Archive for April, 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 any of you to make the real thing, but you could. I promise you, it is just a series of easy things that then get assembled to become a rather complicated thing. What I do want you to know is how to make and bake pate à choux because it is one of the most useful easy things in the world of cookery. Make them big and stuff them with chicken salad, or shrimp, ham or vegetable and cheese salad. Make them big and use them as shells for a creamed chicken with sherry and mushrooms. Turn them into the éclairs and cream puffs of your daydreams, so much better than bakery ones that you’ll weep for lost years. The bagged beignets from the supermarket do not belong on the same page as these you can so easily make. They are also lovely filled with ice cream and sauced with chocolate, butterscotch or a berry sauce.
Pate à Choux
Preheat oven to 200°C or 400°F
17 ounces or 500 ml of water
4 ounces or 115 g butter
a good pinch of salt
2 cups or 260 g regular flour or farina 00
4 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
Heat the water, salt and butter until the butter melts and then turn the heat up to bring it to a boil. Remove it from the heat and dump in all the flour at once, stirring it vigorously until it forms a thick, smooth and sticky dough. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and yolks in one by one until the dough becomes very smooth and shiny.
Put parchment or baking paper on a baking sheet or placca and then, if you want the easy way, pipe the dough from a pastry bag in the shapes you want. Longish bars make éclairs, round mounds make cream puffs. You do not have to leave a lot of space around your shapes because most of their growth is up, and if they do touch as they grow, they are easily separated.
If you want to do it the hard way, use two spoons to form the shapes. The first time I ever made pate à choux as a young wife I had neither electric mixer nor pastry bag. By the time I finished them I was convinced I would never bother again. With those two inexpensive helpers, it’s almost child’s play. Almost.
Put one baking sheet into the oven on a middle rack and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 190°C or 375°F and cook for 10 t0 15 minutes more. They should be puffed up, dry and firm on the outside. Using a skewer or a sharp knife, pierce each pastry to allow steam to escape. You’ll need to turn the oven up again for the next batch.
As soon as they are out of the oven and have been pierced, cool them on a cooling rack. If they seem too delicate they may be a bit undercooked. Bite into one and see. They can be put back into the oven and cooked a few more minutes with no penalty at all.
This recipe will make about three baking batches. The only time consuming thing is putting them in, taking them out. They mix up easier and faster than brownie mix.
As you can see from the picture above, part of mine had to be piped on to form a border on the base of the gateau. I needed a further 20 medium sized puffs to be glued on with caramel to that border, and then a bunch of little bitty ones to cover the pastry cream center. All of those puffs are stuffed with whipped cream using my trusty pastry bag with an elongated feed that came with it.
Now you all know how to make cream puffs, éclairs, and fancy shapes of choux pastry, all of which have a lovely cavity to be filled at whimsy. If anyone really wants to know how to make the pastry cream and glue this whole thing together, let me know and I’ll oblige. I think everyone ought to have the real thing once in a lifetime, but there’s always Paris, you know. Meanwhile, here it is finished and in a big copper pot about to be hauled off to Gianna’s house.
April 19th, 2008
Today the American kitchen is at Calabria with Bleeding Espresso. I have been hearing for years about filling. Time to catch up with it now!
April 18th, 2008
This is another dish from last Monday’s dinner. It’s an antipasto/appetizer from Puglia. Although recipes I found when I first tried to make it called for using vegetable broth to cook it, I soon discovered that I could make the vegetable broth and cook it all at the same time. It is a very healthy dish in the highest level of Mediterranean attention to vitamins, fiber and animal fat completely replaced with healthy olive oil. I cannot tell you where to buy dried fave in your country, but I know people have bought them in every country I know. If all you can find are fave with their skins, you can use them, but it will have to cook longer and you will need to use a food mill to remove the skins which I am told cause really dramatic intestinal gas.
I was served this garnished or plain in Puglia several times, but this version is my favorite one so far. I ate this by itself for supper yesterday. Jump to the recipe:
Purea di Fave
1 carrot cleaned and diced
1 leg of celery cleaned and diced
1 onion cleaned and diced
1 small dried red pepper crushed
1 teaspoon salt
water to cover
1 large or 2 medium potatoes peeled and diced
250 g or 1/2 pound dried fave/favas/broadbeans without skins
water as needed
salt to taste
Garnish:
red sweet pepper/peperone/capsicum, cleaned and cut in thin slivers
good olive oil
salt to taste
In a tall pot, put the first list of vegetables and salt, then cover with water and bring to a boil. When it is boiling, add the diced potato and water to keep it covered. When it comes back to a boil, add the dried fave and more water to cover.
Cook this at a simmer for about 45 minutes, adding water periodically so that there is always about 1/2″ or one finger’s thickness of water over the top of the vegetables. At 45 minutes, take a fava out and bite it. It should be soft throughout. If it isn’t cook a bit more until it is. Check for salt at this point and stir in more until it tastes right to you.
You can use a stick blender to puree this in the pot, or you can cool it a bit and put it through a medium-fine plate on a food mill. If you do that, you will need to rewarm it before serving.
Before serving, heat the olive oil in a frying pan and quickly fry the pepper slivers with a bit of salt. Scatter them over the purea, drizzle the pink oil as well, and then add a thread of raw oil. Serve warm.
Leftovers will need a bit of added water to become semi-liquid again. You can, however, make this quite a while ahead and keep it in the refrigerator, then warm the amount you want to serve.
April 16th, 2008
This is garlic before it matures and before the papery covering starts to form. It tastes like garlic plus something. It’s very mild and I enjoy cooking chunks of it with vegetables in oil at this time of year.
April 13th, 2008
April 12th, 2008
Vai! Vai a Msadventures in Italia per una ricetta iconica.
April 11th, 2008
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