Archive for February, 2008
This is the 50th week of Presto Pasta Roundup and I promised come hell or high water I would provide a pasta this time. Here is one of the best. It is a traditional recipe and not one of my own, but I’m proud to present it because it isn’t even well known around Italy and it is way too good to miss.
Those are mussels growing in a mussel farm in Australia. Farming mussels has made them available in places that never heard of them 60 years ago. Places where it is too hot to ship them, too cold for nature to grow them, with farming can provide them to almost everybody these days. The farmed mussels are a lot cleaner and easier to prepare than the wild ones I once knew. It really has made mussels a busy day choice, because they are cooked in a flash.
That’s what they look like raw. All you have to do is wash them under running cool water and tear off any “beard” that’s clinging, which resembles Spanish Moss. It’s how the mussel attaches himself to things. Throw away any that are lying there open and don’t close when touched. Those aren’t good. Once they are cleaned they need to be cooked quickly, because the cleaning process is the last thing you do before preparing them. Recipe follows the jump
In a big pot melt 2 ounces of butter and sauté in it a few halved cloves of garlic. Add about 1/2 cup or so of white wine. Toss in the mussels, heat on high, pop on a lid and cook until they open. It doesn’t take long, so keep an eye in them.
You can either proceed with 1) eating 2) preparing a dish or 3) storing them immediately. To store, remove them from their shells, throwing away any that are shut, because those also aren’t good. Put them into a container with the cooking juices and cover well, then refrigerate them.
These are fagioli or beans as imaged by Ciccio, a great blog. If yours look like that, pick out the white ones, soak and then cook them, because we want canellini.
These are cavatelli, a Pugliese pasta used in this dish. 
or use gnocchetti sardi which are almost exactly the same thing 
or even casariccia. 
I think I am getting carried away with the possibilities at IndustryPlayer!
To serve 6 lucky eaters you will need:
1.5 kilos or 3 pounds of mussels cleaned and cooked as above
.5 kilo or 1 pound of cooked white beans
2 cloves of garlic
7 to 8 tablespoons of great olive oil
1 peperoncino, or small dried chili pepper, crushed
5 or 6 cherry tomatoes, halved
salt and pepper to taste
600 grams or 18 ounces of dry pasta
Heat a big pot of water to boiling, add a very large 4 finger pinch of salt and the pasta. Note the time and the time the package says to cook your pasta.
Heat a wide frying pan with the oil, then add the garlic cloves. Sauté for a bit but do not brown the garlic as it is there to scent the oil. Add the beans and the cherry tomatoes, stirring around, then just before the pasta will be done, add the mussels with their cooking liquor, with a few shells for atmosphere.
Taste for seasoning and correct. I do not think you will need salt. You do NOT eat cheese on this pasta. (I know that makes some of you immediately want to have cheese on it and say, “So there!” Don’t.
This is how they were served to Luchena in Puglia.
I think this is one of the great dishes of Italy. You need the best ingredients you can find because there are so few of them and each must star. The first time I ever tasted it I screamed or fainted or did something embarrassing that I’ve forgotten. “This is the ONE!” came into it somehow.
February 28th, 2008
Without Coco Chanel and what she did to women’s clothing in the early 1900s, we might be wearing anything. Corseting and restricting had gotten steadily worse for women until she stepped in and said,”Take it off!”
Celia Walden had the chance to visit the apartment Coco Chanel kept in the building that houses Chanel. It was closed when she died and never opened until Ms Walden wheedled her way in and wrote this story. Make sure to look at the photo album.
I wonder if I can declare this as my pied a terre in Paris? So what if it has no bedroom, who wants to sleep in Parigi?
February 27th, 2008
Not only with the full skirt, but with other even more tempting fashions this spring and summer, there are pockets! You need pockets. We have always needed pockets, but for too many years we have been denied them in most usable forms. Then a year ago they showed up in ball gowns and now they are back for real. After all, without a pocket, where will you hide that note no one should see when you hear voices nearing?
