It’s hard to get to know some of the readers because they come on very late or very early and they don’t leave comments. This one was dressed so beautifully. She wore an underskirt of brilliant orange which showed only when she pirouetted.
4 comments August 31st, 2008
Before anyone is shocked at my callousness toward animals, she did this herself. She insisted on it, actually, and I had to remove her after I took this photo. It made me think, however, that Tilda certainly deserves to go on LOL Cats. Except I could use some help with the importantissimo caption.
Here is the situation: she is inside a glass-doored bookcase and she is on the shelf that holds history books. What’s funny about that, other than that she looks funny in there?
6 comments August 30th, 2008
That’s a fat tablespoon of this:
This is the most powerful thing I have made this year. I found the original idea in a preserving magazine, where it claimed to be a substitute for commercial vegetable broth cubes, but when I read their list of ingredients, I was convinced it would taste of nothing but sage. I really like sage, but my sage is strong and resinous and it can overwhelm almost any other herb I use it with. So I juggled the list and made the flavors my own.
The instructions said not to use it for ten days, but to me it seemed usable immediately, so I distributed samples to various cooks I know and asked them to test it, using it anywhere they might have used salt or also vegetable broth. All the cooks I asked are competent family cooks with no training. They all promised to get back to me with results.
The reports were rewarding. They’d used it in dishes from tomato sauce to roast pigeon and loved the results every time. More, more, was all I heard, and I honestly wish it were legal for me to make it and sell it, because I think I really could. Instead I plan to make as much as my herb garden can provide and give it away as gifts.
The preservation technique used here is salting. Salting is not used very often in western cookery other than with meats and fish. Some pickles could be said to be salted, sauerkraut is salted and there are a few other pickled items that are salted but found only in certain ethnic kitchens. Once upon a time, however, salting was as important as drying. In places where the climate didn’t offer enough sunny, dry weather following the harvest, what else could one do? You can’t dry herbs in a rainstorm. Salting creates an atmosphere in which bacteria cannot thrive, the same thing that drying does. Instructions are not to put it into the refrigerator but to keep it in that ubiquitous dark and cool space. I think that is probably to avoid mold, because there are molds adapted to every condition, including the ocean which is salty and cold.
Many recipes for preserving herbs and flavorings here in Italy are sott’olio, or under oil. It makes for a great product, but is extremely dangerous because of the possibility of botulism. I feel that using oil for preserving needs to be left to commercial enterprises that have the equipment and science to be sure botulin can’t be produced. This salting technique I feel very confident about.
Perfumed Salt
Ingredients list:
Weigh the herbs stems and all, because you use all but the rosemary stems in the melange. Don’t worry, it works.
7 ounces onion, peeled
5.25 ounces carrot, peeled
3.5 ounces celery including leaves
1.75 ounces parsley
.75 ounce sage
.75 ounce rosemary, weighed before removing the leaves from the stems
.75 ounce thyme
.35 ounce oregano or marjoram
.35 ounce basil
.25 ounce peppercorns, freshly ground over the composition
8.5 ounces salt – it’s best to use sea salt, Kosher salt or pickling salt to avoid the powder used to keep salt from clumping.
Wash well and sterilize a couple of sealable jars to keep the mixture in.
You can make this melange two ways. The way you see it here is done by stages in a food processor. Starting with the vegetables I minced and scraped until they were very finely minced. I then added the thyme and rosemary and then one by one, the rest of the herbs until they were all in the food processor and all ground up. I then added the salt and pulsed and scraped to mix it all together. The melange is then removed to a bowl to do its preserving thing. The result is smooth, green and not very pretty.
Another way to do it is to mince everything separately by hand, or to mince each ingredient by food processor using the pulse feature to reduce it to small bits, and then assembling all the parts by hand. That is much more attractive and I will try it that way as soon as my thyme recovers enough to make another batch. Then put it into a bowl and stir in the salt. It will be much more attractive, but there will be some twiggy pieces here and there. That’s why it is better looking. The rest will be the same.
If you watch this once the salt is in, you will see the ingredients start to produce water. That’s good. Then it starts to reabsorb the water and when it is all reabsorbed, thus exchanging flavors from one item to the other, it’s ready to pack up.
