simplest things first. Unless you are at a four star restaurant with a dozen or more chefs, most kitchens are taking the simplest route to the end they envision. Besides, this was supposed to be a country dish made by housewives, so I figured simple was good.
This one didn’t quite make it for me. It was good and I feel like I ate well, but my face is still in one piece and it wasn’t red enough, either. I need a couple of ingredients I don’t have in the house.
Iit may be that the original dish would be too strong for you. Maybe you prefer a nicely spicy, but not revolutionary flavor? This version might be just right for you. It wasn’t a failure at being good, it was just not what I ate at Terra Terra. So here it is. It’s easy, cheap and yummy. It isn’t stirred endlessly like normal risotto and it only dirties two pots. That counts for something. It can be either a first course or a main dish.
Risotto with Vinegared Pork
Version One
2 servings
2 ounces lean pork, chopped
strong vinegar to moisten well, any kind
Prepare the pork a day ahead, completely mixing in the vinegar and let marinate in the fridge
2 tablespoons butter
½ onion chopped
½ cup arborio or other risotto rice
1 pint boiling broth
boiling water as needed
½ cup of tomato puree (passata)
1 pinch sugar
1 small pinch cloves
2 pinches of cayenne or peperoncino in polvere
about 1 ounce of pecorino, finely grated
Heat the butter in a pan and sauté the onions until transparent. Add the rice and sauté it until it turns opaque and white. Add all of the broth and stir up. Stir once in a while to prevent sticking, but you don’t have to stand there stirring constantly. Cook it to a stiff risotto consistency rather than creamy. You might need a tablespoon or so of the extra water to get the rice to al dente, just to where there is no crunchiness left. Toward the end, it does need stirring or it will stick.
Add the tomato puree and stir it in. Add the pinch of sugar, cayenne and clove. As it heats, taste for salt. You probably won’t need it.
Dump the water out of the pan you were boiling, and dry the pan. Put just a little olive oil in it, then the pork, and sauté it briefly. It foams, rather than browns, but when it loses its color, it is done. It takes only moments. Stir the pork and vinegar into the risotto. Add the grated pecorino and stir it in. Serve immediately, piping hot.
November 6th, 2007
I’ve learned this morning that my Aunt Laurette has died at age 94. That’s a long life, to be sure, especially if the last of it was fraught with the terror of Alzheimer’s disease, which begins to seem the curse of that generation of my family. You can’t help but feel that this last step was a relief for her, although it leaves a saddened family.
And it leaves me sad, too, because I have rarely met a woman like her. We lived nearby for much of my early childhood and she was one of the markers of my early life. I learned a good bit about bearing up and going on from her, but she did it with the kindest of smiles for everyone.
Aunt Laurette was married to my Uncle Richard, who physically resembled my father, his younger brother. They had twelve children. They sat down fourteen at table when they were alone, but often there were others invited and the enormous kitchen rang with noisy people and a busyness that resembled an anthill. Each older child seemed to have the care of a younger one. Food came off the cooker and onto the table in quantities that were unimaginable to me at the time. Everyone had a chore and did it. If it hadn’t been that way, life could have been a shambles in a moment.
And there was love. I can remember watching the older girls make hairdos for the tiny twins– not at the table, of course. I remember thinking that I could see and feel the love they had for the twins in what they did for them. It shone also in what they did for others. Tina, the daughter one year older than me, was assigned to take me to school my first day. It took all the scary out of it for me. I did not do as good a job when it was my turn to take my little sister, who was miserable and wet her pants on the front step because she didn’t know where the toilets were. I also never braided her hair.
Uncle Richard died very young from a heart attack, leaving Aunt Laurette with a baby in her arms. She and her kids kept their farm going while she returned to work, although I can never remember a time she didn’t work as hard as anyone I ever saw. They had a dairy farm and her hands and wrists were often cracked and scarred by the washing compounds used for the glass bottles milk came in in those days. Did she ever rest? I’m not sure. I never saw her just sit until she was a very old lady and surrounded by kids and grandkids, decades later.
