Posts filed under 'cucina'
This recipe is just a lovely thing, but I have been having a hard time sitting myself down to write it. It is the meat course from the menu of April 7, 2008. I’ve cooked it four times, photographed it once and still I haven’t typed it up and published it. I’m not sure why.
My suspicions lie with the fact that although it’s easy, it’s also easy to screw up. It depends very much on good meat. The first and third times I made it I used ordinary supermarket meat and it was a fine dish if you hadn’t had it the other way. When I used local hand-reared pork from this area that I bought and had prepared at the butcher shop for euro 13 per kilo, it was fabulous. My local Coop now offers the same service at half the price, and it was good, but not nearly as good as the pampered pork
The recipe here was inspired by a recipe I found in an Italian culinary magazine. I actually made their recipe, but I found the stuffing mixture of sausage meat, two cheeses and three salamis too heavy, although it might be great in January. I wanted something springy, and something in which I could use all the fresh herbs jumping up out of the ground these days.
The stuffing looks, even to me, unnecessarily complicated in terms of ingredients, but I found out the hard way that you really do need two different kinds of breadcrumbs and two different kinds of cheese.
The amount it makes is awkward. A whole one of these double chops is too much meat for one person, especially in an Italian meal. On the other hand, I found it impossible to cook less than one per person, because it thought it looked chintzy not to have one bony piece per person, just in case. On the plus side, the leftovers are terrific either cold or gently heated. Oh, and by the way, there is a reason why these are rib chops and not loin chops. By the time these thick stuffed chops were cooked through, the tenderloin bit of the loin chop would have become sawdust. Use the cheaper rib chop.
So how come if I like this dish so well, well enough to have cooked it four times, have fed it to clients and again to friends, how come I haven’t splashed it out onto this page? Never mind, it’s making it today.
Costellette di Maiale Ripiene or stuffed rib pork chops
Four pieces, which I think should serve six people
4 rib chops one rib wide, or about 2 centimeters thick, with a pocket cut in them to the bone
6 to 12 toothpicks
the stuffing:
soft breadcrumbs from one slice of Italian or other real bread
½ cup of dry bread crumbs (a couple of handfuls or 2 espresso cups full)
one medium onion, minced fine
2 teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons of minced chives
2 teaspoons of fresh oregano leaves
salt to taste
half of one beaten egg
enough white wine to moisten the mixture
3 ounces of coarsely grated relatively unaged pecorino cheese or another very tasty not very hard cheese
another stuffing:
4 ounces of Rambol herbed cheese in Italy and Boursin in other countries
the cooking:
olive oil for frying
about 2 teaspoons of salt
sprigs of all the herbs used in the stuffing
three or four whole garlic cloves
a couple of espresso cups of white wine
Preheat the oven to 375°F or 165°C
If you have not talked your meat seller into making the pockets for you, then you will need to use a sharp knife and carefully cut pockets from the fatty edge toward the bone, being careful not to let the knife wander and cut through the meat. I recommend using your charm on the meat person of your choice!
Mix up the stuffing. It should be moist and cling together when you gather it in your hand, but not wet.
Using your hands, (I use surgical gloves when cooking professionally and touching raw meat) open the pocket in the chop and stuff in a good spoonful of the herbed cheese. Then gather up a fistful of the stuffing and push it in after the cheese. Add another good spoonful of the cheese and then close the pocket up using one or two toothpicks, depending on how wide the meat person made the pocket opening. You can pretend you are a plastic surgeon when doing this part of the operation.
Heat a quite large frying pan, or two of them, if you don’t have one that fits all four chops. Pour in about 2 tablespoons of oil, and then brown the chops on both sides. Be patient so that you will get a lovely golden brown without chancing a scorching. When they are all nicely browned, toss in the garlic and the herb sprigs, toss the salt over the chops, then pour the wine into the sizzling pan.
Put the pan into the oven and cook about 40 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 160°F or 72°C. Remove the chops to a board and allow them to rest 10 minutes while you reduce the sauce in the pan over a fairly high heat.
Using a sharp knife, cut 1 cm (fat ¼ inch) slices off the chops until you almost reach the bone. Arrange the chops on a serving dish and garnish with some of the fresh herbs you used in the dish. Drizzle some of the reduced pan juices over the meat.
You know what’s really nice about this dish? That soft herby cheese melts and coats the inside of the pocket and the outside of the stuffing, making both things extraordinarily creamy and herbalicious. The meat is tender and gently seasoned. The stuffing is springlike with its herbs. I consider it a four-star meat course.