Using a scrupulously clean wooden spoon, pack the melange into the sterile jars, pushing down and then slapping the jar smartly with your hand, which will help settle it and prevent the formation of air bubbles. Fill the two jars and cap them, leave them for ten days, then start using them in the same quantity as you would use salt in any recipe you choose.
To use it as vegetable broth, boil a tablespoon of it a couple of minutes in a half pint or so of water. You may want to strain it if you’ve rough chopped your version. Always remember that this is very salty. Don’t overdo it.
Here are some ways we have used it:
Rubbed onto chicken pieces before roasting them
Stirred into the oil in which meat was fried, then cooked with a bit of wine or water to make a sauce
Rubbed onto pigeons for roasting
To replace all the salt in Pomorola, or plain tomato sauce
Stirred into the butter in which zucchini was being cooked
Stirred into chicken gravy in place of salt
Rubbed onto beefsteak before grilling
Stirred into hot vegetable soup instead of salt
The originators suggest that it is good for seasoning scrambled eggs, and that sounds good to me.
Keep this on the pantry shelf in the dark among the spices and seasonings. I have had this in my kitchen for a while now, and every time I open the jar, the kitchen fills with a delicious smell of no particular thing, just goodness.
I am planning to go to a shop I know which sells adorable little ceramic topped mini canning jars. That will be a stocking stuffer gift or a little extra hostess gift for the Christmas season. It has been welcomed so enthusiastically here that half my batch of more than a pound is already gone and I don’t yet have enough thyme to make another. It takes a lot of thyme to add up to .75 ounce, even with the stems!
If I had to buy the herbs to make this, I would. As a matter of fact, I am going to have to buy some herbs if I make as much as I plan to. It’s worth it. I don’t plan to use it in every dish, but whenever I make something that calls for vegetable broth or something that has no particular required seasoning, this little composition will add a sparkle of Italy to my plate.
You too can play with this list as long as you don’t alter very much the proportions of wet items to salt. If you hate one of those herbs, use a different one in the same weight ratio. Or if you aren’t sure, make half the recipe and try it out first. Hurry up, though, because the season for tender herbs is leaving us soon. Let’s get them into a jar before summer and her basil run away!
10 comments August 29th, 2008
Tell me what you think this is?
Hint: it’s hugely successful here right now, it’s a genuine summer-only kind of thing and the view you are looking at might be a bit tricky.
Tomorrow I will show you the answer and give you my best of the season.
Meantime, here is something I would love for each and every one of you to do.
I have been chattering away here for years about mostly Italian cooking. I have told you what Italians say about the secrets to great Italian cooking. I have been telling you what wonderful things one can buy here to cook with and what items I was used to that cannot be bought through almost all of Italy. We’ve repeatedly gone into the essentials and talked about differences among regions. You are at this point, even if you never had cooked an Italian, real Italian, dish before, somewhat educated in the discipline.
The beautiful magazine, “La Cucina Italiana”, is sponsoring a recipe contest to celebrate publishing an American issue in English! The contest will be run from Alex’ “Blog from Italy” and I will be one of the judges. Rest assured that I will not know the names of the people whose recipes are being judged, so I can’t play teacher’s pet.
Since we are entering autumn, the recipes are to be Italian style autumnal soups using as many organic ingredients as possible. The rules are simple and will be completely laid out on Alex’ blog in a week or so. The contest entries will be sent to Alex from 12 September until 19 September.
Start thinking now about what kind of original fall soup you’d make and write up the recipe. You don’t have to test it as many times as I do, but I think you should test it at least once! Remember, it cannot be a recipe used unchanged from a cookbook, website or magazine. It should be your very own thing r adaptation.
The prizes will be one-year subscriptions to “La Cucina Italiana” and that is not a small thing. They will send them anywhere you are if you win. This is a great opportunity for readers in Kuwait, China, Korea and anywhere to be really a part of what we do here. “La Cucina Italiana” is a magazine whose Italian issues I read all the time. Unlike many cookery magazines, this one offers cookery information for the amateur as well as the professional. Beyond that it is also exquisitely produced with photography and graphic design that makes each issue a treasure trove.
This is just a heads up, and I will post to remind you the day Alex published the rules. Just Think On It, and be ready to make me proud. Because even though I won’t know who enters, if one of my readers wins, I sure want to hear about it!
