Archive for April, 2008
Here I am again, not only with pasta, which I am not supposed to be eating, but with a pasta so easy you don’t need a cooking teacher. If I keep this up I won’t be able to afford pasta for myself.
I had fresh goat cheese left over from a dinner I made on Monday evening. This goat cheese is not the little one with a soft white crust, but really fresh, like cream cheese only tastier by far. I kept staring at it and trying to get it to tell me how to eat it without carbohydrates, but alas, that innocent looking goat kept saying, “No way! I want bread or pasta.” So then I had to think some more on what would be nice with goat cheese. What wouldn’t be nice with goat cheese? I am such a fool. I pulled out some diced smoked bacon and said, “This week it’s you!”
I am using up this unfortunate pasta called lumache. Lumache means snails, ergh. Pasta lumache can be fortunate, but this particular one doesn’t cook evenly and one part starts to shred before the other part has stopped being crunchy. In the spirit of not wasting the resources used to make food, I am eating it, although with regret. So the first thing I did was look at the package to see how long they say to cook it. It usually takes a minute less time, I find.
Check your age and height. If you are over seven you can make this pasta. If you are tall enough to reach the top of the cooker while standing on a chair, you are allowed as long as someone grownup is in the kitchen to help with heavy stuff and draining big pots of boiling stuff. Tell that grownup to make a nice salad while he waits to do his part.
Look at your pasta package. If it says it takes 12 minutes, this pasta will be done in 12 minutes, including the minute it spends in the cheese pan after draining. Get the big pot of water boiling. It helps if you put a lid on it until it boils.
Goat Cheese-Bacon Pasta
for one, just multiply for as many as you are feeding
100 grams or 3-1/2 ounces of chunky pasta (spaghetti and noodles aren’t so great for this)
30 grams or 1 ounce diced smoked bacon or pancetta
40 grams or a little over an ounce of fresh goat cheese
Liberal amounts of freshly ground pepper
Put some but not much salt into the boiling water and then the pasta. My goat cheese is a bit salty and so is bacon, so we keep the salt down in the pasta.
In a frying pan, fry the diced bacon until it starts to brown, then ladle some of the pasta water into the pan to get the browned bits off the pan bottom. Leave it to simmer until the pasta is done. Because this is a creamy pasta, cook it a little less than normal. The very moment the pasta stops being crunchy, drain it and toss it into the bacon pan, then drop the goat cheese on top and stir it all together for a minute. Scrape it into a pasta bowl and grind fresh pepper over it and eat it while the smoke is still coming off into the spring air.
I would have liked a salad of maché with a lemon vinaigrette, but my cook was too lazy. So instead I photographed it and decided to send it off as a spring offering for Presto Pasta Night.
If you are over 15 years old, you should cut and paste this whole post and share it with someone younger, offering to be the big person in the kitchen with him. Remember the story of the lion and the mouse. Or was it an elephant?
April 10th, 2008
I wrote this yesterday and it went poof!
Some of the dishes on this menu are already on the blog as recipes. Those that are not are being written and will be published over time. Everyone seemed to really enjoy all of it, and all but one eater were Italian. I consider that a yea vote, right?
Antipasto:
purea di fave secche con peperoni fritti (puree of dried fava beans/broadbeans with fried sweet red peppers)
piccole patate arroste sotto sale con formagino di capra (tiny potatoes roasted under salt with goat cheese)
Primo:
tagliatelle ai carciofi con pecorino sardo affumicato (egg pasta with artichokes and shards of smoked Sardegnan pecorino cheese)
Contorno:
sformato di asparagi (puffy custard of asparagus)
Secondo:
Costolette di maiale ripiene di formaggi (double rib pork chops stuffed with a cheese stuffing)
Dolce:
palline di cocco con due cioccolati (coconut balls with two chocolate ganaches)
jump to recipe
Palline di cocco (coconut balls or cocopuffs to me)
Makes enough for at least 8 people
Preheat oven to 170°C or 350°F (yes, the F temp is higher than reality, but these droop and spread if the temp is too low.)
2 eggs
175 g sugar (6 ounces or about 7/8 cup)
240 g dried coconut (8-1/2 ounces or about 3 cups)
I have been fussing for years about how to use the coconut one can buy here, which is dried and not shredded, sugared or any of the things that are done to coconut in America. I checked, and you can buy dried or dessicated coconut in US health food stores and perhaps the nicer grocery stores. Check out Indian groceries, too, for lower prices. Anyway, at last I found a recipe for using it. I misread one of the directions in a way that made it intriguing to me, so away I went. When I discovered my error, I decided to go for it anyway and I really like the result. If you don’t try this you’re nuts, because it is just about the easiest way I know to please some diners.