With it I served a good old American carrot and raisin salad which was new to my guests and they liked it!
May 7th, 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
Starting this Friday, the 21st of March, one of the American cooks will post a genuine and traditional American dish on her own blog. All the other bloggers in the ring will post and point you at whose turn it is.
This Friday Mary of Abruzzo Flavors will inject a little American flavor into your day and in your language, whether it is English or Italian.
March 18th, 2008
Here it is Monday and no ready to wear clothes! Why? How can that be? Are there no more things to wear in 2008? The answer is there is more to come, but this is my 400th post and so I am announcing something new and sharing a tiny gift with you.
I know I have complained before about the way American food is dismissed as terrible, accused of being unhealthy and generally viewed by many Italians as poisonous. They are told this on the government supported TV cookery and food shows, programs which I am forced to pay for with my annual TV tax. You know it burns me up!
Most recently the termagant who is just the worst American hater said that we do make good sweets because that’s about all we eat.
Basta! Enough! I’m not taking it any more.
Some friends and I are going to begin publishing weekly recipes for old fashioned American food, food like grandma used to cook and perhaps like you still cook, if you happen to be American. So what’s new about that? There are innumerable food bloggers in the USA pouring out magnificent food of every description as made in the USA. Yes, that is so, but they don’t do it from Italy and in Italian!
Every dish we make and publish will be made with ingredients you can actually buy in Italy and the recipe will be written twice– once in English with US measurements and again in Italian with metric measurements.
No excuses, no lies, no obfuscations. If you know some Italians who cook, send them to us and they’ll know what we eat besides brownies and McDonald’s plus they’ll be able to make it and try it. They won’t love everything we do, because they didn’t grow up with it, but it’s a beginning, yes? Downhome cooking is a thing no one can sneer at. When expatriates are asked “What do you miss?” it almost always starts with food, the familiar food of home. If you know the awful Beppe Bigazzi, 
send him over too, the ignorant jingoist! (Folks, I think Italian products and Italian food are wonderful, but you don’t have to speak disparagingly of all other cuisines to make that so.)
We are starting out with Barb of Barb and Art Live In Italy, Michele of Bleeding Espresso, Mary of Abruzzo Flavors, Sara of MsAdventures in Italy and me. There may very well be more padella packing expatriates as we go along, but these are the Fabulous Five for takeoff. Tune in for time and place “tra pochissimo” as we say over here.
And now the little gift. Have a look at Wanhart blog and look at the incredible work of British photographer, Carl Warner. You will be glad you visited.
March 17th, 2008
but she is not and she is also not really a soup.
When something tastes this good and is this easy to make, looks shouldn’t count. I even threw a rosemary sprig at her, but it didn’t help, and I didn’t want to sprinkle something all over that would alter the flavor. This is a traditional dish of Sardinia again, and again it is just the kind of thing you need to know how to make if people come in for meals at intervals or at odd hours. It takes five or ten minutes to put it on the table if the ingredients are at hand.
I hope someone will try making it with lavash, because I think that will work but I can’t buy lavash here.
This is another dish made with Pane Carasau– see below. It sounds a bit unpromising, but once you have the box in the kitchen, you really do have to try all the ways to use it. Don’t you? It turns out that this first course vegetarian main dish is delicious enough to warrant buying the box in the first place. The most difficult part of making it was deciding which cheeses would work the best. The ones I used were terrific and I suspect that anything you choose may be terrific too. Recipe after the
Zuppa Gallurese
Pane Carasau, about 1 to 1-1/2 sheets for 2 portions
formaggio fresco/fresh cheese, anything from Kraft Philadelphia on up, about 2 ounces (60 g) for two
Pecorino not very aged, grated on the big holes of the grater (about 2 ounces for 2)
Pecorino stagionato quite aged and gratable like Parmigiano, or use any grana including Parmigiano– about 1 ounce or 30 g for two
a few leaves and sprigs of herbs, such as bay, rosemary, thyme or sage
boiling hot reduced broth or stock, enough to cover, about one pint for two.
In a pot that will hold the amount you want to make, make a layer of pieces of Pane Carasau on the bottom. Using a spoon, add a few dollops of the fresh cheese on top, then sprinkle with the grated soft cheese, then grate the hard cheese over that. Add a few pieces of herbs. Continue with another layer of everything, in the same order, but you must end up with a layer of the crispy bread.