6 comments August 28th, 2008
I just read here that Italians buy 49 thousand tons of stuffed pastas each year. That’s 98 million pounds or about 48 million kilos. Add to that the many thousands of tons made by loving mothers and grandmothers and a few men. My neighbors would rather strip naked in the streets than buy tortellini!
If you count only the bought, it comes to a mere 1.66 pounds, less than a kilo, per person, but that includes people who are in comas and babies still nursing.
Just yesterday I ate a salad made of tortelli and cucumbers and tomatoes. Very nice it was, too. I made it with a nicely herbed vinaigrette, ladled the hot pasta over the cool vegetables and eccola!
How much stuffed pasta does your household consume?
6 comments August 27th, 2008
Sounds nuts, doesn’t it? But Beppe Grillo has written an article that needs attention. This worldwide problem gets glossed over all the time, and it won’t be long before it’s too late to fix.
2 comments August 26th, 2008
I invited a friend to supper and she brought me one of the greatest hostess gifts I have ever had. It was a shallow basket filled with things from her vegetable garden and these porcini mushrooms which she had found and picked.
Porcini mushrooms
It’s very early to find porcini, but she had been in the mountains where they come earlier. I photographed these to show you how they look cleaned and uncleaned. All have been brushed and then pared away at the stem except the dirty one up front.
I had lots of ideas of what do do with them, but I knew that these porcini would make at least three dishes for me. I think of porcini and autumnal foods together, and one of my favorite autumnal pastas is pasta alla Norciera, named for a woman from Norcia. Norcia is an Umbrian town famous through the millennia for her pork. Norcia and pork are so connected that in many parts of Italy pork butchers are stilled named after the town, as they were in Roman times. This pasta, usually made with penne, reflects that area of Umbria which is high in the hills and surrounded by woods. It’s rich and deeply flavored and will stick to your ribs unless you run outside immediately after consuming it and chop some wood. I can swear to its deliciousness, because I have eaten it at least once every year since I arrived.
You do not need to have fresh porcini mushrooms to make this dish. I know they are becoming more available all the time, shipping from Finland, Chile, Poland so that even in Italy many times we are not buying Italian porcini. Dried porcini are very easy to find in most places and work perfectly in dishes for which the mushrooms are sliced or chopped. Boletus edulis grows in many places and has many names, Cepes, for example, being the French. I have never met a boletus edulis I didn’t like. Dried ones are fabulous and perfect for dishes like this. Really huge porcini are very often grilled like a steak, but these smaller ones you can use to make the hundreds of wonderful dishes like this pasta.
Pasta all norciera
for 2 to 4 people
1/2 medium onion, chopped
a little olive oil
2 sausages — if you are not in Umbria, you may need salt in your dish. Umbrian sausages are very salty and provide all the salt you could want. They are also very lean and can’t fry without a bit of oil.
2 porcini, sliced lengthwise or a handful of rehydrated dried porcini
65 to 125 ml (1/4 to 1/2 cup) heavy cream
a scraping or two of nutmeg
pepper
200-350 g pasta prepared according to the package and timed to be very al dente when the sauce is done.
Optional grated Pecorino or Parmigiano cheese.
In a frying pan, heat the olive oil and then fry the onions until transparent, without browning them. Cut open the sausages and crumble the meat into the pan, then fry that until it loses its color.
Add a little more oil and the mushrooms, stirring and sautèing until cooked but still firm. Then add the cream, stirring up every bit of the brown part that is on the bottom of the pan. Taste for salt and correct it if necessary. Continue to simmer this on a very low flame if possible, until the pasta is done. You may add a little of the pasta water to loosen the sauce a bit, but remember, too, that with cream sauces it is important that the pasta not be even a bit past al dente, or it will feel slimy.
Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce pan, tossing around to coat very well every piece. Add a bit of nutmeg, then grind fresh black pepper over the whole. Serve smoking hot to two as a main course or 4 as a first course.
That, just in case anyone questions it, is how pasta should be boiled. Except for delicate stuffed pastas or some gnocchi, pasta isn’t a gentle simmer with a dimpled and jolly surface, but crazy-wild-foamy and volcanic like that photo.