If any of this sounds grim, it really wasn’t. I think Aunt Laurette took all this on as her particular place in the world. Hard work happened. She did it. Tragedies came along and she survived them. Her kids grew up and took over, one thought happily, the burden of running things, extending the arms of care and eventually they built her a modern home exactly where the shambling and enormous old one had been. She was so proud of that, as she was right to be, because they’d all learned their lessons well. They turned into interesting people who did various things and didn’t resemble each other much, except for the caring attitude I always felt from them. They are a most attractive group of people and I am proud to be connected to them, although they are all far away and in different worlds from me. Of the eleven surviving children, they seem as individual as if they came from different families, other than this common trait of being lively and connected to those they meet. And that, I believe, is her memorial, that in the necessarily chaotic life of fourteen people under one roof and a family business to run, she reared individuals. To me, that makes her a hero.
It is usual to say rest in peace, and I know there will be peace, but I have a hard time imagining Aunt Laurette resting. There will surely be many things that need to be organized in heaven and she’ll take care of them, too.
Read about this wonderful woman in her local paper.
November 5th, 2007
There’s a really good scale and a really good sale on for US residents at ekitchens.
They are selling at least one high quality scale that tares and switches from metric to ounces. The good price is even better when you enter the word FALL into the checkout coupon area– 5% off in addition.
You need a scale.
November 4th, 2007
I’ve just had an odd experience in the kitchen. It started in Florence when my friends and I stumbled into a little and not at all posh restaurant for supper a couple of weeks ago. I don’t even know its name, but I could find it if I had to.
The special of the evening was “fried chicken and vegetables.” Two of us ordered it. What arrived resembled in no manner fried chicken as we knew it. Instead there was a platter for the two of us piled high with something pale, fluffy and crunchy. As we munched through the pile we found small bone-in chunks of chicken, redolent of chicken essence and crisp as rice crackers. Among those and sometimes stuck to them were batons of carrot and zucchini with the same light and crispy crust. It was delicious.
After my friends returned to the USA, I started to think about that chicken. How did they do that? Why was that crust so light and crisp and filled with bubbles? How come that chicken was so juicy, when chicken is so usually over cooked in Italy? I went to the store and bought some chicken. I looked through the flours for rice flour, but there was none. Then I saw the potato starch (fecola di patata) and picked that up. I reckoned that an Italian restaurant was most likely using something you could buy in Italian shops, right?
In the kitchen I made the decision to make just a small amount, because I might have to try several approaches before I found the right batter. I used my heavy Chinese cleaver to chunk up a leg into two pieces, a thigh into three. I scattered a mixture of rosemary, salt, pepper and cayenne over it. I made carrot and zucchini sticks.
Ahhhh, the coating. I tossed about a half cup of corn starch/flour (Maizena) into a bowl, then an equal amount of the potato starch. Why did I use those? Because they have no gluten to toughen the batter. I added some of the seasoning to that, too. Then I gradually added Chinese beer that was lying around until the batter was about the consistency of yogurt. I added enough sparkling water to bring it to the consistency of cream. It would be it, or it wouldn’t.
I made up another bowl of plain flour with more of the seasoning to help the batter stick.
I heated sunflower oil in a small but deep pot, enough to deep fry the chicken pieces. One by one I dipped the chicken pieces into the flour, then into the batter, and then laid them into the hot oil. I turned them once. They almost don’t brown at all, so it’s difficult to know when they’re done, but I winged it — ha ha like a chicken — you can hit me now. When they looked done to me, I took them out and laid them on paper towels. On and on, through the chicken bites, then the vegetables, I fried.
Friends, one of those two starches is the right one. I don’t know which. The chicken and the vegetables were both just delicious, but the coating was a little hard on the edges, not perfectly falling away onto the lip in spicy, crackling shards. I thought to try just corn starch next time.
And then I thought again. This was easy. A person could do this any time a chicken happened by the kitchen counter. I liked it. I liked it too much. Perfecting this chicken might be the dumbest thing I would ever do. Does the world really need another fried chicken recipe? Does my world really need me after eating this every week for a while?
For now, the answer is no. All my clothes but one skirt currently fit. If there is one thing I learned from the ‘Chinese dumplings made easy’ episode, it’s that truly delicious and fattening things that are too easy to make are just perilous. I’ve whipped the dumplings into a once a year treat, I don’t have the character to battle this chicken too.
So go for it. It’s either all potato starch or all corn starch, a bit of beer, a bit of sparkling water. But please don’t invite me.
November 4th, 2007
Palma cooks so widely and so well, that it’s fabulous to find myself on her blog. She recently made the Gorgonzola Cookies and did a step by step photo log of the process. That’s more than I did for them!
November 3rd, 2007
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