This is by Donna Karan who made a lot of full-skirted clothes, and might just have done the best with the look. Slim top, belt and full skirt, that’s all it takes. I’d eschew the transparent top, for work have a small sleeve and although I like this hat, it really isn’t big enough to be useful, so pump it up.
Blugirl did this terrific look. A short sleeved T, a belt and a skirt in the same color and what was an evening outfit goes daytime. I’m going to wear a high-heeled sandal with mine, with a sensibly wide heel to avoid looking a fool on the stone streets of Italy.
This is by Narciso Rodriguez, for the lucky one who can wear the short skirt. Look at those great shoes. Bronze and tie-up, both comfortable and smart. This dress would even look cute with a Keds sneaker for dropping into the cleaners and the market.
The top and skirt look I was able to copy at J Crew. The little floaty dress was well represented at Banana Republic, in spirit at least. 
February 24th, 2008
I started thinking the other day about fashion and clothes. I have a lot of fun when the runway shows are on and I love to talk about them and post pictures from them and surmise what will have the legs to reach the market that is us, more or less. It suddenly hit me that the “us” of whom I speak is no longer me. That “us” was a working professional with a need to look on top of things and as attractive as possible. The expense could be justified by that image thing and I had just enough of a social life, too, to make it a pleasure to think out pretty clothes and spoil myself a little. And I was a lot younger. It stymies me to realize that some of the nicest looks are denied to women my age. Just when we need to disguise our bottoms we are told that full skirts make us look like mutton dressed as lamb. Someone made fun of me for wearing a stitched down pleated skirt three years ago. It didn’t stop me wearing one, because they make too much sense and certainly don’t have to be worn schoolgirlishly, but it did make me start paying attention to that issue a bit more.
One thing and another, it all adds up to the idea that runway clothes can only be fun, like going to Chick Flicks. You go for fun, and you have no expectation that you will advance humanity or your understanding of it a bit. I like to see what can be pulled from the pool of insane creativity and used in a sane wardrobe. But it looks to me as if no one does that any more.
There are a few people who have websites in which they show what they design, adapt and sew to wear. There are others that shoot photos of street style in cities around the world. There are a few who report on wardrobe building, trends, fad avoidance, bargains… and I enjoy all of these ventures. One I love that is rarely updated is written/drawn by a fashionista rabbit who shows herself wearing her choice of runway fashion. I asked for permission to link to her, but didn’t get it, so you’ll just have to hunt if interested.
The real ground floor to this subject, however, is this: if you can’t buy it you can’t have it. That means that it isn’t runway fashion that is ruling us, but prèt a porter fashion. Many of us won’t spend the money for even that, and unless we are very creative we will have to settle for the bits that filter down a year or two later into what the British call high street fashion, or the kind of fashion you find in Main Street shops and department stores.
So I have been pulling together what it takes to see what there is in prèt a porter. By ten last night my eyes were swimming with images of what’s in the boutiques this spring for 2008. I wanted to get up and start cutting and sewing, but then I remembered I am really not very good at that and besides I can’t fit myself, only someone else. Another thing was the awful feeling that I might be a bit too old to get away with it. I need to go somewhere where there a lot of chic ladies of a certain age and see just how straitlaced I must be. I know I can wear big hats and big sunglasses, but it doesn’t seem enough.
The other discouraging thing is what women themselves tell me about what they really wear. There seems to be some idea that comfort can only be achieved in clothes designed for active sport. IT IS NOT TRUE. Comfort can be achieved with clothes that have form, with underwear in full complement, and with shoes that are made of leather and are not padded. Trust me on this.
Still, I hear from women that they “live in” yoga pants, sweats, running suits and balloon shoes. I despair. I despair of a population willing to all look that much alike. I despair of any group of over six people willing to wear baggy and odd-colored sets of things. That’s what basketball players wear, but they get paid a lot to do it. My own daughter tells me that no one wears anything but jeans at her techie workplace. She loves gorgeous clothes, but I know if they don’t go with jeans, she will never wear them, no matter how sincere her passion.