In a large mixing bowl, break the eggs and toss in the sugar. Using an electric mixer, beat them on high speed until they become thick and almost white. Add the coconut and at low speed, stir it in until it is blended.
Here’s the tricky, cute part. Line a baking sheet (placca) with baking paper. Using an espresso cup, scoop up this coco-dough, about 2/3 full, and press slightly with your fingers, then turn it upside down on the paper, rapping sharply to release the little form. You can place them fairly closely because they should not spread. When they are all on the paper, put them into the pre-heated oven and cook 15 minutes.
If they spread or are not that lovely golden color, your oven is running cool and you should probably get it calibrated. Cook them a little longer this time.
These are delicious. Crunchy on the outside and chewy, damp and slightly sweet inside.
For the two chocolates, choose a good dark chocolate and a good white chocolate. In two very tiny pans put the chocolate and add an equal weight of heavy cream. Over the lowest achievable heat stir the two chocolates and when each is melted and blended with the cream — you can take them off the heat when almost melted and they’ll safely finish melting with no chance of overheating disasters — use a spoon to drizzle streaks and drops on a plate and dip the bottom of each pallina into the dark before placing it on the dessert plate.
Try it. It’s really good and dessert doesn’t get any easier unless you buy it.
April 9th, 2008
My first dinner is next week and I am very happy. The calendar has rolled around again, tourists arrive, there were tour buses in the parking lots this morning when I went to market. The biggest thing, however, was combing through the lists of dishes in my mind and in my magic purple book to make menus again.
A tramp through the market shows me what’s in season for sure– the strawberries are still from Spain– but I found things like duck and goose eggs, more artichokes than most people will ever have seen in one place, and the first of the tiny baking potatoes for antipasto. I can’t bring myself to buy the live hens and pigeons that the vendor will kill to order. If I were rich I might buy them all and set them free. I’d be arrested because Città di Castello may have a swan park, but they do not encourage poultry in the streets.
Inside the wall my herb lady sold me not only a gorgeous oregano plant but perhaps the most glamorous cauliflower ever. I shall make a portrait of her when the sun is shining.
A trip to my butcher proved that in her opinion, at least, pork is better than veal still a while. She tried to talk me into turkey and again I had to explain how mundane turkey usually seems to Americans, even though at €13 per kilo it wouldn’t seem mundane to me. That’s about $10 or £5 per pound — although the British are used to horrific prices and may not find this shocking in the least.
Now begins a time when most of my cookery posts depend on classes or chef jobs and I don’t have to eat everything. Time to diet off the pounds gained from quitting smoking. Time to wander the specialty shops and come up with new ways to use the old things and invent dishes with new things. Time to ask about wines and honeys and time to toast nuts and snip herbs and prune the rosemary and the sages.
I think the Romans had it right when they made the year begin with spring. What wrong-headed power monger changed that?
Here is a hint at things to come. 
April 5th, 2008
I sure wish they were at my house this rainy day! But you will find them instead at Barb’s house.
Scalloped potatoes are such a favorite with me that when I was in the hospital having my baby, my sister brought me scalloped potatoes instead of flowers.
April 4th, 2008
Poor Amanda, who is expecting something quintessentially American is faced with something all British. A popover is simple a Yorkshire pudding made small and without meat.
I was having a problem with them for a while. I asked British food groups how they made theirs. I tried all the things they said. I still intermittently had problems. So, I dragged out my two really old American cookbooks and checked their recipes side by side. One, the one I had been using, said to mix the ingredients and beat them for 2 minutes. The other said to beat them only until they were smooth and that overbeating them would reduce volume.
Lightbulb. I did it the easy way and the above is what I got.
Popovers
1 cup flour
1 pinch salt
1 cup milk
2 eggs
Preheat the oven to 450°F or 220°C with the baking dishes inside.
Mix together and beat with a beater just until smooth. Allow to rest a few minutes then ladle into heated forms already in the oven with a generous amount of fat melted in them. What you see is individual soufflé dishes. Popovers are usually cooked to the point you see here, then stabbed to the very heart and left in the oven with the heat turned off to dry out a bit. I am far too impatient for that.
When I make a big one for Yorkshire pudding I use an iron frying pan preheated and with quite a lot of fat melted into it. It will puff, puff, slip and slide while you watch… what fun! The pudd is eaten as soon as it is big and brown.
