Posts filed under 'contorno'
And it is really good, too. I have eaten them in Greece. I have eaten them in Italy. I ate them all my life in the United States. I liked them however they were done by whoever had cooked them.
The Greek ones did not have meat but did have lots of oil and rice. They were cooked to collapse and served at room temperature at lunch time. The Italian ones were cheesy and had crumbs over the rice filling. Sometimes they had meat, sometimes they didn’t. The American ones came in many different versions. Some were filled with a solid meatloaf type of filling and those were very nice. Some were made with breadcrumbs and vegetables. Those were good, too. Some were made with macaroni and cheese. Those were strange. Once I had them filled with chili and that was better then you’d think. This version, however, is the kind I remember from home as a kid. We never had them often enough.
Just lately eg has been talking about making and eating stuffed peppers in her home. When I saw these I knew I had to make them, too. They look like nice, big tomatoes. They have thick, substantial walls. They are beautiful and charming. I wanted to eat them.
Stuffed Peppers like Mom makes
for 4 people
heat the oven to 175°C or 350°F
4 nice peppers in any color and shape you like
1 cup of rice, cooked according to directions
1/2 onion, chopped
.5 pound or .25 kilo ground beef or lamb
about 3/4 teaspoon salt
handful of fresh oregano leaves or a different herb if you like
1 egg
olive oil
Clean the peppers removing all the innards and depending on the size, leave them whole like mine or half them vertically if they are those tall thin ones. Salt the inside very well. Really well. I did not salt enough.
Oil the bottom of a shallow baking dish that will hold your 4 peppers or 8 pepper halves. Put the peppers in it.
In a frying pan, heat some olive oil. Add the onion and fry it until it is transparent. Add the meat and fry until it loses its color. Add the rice and then salt, tasting as you go to make it suit you. This is separate from the salt inside the peppers. Toss in the oregano leaves and stir them in. Add the egg and stir that in quite well.
Using a big cooking spoon, put the stuffing into the peppers. Distribute any extra filling around the peppers– this part will get a crunch bottom and be really tasty. Drizzle a little oil over the peppers in the pan.
Put it into the oven and cook about an hour. The peppers should start to collapse a bit, to be really good. Depending on what you stuff these with, they could be anything from antipasto to contorno or side dish. With meat, mine were a one dish meal.
I like these best not really hot, but just warm. The peppers in this photo are not dancing, but my arms are. Sorry.
eg’s recipe actually sounds even nicer, but she doesn’t photograph her food, being normal and all that.
July 31st, 2008
I just clicked on that revolving photo presentation in the margin a moment ago. I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. It was a portion of spoonbread! I haven’t even thought of spoonbread since I posted that article and recipe. It was just delicious. Why haven’t I even thought of it?
What food occupies the top layer of the mind right now?
Tomatoes. I bought a book yesterday that is just different recipes using tomatoes. They are late this year, so they are just beginning to ripen and should stay with us until November, when we will take advantage of Puglia’s longer summer and buy from the Pugliese farmers every Saturday. I’ve already Post-It marked several pages to try, and have started wondering if any of the newly discovered regional dishes will make up readily for twenty.
Lamb. I still have half the lamb I bought this spring. I am pondering slow-cooking a leg in the fireplace for lunch in the garden. Or I could invite just one person and flash cook the rack.
Green beans, or fagionlini. I helped Amelia pick hers this morning right after I picked mine. Mine provided two fists full, hers a whole basin full. We discussed various recipes in which the bigger and more mature beans are good. Amelia went in to prepare Fagiolini alla Greca for lunch! I decided to make a puree one day and a sformato another day. Mine, who live under a walnut tree, are never going to provide that many, but this time of year you can pick anyone’s beans and they’ll thank you for it. If they are not completely stripped they stop making new beans.
Pickles. The cucumbers are really coming on and the dill is almost heading. If the plums don’t hurry up and riped, I may make some pickles from them, too. There are too many to just eat, even if you made plum cake everyday until they were over.
Suppers. When the heat recedes and you can take pleasure in making food just-so for happy people who are happy to eat what you make. Here below is a supper from a few weeks ago. What pleasant people they were! Think what size that table must be to hold fifteen and still have room for another fifteen. What a gorgeous villa that is, and what a terrific kitchen it has! If you ever need eight bedrooms, just ask.
What makes you think of food, and what food are you thinking of this season?
July 22nd, 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
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
Today alisonk came to lunch. She is doing a low carbohydrate regime, so I had to whip up some flour-free goodies. For a first course in place of pasta or risotto, we had a mushroom soup. I made the basic soup a day ago because most soups get better for sitting. When I reheated it I added the part that might not have refrigerated well.
As you can see, it is very dark and filled with mushrooms. The following recipe made soup for two.