As to sex and romance, well, I won’t go there because I am told I don’t know what modern young men want, and that would be true. If they would tell me, I might believe them, but they always tell me they are looking for the right mind and soul. It was my belief that in “When Harry Met Sally” he ran away frightened after their first romantic interlude, it was not because he felt proprietorship and coupledom so scary, but because she wore those little white socks in bed. That is scary, that she could leap directly to bedsocks in one night. I suspect it would take me a lifetime.
So I am hoping that there are at least some of you who still have your latent princess within and still think that comfort is nice but beauty is equal. As I rip into the marketplace, once a week I will show you a look one can actually buy, now, this year, in 2008.
February 23rd, 2008
Gianna sent these to me this morning.
February 22nd, 2008
I vacated my house two weekends in a row. I become so cooped up through winter and believe me, gray and drippy and cold are not tempting me out, that I start to get tunnel vision. So I’m getting a new look around lately.
This past weekend I went to Civitacastellana. That’s in northern Lazio, somewhere on the shin of the boot, almost at the foot. To get there I drive south to Terni in southern Umbria, then streak off southwest toward Viterbo and eventually south toward Rome. Civitacastellana used to be one day from Rome and so it was a stop off point for travelers north. It perches on a plateau with a rather dramatic gorge that runs through it now, but used to separate it for safety’s sake.
I probably wouldn’t even know it if a friend didn’t live there. Similarly, nearby Otricoli, to which I also went and where another friend now lives.
It’s just different. The terrain, the people, what they eat, the way the light looks, the architecture. It’s all just different. I’m jammed into the Apennines that run along the eastern side of Italy. They’re stuck into the western ones. It’s something like the difference between New Hampshire and West Virginia, only not so far apart.
My refrigerator wasn’t working as I left, so I dragged along a sack of things that wouldn’t be any good if it didn’t switch on while I was away. (It did and I was very happy.) Alison and I decided to make supper of that sack for our friend in Otricoli and her visiting art school student daughter. I played with Alison’s very cute cat. I watched satellite television a bit. I slept late.
The sun shone both days. Sunday we drove to see the house near Otricoli and ended up making lunch together. Alison grilled sausages in the fireplace, Lisa grilled bruschetta in the wood stove and I whipped up some vegetables that were lying around. It was very good and lots of fun to cook so effortlessly with friends, which really doesn’t happen here.
I left a bit early because I am not so crazy about driving after real dark descends. It meant driving through sunset, twilight and evening.
When I turned eastward, all the eastern Apennines were rosy with light coming from the sun sinking into the Mediterranean. Mile after mile the mountains, rocky and gray or whitely snowy, lay bathed in pink and looking like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. I was almost reluctant to turn north toward home, but as I did I saw that the western Apennines were deeply violet from the same sunset and for at least half an hour of the northward travel they slid by on my left like a thousand postcards.
All that pleasure and beauty affected the way I thought over the next couple of days. A bit of change is good for me. There is beauty all over this country if you just open your eyes and go out to meet it. It’s probably true where you are, too.
Cavollini di Bruxelles alla Lisa (Brussels Sprouts for Lisa)
1 Kilo (2.2 pounds) Brussels Sprouts, trimmed and washed
3 tablespoons (cucchiai) good extra virgin olive oil
1 big handful of roughly chopped walnuts
salt to taste
about 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Heat a large pot of salted water and when it is vigorously boiling, toss in the brussels sprouts and cook briefly to set the color. They should still be crunchy. Drain them.
Heat the oil in a wide frying pan and toast/fry the walnut pieces for a few minutes, then add the drained brussels sprouts and sauté, stirring/tossing to dry them a bit. Some of the outer leaves may brown and that’s OK. Taste for salt and correct it. When ready to serve, add the balsamic vinegar and stir to coat the sprouts and nuts with a glaze then scrape all into a serving dish. Pretty good!