Now pour boiling hot broth over it until it is just covered. Let it sit for a minute or so until it is moistened, then serve. This is the step that gives her her name. Soaking the dish in broth is to inzuppare, and so it is called zuppa even though as you can see, it is not soup. Black pepper is a very nice addition. You really won’t believe what this tastes like!
I gave you an estimated amount for two portions, but that could change if your pot were wider or narrower. My pot was about 7″ wide and I made 3 cheese layers surrounded with bread layers. By simply layering up more I could have made many more servings. In a 10″ pot I could easily have made servings for 10 people. I could have made it richer by using more cheese. I could have made it less rich by using stronger cheeses but less of them– although you do need the soft cheese to combine with the broth, so don’t alter that one. The broth both melts the cheeses and becomes milky itself, and that is why there are two fairly young cheeses in the dish. If you were to use more aged cheeses, that effect would lessen. It would probably still be mighty good, however. I don’t really see how it could ever fail as long as you use tasty cheeses.
I picked the herb bits out as I ate this. They definitely flavored the dish, so I would never leave them out, but all the herbs mentioned are woody and stemmy and I can’t see eating them. All in all, this is another surprising dish from Sardinia, a place that has a talent for surprising me in the nicest possible ways. Let’s see if we can surprise Ruth at Presto Pasta Night with it. 
March 16th, 2008
I am experiencing a small problem with the cooking school/lessons for which I need advice. I will so appreciate comments expressing your genuine opinion.
We do not set up the subject of a lesson until someone has signed up for it. That person then gets to say what he/she would like to learn, based on seasonal availability of course, and excluding things that must cook longer than class time. Maybe it’s just one thing, and we build the rest of the menu around that, or sometimes someone says, “Anything but that!” when they have food hates or sensitivities. Lately, however, we have had more people want us to say what they should learn. (Of course, if they are the second or the third to sign up, that’s already been done for them, probably.) With some discussion that may seem like social work, I can probably suggest things. It makes no sense to teach people to cook things they’ll never find where they live. Some dishes are unique, and so learning to make them will not open the doors to many other parts of Italian cuisine. I like to teach things that lead to other things, in essence you should leave class prepared to make judgments about so-called Italian recipes you run across, or be able to remove ingredients that just shouldn’t be in a real Italian recipe. It is meant to be the most durable souvenir ever– the ability to choose, to cook and to judge Italian cookery forever (plus some printed recipes that you made, etc.)
This means that I feel like I have designed the policy and whatever you want you can have within that policy. That’s why lessons at the school start with shopping, because shopping right is very important in Italian cookery. So we could teach you to make genuine Italian dishes from whatever you found in the pantry and the fridge– after all, 50% of Italians are going to do that at lunch today– but we think figuring out what ought to be in that pantry and fridge is important.
So the question is this: is it better to offer an unformed and customizable class? Or is it better to design classes and then let the people who want that class sign up for it? Since almost all the students are travelers, should that be instead: “This is what we can teach any day, you choose which one.” Which would mean dividing the information up into a few offerings.
Although my pleasure at teaching is certainly key for me, suiting just me is not what I want to do. I like being able to teach food of the north one day, food of the south another, food from the center on a third. I like being able to do one meat Wednesday, a different one Saturday and vegetarian Friday. But it might be easier for travelers to know that, for example, every Friday was vegetarian, or every Thursday was southern food.
In trying to be as flexible as we can be, we may have made ourselves too formless so that those with little experience don’t know where to start?
What would you prefer and why? What would make your experience of a day or two in an Umbrian kitchen just perfect?
March 13th, 2008
Underway are experiments using white chocolate. Need volunteers to eat same.
Classes are forming in April, May and June. I’m looking for an interactive calendar that will show the days that are available. Any suggestions?
February 1st, 2008
This cassole symbolizes the power of our food blogging community coming together. This well-loved and experienced ‘cacola’ will be your French guardian angel perched on a kitchen shelf; a link to the French Kitchens of the past; a cradle for your culinary hopes of the future.
And just to make sure you have the spirit of Camp Cassoulet (see multiple posts in the archive here and at David L’ site and Lucy Vanel’s), I will include a copy of the new Camp Cassoulet Authentic Workbook & Recipe Primer.
I’ll even throw in the beans! A kilo of Haricots Tarbais and the shipping by international post chez vous!
Kate Hill teaches French cooking in France. Maybe you’ll go to her to learn to make cassoulet, but just in case you don’t, why not buy a raffle ticket that will win you this wonderful cassole and the beans and the instruction book? She will ship internationally!