Grated cheese is optional because it adds salt. Mine could not take the additional salt, so the cheese was placed there to make it look better in a photo. This is not a particularly pretty nor photogenic dish! But it is a really satisfying thing on a cool or rainy day.
I could eat that right now and it is not yet even 11 AM here. Anyway, let’s send this off to Presto Pasta Night, because in Canada it’s going to be cold a lot sooner than here, and they should be well armed for it before it happens.
7 comments August 26th, 2008
plum fig geranium
Figs are finished until September brings a second crop, if we are lucky. That’s why I was in a rush to make some Caramelized Fig and Lemon Conserve. That’s the big jar in the middle of the chorus line. I serve it with variously aged or not Pecorino cheeses as either an antipasto or sometimes dessert at home. It’s a slightly bitter sophisticated taste and not at all what some expect if you call it fig jam. It ain’t.
You can make any amount that makes sense to you by just dividing or multiplying the quantities below, but considering the length of time it cooks, it probably doesn’t make sense unless you are making at least a pound or half kilo of figs, because it would otherwise use too much fuel. Or, you could freeze the figs now and make the conserve when your wood stove or your oven are on more often. Recipes and more photos after the jump.
Caramelized Fig and Lemon Conserve
1 kilo or 2 pounds ripe figs, halved or quartered
4 lemons, thinly sliced
.5 kilo or 1 pound sugar
Put these all into a heavy pan and bring it slowly to a simmer. Set the heat the lowest possible, or even use a flame tamer. Cook for at least a couple of hours, checking back and stirring once in a while, until it is caramelized and has altered both color and flavor.
Scrape the conserve into sterilized jars and top with sterilized lids. Before lidding, hold the jar with one oven-gloved hand, and slap it smartly with the other in hopes of eliminating air bubbles within. I can never make it perfectly, but frankly, this doesn’t usually last long enough for that to be much of a problem.
The year of the plum
That’s the jar in the front, closest to you. This has been the year of the plum in Umbria. Trees are bearing plums that have never borne plums before. I may have been here only 7 1/2 years, but my neighbors have been here almost 50 years, and they didn’t know those were plum trees, either.
The year of the plum has meant that this is the year of no cherries and few grapes. The vintage will be poor in quantity this year, although it could still be high quality. You cannot know until we are closer to vintage time of mid-September.
But plums we surely have! The little yellow plum tree I planted from a pit 7 years ago became so loaded with fruit it fell over. As soon as all the fruit is picked we have to top three of its trunks. I’ve frozen so many plums I can’t even estimate how many, and I’ve made jam twice — once for the neighbors and once for me. I make desserts from or freeze the prettier ones, and make jam of the ones with scars. All my fruit is organic, so it tends to be smaller and much less perfect than what I could buy in a supermarket. Wasps like to sting the ripe plums and make some of the juice ooze onto the skin where they can get it. The plum then forms a crystal clear bead or a little dark spot and gets on with ripening.
The frozen plums will wait for the occasion to make this plum cake, or a tart, a crisp, a crumble or a cobbler. I’ve already made the plum cake twice using fresh ones from my blue plum tree. I have to make another to swap with a neighbor down the road for some of his prune plums.
The easiest thing of all, however, is the jam, and you can accomplish it while watching a TV show or reading a book, because other than a few stirs and the bottling time, it almost makes itself.
Spiced Plum Jam
1 kilo or 2.2 pounds plums, pits removed
.5 kilo or 1.1 pound sugar
1 cinnamon stick
4 whole cloves
a few scrapings of nutmeg
Before you do anything about the jam, get glass jars and lids ready, by which I mean wash them really well, and then put them into a big pot completely covered with water and boil them. They must reach the boil and boil ten minutes before they are used to jar the jam. This sterilizing normally take about 30 minutes longer than the jam takes to make. You will also need a wide-mouthed funnel, tongs and a ladle. Mine are all metal and get boiled with the jars. I also place a doubled clean dish towel on the counter near the cooker so that I have a safe and soft spot to work with the hot glasses and lids. Set it up and walk away and let it do its thing.
Put the pitted plums into a heavy pot that is at least 4 times bigger than the mass of the plums. Heat them slowly and then simmer until they look cooked and start to shed their skins, about 10-15 minutes. Pour them into a large-holed sieve or colander and use a rubber spatula to press the flesh through while leaving the skins behind. You should end up with just a small amount of dryish skins remaining. This can be done even more easily using a simple manual food mill.