February 20th, 2008
I am extremely fortunate in my friends. One of them, Miss Joe, sent me this last week.
I Meant To Do My Work Today
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flittered across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the Buttercups nodded their smiling heads,
Greeting the bees who came to call,
And I asked the lizard the time of day,
As he sunned himself on a moss-grown wall.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?
Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947)
Tomorrow I am going to a town north of Rome to visit Alisonk.
I don’t smoke anymore, and sometimes I am not even witchy from it.
February 15th, 2008
I bought some elegant elongated servers the other day for desserts or antipasto. There were huge stickers on the backs and no matter what I did I couldn’t budge them. It wasn’t as easy as the following says, but by alternating approaches they are about to be usable.
February 13th, 2008
The subject that this map covers is one that I wonder about quite often. It never occurred to me to actually do the work and make this map, but I’m glad there was someone less lazy than I. It helps if you know the United States fairly well.
What it is is a map of the United States in which each state is renamed for a country of the world with an economy the same size as that of the state. Ergo, Maine, where I was born, is labeled Morocco because the gross domestic product is about the same.
Of course the one I usually think about is Italy and it just isn’t on that map. It’s tempting to compare Italy to California because both are long north to south, have a variety of climates, lots of tourism, lots of coast, an entertainment industry, wine and I know both of them. It is France that resembles California on this map. Other than the shape I can think of many resemblances among those two, too. Italy is a little smaller ($30 bn) than France as measured by GDP, but is too big for Texas, which is next below California.
Some surprises await. It takes the whole of South Carolina to match tiny Singapore, where discipline and focus really pay off. Norway matches Minnesota, whereas I thought with her oil she would be stronger. Ireland is the new tiger of the EU and yet Nevada with her gambling matches her. I wouldn’t have thought of Algeria matching West Virginia in any way. I think I need to go see Algeria.
In spite of the fact that many nations are hard pressed by the new oil prices, being a major producer of oil didn’t make those countries that are into bigger economies. It’s true that they might be completely off the map without petroleum, but with it they still are not giants.
The more I look at that map, the more things come to mind. It shows me, too, that there are lots of questions I ask myself that I never bother to answer and that’s not good.
The biggest question this morning, after looking and thinking for a while, is: how much effort did it take to wreck the dollar when reality is represented by that map?
February 9th, 2008
This was one of the best things I have eaten in months. It owes a little bow to Sicily where the North African way with dried fruits and nuts takes on an Italian sensibility.
It was what I was daydreaming last Sunday when I roasted the little leg of lamb and then made a stock of all the bones and trimmings. Nothing but the lamb, its seasonings and water, cooked a long, long time until I had almost a liter of strong broth.
This will serve two for a first course or one very hungry person <--- as a one dish meal.
almost a liter of lamb stock, simmering
1 ounce butter
1 small onion, chopped
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup of rice for risotto
1 tablespoon fortified wine (sherry, marsala, etc.)
about 1/2 cup julienned cooked lamb
1 tablespoon raisins
1 dried apricot diced very small
1 ounce butter
about 1 ounce hard aged cheese (pecorino my choice) freshly grated
2 tablespoons thinly sliced almonds, lightly toasted
Start the stock simmering before doing anything else.
In a heavy bottomed pot, melt the butter and add the chopped onion and salt. Sauté until the onion is transparent, then add the rice and stir until it turns opaque. Splash in the wine and stir until it is absorbed.
Add 1 cup of simmering stock and stir until almost absorbed. Continue to do this for about 15 minutes, then add the lamb, raisins and apricot, stirring in. Continue to stir in hot stock until the rice is creamy outside with a "bite" inside. Check for salt, recalling that the cheese will add a bit of salty flavor.
Toss in the last amount of butter and the grated cheese, remove from heat and stir in to make a thick, creamy risotto. Ladle into a serving plate and sprinkle the toasted almond slices over the top.
This is a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. Believe me, if you like lamb, you will love this risotto.
February 8th, 2008
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