Photo by the nicest fellow in Paris.
December 18th, 2007
I have this theory, and I am willing to be told I am wrong in this. My theory is that the familiar foods we call comfort foods can make us fat. Why would that be? Because we invest those foods with emotional content. We pull them out when life is hard, when the weather is terrible or when we feel bad for some reason. It’s often the first thing that comes to mind when we want to comfort a friend, too.
So, if it’s been a hard week and things haven’t gone our way, we make mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, stew, or whatever we find comforting and that reminds us of easier times. These are all things we know very well. Our tongue responds with impulses to the brain that open the doors to good memories and good feelings.
And then we overdo it. After three to five bites we’re relying on experience, and our taste buds take a rest, but we don’t stop.
Foods don’t really have emotional content. They have triggers to parts of us that have remembered emotional content. Whether the memory is good or bad, we connect to it. I once had a liverwurst sandwich hours before coming down with a bad flu, and I have never had another liverwurst anything since, although I used to love it.
Knowing that this is true for me, I don’t fix comfort foods of my past when I feel down. I, instead, try something outside of my experience and try to lose myself in learning new tastes, which for me is as distracting as mashed potatoes.
I do not believe that nothing says loving like something from the oven. Things from the oven are a delight. They are not love, but might inspire a memory of love, and not a thing more. If I am capable of thinking, I can inspire memories of love that don’t have anything to do with doughnuts, brownies or even holiday roast turkeys. If I am incapable of thinking, I take an orange or an apple and get over it.
I am 5’-1 ½” tall. As much as I cook, I could easily weigh 200 pounds if I let food and love get mixed up. Since I have the opportunity every four weeks of carrying 50-pound bags of salt, I know how I would feel if I gained even only 50 pounds. It wouldn’t be nice. Sometimes it even hurts my back for a day or two.
Divest yourself of habit and your mouth will deal with surprise. You’ll taste more. If food is an adventure rather than a happy-pill, you’ll know when you’ve had enough and won’t keep putting it in your mouth to keep the love going. Unless it is just an extraordinary thing you’ve happened on, in which case you may need a life coach to pull you off the plate. That would be me with the Sardegnan risotto with vinegared pork, which I ate yet one more time yesterday in Florence! You know what? My recipe is pretty good. I need to leave the pork in the vinegar longer, two days, I’m told, and make a more interesting tomato sauce as well.
That brings me to spaghetti sauce, which is a rather stupid term in Italian. There is no one sauce, as you know if you read this blog. I have recently found, however, that in the USA people do tend to think that there is something called spaghetti sauce and that their recipe is it. They also think you can buy it in a jar or a can. Well, you can buy various sauces in jars, cans and the refrigerated cases in Italy. The best I can say of any of them is: it’s alright. I never said that in the US, because they were too sweet.
There are thousands of ways to serve pasta wherever you are. Sometimes it’s even spaghetti. Most of the ways to serve pasta can also be used to sauce cooked grains or polenta, too. Just a glance at Presto Pasta Night ever Friday should convince you that this time I’m right.
Here is a modernized ragù that I like more often than the original recipe by Artusi, a meat sauce I find very rich and that for me lacks the brightness of modern foods. I like the spike of a little acidity from tomatoes, the slight smokiness and the reduced fat. I am still a dedicated Artusi fan, and I will still on occasion make his ragù, but this is my new fall back recipe, because it lends itself to other foods besides pasta, and yet is a wonderful thing with pasta, too. This is a spag bol, a polenta sauce, and today I ate it on boiled farro or spelt. That looked bad, but it was delicious. I used a tiny bit of Parmigiano Reggiano, but not much, because it was full-flavored on its own. This is a sauce to make up in quantity and freeze in portions that make sense for your home. It takes about 15 minutes to chop the vegetables, another 15 minutes to sauté them, perhaps ten minutes to cook the meat, and then, other than the occasional visit, it cooks itself.
A 21st century Ragù
1 cup of chopped onions
1 cup of chopped carrot
1 cup of chopped celery and leaves
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of salt
1 small chili pepper (peperoncino) broken in half
1 tablespoon dried oregano or 3 tablespoons of fresh basil – if you use fresh, add it toward the end of cooking
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
100 grams (3.5 ounces) diced smoked pancetta or bacon (cook it first and then drain the fat if you use bacon, then pick the cooking up from the oil *and proceed)
2 pounds (1 kilo) of lean chopped meat – all beef or vitellone or part that and part pork
A glug of fortified wine like Sherry or Marsala
About 1 cup of milk—fat free is fine
Water
1 can (14 ounces, these days) of peeled canned tomatoes or a similar quantity of peeled fresh tomatoes
Salt to taste
Nutmeg to taste
Heat a large frying pan with the oil*. Sauté the chopped vegetables and the pancetta or cooked bacon with the salt very slowly until they are starting to brown a bit. Add the wine and cook until it dries out. Add the dried herb and the chili pepper, and then the chopped meat. Stir it up to mix while the meat loses its red color.