April 2nd, 2008
Bucatini makes me happy. I don’t know what it is about this pasta shape, it makes me feel like a kid, feel like slurping, it requires eating alone. It’s messy, because it never gets really limp. You can’t wind it around your fork. One single piece fills your mouth. It demands fun stuff on top, none of your serious gourmet sauces need apply!
It looks like fat spaghetti, but there is a hole inside, una buca, and there’s how they got the name.
If you don’t know where to find it near you, the site where that picture comes from can sell it to you online.
Anyway, that hole means that bucatini is great for juicy things that can run inside. Therefore, since you can’t roll it around your fork, and have to slurp it a bit, and that hole is filled with something liquid, it’s pretty much a scene from Tom Jones, the movie, when I eat it. I snap the long strands into thirds and that helps a bit.
Tonight I ate them with tomato sauce just like that I used for the Pane Frattau.
Simple Tomato Sauce
1/2 cup finely minced onion, celery and carrot
2 cloves of garlic cut up
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
1 28 ounce can of peeled Roma tomatoes, or others you like
salt to taste
You may add oregano or basil or any herb you like, but you don’t have to every time.
Sauté the vegetables and garlic in the oil until they soften, then add the tomatoes, stirring them in. Using a stick blender, puree the sauce and then heat it, tasting to correct salt, for ten to 15 minutes. Once cooled it can be kept covered in the fridge for many days or frozen in portions for almost forever.
Chinese Meatballs
I also made some Chinese meatballs like I’ve made before for a very different recipe. These meatballs consist of the meat from inside sausages and about an equal amount of lean ground pork, a few minced scallion tops, some grated ginger, some wine vinegar, a bit of toasted sesame oil, and sometimes some crushed red chili bits. I think cheese would not go with these meatballs at all.
I liked it. I liked it very much indeed. I smiled through the wreath or tomato sauce around my mouth and felt not a year older than twelve. You have to love a food that can do that for you. It’s especially nice to be a twelve year old who can also drink I nice glass of Rifosco with her bucatini. As a matter of fact, with what I have been hearing about the foul weather in North America, I think I have to export this feeling to Presto Pasta Night. They could use a big red grin over there.
April 1st, 2008
Over the next few days we shall be having the recipes for everything that is in that photo, one at a time. Today it’s “Fool’s Hollandaise.” Did you know that Hollandaise is part of classic Italian cookery as well as French? In Italian, however, it’s called salsa olandese. You can find the recipe for real Hollandaise sauce a thousand different places, and for blender Hollandaise a thousand more. I, too, can crouch over a double boiler watching egg yolks attempt suicide and splodge themselves into orangey bits clinging to pan and spoon and unwilling to play nice with lemon juice. I only do that if someone is paying me to.
This is the one I make when I just want sauce for myself and mine. I can make this without looking, while talking over my shoulder to a friend, while dressed or undressed, in any quantity I need. This should be enough to sauce perhaps asparagus for four normal people, or two spring-starved eaters who plan to eat a lot of asparagus– or something else.
Fool’s Hollandaise
4 ounces (120 g) butter at room temperature, cut into pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt
juice of 1/2 lemon
pinch of cayenne (peperoncino in polvere)
1 egg
In a small, heavy pot, start to heat the butter and lemon juice. Once the lemon juice heats and starts melting the butter, remove it from the heat and add the cayenne and salt, then stir vigorously with a whisk. As soon as the butter is completely melted into the lemon juice, add the whole egg, whisking vigorously and continuously. Move the pot back over low heat, continuously whisking, and lifting the pot to cool it occasionally, if it appears to be thickening too fast. Quickly taste for salt; you may need to add some because it depends on how acid your lemon was. Continue to whisk until it is become a smooth, thickened sauce.
The only thing you can do wrong is let it get too hot too quickly in which case the egg will scramble and separate from the lemon butter. In that case, call it Goldenrod Sauce and serve it anyway. Avoid that by controlling the amount of heat and never stopping whisking until it is finished. I could have used a flametamer as I do with polenta, but to me it is just easier to lift the pan away from the heat.
If when it is done you are not ready to eat it, keep it warm by putting the pan into a larger pan containing hot, not boiling, water. I don’t think the microwave should come into this at all, although because I don’t have one, I haven’t tried it.
This sauce is fantastic on greens and with spinach as shown above, it provides the acid you must eat to liberate the iron in spinach. I like it on asparagus, as a dip to artichoke leaves, on eggs, and surprise! stirred like fudge ripple into mashed potatoes. Don’t incorporate it, just make a swirl of it in the potatoes.
April 1st, 2008
Next Posts