No Carbohydrate Mushroom Soup
1 pound (.5 kilo) champignon or button mushrooms, cleaned and sliced. stems chopped
2 tablespoons butter
about .75 quart or liter of strong beef broth
salt to taste
heavy cream to taste
In a heavy pot I sautéed the mushrooms in the butter until they were quite browned and almost dried. Then I added the beef broth. I allowed this to cook and cook down several times, adding water to bring it up to level each time. Because I used “Better Than Bouillon” for the broth I added and needed no salt. When the whole thing was thoroughly infused, I poured it into a container and refrigerated it.
Today, a few minutes before I needed it, I warmed it up almost to a simmer and then added heavy cream, stirring it in, until it tasted balanced and rich. I ladled it into two deep bowl/cups and this is what happened. 
The verdict was “Good!”
For main course, or secondo, we ate Pollo fra Diavolo from this page.
With it we ate a cabbage dish from Puglia that I once had made into a pasta, but today served it as it was meant to be. Because there is no chance at bread, pasta or dessert, I changed the fat used from oil to duck fat, but it will be good without it if you are not as lucky as we are.
Cavolo Pugliese or Pugliese cabbage
This would have been enough for four people normally, but this was a slender menu indeed.
about 3 cups of slivered fresh cabbage
2 small hot red peppers peperoncini
about 2 tablespoons oil or fat
salt to taste
5 cherry tomatoes, quartered
Heat a big frying pan with the fat you will use. Crumble the pepper into it (or take a pinch from a jar of crushed red pepper.) Add the cabbage and toss it about a bit to get the fat distributed. Continue to cook it, stirring once in a while, until some of the edges start to brown and there are no really hard parts left. Add about 1/2 teaspoon or a decent sized pinch of salt, stir and taste. Add salt until it seems right to you. Toss in the tomato pieces and stir until they wilt a bit. Serve.
I had prepared a salad, but there was no room left for it. We had eaten well.
March 4th, 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
Cold weather food happening here:
Cream of celery soup
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cups chopped celery
1/2 teaspoon salt
a few grains of cayenne (peperoncino in polvere)
2 tablespoons butter
Sauté briefly to soften a bit, then add a cup or so of water and let simmer for 30 minutes or so.
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 cup milk
Pot these together in a jar and shake like mad until well blended.
Raise the flame under the simmering vegetables and pour this into it slowly, while stirring. Bring to a simmer and simmer for a couple of minutes. Taste and correct for salt. Grind fresh pepper over it when serving it HOT!
Mashed celery root
1/2 of a medium celery root (sedano rape) cut into cubes
1/4 teaspoon salt
water
Put into a pot, cover and simmer until soft– it’s pretty fast compared to potatoes. Drain, mash with a potato masher, add butter and salt and pepper to taste. Eat it up with a big grin. Serves 2 normal people or just me.
Later on there will be fresh homemade tagliatelle with ragù frozen the other day and a baked half of a poussin, or weensy chicken.
December 17th, 2007
This exuberantly ugly thing is a spinach sformato, which means deformed and it surely is. It would have taken me about a minute to make a double cuff of baking paper and tie with a string around the top of the dish and then it would have been a soufflé. It would have been beautiful and delicious, but only beautiful for a minute. I figured that was how long it would take me to get the cuff off and by the time I photographed it, it would be deflating. In the end, this was a bit deflating anyway.
It was delicious. I ate it.
Hardly anybody makes soufflés anymore. They think it’s hard to do. It really isn’t, and if you bother with making the cuff, it will be beautiful. If you don’t want to bother with the cuff, my advice it to fill a lower baking dish 2/3 full to give it room to rise, and call it a sformato. Handy word. The thing is, because there was no restraint and because my oven has a hot spot, this rose up and spilled out like magma on the opposite side and now I have to clean the oven. Careless cook, indeed.
Elaborate vegetable it is, however, and good to eat and healthy. With eggs. milk and spinach in it, it can be a vegetarian meal or a puffily, steaming vegetable dish. You can not, however, drag it outside to photograph it nor get more than a few shots before it starts to deflate, so serve it quickly to some eager eaters.
Sformato or soufflé of spinach
Preheat the oven to 150°C or 300°F
about 6 ounces of steamed spinach, or about a cup, wrung dry with your hands
1 tablespoon of butter
2 tablespoons of flour
a pinch of cayenne or peperoncino in polvere
1 cup milk
3/4 teaspoons salt
2 eggs, separated
a generous amount of nutmeg, to taste
about 1 ounce of freshly and finely grated hard cheese, such as Parmigiano Reggiano
1 teaspoon butter for the cooking vessel
Chop the cooked and wrung out spinach finely with a knife.