Add milk almost to the top of the mixture, lower the heat and walk away until you can hear it sizzling again. This took about 30 minutes for me. Then add hot water to cover and leave it alone again, checking back every 30-40 minutes to keep it wet until it has cooked about two hours and then allow the juices to evaporate away. The meat should then be very tender.
Add the tomatoes and break them up with a wooden spoon. Simmer that mixture ten minutes, then taste for salt and correct for it.
Allow it to cool in the pan, and then fill plastic freezer bags with the quantity you think you will use.
When you thaw and reheat it, grate nutmeg at the end until it suits you. Some like a lot, some none.
This recipe made 4 packages of something over a cup for my freezer.
There’s nothing tricky or out of bounds about this recipe. It’s a great thing to have in your fridge freezer, ready to pull out when tagliatelle, cooked grain or polenta is the right thing to eat. It will make a lasagna much richer than my taste, but certainly a tasty one.
Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but the handy extra jars from the Prego you thought you liked.
December 14th, 2007
I read somewhere on the internet that cranberry/grappa jelly was the hot new dish for Thanksgiving this year. Who wouldn’t want to make the hot new dish of the year? It’s from Gourmet magazine, too, so there you go.
Three years ago, eg brought me two bags of cranberries in her luggage. They have sat, triple-bagged, in my freezer since then, because like the story of the pig you wouldn’t want to eat all at once, I couldn’t bear for them to just go away. But for the hot new dish of 2007, I figured let’s do it! Those of you who don’t live here will think how silly we are to miss something most people eat once a year and many people deride as not real food. I love cranberries.
The original recipe is fairly straight forward but a little messy with a lot of straining and pressing to get the skins and seeds free of the juices. Note that not only does it star the elusive cranberry, but also granulated gelatin, which doesn’t exist here, as far as I have ever been able to tell.
Italian gelatin is evocatively named “fish glue.” Yum. It comes in transparent sheets or leaves in envelopes. I made a strawberry Bavarian some years back using fish glue and it didn’t jell. I didn’t know how much fish glue to use to replace granulated gelatin nor did anyone I asked.
But I am nothing if not determined when it comes to my cranberries. The package says that the enclosed leaves will jell 500 milliliters of liquid. I started adding up the liquids in the recipe, converting the number to milliliters and voila! It needed more than eleven sheets of gelatin. Whoa, said I, but I soaked twelve sheets in cold water. And you know what? It’s only a few hours later and it’s jelled. Hunh.
So here is the recipe for Cranberries Expatriated. Only the translation is mine.
Get 20 ounces of cranberries, frozen or fresh — or use lingonberries instead if that’s what you can find.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cold water
3/4 cup grappa
Remember that 250 milliliters is one cup, or close enough.
In a large pan, put those ingredients and bring them to a boil. Allow them to boil briskly, popping and eventually thickening, then remove that from the flame. Gradually pass all of it through the finest screen of a food mill. This is much cleaner than a China cap and kitchen towels, believe me.
You can soak 10 sheets of fish glue in cold water to cover while that’s cooking.
1/4 cup water
the soaked gelatin
1 cup of the juice you have now milled.
Put those into the same, now empty pan and bring it to a simmer, stirring. As soon as it is all melted and wonderful, remove it from the heat, and stir in 1.5 more cups of the juice and 1/2 cup of grappa. Oil a mold that holds at least 3 cups and pour the mixture into it. As soon as it is room temperature, put it in the fridge to chill until the next day.
To unmold it, run a sharp knife along the edges of the jelly in the mold. Dip the mold into a deep bowl of warm water for a few seconds and then turn it out onto a plate
I had a lot of leftover cranberry juice, so I put it into a jar in the fridge. I feel cranberry other things coming on. I will try to photograph this beauty (we can hope) tomorrow and add the photo when I get back from Massa Martana. And now, happy Thanksgiving to all the celebrators of same.
NB I have changed the number of leaves of fish glue, because it was too jelled.
November 22nd, 2007
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