Return the plum flesh to the same pot as before, add the sugar and the spices and stir in. Heat to a full, rolling boil– a boil that you cannot stir down. Cook at full boil for twenty minutes. The jam is done.
One at a time, use the tongs to remove and drain a jar, then using the funnel and ladle, fill the jar within 1/4″ or a scarce centimeter of the top. Using a dampened paper towel, clean the edge of the jar, then grab a lid with the tongs and screw it on just to snug. Turn the jar upside down on the towel to one side. Obviously, you need either mitts or hotpads to handle these hot babies! When the jam is all bottled properly, there may be a bit leftover. Spoon it down. Gnam! After 5 minutes, turn the jars right side up, and tighten the lids down well.
Jams are often used in Italy to make crostata. They make a sweetish pasta frolla, spread the jam over it, top with a lattice crust of the frolla and then bake it. It lasts forever. Never goes stale. I rarely like it. I am therefore trying to convince my cooking neighbors not to make jam of all the fruit, but to freeze some of it. I have translated some US and UK recipes to show what other people do with fruit and they sound somewhat convinced. Sort of. I think almost any of the desserts I know would be healthier than a crostata! One third sugar and the fruit is cooked twice? How nutritionally sound is that? In comparison a fruit cobbler is health food.
5 comments August 25th, 2008
This is elderberry vinegar. It is probably the prettiest thing I have made so far this year, and I like it, too. It’s about as sweet as balsamic vinegar that you buy in a shop; not the real, expensive twenty-year-old stuff, but the stuff most of us can afford to use. If you add the sugar bit-by-bit, you’ll be able to fine tune it to suit your taste.
I am using it, and plan to experiment further, like I would use any flavor enhancer like Worcestershire Sauce or Heinz A-1 Sauce. I add a few drops, a teaspoonful, a tablespoonful — depending on the dish — taste and then maybe add some more. It seems to perk up the flavors that are already in the dish. I think it will help set apart even more some of the dishes I cook for clients.
Obviously, I am not going to use it in every dish or I would chance them all tasting the same, but so far I have liked it in chicken gravy, stirred into the oil for a sauce after sautéing meat, added to the oil when dressing a cooked vegetable for the table. I don’t like sweetened vinegars on salads, but if you do, obviously that’s a good way to use it. Click the blue for more, more
Elderberries grow wild and are free to the picker. The season is right now. Take a jaunt into the countryside and look for huge bushes with bunches of tiny berries hanging off them that look like purple showerheads.
That photo comes from an interesting site called New Being Nutrition where you can also find out what else there is to say of sambucus nigra. Of course in Italy they famously make Sambuca from Sambuco. I used to have a poster in my US office promoting Sambuca which showed a triumphant Julius Caesar with the legend, “After a hard day at war, Caesar did not return home to a salad.”
Scrounge around for some ripe elderberries and try this sweet and sour, deeply fruity flavored condiment.
Elderberry Vinegar
700 g / 1-1/2 pound cleaned and washed elderberries
600 ml / 2-1/2 cups white vinegar — I used white wine vinegar which is the cheapest you can buy here
450 g / 1 pound sugar
To clean the elderberries you need only give them a little shower, then holding the bunch in your hand, use the fingers of the other hand to gently pull the small berries off, letting them fall into a big pot. Once they are all in there, cover the berries with cold water. Bring it to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for twenty minutes. Turn off the heat and let them cool naturally.
Do be careful handling the berries and the juice, because they stain and dye very effectively. I stained a bright red dress with a deeper red stain last week.
Strain the juice off. There should be about 300 ml, or ten ounces. Put the juice, the vinegar and most of the sugar into a pot and heat gently, stirring. When it comes to a boil, taste, then add sugar to your taste, then cut to a simmer and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, until the vinegar become syrupy and clings to a spoon.
Use a funnel to pour it into clean bottles and seal or cork them. It makes about 5 cups and will last a very long time. Actually no one knows how long it will last, because no one has ever had it around long enough. Maybe it is permanent? Maybe I should be putting this on my face?
8 comments August 24th, 2008