Grate the cheese. Generously butter the inside of a baking dish, then use part of the cheese to coat it, as if you were flouring a cake pan. Shake any excess back into the container in which you’ve grated the cheese.
Use a fork to whip the egg yolks in a small bowl.
In a small, heavy pan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and then stir in the 2 tablespoons of flour to form a thick paste. Remove the pan from the heat and very slowly stir in the milk, a little at a time, using a silicon spatula to flatten any lumpy bits. When the mixture reaches the consistency of cream, you may just stir in all the remaining milk. Add the salt and cayenne. Return the pan to the heat and bring to a boil, stirring, then reduce the heat to minimal and continue to cook a couple of minutes. It will thicken and become a white sauce.
Stir about 1/4 of the hot sauce into the egg yolks, then scrape that back into the pan. Stir in the chopped spinach very thoroughly. Grate some nutmeg into it, quite generously. Taste and correct. It should be a bit pungent, because it will be diluted with the egg whites shortly.
Using an egg beater or a mixer, and with the egg whites in a large, rigorously clean, non-plastic bowl, whip the egg whites until they are stiff but still glossy. It took about a minute for me.
One-third at a time, using a silicon spatula, fold the spinach mixture into the egg whites. Scrape all of the mixture into the prepared baking dish, then scatter the remaining grated cheese on top. Pop into the oven and leave it alone for 40 minutes. You literally do have a minute or so to serve it puffy. It’s best served with two forks.
The butter and cheese form a delicate crust that releases from the dish. All the prep dishes are easy to clean. It’s really not much trouble at all.
Dedicated to Kid Magnet, who loves spinach like I do.
December 3rd, 2007
It’s one of my descriptive phrases: elaborate vegetable. When you are serving something good that doesn’t look like much, the plate needs a hit of glamor. I’ve a list of these elaborate vegetables, mostly but not all Italian.
As anyone who will listen knows, I’ve recently lost most of my appetite. That’s really alarming for a cook. I try this and that, and yesterday I thought I’d try someone else’s cooking. I went to a little cafe that on two or three days a week makes a lot of contorni, or vegetable dishes. One of them was a torte di cime di rape, or a torte of turnip greens. It was stodgy and dull. I thought I could do better, so I gave it a try.
It was so good that at ten o’clock last night I was wiping up the crumbs. But it was far too late to get decent photos, so I made it again today to get daylight. Unfortunately it went cloudy while I was cooking, but it looks pretty edible anyway, doesn’t it? I had to shoot it sitting on my car to keep the cats off it. Recipe is after the leap into the future.
I varied the recipe by one ingredient on the two trials, and here’s the better recipe. It’s really easy, and you can keep everything but the fresh greens in your pantry or freezer, so you can make it any time you buy greens. Clean up was a snap, too. Hey, it all counts in my kitchen.
The photos show one-half recipe, which is one sheet of puff pastry divided in half. It would make a great picnic or work lunch, at that size. It’s good hot or room temperature, and there’s nothing in it that would spoil before you could eat it. Microwaving would make it soggy, though.
Torta di Bietola
Swiss chard or bietola, cleaned and cut into 1/4″ or 1 cm wide strips. Cooked in only the water from the washing, and only until just done. You will need 2 cups of these steamed greens.
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 smallish cloves of garlic, sliced
2 anchovy fillets (yes, use them, you won’t know they are in there!)
3 small chillies (peperoncini) broken in half
salt to taste (qb)
1 tablespoon of vinegar, whichever you like, but not balsamic
2 sheets of frozen puff pastry
1 egg, fork whipped with a teaspoon of cold water
Make sure to read the package instructions on the puff pastry, and thaw it the amount of time needed and not more or less. It’s only hard to handle if you mistake that.
Preheat the oven to 200°C or 400°F.
This was under my 40 watt hood light in my black pan.
In a large frying pan, put the oil, the garlic, the chillies and the anchovy fillets, and sizzle together for a few minutes over moderate heat, mashing the anchovy so it disappears. Remove the visible pieces of the chillies! Add the vinegar and then the cooked greens, and stir them together. Taste and salt as needed.
Lay one piece of puff pastry on a piece of baking paper or foil that you have put on a flat baking sheet with low or no sides. Spoon the greens onto it, then spread them out to cover all but about 1/2″ at the edges. Using a finger, brush that naked edge with some of the egg glaze.
With a sharp knife, cut some slashes or holes in the remaining piece of puff pastry. then lift it onto the filled piece, and lightly tap the edge down onto the egg glaze. Using a brush, brush the entire top with egg glaze. (you’ll have some leftover for the cats — makes them shiny.)
Put it into the heated oven and cook about 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Eat hot or at ambient temperature.
I like it so well I see myself experimenting with other fillings, other pastries. Yummmm.
All the small photos are clickable to make them bigger.
November 29th, 2007
